The Internet has Made Me Bad at Reading

The Internet has made me really bad at reading. There’s always such an abundance of things I could read that I need to selectively filter what I choose to (because my time, like everyone’s, is finite and valuable). The unfortunate reality is that I find myself reading more articles, but only skimming them. 

Take this article I found on Hacker News this morning: I keep forgetting to use your app. It’s apparently about mobile app development and probably about use experience, but I’m not reading it. It has no pictures, no diagrams, and the layout doesn’t grab my attention, so I closed the tab after skimming only the first paragraph.

Maybe it’s just that the paragraph didn’t pull me in and tell me what the full article was about. Maybe I’m over-reacting to an Internet full of people who aren’t great at writing compelling blog posts (gasp!), but I feel in some ways that my attention span has been reduced; I feel like because there’s always something to read, I never take the time to read and reflect on anything in any amount of depth. And I kind of hate it.


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