I’ve seen a lot of rhapsodic references online recently to a new app called Spritz that’s supposed to revolutionize reading and make us all super-consumers of information. The app works by showing you one word at a time within a constrained text box and highlighting for you what the app’s makers call the “optimal recognition point” for each word. The idea is that our eyes do a lot of work just in moving from word to word and seeing enough characters to recognize each word. By letting you stare at a fixed point and sort of balancing each word on that optimal recognition point, the app does in fact seem to allow you to read strings of words more quickly. I was convinced by the quick demo I watched that this was a faster way to read text.

But I was also horrified. The prospect of reading much beyond a brief snatch of demo text struck me as probably exhausting. And worse, it seems like an approach to reading that disregards aesthetics, which for many readers is a big part of the point of the enterprise of writing and reading to begin with.

First let’s consider the relentlessness of the method. We all read things sometimes that we just want to burn through quickly — news articles, for example. In these cases, you just sort of want to ram the information into your head. For brief texts short on style, I can actually see the benefit of using an app like Spritz that facilitates dramatically faster reading. Even if reading comprehension suffers a little, as I suspect it would especially as text length increased, sometimes you need only just enough comprehension to get by. Spritz will likely be a useful tool for cases like this.

Maybe the abbreviated time it would otherwise take to slog through some dry longer texts would make the stress of such rapid-fire reading a reasonable payoff. But what about texts designed to actually be a pleasure to read, in which the aesthetics of the work are tied up as much in the prosodic relationships of the words to one another within sentences and paragraphs as to the definitions of the words? What about rhymes and near-rhymes and word choices that are consonant with one another, or dissonant? What about sentence rhythm and paragraph rhythm, pauses and run-ons, sentences whose very shortness conveys meaning not conveyed by the meanings of the words themselves? Surely this is all lost when reading using an app like Spritz.

Speed-reading has been around for ages, and I’ll confess that I’ve felt the allure of it from time to time. “I could read so many more books,” I’ve thought. But of course more doesn’t always mean better. Speed-eaters can swallow a whole bunch of hot dogs in a hurry, but I suspect there are few who would suggest that we should all aspire to gulp down that much pig anus in one very quick sitting.

I suppose I’m picking on Spritz not because it is any more troubling than any of the old speed-reading techniques but because it’s been touted very recently as a tool that will revolutionize reading, and more, that it will do so in a beneficial way. Perhaps it will bring speed-reading more into the mainstream. In that way, it may be somewhat revolutionary. But I’m clearly not convinced it’s a good revolution.

Although I’m often guilty of it myself, I’m a little bothered by our collective impulse to do more and more things faster and faster. I worry that even if Spritz is accepted first as a way of reading short pieces written with little emphasis on aesthetics, the more/faster mindset that it encourages will eventually lead to more widespread speed consumption of art. In their FAQ, Spritz provides a list of some of the types of things they’re working on providing access to. Among other things for which the app seems a reasonably pragmatic use, they list the following:

Digital Books: Atlas Shrugged in a day? You betcha. We are currently working with some pretty big players in this field.

Atlas Shrugged may not be the greatest example of writing in a lofty style, but it’s clear that the folk at Spritz are thinking beyond just making quicker work of drudgery. If they’re thinking of Atlas Shrugged with its utilitarian and didactic prose, they’re also thinking of Moby-Dick and The Grapes of Wrath — both books of the sort that would suffer horribly if force fed at 700 or 800 words per minute. And just imagine trying to take in something like A Clockwork Orange or the centerpiece of Cloud Atlas at high speed. Of course, it’s not just Spritz thinking with glee about literature at the unornamented speed of thought:

While we’re not sure what it would be like to actually read a novel at these speeds, the possibility of eventually completing a work like Infinite Jest in almost one work day is pretty exciting.

Well, sure, it’s exciting on the surface. I could read so many more books. More is better and faster is more and immersion in the structure and style of a book is for the birds.

Spritz seems to offer a very tempting way to change the mechanics of how we read without much thought toward how reading as a more nuanced practice might be affected. Of course, critical thinkers who also happen to enjoy reading for style as much as for content will wind up seeing the problem here, but judging from all the “wow, this changes everything” comments I’ve seen on the web, it’s a dwindling population.

I’m not generally the doomsday sort who wrings his hands at progress and pines for the good old days. I suspect that Spritz will cause a brief ruckus and that people on the whole will discover that it creates a dreadful experience for reading long texts or beautiful texts. Still, I feel a little unease here. Speeding up our reading is another way in which we’re trying to increase efficiency and cram more into our brains and become super-consumers. For all that’s to be gained in the enterprise, I worry that there’s also much to be lost.