

Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say - petethomas
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-hit-from-online-scanning-and-skimming-researchers-say/2014/04/06/088028d2-b5d2-11e3-b899-20667de76985_story.html

======
petercooper
I'm an extreme version of this because it's my _job_ to read several hundred
articles every week and curate and summarize them, so my entire reading
process has been optimized to rapidly grasping something, contextualizing it,
and moving on. It's amazing how good you can get at this over time and I
consider it to be a very positive thing in terms of my reading.

In other contexts, I think there have been a few slightly negative
psychological side effects, such as struggling to watch full TV shows without
fast forwarding through the "boring" bits, or choosing to watch other people
playing computer games on YouTube rather than playing them myself because I
get bored too easily. But in general I seem to thrive on having an impatient,
jumpy brain.. for now!

~~~
DonaldH
> choosing to watch other people playing computer games on YouTube rather than
> playing them myself because I get bored too easily

Could you please elaborate a little bit on this? I'm intrigued - I assumed
that actively playing a game would be _less_ boring than passively watching
someone else play. I'm not a gamer though so I really have no idea.

~~~
petercooper
I think it's a bit like watching TV vs reading a book for a lot of people.
When something is on a conveyor belt into your brain, it's easier to let it
flow even if the experience is cheaper, whereas playing a game or reading a
book requires a significantly extra level of 'participation'.

Of course, it could just be that I'm getting old, the dopamine hits from
gaming aren't there as much anymore and that I'd rather watch skilled people
at work ;-)

------
kisielk
> Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits
> for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way
> of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed
> over several millennia.

Where's the evidence that we've developed "traditional deep reading circuitry"
over several millennia? That's presented in the article without any
justification.

~~~
mcguire
Indeed. Given the availability of reading material and the skill of reading,
any "circuitry" would have to be a relatively recent effect in the general
population. Further, if "new circuits" are developing over a few tens of
years, why would anyone expect the "traditional circuits" to have taken
longer?

It seems to me unlikely that this is anything other than an individual
behavioral difference.

------
laichzeit0
I do this because I don't want to spend too much time reading crap or second-
rate writing. Essentially stuff someone decided to blog because they're
bloggers or had a "cool" idea. If something takes 30 minutes to write, I
probably want to spend about 30 seconds reading it.

But on great works which an author has spent years thinking about before even
committing it to writing; or have gone through several revisions of it, I will
devote my time to slow-reading and understanding.

------
logn
On a meta-level... I think this style of reporting is terrible for the topic.
There are three main voices: the journalist, the scientists, and an everyday
person. The only one I trust on this are the scientists and the others are
just confusing the whole issue. On top of this, there are some humanities
professors the journalist treats as scientific authority. All of this is woven
together in a pseudo-science tale that's really not worth a careful read.

~~~
coldtea
> _On top of this, there are some humanities professors the journalist treats
> as scientific authority._

Well, they are. Their field is how humanity understands itself, and what
traditions (historical, literary, etc) and values we have.

The results of the "real" scientists are useless when not valued and judged
under a humanist interpretation.

E.g, scientific measurable fact: "We're reading less".

OK, so what? Is that good or bad -- not with regards to mere "evolution"
(which might not even be applicable to such timespans and matters), but
concerning the kind of society we want to build?

That's where the humanities professors come into to play (as does "the man on
the street" \-- we're all men on the street, after all).

~~~
logn
Discerning any scientific results from this article was impossible when
filtered by all non-scientists. I'm happy to see lay/ethical/moral discussions
of research but I'd like to at least clearly see the science first. The
information presented in this article wasn't different than what any average
group of people could have come up with over lunch, but it's written with this
authoritative and dramatic tone like we're all learning something.

They bring up some startling 'scientific facts', that the internet may be
permanently changing our brains and destroying reading ability. There's some
confused explanations of evolution (or lack thereof) thrown in. Can we all try
to understand this first before we zip to a pleasant concluding paragraph from
a mother raising kids?

------
rdwallis
Scanning and skimming is a problem caused by UI. The way we scroll text on
computers and other devices destroys reading flow.

I built an extension / bookmarklet that allows you to scroll websites in a
different way and goes a long way to solving this problem on desktop browsers.
I hope no one minds me reposting it, it was very popular on hn a while ago.

[http://www.magicscroll.net/ScrollTheWeb.html](http://www.magicscroll.net/ScrollTheWeb.html)

~~~
cliveowen
I find that line more distracting than scrolling.

I don't know what the solution might be, but this is not it.

~~~
rdwallis
The line takes a bit of getting used to. The trick is not to use it to
underline the text you're currently reading but to keep the line a good
distance ahead of where you are in the text.

~~~
zokier
I think it might be more natural if it had gradient below the line:
[http://i.imgur.com/8ku3OoL.png](http://i.imgur.com/8ku3OoL.png)

I'm not sure if white or black gradient would be better though.

~~~
rdwallis
Thanks, this is a common suggestion and I've tried a version with a shadow
below the line. It is far more distracting especially when you use the
autoscroll feature (play button at the bottom right corner.)

If you want to experiment the source code is at
[https://github.com/rdwallis/MagicScrollWebReader](https://github.com/rdwallis/MagicScrollWebReader)

The line is an impossible challenge to design because the break between pages
should be very obvious but also not distracting to the reader.

~~~
jmulho
I find the already read text distracting. I would like everything within peek-
ahead distance to be new text. Perhaps a white gradient below the line would
work, or a three line tall moving white bar instead of the line.

------
ColinWright
Print version, avoiding the ads and giving simple, direct text, instead of
having to meander around the ads and inserts:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-
takes-a-...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-hit-
from-online-scanning-and-skimming-researchers-
say/2014/04/06/088028d2-b5d2-11e3-b899-20667de76985_print.html)

 _Edit: Interesting - a down-vote._

~~~
tokenadult
Colin, it wasn't my downvote, and I hardly ever downvote comments like that,
but I hardly ever upvote them either, because it doesn't add to the DISCUSSION
here, really, to tell people about an optional view of the Web content that is
(usually) easily discoverable by every user. Even in a Hacker News discussion
with the immediate context of this discussion, about readability, most such
comments are at best a no-op.

------
userbinator
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that people don't seem to be
as careful and deliberate in reading things like manuals and instructions as
they used to. I have on countless occasions pointed someone to an important
piece of information in some documentation, and been responded to with an "oh,
I looked here but I didn't see that."

~~~
coldpie
I think that might partly be due to the deluge of useless information in most
documentation. I read through the instructions for a meat grinder we picked up
the other week. It had about 10 pages. About half of one page somewhere in the
middle was real content (how to attach it to the stand mixer, how to prepare
the meat, etc.), and the rest of the packet was recipes and pages and pages of
warnings and warranty information and other garbage.

It's easy to skip the important bits when they compose just 5% of the whole
product.

------
Synaesthesia
Definitely find this to be true, trying to read a complex Umberto Eco novel
after a steady diet of web scanning for the last 10 years is quite a task! But
worthwhile. I have to force myself to read properly for the first time in a
long time.

------
dwc
I'm pretty sure that I read more longer pieces than I used to, as so much is
available for any topic of interest. In fact, I must decline to read some
things simply due to time constraints. Contrast that with getting a magazine
once per month, where I was much more willing to "curl up with a good article"
even if it wasn't so good, where I was willing to wade through asides on the
colorful characters of the main players.

These days, I want non-fiction articles to get to the damned point. I'm fine
with long articles, but I don't want my time wasted. Not long ago I began
reading popular coverage of an exciting scientific finding. The article began
with something like this: "John grew up in a small Ohio town. His father was a
clerk at a hardware store and his mother worked for an optometrist." Close
tab. That might have been fine pre-internet, but it's not what I want now.
Things have changed, but writers and editors are still operating in the old
model. I don't mind humor, style, interesting biographical bits, et al, but I
want them to occur in reasonably sized chunks inline with the actual subject
matter. But mostly I want the information that was promised in the headline.

For fiction... I still buy books and read them on kindle. I buy and read more
new books now than I used to.

I don't think I'm all that unusual among people who habitually read.

~~~
crpatino
I don't think this is the same phenomena the article was talking about. It is
not that online readers lack the ability/patience to read long pointless text-
walls. It is that they seem unable to grok longer, come complex texts.

As a programmer, I have been reading online my whole adult life, and probably
spend online much more than the average (but "civilians" seem to be catching
up, fast). I do not feel I am particularly affected by this effects, but I
(and I suspect you as well) have do deal on a daily basis with complex,
artificial, information dense constructions _all_ _the_ _time_. Contrast that
with the mindless stream of tweets, likes and lolcats that fall on the typical
user every day.

Also, I as well as you read fiction but online and in paper. It's hard to
measure but I'd say at least a million words per year. This quantity is not
typical at all. On the other hand, even amateur fanfiction is authored with an
audience in mind and goes to at least an order of magnitude more composition
and editing than whatever piece of crap we send/recv over the privacy of out
SMS on a daily basis. So yes, I think you are pretty well protected from the
debilitating symptoms of these new disease (if you allow me to call it that
way).

------
saturdaysaint
For those interested in further reading (ha), I can't recommend Nicholas
Carr's _The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains_ enough. Just a
profound meditation on technology's effect on humanity, particularly
pertaining to our Google/internet era. Frankly, he's more skeptical about
technology than I am, but I find his perspective genuinely useful for raising
interesting questions that have changed my thinking.

------
zokier
This is one reason I like to read anything significant on Kindle. Scanning and
skimming is not really something Kindle tends to, having only small amount of
content visible at time (I tend to have relatively large font size) and slow
page turn speed.

~~~
arjie
I feel like the Kindle has too little text available, though. I read certain
kinds of fiction far faster on actual books than on the Kindle. Perhaps the
text size I find comfortable would be much better on a Kindle DX.

Also, the fact that Kindle 'pages' for a text file are not fixed is a bit of a
problem. For instance, with a real book if it refers to a previous event and I
wish to read it again (sometimes climaxes can be great to read again) I can
usually remember a page range and a location on the page (top left, right
side) that lead to me being able to identify it in seconds, but I've often
gone backwards in a Project Gutenberg eBook to find that the location of the
words has changed! A very disconcerting effect.

~~~
dublinben
1\. If you decrease the text size on a kindle, you can display quite a bit of
text on each screen.

2\. E-books don't have a concept of "pages." They're essentially responsive
html documents, and should be full of links (both internal and external).

------
epo
If you scan or skim then you miss stuff. You have no idea whether or not what
you missed is important because you didn't see it. And so comments by people
self-importantly declaring themselves to be more effective by
scanning/skimming are in effect saying "I didn't read that bit because I knew
it wasn't important and, despite not having read it, I know I was right not to
read it". What you mean is you have an impaired attention span.

Scanning or skimming can only be optimal with carefully structured texts where
you know what to expect, e.g. textbooks where the beginning and end of
chapters contain synopses.

~~~
6d0debc071
What I mean is that time is finite and a piece only has so long to convince me
that it's worth reading in depth. While it's possible that a mostly skipped
paragraph contained something worthwhile, if I've read a decent number of
other paragraphs from that source and they didn't, that's not the way to bet.

------
jwmerrill
Scanning and skimming is good, most of the time. It means you are taking an
active role in deciding what parts of a document are relevant to your purpose.

In the bad old days, you had fewer alternatives and higher switching costs, so
you just read what was in front I you. With the internet, the next best
alternative is so available and so good that you might as well spend some time
browsing and quickly discarding the fluff so you can find the really good
stuff.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_learning](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_learning)

------
whoopdedo
Whenever I start reading an internet article in depth, I get a nagging feeling
that I'm putting more effort into reading the article than was put into
writing it.

------
Raphmedia
This happens to me a lot. I have to take a pause and consciously focus on
reading the text that is in front of me. Otherwise, I simply skim it. Sure, I
get enough information to understand the article and talk about it, but I hate
how I can't read a whole text as easily as I once did.

------
npsimons
It's been said before[1] and I'll say it again: some things aren't worth your
full reading attention. Heck, even if they were, you don't have enough time to
read everything[2].

That being said, I am a little worried that people (at least myself) aren't
getting as "deep" into topics as they might have used to. I try to solve this
by (very carefully!) picking books that I can slowly digest, over multiple
readings. If nothing else, just reading them at the inspectional and
superficial levels can help me decide whether I need to go back for more.

[1] - See "How to Read a Book"

[2] - [https://what-if.xkcd.com/76/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/76/)

------
askar_yu
That moment when you're skimming through an article which is about skimming
and scanning. Yet you keep speeding and scrolling through the content which in
turn is revealing what you're experiencing as you're just reading about it.

------
terranstyler
TLDR: People's brains become optimized for TLDR

------
mixologic
tl;dr

