Skipping reading
Whether you like it or not, skim reading or simply skimming (reading in jumps) is the new way of "reading" text on screens connected to the Internet. Consequences matter, as Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), aptly points out. When the reader's brain jumps through a piece of writing, there is no time to grasp and assimilate its complexity, understand the pathos that runs through it and perceive its beauty. It's not cheap, but that's how it is.
Skimming is an accelerated reading process which consists of visually searching a page for clues that help to get a rough idea of the content. This type of reading usually occurs at a much higher rate (around 700 wpm), than normal reading done to fully understand a text (around 200-230 wpm). Reading experts consider this practice risky because it produces a more approximate level of understanding than reading tout-court, especially if you are reading a text rich in information content. Here is another Internet calamity one might say, given that these days the popularity of the medium resembles that of President Macron.
Something inevitable
But the fault of this state of affairs is not only the Internet. It is something inherent in the digital advance of the cultural industry in which all the barriers to publishing have fallen and any filter between a creator of a content and its potential user has disappeared. Furthermore, all industry compartmentalization has been unhinged: any type of content reaches the user through a single medium, the network, and therefore any content tends to compete with any other content regardless of its nature or its intrinsic quality or whether it is a book or an episode of The throne of swords.
The overcoming of cultural intermediation and the compartmentalization of the media is a great phenomenon of democratization, but, as we know, democracy always comes with a few problems too many and it is a form of relationship that requires a certain civil and intellectual maturity on the part of its beneficiaries.
The fault therefore does not lie with the Internet, but with time: all content is thirsty for other people's time. And it happens that there is an absurd disproportion between the offer of contents with their drumming promotion towards the public and the time that the latter has to consume them. People already have little time to dwell on the content that interests them, let alone the ones that need to get their attention!
The time variable of consumption
Here then the variable "consumption time" becomes decisive and must now be distributed over many different activities, thus leaving room for new and relevant behaviors, such as reading in jumps. The latter does not only affect posts, articles, personal communications, but also the aristocracy of written content, i.e. the book. It is no coincidence that the "book content", after centuries and centuries of hegemony, sees its cultural space eroded by more Pavlovian and immediate media such as video, a medium that was previously the prerogative of a more popular culture and is now simply hegemonic in all its various manifestations.
We should then ask ourselves what can be done to mitigate these consequences, help people who read skipping to better understand what they are reading, perhaps fixing their attention on what is the heart of the content? It is a question that any content producer should ask themselves when preparing a text for video reading, that is, for reading.
An idea could be brevity which is a great gift in itself. In reality, however, it is a shortcut that does not go beyond the reading mode in jumps and risks damaging a content of a certain complexity.
Twitter recently doubled the characters available to its users because monstrous phenomena came out with 140 characters. Distortions that led one of its founders, Jack Dorsey, to explain them to the US Senate Intelligence Commission and induced another founder, Ev Williams, to leave the mini-blogger with some disgust to found a new platform, Medium, where there are no limits to the expression of a thought and the argumentative necessity it requires.
Brevity
In any case, brevity remains very important because it purges the superfluous and the vain, pushing towards synthesis and essentiality, therefore it is part of the equation that reduces the consumption time of a written document. However, there are other aspects more internal to the content, its format and its aesthetics that can facilitate and help reading in leaps. For fiction, at the moment, not much can be done other than experimenting in the round towards, as we have been supporting for a long time, the innovation of the narrative content which is an evolution of what, for centuries, has been put on a printed page . But here we are still far behind and it will take time, as happened in the early cinema, for narrative to invent its own specific language for the digital age that detaches it from the traditional one towards its own specific territory.
For non-fiction, on the other hand, much can be done, especially in the field of non-fiction and long journalism which, thanks to new media, are experiencing a new spring. Let us dwell on four facilitators of leap reading without claiming to be original and without going into the merits of writing, language and the register of communication.
Paragraphing
Distributing the paragraphs of a text well so as to distinguish them immediately is a very important action. These blocks of text, which are nuclei of thought, must be well distributed and immediately distinguishable. Since the first sense to perceive them is sight, they require an effort that is similar to that of the urban planner who makes a landscape immediately legible when flying over it.
Paragraphing is so important in the packaging of a book, but also of other writings, that it requires specific skills, which should first belong to the author, then to the editor and finally to the art designer. A simple example: Breaking off paragraphs with a thin white line is already a great help in skip reading: the block of text is immediately caught out of sight and the brain can isolate the scope of its work.
Titrationi
Content granulation is crucial for effective communication in the new media age. Gathering coherent portions of content under an effective, hierarchically thought-out title is an essential communicative action. Returning to the similarity with the urban planner, it is equivalent to making the districts of an agglomeration identifiable so as to identify the one to address and those only to go through. Knowing how to build an effective titration requires thinking carefully about the hierarchy of content and building a sort of meta-content that helps the reader to evaluate his own time commitment and the intellectual energies to be used for the use of the material.
This can be to the detriment of serendipity and tends to consolidate the reader in the development of his or her vested interests, but if the author is good and knows how to correlate the content, the reader could make discoveries in the already known and, perhaps, find something not sought after or unexpected that turns on some neuron. Effective titration pulls it into the content and when the brain is there anything can happen. Also nothing.
Furthermore, the continuous back and forth between reading and other activities notified by the devices with which the reader surrounds himself and from which he does not separate himself can be less traumatic if the return to the content can hook onto a pivot such as a title not only to find the point of reading, but also to rediscover the thread of reasoning
indices
It's hard to underestimate the importance ofContent index. The first clue is found there. The more extensive the better as long as it is built for skimming. The parts of the content and their internal hierarchy must be immediately perceived as the plots of an agricultural landscape seen from above. If there are several layers of content such as artwork, equipment, expansions, each of these layers should have its own index separate from the general one. In their aridity, lists facilitate reading in jumps and also stimulate serendipity.
The second essential tool, particularly in a book, is thename index which today can also be built automatically. I'm not saying the index of subjects that would require artificial intelligence tools that don't exist yet and that in traditional publishing is a real art practiced by qualified professionals. A simple list of names, places, and works cited is the second place the reader visits after the table of contents. It's part of basic hospitality. It doesn't do for the author or editor to be too selective or to judge the importance of an occurrence based on their own judgement, but to let the automatic list generation engines work which are totally agnostic.
So how does relevance emerge? With the number of occurrences that must always be communicated. On the contrary, it is appropriate to extrapolate and highlight a small list of the most cited names as if we were drawing up a real ranking. The strongly recurring names will become real keywords to which the reader will turn to get a fundamental clue on the orientation of the content also with respect to their reading objectives.
Expansion
Expansion is the spouse of essentiality. Comprehensiveness is nonsense today. We assume that in front of the page there is a mature reader and behind the page is the network. The content is immersed in a large pool from which one can come and go to get information and develop it and then return to the matrix content which must know how to regulate and direct this functional traffic to its own development. There are many tools, beyond the classic explanatory notes at the foot of the page or the bibliographic apparatuses, to develop the expansion. Content in the digital age can only be expanded and only this exit from itself can determine its ultimate usability.
Sfinal solution
About last. If instead of a truce with the practice of skimming, content producers wanted to go towards unconditional surrender, given the new normality of this reading mode, they could produce a text that can be easily summarized by an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of accommodating it in some screen of the iphone. There are already many of these algorithms and sometimes they work in a way that leaves you stunned. Perhaps in this way we could finally be able to understand the Phenomenology of spirit of Hegel.
There is also another final solution. Postulate that none of this exists and continue writing for those who read at the time of Hegel and Proust. There are still many like this.
