Unreadable
Written by Joe Clark. 17 comments
About Joe Clark
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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?
Written by Michael 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!”
Written by Pedro 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.
Written by Martijn 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.
Written by Richard 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.
Written by Martijn 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.
Written by Guy Leech on the 13th of January
Richard: I’ve adjusted the type a little, does it work better for you now?
Written by Richard 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.
Written by Kev 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.
Written by Elton 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.
Written by Dave 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.
Written by Kenton 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.
Written by Stu 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 Montreal, 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
Written by Irwin 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
Written by Tim 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.
Written by Eric 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.serendipity.li/jsmill/post_1.html
Written by Brendan 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?
Written by David 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.