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People Don’t Read Anymore, They Merely Skim

Thursday, June 18, 2009, by Sebastian Dwornik
Skim Milk

If I leave my RSS reader alone for too long it will eventually implode into a black hole under its own weight of unread articles that have piled up. Most of which will be ignored by the time I get to them. And those that I do end up reading, better be short, sweet, and to the point. An added picture that summarizes the writing most clearly will usually get more attention than the accompanying text.

This is because most people online merely skim the text for keywords and partial sentences, in the hope that the information will piece itself together in their brain and make sense. All to save time, and move on to the next article for skimming.

The massive bombardment of inorfamtoin ovrelod has adpatd our brians to wrok like a programmed search engine. To seek out bits from text and pictures but never the whole composition. As if we’ve lost our patience for it.

Which can be frustrating when you spend a large amount of time writing a detailed email, to only then have to repeat it again to the person you just sent it to, because they skimmed over it and missed all the best jokes.

This realization has forced me to reduce my RSS subscriptions substantially and begin using the telephone more often when trying to explain ideas to people. I suppose Twitter’s success partially stems from this skimming of emails and blogs.

For now, if you have read this article fully, did you catch the typos? Or did you skim?

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My name is Sebastian Dwornik and I am an entrepreneur located near Toronto, Canada.

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