Reading Habits and Modern Technology
Reading Still Matters
Within the last few decades society has seen a rise of various technologies that have undoubtedly influenced our lives. Various disruptive devices and services have emerged, including personal computers, the Internet, smartphone and E-readers, and they are changing the way we read. A lot of us also hear about A.I. that is getting better and better at understanding what we say or write, A.I. that will eventually spill out into the realm of reading too. In this article, I want to explore the changes that have been caused by this shift towards more technologically driven society and how it sends ripples into the world of avid as well as not so avid readers.
If you are one of those readers who likes to skim through the chapter headlines and the quotes instead of reading the whole article, I have caught you red handed. If you still want to skim through, each paragraph has a sentence or a phrase in italics that will give you a gist of what is currently discussed and is in my view a better alternative. Enjoy.
This post is partly research, partly a synthesis of some prominent works on the topic of reading. The research is based on the results of a survey conducted online to assess how the modern reader is influenced by technology and on how they use technology to read. Furthermore, the participants are surveyed on how their reading experience may be enhanced through potential future technological breakthroughs and whether they are ready to embrace them.
While we often hear that technology is detrimental to our ability and willingness to read¹, not much attempt is made to find out how both can coexist. In our research, we also look into how our reading experience can be improved, both digitally and with printed books. The respondents are asked to share whether they read more digital or printed books and through additional analysis, we can evaluate why they choose a certain medium and what could influence them to prefer the opposite one.
Before you continue reading, consider disabling notifications on your phone (or putting it away) and closing your E-mail client for 10 minutes to maximize the experience. Consider this to be a challenge. When was the last time you read a whole article (or even a whole book) uninterrupted?
When creating the survey we also explore the idea that reading digitally influences concentration levels by distracting the reader with various notifications² and that the nature and the structure of the Internet itself influence our reading habits. Is the influence positive or mainly negative? Let us find out the answer, but first I want to give you an overview of who participated in the survey and what their general reading habits are.
Survey Participants at a Glance
Participants for the survey were recruited online and are from all over the world. 126 respondents took part in the survey, 33% of the sample are German, while the second largest group is from the U.S.A. representing 16% of the participants. Another 51% come from around 30 various countries. Also, the split between male and female respondents is almost at half-and-half. Notably, about one-third of all participants studies or works in the field related to computer science.
Interestingly, 36% of respondents would identify themselves as digital natives (born when technology was already around). The average age of the participants is 26, with the oldest being 58 years of age (for more details, see the provided “Age Distribution” graph). Now that we know our respondents a bit better, let us look at what their reading habits are, how many books they have read lately and more.
General Reading Habits of the Respondents
The survey included a range of questions related to how and also how often our participants read. On average our respondents have read nine books within the span of the last 12 months. We had 16 participants who have not read a single book from cover to cover last year, and one Goliath of a reader who devoured 126 books within a year. Almost two-thirds of all of our respondents shared with us that they really enjoy reading, while the rest does not view reading as a particularly fun experience (their responses are particularly valuable too since we don’t want to bias our views by only considering those who read with pleasure).
Preference for fiction or non-fiction of our respondents is also something we have looked into. Most of our participants have a stronger preference to read fiction than non-fiction (see a more detailed distribution overview in the provided graph). With a broader picture of our readers in mind, we can now proceed to the first block of our research, namely the printed books versus digital ones.
The Co-Existence of Printed and Digital Books
Let us look at how much preference is given to printed or digital books and also discuss how we can improve both of them.
The respondents were asked to choose whether they prefer digital or printed books. 60% of all participants prefer to read printed books, which accounts for 75 respondents out of which 20 read printed books exclusively. 19% prefers to read digital books, accounting for 24 participants out of which only 5 read digital books exclusively. Another 21% reads both printed and digital books in equal quantity.
Participants were also asked about their reading preferences when at home or traveling. 84 participants prefer to read printed books, and 38 prefer reading digital books when at home. At the same time, 51 participants chose to read printed books, and 45 opted to read digital books when traveling. The choice of printed books decreases when traveling in comparison to home reading, which underlines the mobility of digital books compared to printed ones, however, printed books are still in favor.
Furthermore, the participants were asked to rank the medium or device they read on. The choice consisted of five options, the most popular is printed books, the second rank goes to a dedicated E-reader, the tablet is ranked as a third, personal computer as fourth and smartphone is ranked last.
Next, we will analyze why the participants prefer digital or printed and what would make their preference change.
How to Improve Digital Books
Our participants were asked about reasons which would influence them to read more digital books. This question explores what digital books are lacking in comparison to the printed ones and how we can improve the overall experience of reading digitally. The respondents were given multiple predefined choices to choose from as well as could share their own ideas.
Most of the respondents are bothered by the idea that they need to read on a digital screen since it causes eye strain (58 respondents chose this option). For 55 participants, digital books lack the aesthetic and natural feel the printed books provide (e.g. weight of the book, smell of the paper).
In addition to that, some respondents were also interested in the option of being able to resell the digital books, as it is possible with printed ones. Open answers also included the ability to annotate digital books in a more efficient way than is available now. Also, few participants referred to the high price of dedicated E-readers stopping them from reading digital books. One participant also extended the idea of the aesthetic and natural look of the printed books with a preference to be able to see the collection of printed books on a shelf every day. For many, a home library on display expresses the social identity of a reader to their guests, something that is not possible to do with digital books.
Moreover, 29 participants would read more digital books if they felt less distracted when reading online. This point will be discussed later on in more detail.
What are Printed Books Lacking
By analyzing the participants’ answers regarding the shortcomings of the printed books, a conclusion can be made that the “bulkiness” of the book is the most distracting factor to the reader. The printed book’s size, in comparison to digital books being virtually stored on a slim E-reader, seems to bother 57 survey participants (46%) more than any other factors.
Another concern of the participants is the printed books not being accessible enough. 32 participants would prefer the printed books being more readily available for purchase, as in the case of digital books. Expanding the idea of quick access to books, 24 participants would also be interested in instant delivery of ordered printed books. Right now, there is no technology to support such instant delivery. Maybe in a not-so-distant future, almost instant drone delivery or even ability to print (maybe even with a 3-D printer) ordered books at home, we may see an increased interest in them.
Some participants also would buy more books if their production was more environmentally friendly. 25 respondents chose this option. The “Carbon Footprint Assessment of a Paperback Book”³ study estimates the carbon footprint of printing a book at 2.7 kilograms of CO2, which raises concerns about polluting our world even more when opting for printed books instead of digital ones (if you are using green energy that is).
Also, only 5% of all respondents (6 participants) are interested in printed books becoming more interactive. This indicates that various attempts to make readers interact more with printed books do not seem to have an audience.
Reading, Technology and the Modern Society
The notion of hyper-reading, first introduced by James Sosnovski in 1999⁴, implies that we mostly skim and fragment texts when reading online due to the digital nature of this medium. Alternatively, as put by Katherine Hayles⁵, hyper-reading is “a response to an information-intensive environment.” The Internet taught us that we need to identify the most relevant information since there is so much of it. Unfortunately, we may have transferred this “skill” to our reading of literary texts. This resulted in quick filtering for the most relevant information, urge to get the results quickly, reading summaries instead of whole texts and searching for the most important text snippets. As pointed out by Nicholas Carr in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain”⁶, our brain is rewired to only concentrate for a short time.
The survey also explores the influence of technology on the concentration during reading. When asked directly about their concentration levels, 74 participants feel more concentrated when reading printed books, and only 5 participants are more concentrated when reading digitally. Another 47 respondents do not think their level of concentration is different when reading printed or digital material.
Even though hyper-reading is meant to be fast, due to constant distractions the digital reading experience takes longer. 42 respondents feel that they read printed books faster than digital books, in comparison, only 23 respondents think that reading digital books is faster.
The survey also investigates what the common distraction factors are when reading digital content. The participants were presented with a set of online distractions to choose from (multiple answers per participant are possible). The temptation to check social media while reading seems to be present in 53 participants (42% of the whole sample) and 43 respondents (34%) are eventually distracted by social media notifications during their reading sessions. It is in the nature of social media apps to show you the notifications instantly, making you feel obliged to check or reply to them, and while doing so opening the app and glancing over a few ads with the corner of your eye.
Checking your E-mail client also affects our attention spans. 43 participants feel tempted to simply check their E-mail and 38 of them eventually get distracted by an E-mail notification while reading. Besides social media and E-mail, 42 participants tend to look up words from text during reading and 35 would go to Wikipedia to find some additional information related to the text.
Nevertheless, 30 participants do not feel distracted at all when reading digitally. In general, regardless of whether on a digital or printed medium, most of the participates, in this case, 65, can concentrate on reading from around 30 minutes to one hour. 26 respondents can focus more than an hour on reading, 25 can only concentrate between 15 and 30 minutes, and 9 respondents can only focus on reading for less than 15 minutes at a stretch.
The short attention spans and constant distractions by various notifications in many ways mirror the idea that our brains are rewired by the online medium to concentrate less until we get satisfactory stimulation from either social media or by checking our E-mails.
In addition to looking into the changes of the concentration levels, the participants were also asked to give a possible reason that would allow them to spend more time reading. This was an open question and participants filled out various opinions on how they could be moved to read more. While a lot of participants did not input any particular reason, the majority of those who did, including, 38 participants, had a very similar answer, namely “If I had more time.” The hectic life in our modern society simply does not allow us time to enjoy reading. This may change significantly with further expansion of automation, with companies understanding the value of a 4-day work week, and possibly with the introduction of Universal Basic Income in some distant future. Any of those options would allow allocating more of our free time to self-development and recreation. While we are waiting for any of those things to come true, we can already utilize technology to improve our reading experience with distant reading.
Distant Reading and Future Technologies
Augmenting our Reading Using Technology
In her article in the New York Times, Kathryn Schulz introduces us to the notion of distant reading. Distant reading, a term coined by Stanford Literary Lab scholar Franco Moretti, is a concept of using computers and natural language processing to improve our reading experience and to learn more about literature by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of literary texts at once. One example given by Moretti is a way of visualizing the connections between various characters within a novel by representing them as a graphical network.
Moretti and his team are driven by their needs and the needs of the literary scholars for tools to analyze literary works faster and more efficiently. This survey went directly to the reader and asked what would they want distant reading to be like. The participants have been invited to imagine a situation where they had their personal computerized assistant to help them improve their reading experience and were asked to choose a number of actions they would like it to perform. The top choice was looking up a word definition or information related to the text prompted by voice command. The second choice was, much like in Moretti's example, to visualize the connections between the characters. The reader would also be interested in a bot answering any questions related to the plot, so to say, to clear any misinterpretations or help understand the events of the book and also for it to give detailed information on the characters. Other less popular options also included summarizing the plot of the book, summarizing all book reviews on the Internet and turning pages automatically (e.g. based on the eye tracking of your page focus position).
About one-fifth would also like to have the book read to them by a bot that can synthesize anyone’s voice (i.e. given a voice sample). Text-to-speech synthesis technology could in the future potentially replace the audio-books as we know them now and allow the reader to select and customize the voice of the presenter in any way they please. Some of you may have seen Adobe present a project called Adobe VoCo, a voice synthesizer software that would do exactly that, generate any voice and read any text with that voice. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we haven’t heard anything about the project after that and seemingly it was just a concept idea. Maybe someone else will pick up this idea in the future. Currently, the only other company I know of working on something similar is Lyrebird. While it could be an interesting use case in the reading realm, imagine the legal and moral implications of such a voice synthesis technology existing …
In addition, the questions about distant reading also included an option to input any other custom action for the bot. Some respondents wished for it to be able to visualize how characters would look like based on their description in the text, find allusions to other works and also provide a framework to make notes in the text with the ability to see the notes other readers took. There are also participants who would not be interested in such technology, as 20 respondents opted for an option of not having any kind of automated bot to assist them during their reading sessions.
Death of the Author
Roland Barthes argues in his essay “The Death of the Author”⁷ that the author of a literary text is just a mediator between the society, the past historical occurrences, the texts written before him, the language the author speaks, and eventually the written text. This idea renders the cult of the author less significant and marks the author as “dead” to the reader (insignificant compared to the author’s work). Sven Birkerts picks up on this idea in his book “The Gutenberg Elegies”⁸ where he describes that the author may become even less important and less relevant due to the rapid development of technology.
Since around the year 2006, we have seen many breakthroughs in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor and one of the most influential researchers in the field of A.I., said in his interview to the Wired Journal:
“For the first time in my life, it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime”
While the early breakthroughs took place in the fields of image recognition and video processing, only recently have we seen significant A.I. development in the area of Natural Language Processing. While we are still many steps away from A.I. writing comprehensive novels, computers can already write some types of news articles. An American-based technology company Automated Insights offers a form of an automated bot called “Wordsmith” that can describe numerical data it is given using the English language. Right now Wordsmith is already used by some major media companies, like Associated Press and Yahoo, to write overviews of sports events.
There do actually exist movie scripts written by A.I., alas they make absolutely no sense. Someone, however, decided to film an actual short film based on the non-sense that an A.I. system called “Jetson” produced and the result is both cringe-worthy and silly: Sunspring | A Sci-Fi Short Film Starring Thomas Middleditch
While for now, computers cannot replace the author, the rapid development in the field of Artificial Intelligence may bring this idea to reality sooner than we may expect. For this reason, the survey tries to assess whether the readers of today would accept such a change.
Only three respondents would refuse to read a text or a novel written by an A.I., 27 participants would have no problem at all with such a change, 81 would read it out of curiosity and 15 participants while hesitant would still give it a try. We are apparently quite open to such an advancement in technology shall it ever come to pass.
All Things Come to an End
In one of the questions, the participants were directly asked whether they agree that technology has influenced their reading habits. 99 respondents agree that they indeed have been influenced, while only 24 have not noticed any changes in their reading habits. Also, this was an open question, where the participants could elaborate on their choice. Their answers can be categorized into the positive and negative influence of technology on our reading habits. From the positive side, the overwhelming majority points out that the books have become more easily and readily accessible and also allowed us to take many books in a digital format when we travel. The bigger part of the negative influence comments includes lesser ability to concentrate and shorter attention spans when reading. Some also remark that instant access to other forms of entertainment online discourages them from reading more.
One respondent, in particular, summarizes the adverse influence of technology quite well by saying that the current generation has become the generation of instant gratification and reading certainly doesn’t provide that. As David Brooks remarks in his article “The Outsourced Brain,” in many ways, we have outsourced our ability for memorizing information or ability to navigate in towns to the digital and technical solutions like Wikipedia or the GPS. And now we are also beginning to outsource our reading ability by letting the technology summarize, highlight and find for us the information we are looking for.
Help Advance the Research
Currently, my wife, who specializes in Workplace Psychology, is conducting a very similar type of research. The topic is about how modern technology influences our concentration levels at work. Please, if you find five minutes, feel free to fill out her survey here. Participation is anonymous and the survey runs through her university.
About the Author
My name is Ivan Bilan, I am a Data Scientist who specializes in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, working at TrustYou on automated summarization and text understanding. I am also interested in psychology and all things technology. Besides my degrees in Computational Linguistics and English Studies, I have also studied Technology Management and as a result, spend a lot of time within the fascinating start-up culture here in Munich.
I also do a lot of research in the field of NLP and AI, and if you are interested in those topics, my research projects are always available on Github.
References
- a. Bauerlein, Mark. 2009. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future (or, don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). New York (NY): Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin
…. b. Yienger, Maria E. 2016. “Too Much Tech Harms Reading Retention in Young Children.” Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse 8 (3). http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=1374
2. Carr, Nicholas. 2008. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Blackwell Publishing Inc) 107 (2): 89–94
3. Wells, Jean-Robert, Jean-François Boucher, Achille-Benjamin Laurent, and Claude Villeneuve. 2012. “Carbon Footprint Assessment of a Paperback Book.” Journal of Industrial Ecology (Blackwell Publishing Inc) 16 (2): 212–222
4. Sosnovski, James. 1999. “Hyper-readers and Their Reading Engines.” Passion, Pedagogies, and Twenty-First Century Technology (Urbana: Natl. Council of Teachers of English) 161–177
5. Hayles, Katherine. 2010. “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine.” Association of Departments of English Bulletin 150: 62–79, 66
6. Carr, Nicholas. 2010. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: Norton
7. Barthes, Roland. 1978. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text 142–148
8. Birkerts, Sven. 2006. The Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Faber and Faber.
