on distracted reading

I recently tried to read the book, How To Break Up With Your Phone, by Catherine Price, partly after a recommendation from a friend (love you!) and partly spurred by my own desire to have some independence from the device I keep with me basically 24/7.

I wasn’t very successful in reading it, which is about on par with how these things usually go for me. But in that glorious, fleeting 20% that I did manage to finish before my library hold expired¹, the book mounted an attack on online articles, and the crux of their argument was that web articles are very different from physical reading because of the links scattered around the page – it’s all distraction and with each link, we make a choice on whether to click it or not. This, the author argues, allows our deep focus brain muscles to atrophy while our mind becomes acclimated to… distracted reading.

This was only a brief part of a very well thought-out, multi-pronged attack on phones and the web in general (I seriously recommend you to check out the book!), but it was, strangely, one of the parts that stuck with me the most.

Her argument was so convincing that for a few seconds in the shower, I considered no longer using (gasp here please for dramatic effect) footnotes in my blog posts – after all, don’t they also provide a choice in each one? Do I interrupt my flow of reading to click on whatever inane comment Caroline decided was potentially worthy of my time? Do I read them all at the end and try to piece the post back together? Why did she make those little numbers so hard to read anyway?

And, from an artistic standpoint, I liked the idea of removing that choice, of every reader essentially having the same narrative flow and thus every reader having to go through a good number of parenthetical comments in every blog post.

But the thing is… I like those links in articles. I like those footnotes. Isn’t there beauty, also, in letting the reader choose? In having many tiny choices embedded in each post?

These are strengths of the medium. You can’t do links in physical books or newspapers, and with every link and reference, I embed each post into a traceable web of knowledge. With every footnote or URL, I add another node to a branching tree of infinite choices. With every link, I introduce a possible rabbit hole, a new path in the maze of interconnected knowledge.²

Why not play to the strengths of the medium? Why not help build the web?

Maybe this does lead to distracted reading. But maybe this kind of reading, one with a thousand choices, is where the future lies.

footnotes