Distracted Reading
Have you ever been driving and completely immersed in a podcast or jamming out to some Britney during your Hotgurl Summer and completely missed your exit? That day, you were driving to Hobby Lobby to get some iron-on lettering to make an ironic T-shirt, but instead, your forgetful ass kept driving as if you were on your way to work. What gives?
This is commonly referred to as a process called automatization. Often times, when we think we are multitasking, we are simply cycling through multiple tasks seemingly at once, but our focus can truly only be on one thing at a time. So, when you were going over your shopping list on the way to Publix, you went through the light and forgot to turn left. Your body literally gets put on autopilot and follows prescripted routines. There’s nothing wrong with you, our minds are prone to meandering.
Such is life. While writing this, my mind has been in approximately 7-9 other places. Is it about the journey or the destination? I don’t know, but my mind is going places, much like Jon Hamm in the above GIF. Some would argue that our current technological advances are shaping my brain to slowly become more and more scattered; that with each passing swipe, I become increasingly more like a Mayfly. Soon my future will be lived in 15 second increments, slipping from one TikTok to another. I’ll be unable to focus long enough to shower or feed myself and devolve into a slovenly morph of man-slug incapable of the simplest of tasks, reminiscent of the humans in Wall-E.
So, when is this guy gonna start boring us with talks of literacy? I’m working up to it. Every few years the Karen Krew gets together and starts talking about ADHD or whatever new inclusive term we came up with to replace the scientific parlance. They wring their hands collectively and plaintively telling us that our children can’t focus on a single task at hand. Never mind that for centuries, kids have had wandering minds that instinctively creep away from instruction.
Pa is gonna be so disappointed that I forgot to close the door on the stable.
When I was young, there was a girl named Jennifer Smith at my school who could speed read. I had a locker next to hers, and it was completely filled with paperbacks. Whenever we had reading assignments, she always cruised through them with the simplest of ease. I myself always struggled. I’d quickly lose interest in whatever archaic novel was prescribed to us. As I would turn the pages, my mind would drift. My eyes would be following the text, but my head was elsewhere, probably fighting a cyborg dragon. My enmity for Jennifer Smith knew no bounds. It wasn’t fair that she could read so well.
But she didn’t really. I later learned that though she read fast, her retention was completely shit. I’d ask her what a particular paperback she’d read was about, and her recollection was scant at best. I would read a full page and completely have to start all over again, sometimes three or four times. Reading a 300-page book would take me days if not weeks. Most often, I’d have to ask my friends how it ended for the test. Though laborious, I actually had incredible recall. It was no wonder that the first half of my tests were always stronger than the back 9.
I wish I could tell you that I outgrew this unfortunate learning disability, but it continues to this day. The funny thing? That was the first time I even labeled it as a learning disability. In my youth, we weren’t allowed to milk our victimhoods. I just was a slow reader. Sure, I could truck along if a novel interested me, but even the most interesting novels cause distraction. I would read something that makes me think, and then the train of thought completely derails. I might be 4 pages in before I realize I’ve been stuck in Stu-Space.
Nicholas Carr has written at great lengths both in his book, The Shallows, his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, or this TED-style talk about the same titular subject. When we think of McLuhan, we are reminded constantly how media shapes our relation to information, communication, and ideas. Old media can affect new media. How we consume the old media may inform how we create the new one. Example: one may notice certain writers have a “cinematic style” to their writing. Hopefully it’s not a Bruckheimer/Bay style, but I suppose it would be befitting to certain genres. Back to Carr, with his research, he contends, “(media) also shape(s) the process of thought,” (and you may notice how I jump through many topics seemingly at once, so my writing reflects my thought). It reminds me of the many geeky science shows I’ve sat through about neuroplasticity, our malleability of mind. In the hyperlinked video, he talks about this space we get into in deep reading that is necessary for us to convert working memory into long-term memory in a process he labels as memory consolidation. We need this to form connections between the new ideas we pick up to tie them to existing ideas, for them to inform one another. So, as we process this onslaught of new information, we can compile and contribute meaning.
In Sue Greener’s article, The Medium, the Message and the Memory, she also noted McLuhan and the topic of “cool” and “hot” media (cool being more passive, where hot infers greater participation). So, if as McLuhan contended television was a cool medium, then our relationship to it is more casual. We can have it on, maybe not pay attention to it, be able to pause and walk away or simply walk away during interludes (advertising). If we wanna get really deep, I’d be more concerned what kind of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) would be bewitching our subconscious during these times.
So maybe our relationship to literacy (old media) is somewhat shaped by the internet (new media). Who knows what slips through the cracks when we’re on autopilot, but as Carr contends, we need memory consolidation to form that bigger picture. Perhaps it’s also deeper than that and has to do with the temperature of the medium. If film is considered a hot medium, then maybe we have a different relationship with movies and TV. In film, we are more immersed in story and involved with the characters. Perhaps because our time with them is temporal and fleeting. Possibly this relationship to cinema informs how we choose to consume it. Conceptually our perception of time and engagement informs how we want to divide our attention.
There seems to be a trend in our perceived waning attention spans. My wife refuses to watch movies over 2 hours in length (millennial). She insists that is too long of a period to hold her attention. However, she can binge watch Friends or Downton for hours on end. Before our son, she could literally spend an entire day in bed enjoying Joey eating sandwiches.
My daughter is Gen Z and seemingly has no trouble devouring books. Is she another Jennifer Smith? She’s confessed that she has a similar reading distractibility like her father, but she just pushes through it when it’s something she’s enjoying and keeps it moving when it’s something boring or tedious. I wondered how common distracted reading was, but sadly my Google search only offered solutions to distracted reading (an actual never-ending stream of articles on the subject, which may speak volumes itself). I even found an article about how to shape one’s writing to conform to this sea-change in literacy. Here they contend that 16 percent of people finish reading every last word of every article they read online. First, would it be too hard to back this claim with a quick hyperlink to the data supporting it? Second, I find it sus to believe anyone claiming they read every last word of every article they read online. And do we need to get into the mucky mire of veritas concerning self-reporting? Factoids… they’re about as consistent with the truth as my attention is with reading.
So maybe we are being influenced by the technology around us, but can we put that genie back in the bottle? If good ol’ fashioned book learnin’ failed me in tangible paper-form in my youth, (without these confounded interwebs beguiling me like “Some Pig” a la Charlotte) then how would harkening back to days of yore benefit us now? Maybe reading has always posed a challenge. Maybe reading should always pose a challenge.
Even if we are at a stage of can’t deep read anymore, (as opposed to the apparent difficulty it sometimes poses) what are instructors expected to do in the face of this? I remember the soccer moms of my youth railing against the format of the comic book, saying that the very medium was corroding our literacy. I think perhaps they may have missed the nuance of the medium being more akin to our modern mythos (I see you, Cal-El being all like Moses up in them bullrushes). Perhaps this is just how these arguments are going to forever play out, alarmist dribble for future click-bait. Until then, I’ll be over here trying to unring some bells.
That felt like a nice place to put a pin in this discussion, but there have been some exciting new developments in the two hours since composing this draft. My daughter called me back to answer my questions about her distracted reading. She did confirm that she has difficulties maintaining focus when the topic is dull or dry, and that when she was younger, she was definitely more of a scattered reader. However, she maintains that either by force of will or incessant repetition, her distracted reading had improved over the course of the last two years of junior college. So, like most of our skills, deep reading can improve through repetition and time. Problem solved. Just gotta keep a close eye on which medium is massaging you more.
