This is my second post in a series on the importance of reading (post nr 1) and what that means for any ‘service’ or ‘read it later’ app that comes after Pocket.
I did not wake up one day as an infrequent reader and work slowly towards one hundred pages a day out of some inchoate desire for self-improvement. Rather, like many of us, I decided some years ago that if I did not take it upon myself to spend less time scrolling through Wikipedia or the AllMusic Guide or returning to my Twitter “feed”—the implicit image of a trough is appropriate—I would find myself losing one of my greatest pleasures to sheer indolence. – Matthew Walther, The Hundred Pages Strategy, The Lamp Magazine (December 2024)
Demonstrably detrimental
In a 2022 podcast interview, New York Times journalist Ezra Klein had brain researcher Maryanne Wolf as a guest. Klein had her on because one of his favorite themes for the show is the millennial lament on what we have lost with the smartphone’s rise to dominance (love these episodes, the one on the Sabbath is also really good).
Wolf’s research showed that reading from screens is demonstrably detrimental to our ability to construct complex thoughts. Brains will rewire themselves for shallow processing. When we read on screens – especially phones – we develop what Wolf calls a “skimming mindset.” We scan for keywords, jump between fragments, and lose the ability to follow complex arguments from start to finish.
If computers are bicycles for the mind, phones are actually more like those little clown tricycles. Deep reading, by contrast, activates our full neural circuitry. You’re reading off of paper. It’s slow, deliberate, and demands sustained attention. It’s a physical experience.
Wolf discovered this the hard way when she couldn’t get through a beloved Hermann Hesse book after years of digital reading. She tried to re-read Hesse’s Magister Ludi, which had been her favorite when she was an English major. But after years of digital reading, she found it “sluggish” and couldn’t get through even the first part. She had to deliberately slow herself down and read just a few minutes a day for about two weeks before she could “find her home again” in deep, immersive reading. And it took some time to retrain her brain for the kind of immersive thinking that lets us, in the words of Klein, “go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own.”
Zoning out
Serious reader, take note. To your brain, reading on your phone is completely different from reading on paper (possibly eInk, they didn’t get into that). The difference isn’t just comprehension, or zoning out, or the difference between reading for work and for fun. This is diminishing cognitive capacity. Skimming on your phone costs the brain a skill. The skill of being able to read for enjoyment.
If you love reading, and you want to really retain what you read, and have those EMPATHY GAINS 💪 you can’t read on your phone. And so, if in the Pocketdammerung, you’re building a read-it-later app, if you really want it to improve your reading practice, it needs to meet you where you read best. Which is: not on your phone.