Reading on the web is full of distractions

Let me start by asking you a question, do you prefer paper books or ebooks when you want to read a new book from your favorite author or favorite subject? For the ones who love the smell of paper, the answer is obvious. Now let me ask ebook lovers (like me) another question – do you love reading ebooks on Kindle or iPad? This is another divide where most may like to mention Kindle or a similar ebook reader probably because it so resembles the black & white paper with an additional advantage of listening music to please your ears and an ever expanding ebook library stored in pocketable Kindle. The one who like to read on iPad or any other tablet, I have another question – how often do you skip the ebook and open your web browser to update twitter status or add a few more facebook friends or follow stories/news on increasing number of favorite sites?

Before you get fed-up of my questions, let’s go back and see as we were embracing new means of reading books, the distraction level was increasing sharply. Kindle has choice of music and ability to allow you a quick glance at the newly bought ebooks. And iPad brought the entire ‘social’ web where we could just go online anytime spend as much time on anything but the book you were just reading.

Article sample from Wikipedia

I spend a lot of time reading blogs and ebooks on my netbook and realized that I hardly ever stop at the article or blog post I actually went online to read. I mostly end up miles away reading a topic that was nowhere in my thoughts or list of topics I wanted to read. The culprits here are always numerous cross-links embedded in the pages/comments by eager-to-give-credit bloggers or so knowledgeable wiki authors who would be considered more learned if they added more links in-between.

Like your eager mind, I also thought there must be some research or study on distraction while reading, which should be able to tell us the implications of distractions we come across while being online. And there is one (link provided below) and it takes us to a term called Cognitive Load, which psychologists refer to the state of mind when our short-term memory is not able to transfer the overflowing information to long-term memory.

While we need links to post credible blog posts and wiki articles, we need to find ways and techniques to read them distraction-free. In my next post, I’ll be discussing the many ways to make the web distraction free, which are already being discussed in the blogosphere.

Read more about the effects of online distractions here
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/