Let’s be honest, we are on the same side, how many of your really planning to read this whole thing till the end? I bet not even 10 people would read it thoroughly. Today itself, I was showing my friend this article on travelling, now travelling is a well known topic, right? Everybody has an interest in travelling. I believe the article was of roughly 2000 words, which my friend finished reading in 3 minutes. (I wasn’t counting or anything. *Shuffles nervously*)
2000 words? 3 minutes? Kidding me? And then he has the audacity to say “Wow, man, what a great article. I would love to go to Singapore once.” Guess what? The article had a lot of places but Singapore wasn’t one of them. So what does it say? That he skimmed through it. That’s what we do. We skim through online articles and just read the headlines or the keywords. Even with news, we never bother to go through the whole detail and just run an eye through the article and miss out on important details. Even for a story, most people don’t even reach midday, reading till the last word is a hoax.
REAL STORY BEHIND ONLINE READING
Technology has brought everything to mankind , served in a platter. The end result of this maybe be good but there’s always something bad to the good. The readers surfing through online articles, don’t really go through each and every word. They are not really concerned about reading the entire article. They just pin point the keywords and make a list out of it. It’s been reported that 79% of the readers scanned the information rather than absorbing the information.
All these comfortable online studying is done by highlighting the keywords, giving bullet lists etc. Web sites use the inverted pyramid style of writing so that the readers can speed up their process of skimming through the article.
This can make our work easier but makes our brain more and more lazy. It hampers the functioning of brain, as a result the brain gets used to selective reading. It gradually looks for shortcut. The online readers just skim through, they don’t get into the depth of the matter.
WHAT THE EXPERIMENT SAYS
All these skimming through web articles, have made us humans, a type of living being with digital brains. Those days of going to library , searching for books , go through pages and pages and finding information, gaining depth of the knowledge are gone. This old traditions is replaced by the modern highly developed technology.
Various experiments are made on this serious topic.Claire Handscombe, went through this experiment and showed a commitment problem online. She claimed that at the start it was easy finding answers to all her queries, got to know new things but after a while she became restless. She told that all she was doing was moving her eyes over the words and not really dipping into the informations or absorb it.
We all know that the brain constantly adapts to the process we provide it. This online skimming is badly damaging that. People are getting used to selective ready. And once it gets accustomed to reading in such a fast and selective way that when we try to read a novel or a book we can’t keep our calm and try to read fast. Due to this we loose our patience and also our concentration.
BASIC DEFLECTION BETWEEN ONLINE READING AND READING BOOKS
It is understood that in reading books we can do comprehension study. But while reading online articles we Hardy read the entire article, and not even go near comprehensive studying.
Previously while reading papers or books , pictures are never a point of distraction. But now in online reading, we easy get distracted by images , videos,external links etc. Online searching for informations maybe less time consuming than going through hundreds of books, but it’s definitely a huge point of loosing focus.
A lot of time is invested behind pushing ,touching, linking, scrolling and jumping through text in online. This slows down their patience to sit down with a book or paper in hand. The online readers face a lot of trouble reading long sentences , consisting of huge informations regarding each and every topic.
You know what skimming through an article does? It doesn’t give you the whole fact and you know what they say, half a knowledge is more dangerous than no knowledge. And I think it’s true. Maybe you scanned an article and deduced an opinion. But an opinion without full knowledge of the topic is very harmful. To say it in a sweet way, you maybe ridiculed for knowing half of the things. Has anyone watched Black Mirror? The very first episode showed us how technology has destroyed the world. The girl was left an hour before the actual show happened but no one noticed because they were busy glued to the television. That episode really opened my eyes as to show, how we are so engrossed in our lives and phones that we hardly take note of the surroundings. If any of you have made it to the last of this text, Thank you for taking out your time and reading it to the t.
