If you're interested in how technology might cause self-interruptions that make things like sitting down with a book more difficult, I recommend checking out "The Distracted Mind". [2]
Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
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Re: Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
#12Medium matters. For in-depth, “digital” reading the only thing I have which works for me is my Kindle. It’s distractionfree by design, and that’s why I love it. It’s definitely not just another redundant screen.
Yeah but Kindle != web. And that is huge bummer for me! I generally prefer reading everything online, or not read at all.
Re: Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
#13Long form news articles and technical books consumed in pomodoro-sided is what I have to get by on.
Re: Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
#14I've come to love books intensely. Not only because I enjoy learning--before I read books, I found blogs to be great educators. I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. It gives me time to consider things that I normally have no space for. I remember Seth Godin saying once that every business book can be summarized in just a few pages but the book itself is a story. I think it goes…
Spot on and cue page turns! Fan open a book and read horizontally. Have intermediate stops between chunks of text on two well-formatted pages and then transition to next. A second to soak in the content in between with time and space makes for a huge difference!
Scrolling animation can never achieve or serve this sort of efficiency!
I recently wrote an essay on some of the underlying psychophysics and varying outcomes of user interfaces (UX/UI) and how pagination with page turns (codex) helps in reading and forming memories[1].
Re: Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but Kindle != web. And that is huge bummer for me! I generally prefer reading everything online, or not read at all.
This is really interesting to me. Do you know why you think (feel?) this way?
Re: Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
#16Re: Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
#17I recently discovered I score very low on VVIQ. Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. I don't have full on Aphantasia. But listening to how for other people reading a book is like watching a movie in their heads blows my mind. Being able to imagine with any level of depth sounds pretty amazing. As a kid I never really played pretend or was into fiction. But I'm curious that possibly long form reading is on the d…
Re: Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
#18I've come to love books intensely. Not only because I enjoy learning--before I read books, I found blogs to be great educators. I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. It gives me time to consider things that I normally have no space for. I remember Seth Godin saying once that every business book can be summarized in just a few pages but the book itself is a story. I think it goes…
> I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. Spot on and cue page turns! Fan open a book and read horizontally. Have intermediate stops between chunks of text on two well-formatted pages and then transition to next. A second to soak in the content in between with time and space makes for a huge difference! Scrolling animation can never achieve or serve this sort of efficiency! I recen…
> Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading, skimming along the surface.
Re: Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
#19I recently discovered I score very low on VVIQ. Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. I don't have full on Aphantasia. But listening to how for other people reading a book is like watching a movie in their heads blows my mind. Being able to imagine with any level of depth sounds pretty amazing. As a kid I never really played pretend or was into fiction. But I'm curious that possibly long form reading is on the d…
Re: Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
#20Did a small survey last year on this point and discovered that while technology might sound distracting people are actually spending more time reading/viewing stuff they like more lot more than before. We found that among teens for example very few people read anything from news websites very rarely but almost every single teen had read at least one article in depth on very niche topic that appealed to them. (For exa…
Totally anecdotal story / corner case: I was a terrible reader growing up, I had ADD before the days when they diagnosed that. My son also has ADD and strangely, he is an avid reader. I've caught him reading two books at once (both in his lap) and swapping between them and he was comprehending them (I did some Q&A). At least on the very surface to me that might mean that reading is not necessarily antithetical to som…