How We Read (Or Don’t Read) Online
By: Taylor Carr
Tags: Writing, Society, Culture, Technology, Reading

If you’ve contributed any moderate amount of essays, articles, or writing to blogs or other content creation sites, then looked over the stats for those pieces, you’ve probably noticed a familiar pattern. On this site, the read ratio for most of my own work generally hovers around 30%. That is, most people only make it through about a third of what I’ve written before they venture off to other pages, links, and sites. Of course, this varies somewhat based on word count and other factors, but usually this figure remains fairly stable.

Now before jumping to conclude that my read ratio is so low because my content isn’t that interesting or isn’t written that well (save the effort; I assure you, writers are almost always their own worst critics), there is some additional information worth considering.

Our Online Reading Habits

In 2008, Jakob Nielsen authored a fascinating article on a research paper by Harald Weinreich and colleagues that examined the time people spent on various pages online. Nielsen’s own earlier research into online reading patterns established as far back as 1997 that a vast majority of readers — 79% — selectively scan what they read on the Internet, whereas only 16% read word-by-word. Consistent with this, Weinreich and his co-authors found that on average users read about 28% of the text on their screens, though that number is realistically estimated to be closer to 20%. The study found the average amount of time spent on a page to be 25 seconds, but this likely also includes time we spend figuring out the page layout and navigation, as well as looking at images.

Another study by Nielsen tracked the eye movement of 232 users across thousands of web pages and documented a common F-shaped reading pattern. Users start out reading the upper part of the page horizontally, skip down a bit and read horizontally again, before finally scanning the left side in a vertical movement. There are variations to exactly how many words people read and how linear their eye movements are, so the F-shaped pattern is not pixel-perfect but serves as a general representation of how many of us read online.

The above research is all more than a decade old by now. Since then we’ve seen the rise of responsive web design, the popularization and standardization of search engine optimization guidelines, and other developments that have been aimed at improving user accessibility and retaining readership. These developments have come largely as a result of years of study into our online reading habits.

Just last month, the Nielsen Norman Group published a newly updated report on how people read online. In the last decade, several other common reading patterns have been documented, the majority of which still show selective scanning and fragmented reading. Overall, the report upholds many of the findings from their previous work, with the general consensus remaining that “people rarely read online.”

Reminders about not believing everything you read on the Internet may be good advice, then, partly because it turns out that much of what we do read isn’t read thoroughly at all, and bits of important information could well be lost along the way.

Print or Digital?

One argument that’s been going on ever since the web became a thing and started to be more widely available is the debate over reading print versus reading online. Although there may be fewer people reading print now than there were two or three decades ago, recent research like a 2016 study by the Pew Research Center has found that a majority of Americans read at least one print book per year, including a surprisingly high number (72%) of Millennials. A 2012 study by Daniela Zambarbieri and Elena Carniglia used eye movement analysis to compare how people read on their computer, tablet, and e-reader in contrast to reading from a print book, and the results showed very similar behaviors across all four.

We should be careful what we conclude from this, though. It would be too quick and easy to use findings like these to argue that there are no real or important differences between these different types of media.

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr (no relation) discusses why online reading often is a more distracted, fragmented form of reading that fosters a more distracted, fragmented mode of thinking. The content we read on the web frequently has links (guilty), ads, menus, navigational tools, and even things like the recently popular pull-quotes that all shift and steer our attention in different ways. Perhaps it’s telling that one of our newer cultural narratives involves aimlessly browsing online or ‘falling down a rabbit-hole’ of pages, sites, links, and resources.

This might sound too anecdotal, but as Ferris Jabr explains in an article on “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age” for Scientific American, there are numerous studies that have shown differences in how our brains approach digital versus print material. Some of the findings in them relate quite directly to the advantages of books as a physical medium, the way online material can scatter and divert attention, how the latter may impact our memory and comprehension, and more. Additionally, a recently published meta-analysis of some of the literature by Virginia Clinton suggests that one especially notable difference is that online readers overestimate their level of comprehension in comparison to print readers.

In many respects, to read a book is to make a commitment. It often means setting aside other activities and finding the right time and space to give it your attention. A book is also far more resilient than most of the devices we consume digital content on. It can go almost anywhere with you, doesn’t need to be charged, it won’t break if dropped, and it can have something spilled on it without ruining it. I think in these and other ways, a book demands our attention and focus, and unlike much of the web, it won’t return that by dispersing our thought and attention, or diverting our eyes across a vast assortment of elsewheres.

(Not) Writing for (Non-)Readers

Originally I had pictured this article being titled, “Writing for an Audience That Doesn’t Read.” I scrawled it down on a yellow sticky note and stuck it on my desk along with a question: why would you want to?

Lately I’ve been thinking about just how much content is out there on the Internet these days, how easily accessible it is, how anyone can create their own site or blog, and write and publish their own essays. I wonder and worry, like I’m sure many others do, about how this has affected the overall quality of what’s out there and what people are exposed to. And I can’t help but question if all the marketing strategies, algorithms, and other tools now used to promote an online presence and catch and hold attention spans are smart solutions to a general problem or if they’re making the problem worse.

Even in the little over ten years that I’ve been putting my work online, I’ve seen some major changes. Not all have been bad, of course. But there is a fine line between fine-tuning your work in order to maximize your audience, clicks, likes, and shares, and fine-tuning it to be accessible, readable, and marketable without sacrificing quality or playing into and thus encouraging reading habits that create a harmful environment. At a certain point we must understand that in an age so regularly characterized by misinformation and “fake news,” we are not just mindless consumers of media, but the decisions we make and the habits we help form in ourselves and others are part of what shapes the form taken by media, too.

That yellow sticky note has stayed on my desk for a few weeks now. I’ve been thinking about the question on it for almost that entire time. Some days I felt like it might come to nothing and briefly thought about throwing it away. But for some reason, I just couldn’t.

One of the things I still carry with me from my religious days is a love for what’s sometimes called ‘wrestling with the text.’ In traditions that rely a good deal on religious documents, wrestling with the text is an exegetical exercise that can mean bringing out and comprehending the theological, historical, social, and moral significance of the text, but can also be about letting the text speak to you on a more personal level. This can be likened to the notion of ‘deep reading,’ but what I like about wrestling with the text is the implied sense of struggle and diligent effort.

When was the last time you wrestled with something you read online? I don’t mean disagreed with it, disliked it, or that it gave you new information. I mean that it really made you think and reflect on things, that it spoke to you in a profound or meaningful way. I’ve had these experiences reading some things on the Internet, but they are few and far between. Wrestling with the text, whether digital or not, is a two-way road at minimum.

I think this does well to answer my question. I write for an audience that doesn’t read because the struggle — the dialogue — is worth it. Because the fact of the matter is that even though I love my print books, I’ve read many things online word-for-word, and I’ve experienced some of the frustrations of writing and publishing online firsthand, I am still a member of that audience myself.

Why did I change the title of this article in the end? The original just seemed a little unwieldy and not that catchy.