What Phones Are Doing to Reading
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I still have to battle to find a serious manufacturer that makes flicker free panels, I still have to battle to find monitors with a smooth refresh rate and pleasing accurate colors. Currently there are no displays that allow me to read text for a prolonged period of time.
This seems such a no brainer thing to improve, especially since most tech workers spend their days reading and writing emails, spreadsheets, documents, code, etc.
When a publisher provided a choice between a PDF of a book and a physical copy, I would usually ask for the PDF, because I didn’t want my house to fill up with books that I might end up not reading. . . . now I encounter nearly every written work, regardless of its length, quality, and difficulty, on the small screen of my iPhone.
That sounds awful.
I've been culling my house of a lot of paper.
It takes all kinds to make a world?
On the other hand, I had friends who resorted to moving when first their apartments, then their house, filled up with unread books.
(they got them in bulk from library sales, and left all the resulting duplicates by the door for guests to take home)
I've long hypothesize that people's love of art is inextricably tied to thing-ness. That is, art-lovers are often obsessed with the physical manifestation of the underlying art (music: vinyl album, painting: physical painting, sculpture: physical sculpture). I became interested in this art thing-ness idea in this during the renaissance of 3d printing a couple decades ago, when I saw so many incredible sculptors online, that seemed to get zero attention, because there was no "original" to go see in a museum... but you could just print one at home.
My favorite artist during that era was Dizingof: https://www.youtube.com/@dizingof/videos
Reading in print has lots of benefits, particularly for learning and comprehension, as opposed to reading on a screen.
Beyond the simplest level of comprehension, reading in print has clear and proven benefits. This became very obvious during the pandemic.
Here is a good article with several citations: https://theconversation.com/why-we-remember-more-by-reading-...
>The discrepancies between print and digital results are partly related to paper’s physical properties. With paper, there is a literal laying on of hands, along with the visual geography of distinct pages. People often link their memory of what they’ve read to how far into the book it was or where it was on the page.
>But equally important is mental perspective, and what reading researchers call a “shallowing hypothesis.” According to this theory, people approach digital texts with a mindset suited to casual social media, and devote less mental effort than when they are reading print.
The theory seems to suggest that reading on your phone primes you to be in a certain mental state, but that argument means that a dedicated ereader would be an entirely reasonable alternative.
Digital and print aren't equivalent and there's lots of anecdotal experience showing this.
Again, I'm not saying the studies are wrong, quite the opposite. I'm saying I'd actually like to see the studies continue until there is a thesis that makes a good amount of sense so that ereaders can be updated to better include any reading retention that books have. I only say that glancing at the abstracts included, I have half a dozen issues with studies, and the seem ripe for the replication crisis. My biggest concern being, if we are testing these things on people who haven't grown up with them. It makes a lot of sense that format you learn on at a young age could effect retention on reading in other formats.
Paper isn't magic. If there is some benefit to in-book-physical-location responses, it makes little sense it would be hard to argue that this is evolutionary adaptive, as mass publishing is only a few hundred years old, and an argument for spoken word stories would make much, much more sense.
If the thesis of in-book-physical-location as a benefit is actually real, ereaders could be adapted to fit something like this, by having, say, edges of the ereader change in thickness as the amount of content has been read.
What form of memory would that be?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/memory/types-memor...
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/1...
Lately I worry about all the AI written content that appears when doing a simple web search. I’ll find an article that seems relevant, but after spending 30 seconds or so unwrapping the prose, I find absolutely nothing of value.
If I was younger and every time I tried to read something longer than a tweet I got nothing out of it, I would likely get frustrated. Maybe that’s why it’s easier to default to gifs and memes.