Unreadable

Written byJoe Clark. 40 comments

Joe Clark

Joe Clark lives in Toronto and made a name for himself in Web accessibility, for all the good it did him. Entering his fifth year of trying to raise a pittance for an accessibility research project, he has decided to spend more time working on his next three books.

A species-wide experiment has been carried out on the world’s cyber citizens and the results are in. Thanks to the web, our brains are changing and our ability to read long is going the way of the typewriter. Is this really what we had in mind?

The web is rewiring your brain. By star­ing at web­sites all day, your read­ing abil­i­ties have been for­ever changed. And every child in every fore­see­able gen­er­a­tion of every fore­see­able technology-​​rich soci­ety will be changed in just the same way. Read­ing will never be the same. Nei­ther will you.

This is a problem.

We started out hop­ing the web would make it pos­si­ble and easy to dis­trib­ute doc­u­ments, espe­cially pub­lic doc­u­ments and other ‘impor­tant’ but dull works that were for­merly hard to locate. Later on we decided that what we’d really wanted the web to do all along was to make it pos­si­ble to upload low-​​quality video snip­pets and pack clev­er­ness and pith into 140-​​character lozenges.

We realise now that long doc­u­ments do not work on the web. We should never have thought oth­er­wise. But all those short doc­u­ments we’re read­ing instead are poi­son­ing our abil­ity to read long doc­u­ments. You used to have the Yahoo ‘por­tal’ and Geoc­i­ties home­pages; now you have your own blog, 1470 RSS sub­scrip­tions, need­lessly dupli­cated accounts on every social-​​networking site, Flickr pho­tos you feel oblig­ated to update, and the tri­fecta of instant mes­sag­ing, Twit­ter, and email (which you gave up using prop­erly when you signed up for Gmail).

Our fault

Events are unfold­ing almost exactly as Nick Carr said they would in his now-​​notorious arti­cle for the Atlantic Monthly, ‘Is Google Mak­ing Us Stu­pid?’ Google isn’t; the web is. For any­one who works on the web all day, and for a lot of teenagers, there is no way you’re going to read lengthy sin­gle doc­u­ments online. It’s partly our fault, partly intrin­sic to the struc­ture of hyper­text and partly due to the inabil­ity of a mam­malian visual pro­cess­ing sys­tem to deal with read­ing off a screen all day.

It is just barely prac­ti­ca­ble to read a long doc­u­ment on screen if the doc­u­ment is pretty much the only thing on that screen. How often do you see a page like that? Almost never.

A typ­i­cal com­mer­cial site has a ‘con­tent well’ of some sort, but also mul­ti­ple tool­bars; head­ers and foot­ers; side­bar con­tent; and a search box.

A typ­i­cal per­sonal site resides on a hosted blog­ging plat­form like Blog­ger or Word­Press. These too have a con­tent well, but also a lengthy list of pre­vi­ous post­ings; archives; a search box; and var­i­ous bits of fluff and branding.

A typ­i­cal social-​​networking site barely has any con­tent. It’s a 1999-​​style por­tal by another name, with links to all your friends (often with pho­tos), auto­play­ing music (as on MySpace), and a ‘lifestream’ of lit­tle bons mots from you and your friends.

A typ­i­cal gov­ern­ment site packs as much on to a sin­gle page as a typ­i­cal gov­ern­ment paper doc­u­ment does.

A typ­i­cal search site may show barely any­thing (that’s the Google model), but a search-​​results page has a stream of graph­i­cally undif­fer­en­ti­ated links and ‘excerpts’ sur­rounded by brand­ing, UI ele­ments and ‘unob­tru­sive’ text ads.

With so many design ele­ments on nearly every page we ever visit, we develop a kind of blind­ness that extends well beyond ban­ner blind­ness – the well-​​known phe­nom­e­non in which site vis­i­tors never even notice a web adver­tise­ment. Eye-​​tracking stud­ies show that most parts of a page are sim­ply not noticed. The remain­der might be noticed for a few mil­lisec­onds at a time. One or two items might attract pro­longed atten­tion, mea­sured in seconds.

Through our insis­tence that any page make every­thing pos­si­ble (search, click the third-​​last blog post, read every­thing from April, log in, buy, com­ment, Digg™, sub­scribe), we train site vis­i­tors to read as lit­tle as pos­si­ble and get the hell out of there.

The fault of hypertext

Links make it pos­si­ble to get the hell out of there. Even if a page is so brazen as to con­tain no links, our browsers help­fully give us a ‘back’ but­ton, a search box, tabs (includ­ing meth­ods of dis­play­ing 40 tabs at a time), and unlim­ited book­marks. HTML gives us a spe­cial kind of link, the alter­nate RSS link, which pro­vides ‘a river of news’.

A link means it’s pos­si­ble to go some­where else. Links are intrin­sic to the web (and to cer­tain pre­de­ces­sor tech­nolo­gies such as gophers). Links make it seem like you’re doing some­thing wrong if you rest motion­less on one page too long. The hyper­link is a Freudian con­struct – an oral fix­a­tion of con­tin­u­ous con­sump­tion deliv­ered by auto­mated soft­ware. Open wide.

Reading’s fault

And now the unstop­pable force of the web con­fronts an immov­able object: the human body. Your eyes, your face, your neck, your nerves and your brain were not built to sit up straight and read from a screen all day. But that’s exactly what we’re all doing.

If we exclude for a moment inci­den­tal types of read­ing like sig­nage and bill­boards, through­out most of the past 500 years it has been pos­si­ble to get rea­son­ably com­fort­able with the object you’re read­ing. You can move it closer or far­ther away, sit down, stand up, or lie down, change the light­ing to some degree, and, if you really have to, use a mag­ni­fier or some other aid. I chal­lenge you to ‘get rea­son­ably com­fort­able’ with read­ing from a com­puter screen:

It’s a fixed dis­tance away.

It offers a glow­ing, low-​​resolution panel, prob­a­bly sil­hou­et­ted against a darker background.

You’re sit­ting bolt upright, and nei­ther your seat­ing angle nor the screen angle is easy to change.

Much of the time, you have to read your screen for work, some­where you might not want to be in the first place. And you’re spend­ing the entire work­day doing all this rather than choos­ing to devote an hour or two – at most – read­ing a novel, a mag­a­zine or a newspaper.

Peo­ple respond to the dif­fi­culty of onscreen read­ing in three ways: they suf­fer with­out really know­ing why; they give up the read­ing task as soon as pos­si­ble; or (for the elite) they use every trick in the book to reduce dis­com­fort. I fall into all those cat­e­gories at dif­fer­ent times, espe­cially the last – I put unrea­son­able effort into print­ing out web pages so I can read them com­fort­ably over dou­ble espresso the next morning.

For the peo­ple who merely sit and suf­fer, the best we can do is improve their computer’s defaults, as with bet­ter and smoother fonts and bet­ter screens. But test­ing shows that really good fonts with really good smooth­ing increase read­ing speed by about 5 per cent. That may add up over a work­day, but it isn’t make-​​or-​​break. And most peo­ple can­not alter, let alone improve, their work­place read­ing envi­ron­ments. There’s lit­tle we can do for this group.

Those in the sec­ond cat­e­gory are in thrall of a mad desire to spend as lit­tle time as pos­si­ble on any given page of any given site.

This desire to get in, get it over with and get out spills over into other forms of read­ing. Maybe you can just barely endure a quick flip through one sec­tion of a news­pa­per, but could you even read a book of short sto­ries? I ‘read’ 200 books annu­ally, yet even I barely man­age to begin five fic­tion books a year; of those, I might fin­ish one. I man­age the other 200 books solely because the books can be skimmed over or sim­ply flipped through, as though they were a fash­ion magazine.

I know peo­ple com­plain that long-​​form video doesn’t work on the web. But nobody who likes short video­clips online has lost the abil­ity to watch a full tele­vi­sion pro­gram or motion pic­ture. In fact, peo­ple clam­our to do just that on a mobile device. ‘Watch­ing long’ isn’t a problem.

I don’t see many peo­ple com­plain­ing that long texts don’t work on the web (a few peo­ple, but not many). Yet many of us have lost the abil­ity to read a lengthy text any­where, even in con­di­tions less hos­tile to read­ing than sit­ting at a com­puter desk all day. Read­ing long is a problem.

The future of the web is one of an ini­tially unwit­ting species-​​wide rewiring of the brain. The west­ern world has car­ried out a Tuskegee-​​style exper­i­ment in which cit­i­zens’ neu­rol­ogy is per­ma­nently – and invol­un­tar­ily – altered. At the dawn of the web, we could ratio­nally have claimed not to know what we were doing. We don’t have that excuse any­more, but the exper­i­ment is still under way. In fact, it’s full steam ahead.

If you’re look­ing for a T-​​shirt slo­gan (a nice con­cise pithy bit of text from which you can glance away imme­di­ately), try ‘This is your brain on RSS. Any questions?’

Did you really make it all the way through this arti­cle? But only with effort, and only because it was printed out?

Further Reading

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Comments on this article

  1. Written byMichael Montgomery on the 21st of October

    Good arti­cle, if a bit pessimistic.

    When I reached Joe’s clos­ing para­graph, the feel­ing was eerie. Yes, I did read it. Not with much effort, but yes, I had printed it out.

    When it comes to read­ing, paper still wins. Can you say, “print stylesheets, FTW!”

  2. Written byPedro Mendes on the 29th of October

    Great view on the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. I also don’t read long arti­cles online. I agree they don’t work. I’ve seen count­less blog post that look like essays, and am imme­di­a­trly turned off by them. I do strug­gle to print some of them in a usable way. I, nev­er­the­less, still read long offline mate­r­ial such as fic­tion, and non fic­tion. In my opin­ion, when it comes to long text, noth­ing beats paper in hand.

  3. Written byMartijn van der Ven on the 13th of January

    I fin­ished the whole arti­cle. Mainly because I love the way Joe writes. I must con­fess that a lot of long-​​text read­ing is almost impos­si­ble for me and so it seems to be for many of my classmates.

    I didn’t print this writ­ing to read, maybe I should get myself a cheap printer and give that a show. Although being of a inter­net gen­er­a­tion (born: 1991) I still pre­fer read­ing on paper and so do many peo­ple my age I know.

    It will be inter­est­ing to watch what evo­lu­tion does with this.

  4. Written byRichard Fink on the 13th of January

    With an eye on over­all read­abil­ity, I found com­par­ing the dif­fer­ence between the font ren­der­ing in the PDF edi­tion and this HTML edi­tion inter­est­ing. (They both stink but for dif­fer­ent rea­sons.)
    Please change the frackin’ font. Please. P l e a s e.
    Unless my eyes decieve, it’s Ver­dana at a pixel size that height­ens the weird let­terspac­ing that Ver­dana has always had but is less notice­able at small sizes.

    Any­way, I too, think Joe writes good but I think he’s wrong on the main point. Web or no web, some peo­ple are dis­posed to read­ing longer stuff, some not.
    Are there typo­graphic bar­ri­ers, still? — yeah, of course. (Bad font choices being one of them, wink, wink.) But with the rise in good qual­ity LCD screens, sub-​​pixel ren­der­ing like ClearType, e-​​paper screens like on the Kin­dle, iRex, Sony E-​​Reader, and other devel­op­ments, it’s get­ting bet­ter all the time.
    We’re not scrap­ing along at 800X600 on flick­ery CRT screens, anymore.

    Still, the improve­ments won’t make a dif­fer­ence. I think that changes in cul­tural val­ues and the fran­tic pace of mod­ern life has more to do with it than the web, as a medium, favor­ing the short form.

  5. Written byMartijn van der Ven on the 13th of January

    Richard, the arti­cle here seems to be using Avenir. If you don’t have Avenir on your computer/​console it will try to fall-​​back to Arial and only after that to Hel­vetica. If your com­puter did drop this far back in the CSS you’re still get­ting to see Hel­vetica on a size of 14px which—I think–is decent enough.

    I would’ve pre­ferred Hel­vetica (15px instead of 14 per­haps?) over Avenir, then again it might just take time to get used to it.

  6. Written byGuy Leech on the 13th of January

    Richard: I’ve adjusted the type a lit­tle, does it work bet­ter for you now?

  7. Written byRichard Fink on the 13th of January

    Yeah. Looks bet­ter, Guy.
    I didn’t bother dig­ging into the CSS and I’m using the IE8 “Partner’s Build” RC as my main browser at the moment and all I could see when I went into Devel­oper Tools was “inherit” with­out any clue as to what font-​​family was being inher­ited.
    Thanks.

  8. Written byKev Mears on the 14th of January

    Thor­oughly enjoyed this arti­cle. I find that I will read a long arti­cle if it is well writ­ten. A case in point is the ‘blessays’ that you can read by Stephen Fry. Unusu­ally long for what are in essence, blog posts, but the craft and knowl­edge that is self evi­dent keep me absorbed.

    I always read to the end of Joe’s stuff.

  9. Written byElton on the 14th of January

    Excel­lent, so what’s the answer?

    I’m one of those that ‘copy and paste my entire doc­u­ment on to a web­page’ (govt) and my world revolves around inform­ing the com­mu­nity (on both small and large scale) about what we are doing. Obvi­ously the web is the cheap­est and eas­i­est way to get the mes­sage out there to the widest audi­ence as well as gath­er­ing feed­back from ‘key stake­hold­ers’ — sorry for the govt speak.

    I’m talk­ing about not so nice things like land recla­ma­tion and new rail lines through your back­yard (any­one what me to post that on your face­book wall?) and get­ting the bal­ance right is tricky. Do you pro­vide three para­graphs of overview and get ready to field the angry and frus­trated tele­phone calls or shell out the whole 537 page doc­u­ment (plus the 6 sup­port­ing doc­u­ments that are twice that size) and get ready to field the angry and frus­trated tele­phone calls?

    Alright, so we do this as part of a suite of com­mu­ni­ca­tions activ­i­ties but as everyone’s belt tight­ens over the next few years and we ‘do more with less’ the web is going to get more and more important.

    Maybe, as Richard men­tions, new devices will pro­vide some bet­ter alter­na­tives for the ‘long read’ but we still get a fair chunk of vis­its from those flick­ery 800*600 monitors.

    PS
    Printed the mag­a­zine to read on the bus home because I fin­ished my book on the way in.

  10. Written byDave on the 17th of January

    tl;dr

    But I did notice that you never backed up this statement:

    This is a problem.”

    Show me that the neg­a­tive effects of this change out­weigh the incred­i­ble pos­i­tives, and I’ll be inter­ested. As is, I’m tired of see­ing peo­ple whine about this like it’s the death of deep knowl­edge and lit­er­a­ture as art. I work on the web all day. I sit in front of the com­puter at home for hours and hours. And I read 25~ nov­els last year, started teach­ing myself gui­tar, and I don’t get suck­ered in by unsup­ported claims about “Google mak­ing us stu­pid”, so I’d say things are going just fine.

  11. Written byKenton Maldean on the 22nd of January

    You had me up until “Tuskegee,” at which point I stopped read­ing (and not because I was exhausted). What a patently offen­sive com­par­i­son to make, and so unnec­es­sar­ily too.

    What­ever point you may have been try­ing to make, do try and pull your head out of the hole you’ve got it lodged in long enough to gain some perspective.

  12. Written byStu Lowndes on the 16th of February

    Joe,

    A great read!

    Espe­cially, “We realise now that long doc­u­ments do not work on the web …”

    How­ever, and dur­ing the days of my youth as a reporter with Cana­dian Press in Mon­tréal, an old edi­tor took me aside, threw the Bible down on the news desk, and said: “Okay, kid, I want you to give this a rewrite in only three words.”

    I looked at the white-​​haired old fox and thought he was kid­ding. I finally choked up the nerve and the words to ask him how this could be done.

    Thou shalt not!”

    Long doc­u­ments do not work well in news­pa­pers, either.

    Stu Lown­des

  13. Written byIrwin on the 18th of February

    Hi Joe,

    I read your piece — truth be told, I took the lib­erty of flow­ing it into the Redub Reader, a piece of soft­ware which directly addresses some of the chal­lenges you cite in your essay. I, too, am con­cerned that our brains are being hen-​​pecked but I feel that we have the power, as design­ers, to change the way we read on screens. I have faith that peo­ple will want to read a long arti­cle, if it’s some­thing they truly want to read, and we should take pains to improve the ergonom­ics of read­ing as best we can.

    Here is a link to your piece in the Redub Reader.

    Please let us know what you think! We’d love to hear your feedback.

    Best,
    Irwin Chen
    The Redub Reader

  14. Written byTim Thompson on the 20th of February

    Being a writer, my first incli­na­tion is to flesh every­thing out as much as pos­si­ble with words, even on the web, then edit, edit, edit until only the pol­ished result remains. Unfor­tu­nately, writ­ing online con­tent is often like writ­ing copy for a bill­board: short, suc­cinct, flashy and eas­ily con­sciously for­got­ten. My solu­tion in the world of supremely lim­ited atten­tion spans? Mul­ti­ple sites for dif­fer­ent pur­poses. My busi­ness site, even now in the process of yet another redesign and con­tent edit, will soon birth two sib­ling sites, one that offers the required leisurely micro-​​climate for the more lit­er­ary read­ers still among us, and a blog site that splits out the busi­ness details even fur­ther and addi­tion­ally allows for more discourse.

  15. Written byEric on the 20th of April

    What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Hux­ley feared was that there would be no rea­son to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us infor­ma­tion. Hux­ley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to pas­siv­ity and ego­ism. Orwell feared that the truth would be con­cealed from us. Hux­ley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrel­e­vance. Orwell feared we would become a cap­tive cul­ture. Hux­ley feared we would become a triv­ial cul­ture, pre­oc­cu­pied with some equiv­a­lent of the feel­ies, the orgy porgy, and the cen­trifu­gal bum­blepuppy.“
    – from the for­ward to “Amus­ing Our­selves to Death” by the late Neil Post­man http://​www​.serendip​ity​.li/​j​s​m​i​l​l​/​p​o​s​t​_​1​.​h​tml

  16. Written byBrendan on the 1st of May

    I recall read­ing ‘Is Google Mak­ing Us Stu­pid?” on my morn­ing com­mute, which iron­i­cally, I skimmed and never fin­ished read­ing. I did feel a bit guilty about that, but then I real­ize that every month I prob­a­bly read 3 or 4 full fea­ture arti­cles in each issue, most of the shorter blurbs, and start sev­eral more that I real­ize I’m not inter­ested in half way through. Was I being stu­pid, or was I just a vic­tim of the fact that pos­ing a ques­tion “Is Google Mak­ing Us Stoopid” (which is how it appeared on the cover of the issue) piqued my inter­est enough to start read­ing. Isn’t that the essence of mar­ket­ing? Beyond that, I must ask, since this arti­cle was avail­able in print and online, I would guess that more peo­ple read the piece in it’s entirety online, which seems to point to the valid­ity of online media to some degree — after all, it was linked to twice in this arti­cle alone.

    At any rate, when I con­sider the read­ing habits of many of my acquain­tances, a good deal of them never read, and wouldn’t read a book event if there was no such thing as the inter­net. They aren’t stu­pid nec­es­sar­ily, some are suc­cess­ful, seem­ingly com­pe­tent indi­vid­u­als, they just never read books. I would blame this on TV, radio, movies, long before I would blame this on the inter­net, which actu­ally does require ‘read­ing’ to some extent. I’m curi­ous — though per­haps lack­ing sub­stance — if some peo­ple out there read more than they nor­mally might because of the inter­net? Just a thought.

    My last point, and my most sig­nif­i­cant one, is address­ing the com­puter and inter­net as a sub­op­ti­mal medium for read­ing. By trade, I work on the inter­ac­tion design of a very large con­tent based web­site. Rev­enue is gen­er­ated through adver­tis­ing. Ad ‘impres­sions’ are gen­er­ated via page views. I’m not going to go into a lengthy dis­ser­ta­tion on the met­rics at play here, but it boils down to a few key fac­tors. How much money can be made vs. what is the max­i­mum amount of irri­ta­tion that a user will put up with. Very much to my cha­grin, things are not nearly as good as they could be, but this is by no means inher­ent to the medium — these deci­sions are usu­ally made by some­one who will never read the con­tent in a mil­lion years, and are moti­vated by com­mis­sions or greed. I’ll let you guess who we side with: adver­tis­ers, or readers?

  17. Written byDavid Shirey on the 1st of July

    I agree with your arti­cle, that using the web is mak­ing it harder for us to read long, dif­fi­cult pieces. But I think that the web is not the only culprit.

    Some­thing is hap­pen­ing to our patience. I don’t mean our abil­ity to put up with annoy­ing peo­ple (although I think that is shrink­ing as well), but just our abil­ity to start a job, carry on with it for more than a few min­utes, and bring it to a suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion,. We just don’t have time (whether we do or not). Is this because of the tremen­dous vol­ume of visual and audi­tory stim­uli that hit us each day? Is it because of the way these stim­uli are pack­aged (short, suc­cinct if not always lucid seg­ments)? Is it because the world we have built puts such pres­sure on us that we don’t feel we can stop for a minute to digest some­thing? I don’t know. It just seems that the impact the web is hav­ing on our brains and our abil­ity to do com­plex, long time dura­tion tasks is just part of a more global assault on our abil­ity to do stuff that takes more than a cur­sory glance.

    And if that is true, what does that say about the qual­ity of deci­sion mak­ing going on in our soci­ety? Is it pos­si­ble that the level of good deci­sion mak­ing has dropped over the past decade? Are we mak­ing more mis­takes or more short sighted deci­sions now than ever before? I think there is evi­dence out there to sup­port that theory.

    Nice arti­cle, by the way. Enjoyed it.

  18. Written byMac Squire on the 21st of October

    I think this was a very inter­est­ing topic to dis­cuss. I defi­nately agree that read­ing long arti­cles online does not work for me. Also i find that if im read­ing and i get boared ill go on to face­book and not get any­thing done. I do like though that you can post blogs and arti­cles like this and if they are to long then you can just copy and paste into word then print. The idea that dif­fer­ent fonts and sizes make a dif­fer­ence is a very good com­ment becaue i find a big bold font is hard on teh eyes. very good arti­cle and many good points that were brought up and very well written.

  19. Written byDanica on the 21st of October

    while i was read­ing this arti­cle i noticed you were kind of mak­ing it a joke that there was noth­ing on the sides or any­thing to draw the eye. i thouhgt this was not inter­est­ing and took up a lot of time. its just there to make a point and it did not get me interested.

  20. Written byAmy on the 21st of October

    Well I kinda dis­agree and agree with this arti­cle becuase I do agree that if you spend like 4 or 5 hours a day on the com­puter that a lot of time well wasted and you are really just waist­ing your life away. I do dis­agree with the state­ment that google is mak­ing us stu­pid, becuase for me I have found alot of great infor­ma­tion form google and it has actu­ally made me smarter not more stu­pid. Unless I am really stu­pid and i am think­ing I am really smart, aha. Ok I really thought that this para­graph was really well writ­ten and there was some really good points and it is a arti­cle to debate. It makes me think.

  21. Written bySamuel on the 21st of October

    It is very true how not many peo­ple will read such long pages with no images. How­ever, the author­put alot of time into it and will appre­ci­ate it if peo­ple read it.

  22. Written bySebastian Aviles on the 21st of October

    This arti­cle defined some of the things that are actively destroy­ing our rela­tion­ships with oth­ers. I believe that we as human beings have the right to stay social and at least have infor­ma­tion that can con­verge to our needs. Social­ity is one of the fun­da­men­tals of liv­ing and we have to focus on what we can do to keep that alive and flowing.

  23. Written byMichael Winnitoy on the 21st of October

    Well basi­caly I think that the inter­net is a use­full reli­able source to find all kinds of infor­ma­tion and inter­s­es­t­ing facts! But with the pos­i­tive of inter­net there is a down­side. Before peo­ple invented the web, they had to look things up in books and work to get there infor­ma­tion. I think that inter­net has tought us to be lazy, and that is not a good thing at all. Even with­ought know­ing it; it teaches us bad hab­bits. But overal the inter­net is a great tool to help us learn and share infor­ma­tion with others!

  24. Written byErin on the 21st of October

    I agree with this arti­cle. when i am doing research for a project i usu­ally just skim the long arti­cles. also when i am read­ing an arti­cle and get board it is so easy to just click face­book and for­get about my work.

  25. Written byKalada Nkwonta on the 21st of October

    This is quite and intel­li­gent and thought pro­vok­ing arti­cle. I think that it is true what is said about teens and how we spend so much time on the web. We need to limit our time online so we don’t “melt our brains.”

  26. Written byMaddy on the 21st of October

    Hi Joe.
    Thanks for your per­spec­tive on how long duc­u­ments don’t work very well on the web. Per­son­ally, I have have had trou­ble find­ing long amounts of infor­ma­tion on web­sites for research projects. Thanks for the good read!

  27. Written byRachel on the 21st of October

    I thought that this arti­cle was writ­ten very well. I think most peo­ple can relate to this because most of us are rely­ing on the com­put­ers for every­thing. Com­put­ers are a really great inven­tion and they help us alot but also some peo­ple are on them way to much and it is some­what destroy­ing our brains. Even though there are some very good and intel­lec­tual sites and doc­u­ments on the web, most peo­ple choose to go on point­less sites like myspace and face­book. Also when you said google is mak­ing us stu­pid really caught my atten­tion because if you look up good and help­ful things it can be really good but if you are just look­ing up point­less things, it can really start to make you more lazy and not as pro­duc­tive.
    I thought this arti­cle was really effec­tive and makes lots of good points. .

  28. Written byJoseph Lee on the 21st of October

    I agree with your state­ment on how peo­ple don’t like read­ing a lot on the com­puter. When I see some­thing more than 3 sen­tences long, I ignore. I agree, but I think that applies on the com­puter on paper. No one likes read­ing long arti­cles, but I think peo­ple will read it if it is inter­est­ing. If some­one loves space, obviosly some­one is going to read books about it and search for arti­cle­son them. Peo­ple will read it if it is interesting.I agree with the print­ing thing. I would rather read on paper.

  29. Written byconnor kusick on the 21st of October

    yes i agree with you that we dont like read­ing long para­graphs or any­thing long on the web it is not good if it is long most likely we are going to skip read­ing it or try to read it as eas­ily as we can to make us feel smart and unpres­sured its not just them im talk­ing about its me too if i see some­thing that is more than 3 sen­tences longe i wont look at it ill go on to the next easy thing to read but if in the first cou­ple sen­tences are inter­est­ing then ill read it

  30. Written byKatrina Reynolds on the 21st of October

    I com­pletely agree that long arti­cles are hard to read, and most of the times bor­ing. Some­times, these types of arti­cles are help­ful though. Majorly extended arti­cles are very dif­fi­cult to read because after going on and on on the same topic for hours on end, peo­ple lose inter­est.
    I think that inter­net is mak­ing us rely on it to fig­ure out answers instead of think­ing for our­selves. Arti­cles like this usu­ally take up time that other peo­ple would use to fin­ish home­work or work that they missed. Peo­ple pre­fer read­ing some­thing short and sweet that sums every­thing up instead of blab­bing on about some­thing the reader doesn’t even care about.
    In my opin­ion, you could’ve made your arti­cle shorter to sum it up quicker so that your read­ers wouldn’t lose inter­est in the topic you’re talk­ing about. Other than that, Good Job!

  31. Written byBrendon Gross on the 21st of October

    I agree but I also don’t agree at the same time. I found that when I am supose to read the ‘terms of use’ I never do; but, I have been able to fin­ish sev­eral books. It takes a good book for me to fin­ish it but I have fin­ished sev­eral books.

  32. Written byIby Udoh on the 21st of October

    After read­ing this arti­cle, a lot of inter­est­ing ques­tions come to mind. Is it just that peo­ple arent able to read long texts on the com­puter, or is it just a par­tic­u­lar audi­ence? A major­ity of the com­puter view­ers in the 21st cen­tury are teens on face­book. And face­book is one of those sites, that has soo many dif­fer­ent links that dis­tract from the main point, but also doesnt have very many “long texts”. Hon­estly, i strained to read this arti­cle, and started look­ing at the com­me­ri­als and links around it. But, i think i have to agree with Richard Fink, because i really DONT think it mat­ters if web or no web, some peo­ple are dis­tracted or dis­like large font, and oth­ers are per­fectly fine read­ing them. With that though, it doesn’t help those who are more com­fort­able read­ing short text when there is so much dis­tracted from the main text.

  33. Written byKiara on the 21st of October

    I thought that this arti­cle was well-​​written. I know many of us can eas­ily relate to alot of this. The world is turn­ing to the com­puter for every­thing, it may be a good and help­ful thing but it is also mak­ing us lazy and not need­ing to rely on our brains for any­thing. Sites with arti­cles, sto­ries, or com­ments don’t excite many of us, we find joy in those with chat and inter­ac­tion, which is dam­ag­ing our way of think­ing. Many peo­ple have jobs that are required to sit infront of a com­puter all day, a com­puter can be an easy access to wast­ing our day away.
    This arti­cle has really shown me how com­put­ers are affect­ing us in our gen­er­a­tion, good and bad.

  34. Written byIby Udoh on the 21st of October

    Also, shouldn’t it tell us some­thing, if a lot of teenagers are will­ing to spend 4–5 hours read­ing a bunch of small text, but not will­ing to spend 15–20 min­utes read­ing long texts.

  35. Written byNicolette on the 21st of October

    I agree, com­put­ers are start­ing to take over our lives. We will start by doing one thing and will even­tu­ally end up dis­tracted by another. Com­put­ers are bad at times but I also find them very help­ful. They are easy to get dis­tracted but as long as you are deter­mined you will be able to accom­plish your task.
    Long arti­cles are hard to read over com­puter. They con­tinue to drag on and on. There­fore peo­ple result to skim­ming over the words and skip­ping sec­tions. I think you yould find more suc­cess if you choose to read some­thing in printed form. Over­all I found this arti­cle very accurate.

  36. Written byGeorgia Vogeli on the 21st of October

    I thought this arti­cle was a bit pes­simistic! I agree, com­put­ers are start­ing to take pri­or­ity in our lives, but they are very help­ful to com­mu­ni­cate with long-​​lost friends, etc.! Long arti­cles are much eas­ier to read printed off, but I found this arti­cle long! (a bit ironic, eh?) So, over­all i found this arti­cle very true, but it killed my vibe for what I think is a great inven­tion! Thanks for the read, Joe.

  37. Written byPatrick M on the 21st of October

    After read­ing this arti­cle I have to agree with what you are say­ing. Me as a teenager do the exact same thing that you are talk­ing about. For exam­ple when I google some­thing I dont really open the link I just look under the link under the lit­tle descrip­tion to see what it says instead of read­ing the whole arti­cle. Also most teenagers I know (includ­ing myself) spend to much time on the com­puter and on face­book or other social net­work­ing sites. After you’ve been on face­book or myspace after a while you start to get addicted to it and every­day it seems like that you need to go on. So, I think that this is quite a good arti­cle even though I dont often read very many since I think most of them are bor­ing but I have to say this one changed my thinking.

  38. Written byEvan on the 22nd of October

    I agree with the idea of using the com­puter for more impor­tant tasks and using your time wisely. I use the com­puter a lot but its not used for the best pur­poses. com­put­ers are used by almost every­one in Canada and they are a NEED to our life. com­put­ers help many peo­ple in dif­fer­ent ways and we just have to learn how to use them.

  39. Written bySarah on the 24th of October

    I agree that most peo­ple have prob­lems readng long arti­cles on the inter­net. but, for many younger peo­ple, after being stuck at a desk at school all day, most peo­ple will try and find shorter and more detailed arti­cles than longer ones. If you can get the same amount of infor­ma­tion from either a short or a long arti­cle, I don’t think any­one would choose the longer, even before com­put­ers Peo­ple will not read 5 pages of small black and white text. Google is not mak­ing us stu­pid. Google is jsut mak­ing some of us lazy. But the inter­net isn’t the only prob­lem. Poorly writ­ten and edited books aren’t ehlp­ing either. Thanks for the inter­est­ing read.

  40. Written byChris on the 27th of June

    Good arti­cle, but print­ing out to read later?

    We’re in a pickle at the moment. E-​​readers are great for the eyes but not for web view­ing, or night read­ing. iPads and tablets all have reflec­tive screens which is why we can’t use them for very long as our eyes are con­stantly switch­ing focus.

    I’d sug­gest politely peti­tion­ing Apple to stop mak­ing prod­ucts that look bet­ter switched off. A Mac, iPad or Mac mon­i­tor is not a mir­ror. If Apple make some­thing every­one else fol­lows at the moment so it has to start there.

    I use a mac by the way and aside from the reflec­tive screen, I’d never go back to Win­dows. Android phone for me, though. I like the choice.

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