The Internet may be changing how we read and think, according to a five-year study by scholars at the University College London.
The scholars documented the behaviour of visitors to two popular research sites that provide access to journal articles, e‑books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” springing from one source to another. Moreover, visitors rarely returned to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would visit another site.
The authors of the study note: “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
Patrick Kingsley of the Guardian wrote an article about this phenomenon: “…because of the Internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual tidbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other.”
When I am using the Internet, I typically skim content and often feel rushed. Most of the time, I’m researching content with a definite goal in mind—such as drafting an article like this one!
How does this change affect our writing? Usability guru Jakob Nielsen found that most readers’ eyes focus on the action-oriented content, such as product features and bulleted lists. If readers encounter introductory text on web pages, users often skip it. Nielsen calls introductory paragraphs “blah-blah text.”
But introductory text does have a role. He writes: “A brief introduction can help users better understand the rest of the page. Even if they skip it initially, they might return later if it doesn’t look intimidatingly long and dense.”
He recommends writers include the following content:
1) What’s the page about? A brief introduction can help users better understand the rest of the page.
2) Why should readers care? What’s in it for them?
In this age of hurried reading, Nielsen’s research makes sense to me. Still with me?
I have worked as a
eh — most of the stuff I find on the web isn’t worth more than two pages. If it is, I’ll usually download it or print it to PDF.
I suspect that authors and companies know that readers don’t want to read 30 pages on a topic so they distill their main points to three pages. It used to be fine to read 30 pages; the Internet has changed that.
Thanks for your comment.
I can’t count the number of times I have stood in a bookstore, pulling books off the shelf, quickly skimming through, looking at a paragraph here and there to see if anything sparked my interest. It strikes me that most of what these studies on Internet reading are seeing is simply this very old behavior of quickly skimming content to see if it is of interest.
When you are dealing with books, it is pretty easy to distinguish content selection behavior from content consumption behavior — they happen on opposites sides of the cash register. But online, there is nothing to tell you if the reader is engaging in content selection behavior or content consumption behavior.
There is an innate desire in humans to find the dire hidden cost of a seemingly benign technology — the science fiction genre is founded on this tendency, and probably serves to heighten it. So when we study reading habits on the Internet, we are naturally primed to look for, and to highlight, signs of a hidden catastrophe in the making.
But all I can see in these studies is people looking at content selection activities and reporting them as a change in content consumption activities. This is not to say that I don’t think there have been changes in content selection and consumption. I think it is natural that when a resource is expensive to obtain (either in money or in time) we tend to give it more of a chance to meet our needs. If I have only one widget, I will spend a good deal of time trying to get it to work for me. If I have twenty to choose from, and the first one does not immediately work for me, I will quickly abandon it and try another.
The Internet makes getting information resources much cheaper (both in time and in money) than paper, so our commitment to each of the resources we find online will be correspondingly less. Each piece of content will get less of a chance to impress us because moving to the next one is (or seems like) a more optimal strategy than sticking with the one the initially disappoints.
But none of this tells us anything about how we consume the content that we finally decide is of use to us. Full, deep, committed reading may be statistically rare on the net, but it may still be the norm for the actual consumption of material that really meets our needs.