E-mail is undermining our ability to read...
...indeed, you may end up not reading this post as well as you think you are...
I would say that there’s a better than even chance you will not read this post thoroughly. After the first few dozen words most likely you will skim through it, concentrating on perhaps the first line or two of each paragraph, or going on to look for ‘trigger’ words in the rest of it.
I suspect this explains why more and more people now write emails where each sentence is almost its own paragraph.
Because that’s more likely to keep you interested.
Isn’t it?
Surely one of the culprits for our shortening attention spans has to be social media and our growing addiction to the soundbite, screen-based or not. Remember the ‘good old days’ of 140 character Tweets? [Question: did Twitter actually have any good days? Discuss…]
Another cause [cause for what? do you remember? there it is in the previous paragraph…] - another cause is the sheer volume of emails we now get, spam or otherwise. Imagine if each email we received was a letter. How the postman/postwoman would struggle! We’d all be like Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle with sack-loads of envelopes being delivered…
[Interestingly, if you search for images of ‘mail’ or ‘postman’ on-line you are overwhelmingly presented with graphics relating to e-mail, or pictures of a postman delivering parcels…. (Amazon, take a bow.) Very few of the photos or graphics relate to physical letters - though an ‘envelope’ is often in there somewhere...]
The impact of all of this lack of quality (the soundbite) & increase in quantity (sheer volume) is that our reading attention spans have diminished. How many of us, when we get a long post from someone to whom we’ve subscribed on Substack, end up just skimming through it?
“8 minute read?” - aren’t you normally done in less than three?
And what if this lack of care leaks through to when we’re reading fiction or poetry? I suspect we’re already infected there too.
I have empirical evidence to support my theory about reading quality. In my role as sometime publisher and editor I often have occasion to email numerous people in relation to one book or another. Clever, intelligent, literate people. Yet you would be amazed at the number of times I receive queries from the recipients of those emails where they clearly demonstrate that they have simply not properly read the email I originally sent them. They think they have, but sadly not.
The impact can be tangible in other ways too. Reported in the UK news today the person who presumably either didn’t read or misread communications from his energy supplier - and then found £250k disappearing from his company’s bank account… Or chose not to receive any on-line communications perhaps? Or allowed it to go to spam?
We live in a world where opting out of email is an impossibility.
I confess I have fallen into the same trap too. Inevitably. Speed-reading through an email, thinking it says one thing, responding to that - only to find out later (often embarrassingly so) that it said something else entirely. How many of us have not had that experience?
So a plea - to myself as much as all of you - when you get an email, try to read it properly, as if the words were written on a page and you were holding that page in your hand. Or slow down. Or read it twice, three times.
If you don’t, who knows what you might be missing…