Thinking out loud here...is it possible to use the same patterns for good?
Like, infinite scroll, bite-sized chunk UI, etc. that trick our minds into reading a full book?
Like, infinite scroll, bite-sized chunk UI, etc. that trick our minds into reading a full book?
It breaks up a large task, learning a language, into smaller bite-sized chunks. It rewards users with coins that can be used to do power-ups. It turns learning into a rewarding game.
Perhaps this principle can be applied to other domains as well.
You can even take this further with reading books. Sure, you can get a star by reading a book for like an hour a day...if you're using Apple's iBook or whatever. That just means you're locked out of other books not on that platform or books you have in other unsupported formats or gasp physical books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
My friends that are in med school all use spaced-repetition to cram information into their memory banks, and the app they use (Anki) lets users share flashcard packs. Incidentally, aside from medschool-related packs, there's also packs for learning most languages. I don't think you can ever learn a language through spaced repetition, but it's certainly useful for expanding your vocabulary (learning new words). I started out with Duolingo but switched to Anki because I'm learning a tonal language which doesn't quite sound right with Duolingo's TTS (and the Anki card packs are accompanied with recordings of real speakers).
..and yet I still pop into Duolingo every day though to get my good-boy points :)))
Though there's the option of planting little long-focus concentration seeds by dropping references to both longer-form high-quality works and the mindset that it takes to absorb them within more accessible materials. Books have pretty much always had an accessibility problem --- they're hard to publicise and attract readers to, and there's a considerable infrastructure that's been set up in all manner of contexts to make this easier, including lectures (academic, public, business), interviews, serial and excerpt publications, etc. The fields of education and pedagogy (amongst others) are consumed with this challenge --- minds are not simply buckets into which torrents of content should be jetted.
It seems somewhat similar to me to autopsy and dissection --- the goal is to open up the body and reveal the interesting bits inside, ultimately with the hope that some might find a way to appreciate the integrated (and still functioning) whole. Books, unlike humans, typically survive such treatments.
I see the two approaches as bringing deep content to the distracted (what you're proposing) vs. calming the distracted and bringing them to deep content and teaching the process of attending. Ultimately I think we're going to need the latter. Though some morsal-isation may be of use. Keep in mind that there's been a long history of this throughout the history of media technologies (cuneiform, papayrus, codices, books, photography, phonography, video, computer games, ...), most of high excpectations and exceedingly limited success.
What has worked for me in the past to get away from reading morsel-sized content and back into reading long prose was a lighthearted, but captivating book. I have read something from Terry Pratchett and by the end of the book, I was itching to finally give a read to other works in my library that were just collecting dust.
In some of his works the gags flow so well, you just can't stop turning pages. You "win the jackpot" pretty often.
(It's only one of many on my rather intimidating stack....)
The mainstream social media sites never much appealed to me. Facebook always seemed sus, Twitter, more problem than solution. Instagram and TikTok seem well below my age cohort, and I've engaged with either in a very limited fashion --- occasional content that pops up, but no accounts or apps.
My principle mobile device has no interactive account-linked services. I do use Pocket (which ... has issues: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...>). I'll read a fair bit of HN, for example, but have to go to another device to actually respond. It's also an e-ink tablet / book-reader, rather than a phone. I've installed very few apps: Termux, a podcast app, a feed reader (which frankly isn't much use), Internet Radio (listening to BBC 4 presently with Liz's exit), Pocket, as mentioned. Little else. Not even email, as yet. That said, e-ink and tablets whilst improvements over emissive, colour-enabled, phone-based mobile devices won't excise you of your own daemons and frailties. It still takes work.
Shutting off WiFi is a huge boon. I don't do it nearly enough.
I disable all notifications where those exist.
Increasing general hostility toward any form of intelligence and informational benefit of the Web are their own strong incentives to curtail usage.
Reddit has shown a constant and increasingly dark series of patterns for years, with a sharp inflection about four years ago. My subreddit is now largely a testament to that fact, and I've almost wholly abandoned use of both it and Reddit at large. My experience is that sites whose goals don't match mine tend to match it increasingly less with time. See: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...> and <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/9ebkjh/current...>, both of which point to other long-standing concerns.
Otherwise:
- There's this set of (somewhat aspirational) principles I try to follow: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669503>
- I'd really like to have tools for better monitoring and reviewing what I've read and researched over time. Amongst Pocket's many, many, many failings is that it Is Not At All This But Should Be. Reviewing previous reads ... one often finds that many of them really weren't all that significant. Letting information stew for a bit is often useful, it filters out much uncertainty and bullshit. One notion I'm still looking to properly implement is what I call "BotI", or Best of the Interval. Selecting top items by a period --- week, month, year, etc.
- I have some guilty pleasures. An Imgur binge every so often (a few times a week or month) can give some contact with current trends. Again, not used via an account. Mastodon and Diaspora* have been my principle social outlets. Both can be time sucks, and I try to aggressively filter what I follow, mostly through a curated "highest interest" list or aspect (Diaspora* terminology, similar to Google+ Circles), of people who post with low frequency and high(er) salience. I'll adjust and prune those aggressively.
- I'd been active on Google+ from inception to death, which was an ... interesting experience. It was by stages novel, useless, interesting, useful, and finally, disappointing. Something of a cautionary tale. There were numerous premonitions of what have emerged since as failings of social platforms. Most of the darker aspects of which, I have to say, Google seemed to handle well, though overall adoption of the platform and Google's incoherent strategy regarding it seem to have been the principle fatal blows.
I'm not sure that's coherent, hope it helps.
(Brad DeLong's Slouching Toward Utopia for the interested.)
So in my opinion, I really do not think so.
https://teleread.org/2018/03/21/kindle-ios-app-now-allow-ver...
Don’t forget to shut off the progress indicator or location or whatever they call it. Not knowing how far along you are is the other transformative feature of ebooks. In paper books, you always see the end coming.
The device itself is the size of a printed full-format magazine. It's larger than most books, and if you're reading principally textual material, an 8--10" screen might be preferable (smaller, slightly lighter, more portable), but if you're inclined to read old-school articles scanned in with middlin' quality, this is excellent.
I far prefer paginated navigation. I use the device as well for much web reading, almost entirely using the Einkbro browser, which as the name suggests is optimised for e-ink. Basically, that amounts to full-page navigation based on touch (not gestures), and some settings for favouring a high-contrast black-on-white style on most websites. (HN's slight off-white main-page background is highly distracting. Even on desktop, I've inverted the main body and margin colour schemes using the Stylus extension (Firefox).)
I find that Pocket, though it typically renders articles well, navigates them poorly. It's instead hugely preferable to either read them on Einkbro or use that browser's print-to-PDF or print-to-ePub[2] features and then read content directly via Onyx's bookreader software (NeoReader).
For formatted books and articles generally, I far prefer paginated formatting, and will usually opt for PDF rather than ePub formats because the PDFs read better. This is after decades of being a PDF critic. It turns out that the problem is far less the PDF format than device displays. Laptops and desktops are landscape rather than portrait (though a sufficiently large desktop is good for viewing content with other applications/windows visible, and/or in 2-up mode), and phones are Too Damned Small. E-ink at 8" or larger is a whole new world.[3]
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Notes:
1. Onyx BOOX Max Lumi. Not GPL compliant, but otherwise excellent HW & SW. Wish I could bump the onboard storage up from 64 GB to ~512 GB or better. Starting to look into HW hacking options. Oh, and it also has continuous scroll for the ebook reader if that's your kink.
2. The ePub export is truly transformational, I describe it in more detail here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30973824>
3. That's not to say that there aren't really horrible PDFs, or that the file format itself is especially good. I'm talking UI/UX here, with reasonable care to design matching print standards and conventions.
The other argument here is that there's a whole #LearnOnTikTok type hashtag and the question is, are you actually learning or are you just being entertained while you think you learn something?
<https://www.fastcompany.com/90392917/the-next-big-reading-pl...>
For example, I wouldn't want to read a lot of the content I write, so I considered releasing the tl;dr as feed.