Slow down, you read too fast
Tue, 20 Jul 2010Patrick Kingsley wrote an interesting article in The Guardian last Thursday on ‘The art of slow reading‘. In it he mentions Tracy Seeley’s students’ idea of disconnecting from the Internet for a day a week as a way to combat the effect it has on reading. This is not as unrealistic as some people consider. It just requires discipline, something that even moderate Internet use undermines easily. I think it is certainly well worth the benefit, not that I’ve managed a day a week, but a day every week or so.
I’m convinced that the Internet is contributing in large measure to a shorter attention span. I find Nicholas Carr’s experience to mirror my own somewhat. However, I think that spending time reading serious books and articles offline does help stem the tide. Without it I think my reading skills and attention span would be much less than at present.
Offline reading also stimulates reflection and engagement. Writing comments and criticism is much easier in offline mode. Critical engagement with online reading tends to negligible at best, non-existent at worst. Online reading has a tendency to fragmentation , as hyperlinks are all to easily followed on impulse, and there is a greater temptation to skim the followed links. Footnotes seem to stimulate later follow up reading for me, rather than instantly looking them up and reading right away. Perhaps it is the potential for ephemerality on the Internet that makes me thing that if I don’t read something now it might have disappeared by the time I get round to reading it. It destroys the pleasure of delayed gratification.
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References:
Nicholas Carr, ‘Experiments in delinkification‘, Rough Type blog, 31 May 2010, with footnote on 4 June 2010.
Launcelot R. Fletcher, The Free Lance Academy (Home of Slow Reading).
Patrick Kingsley, ‘The art of slow reading‘ in The Guardian, 15 July 2010.
Tracy Seeley’s blog, http://tracyseeley.wordpress.com/ (Where the books are always slow and the comment thread is always open).