I feel happier reading a book. I also feel relieved when I open a book. I've been wondering why this is and I have a theory.
The information on the internet is unbounded. You know this, you are aware even if subliminally, no matter how you control your browser by blocking ads, pop ups etc. An unbounded information horizon is destabilizing. There is always more (possibly better) information a click away. It's hard to justify keeping attention on just one article. I even read a paper newspaper article with more attention than the same article online.
Of course pop ups, ads, the incredible commodification of attention, has made this much worse, but the problem is inherent to the internet.
When I open a book, there are two covers, marking beginning and end. It's awesome. In between is a place for deep attention.
There have been books that have enriched my life. It's deep focus, not shallow scanning. I think there is something soul crushing about the shallow attention we are left with after years on the job. (Slack & Teams are part of the problem.)
The number and quality of online distractions is ... increasingly tiresome.
Even with adblock on my principle tablet browser, sites such as the Washington Post leave large whitespace gaps within an article where ad spots have been removed. I've counted through these manually at times and believe that there are frequently around ten, possibly more, ads withing the body of a story with not many more paragraphs than that.
Even before we get to sidebars, pop-ups, and other interstitials, it just makes me tired.
Reader Mode can remove many of these though even then some additional tuning may be required. A further problem is the lack of standardisation in how articles are structured, making assumptions about how to apply formatting also fraught.
(As a concrete example: I'm fond of bolding lead-lines of articles with a drop cap. Normally this can be applied to "p:first-of-type:first-line", except where, say, and article wraps each <p> tag in a <div> or other element. Mind that this is a self-imposed problem. Point is that if document-structure conventions were followed, I'd be able to consistently use a cleaner styling. It isn't, so I cannot.)
The information on the internet is unbounded. You know this, you are aware even if subliminally, no matter how you control your browser by blocking ads, pop ups etc. An unbounded information horizon is destabilizing. There is always more (possibly better) information a click away. It's hard to justify keeping attention on just one article. I even read a paper newspaper article with more attention than the same article online.
Of course pop ups, ads, the incredible commodification of attention, has made this much worse, but the problem is inherent to the internet.
When I open a book, there are two covers, marking beginning and end. It's awesome. In between is a place for deep attention.
There have been books that have enriched my life. It's deep focus, not shallow scanning. I think there is something soul crushing about the shallow attention we are left with after years on the job. (Slack & Teams are part of the problem.)