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I love using Pocket, and it has tremendously improved my reading. Also interesting that you spoke about short attention spans at the end. It felt serendipitous, because I just wrote a (long!) piece arguing that the term is over-diagnosed. I think you might like it - https://www.sneakyartist.com/blog/short-attention-span.

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author

Thank you for this, Nishant! Just had a read - good stuff...

I do agree there's a romanticism of the past at work here (as with many other things, eg. folk my age yelling "I REMEMBER WHEN MUSIC WAS GOOD, NOW PULL YOUR PANTS UP YOU LONG HAIRED LOUTS"). And there is a growing amount of *everything* online, super-shortform included. Considering the speed of its growth, "explosion" is probably the right word.

But as you say in your piece: "Everything on the phone is exciting, but always less exciting than the next thing." This is the little behavioural tic that has been wetwired into our thoughts - and where it can definitely be seen is by looking at specific things we *used* to spend a lot of time on that we now take much less time over, looking at the same stuff in both cases. Comparing apples with apples, as it were. For example, from the second study I linked to (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/16/got-a-minute-global-attention-span-is-narrowing-study-reveals):

"A 2013 Twitter global trend would last for an average of 17.5 hours, contrasted with a 2016 Twitter trend, which would last for only 11.9 hours."

There's a lot to unpack there, but it does suggest that on the exact same platform, the same activity is encountering much more attentional (ie. distraction pressure and making much the same people abandon topics faster and faster every year, enmasse. That isn't down to the tech itself - the basic functionality of Twitter didn't change in those 3 years. It was the way we use that tech.

So, yeah. I hear you. It's a topic with a lot of glib, alarmist headlines, and advice that's an impractical overreaction (eg. Waldenponding). But it's also something we should be on high alert about. It's not a trivial thing that's happening here, I think.

And I find it telling that the Centre for Humane Technology, dedicated to rigorously rethinking the way we use tech to find kinder, healthier ways we can be online, chose to call their podcast Your Undivided Attention! https://www.humanetech.com/podcast

Also, I'm curious: as an artist, have you noticed any changes in yourself over, say, the last decade, in the way you focus on your work? Do you find it as easy as before to achieve flow and lose yourself in it without getting in your own way?

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Hey Mike, first up thanks for this wonderful reply. I largely agree with all that you say, but would like to gently push back against some inferences of the Danish study. Here's my counter-thought - "Social media users are abandoning global topics faster on platforms where short attention spans are rewarded and incentivized."

That said, I do agree we all have to fight harder battles against our distractions these days. And I regularly need to employ various techniques to refocus on my tasks of the day. Thanks for the podcast link, I think it will be very useful for me!

To your last question, I have two observations:

(1) The only time of my day that I am in complete focus - in the flow - is when I am drawing. It feels impossible to imagine what it was like 10 years ago, when FB was only on my browser, and I did not have IG or Twitter. But drawing has become a meditative refuge for me, which I think is a new development.

(2) I run a long-form conversational podcast with other urban-sketchers. My episodes are 2-3hr in length. My audience includes the same people who scroll past my writing on FB, who barely scan my art on IG, and hardly notice my tweets on Twitter. So my assertion remains that people tune their behaviour to what the platform permits + incentivizes. The podcast medium does not allow reactions or comments. You cannot interrupt the conversation itself. Behaviour shifts.

This resonates with the following line in the Guardian article - "But Lorenz-Spreen and Hövel argue quality journalism will always have a place in the public sphere, just likely not on social media."

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founding

What a lovely thought-ramble. So many things to consider, one of which is personal (I work as a copy editor, and the toil of paying attention to Every. Single. Word. And every. Single. Line for hours and hours makes me acutely aware of when I’m skimming online but also of the fact that nobody is reading my own writing online the way I would), and one of which is fluffily cultural (what about Ted Lasso’s determination to make his team think like a goldfish and forget their mistakes?!).

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Thank you. :)

I wonder if anyone has done a kind of anthropology of skimming? Did people skim in the age of reading actual books by actual candlelight? Hmm. I do find it takes a lot nowadays to slow my eye (which I loathe, because I want to savour everything I read). Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible was a memorable instance of A Lot - wow, I dragged reading that one out, for all the right reasons...

Nobody skims your writing, though. I just asked everyone. They don't. Confirmed.

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founding

I wonder how you would know how people read in the past? Do we even know ourselves? I feel like I read books fully in the pre-internet days, but reading is such a VR experience anyway that would I even know if I were skimming?

Maybe it's like vision -- you know, how there's actually a blind spot in the middle of our vision that the brain fills by drawing on the rest of the visual information.

Poisonwood Bible was A Lot. I dragged it out, too. Not my favorite of her books, but so incredibly good. N.K. Jemisin was probably my most recent fully immersive slow-down-and-sink-in read.

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I've long known that the brain engages differently when we write vs type and since I work all day on a computer for my job I want to be as far away from it as possible on my off days. That said, I have always journaled by hand and I also do an opposite-hand writing practice as well. When I was in college I would copy my notes 3 times, written notes, written copies, as a study tool.

My brain gets bored reading on the internet, or evening a downloaded copy on a digital device. I SO much prefer a solid book I take and lounge with anywhere and that won't get unreadable in the sunlight either. Instapaper looks like an interesting tool to investigate though. Is it advertisement-free? Pocket doesn't appear to have an option to read online so how do you even know if it's some worth 'saving' to a device?

As you can see by the date, I routed to this newsletter from a recent one, clicking on the 'saccades' link. There must be more offline tools now, though I haven't investigated any.

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