Attention Deficits

Sometime near the beginning of this year, I began reading reddit rather religiously. Reddit is similar to another site, Digg, where users submit articles, and other users give it an up or down ranking. The main page shows the "best" results, which uses some heuristic that is partly based on time (in particular, it is not a sorted list with the article that has the most points with the highest ranking).

Digg attempts to clip out a sentence or so from the text to give it context. Reddit relies on the submitter to write a good tease to attract readers. I tend to prefer reddit since it puts more posts per page than reddit, with 25 posts vs. 15 posts.

I find I'll read the articles if it's short, say, a page or so. If I have to click on a second page, I don't feel like reading it. If there are five pages, I'm not likely to read it either. A beautiful image, or a quick video, I'd also watch. I find that I lack the patience, for these kinds of sites, to spend a great deal of time with browsing.

I wonder if that has to do with a kind of attention deficit disorder? I suspect it simply has to do with what I expect from reading reddit. In order to process a bunch of articles regularly, they need to be short. In general, I don't have 15 minutes to spare, let alone an hour, to read. The funny thing is, if these articles were read out loud, I think I'd be more likely to listen. The act of reading seems that much more laborious to me than the act of listening. This makes some sense as reading, for me, involves verbalizing what I read so it "sounds" like I'm taking. Thus, listening to spoken words cuts down on one level of translation my head needs to figure out what's going on.