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When I published my book “Deep Work” 10 years ago, I argued that email and instant messages were degrading our ability to concentrate on hard mental tasks. I recommended putting aside long stretches of time for uninterrupted thinking and treating this cognitive activity like a skill that you can improve through practice. The term “deep work” quickly entered the vernacular, and I started to hear people and companies use it without even realizing its source.
An opinion article hyping someone’s own work. Gross self aggrandizing. This kind of shit immediately removes my faith in the author’s intent and the article’s purpose. They should make their point without citing themselves.
So many parts in this article reinforced exactly how I feel about the state of things and what I’m doing about it.
No Twitter, no Facebook, never did Instagram or TikTok, no YouTube unless I need to fix something. My one online vice is Lemmy, which is nice because I run out of new content and am forced to do something else like read a book or be productive.
If I’m at dinner with people, phone goes face-down on DND. If I’m in a meeting, close the laptop unless I’m presenting or taking notes. I designate Monday and Friday “concentration says” and keep meetings to an absolute minimum.
It’s done wonders for anxiety and stress. There was a time when the smartphone worked for us, not the other way around. It requires a conscious effort, but it’s totally worth it.
My reason: because you have provided no text to concentrate on. Just a link to some site where I expected to crawl through tons of menus, cookies reminders, photos of diverse people happily smiling and pop-up windows asking for subscription.
So I ignore it altogether.
Who didn’t provide you text to concentrate on?
I’m serious, do you mean this Lemmy post and the OP?
What’s the equivalent of this cardio for our ailing brains? A good candidate is reading. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep reading processes” that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand. “Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought,” she writes. Perhaps consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness.
Honestly I think this read-more tactic has gone too far. Install a word counter and start paying attention to how many words are in news articles. I have been doing that, we have a large number of articles around the 5000 word length, with some significantly more. This opinion piece is over 3100 words, shorter than many articles posted. Assuming a 250 words-per-minute reading speed, this article takes 12 minutes to read. We can easily spend the entire day reading the top news stories in their entireties. In the old days, news items almost always had a lede summarizing the article. Today, many stories keep you reading by not having a lede. When we are reading, we do not have time for activities such as going out and holding up a First Amendment grievance sign, or writing a grievance letter to our legislators. We can all too easily get caught up in stories about Ms. Leavitts supposedly-unflattering double-chin photo, a manufactured controversy, simply as a method of wasting our reading time to stories of little importance to our civics-assigned task of being informed citizens.
Yes, there is…
A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their “apps” these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.
I’m kinda surprised the author is able to put together why the ad experience is bad, even directly calling out the data ining of the sites, but completely misses that apps are even better at mining your data
Laughs in pi-hole
Couldn’t even read that without a tldr.
Email and texting is eroding our intelligence, but somehow reading is gonna fix it. The fuck do you think emails and texts are? 🤦♂️
This is just an ad for the author’s book.
Reading with intention.
All that other shit people say or do these things with:
- only read the headline
- comment after only reading the headline
- say “tldr”
- skim emails
- disengage from long and detailed group chat chats, skipping to the end and saying “I didn’t read all of that, but…”
- using AI to summarize emails and long articles
Etc.
All the problems you listed boil down to someone NOT READING…
They are all examples of seeking short snippets over long form reading. We are being habituated to do that. And there are people that proudly say and do these things and promote the culture of doing these things. People are doing it in this thread.
