 So yes, we're going to be talking about libraries, readers and distraction today and hopefully pretty interactive. So like I'll talk for the first part here. And like, like Susan already mentioned, my background was in tech, interestingly, so just to give this a time frame. I did work at authors at Google is a great job. It was actually really enjoyed what I did working with the major publishers would send me free books and say, what books would you like to have book events? Would you like to invite someone rush you to come to the office and, you know, Buzz Aldrin and Hillary Clinton and all these things. So that was fun to get free books from the publishers. I was also on the scene at the very beginning of the Google book scanning project, which I know most people would be familiar with the machines did not look like this. It was just an old vacuum cleaner essentially rigged a vacuum cleaner with a bicycle handlebar sort of thing that would turn the pages. Obviously they're still doing book scanning sort of things. And my current research works on my PhD in education at the University of Cambridge here and then I'm interested. So this is part of the reason I'm talking to you today because this I speak from experience both professional and academic in terms of our reading habits online what happens between going from page to screen printed page to screen. What is the experience of reading like how do what's the role of social media effects are, you know, our attention span or distractions and these sort of things. So I thought I would apply some of those findings and some of the things that I've heard about over the years to all of you today and we can kind of facilitate a discussion. I'm going to cover a lot of stuff relatively like as a kind of like a wide view of things. This is just, I mean this has been my life for the past half decade so it's kind of hard for me to stop talking. I'm going to take advantage of social media in this case so I'm going to use my Twitter as the footnotes for today's talk so anything that I mentioned that has an article or a link or a book or something. I will share it online later too no need to try to multitask which I'm going to talk about in a second to get all of these things down or share. Feel free to grab those later so anything that is linkable I will mention over Twitter and I'll get those online for everyone to get later today. I'm going to leave a digital distraction of using social media for a talk on digital distraction, but life is ironic sometimes so let's go with it. All right, so I thought I would like go back in time a little bit how did I get interested in this. This topic and I thought I would just share this quote Nicholas car this comes from Nicholas cars the shallows and I read this while I was still at Google. I'm just reading out loud at all. Be quick enough that we're thinking we're not thinking the way I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly what I'm reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or like the article. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety lose the thread begin looking for something else to do the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I'm a science writer still is a science writer but someone who reads and writes for a living. That is ultimately what led me to my path to Cambridge is reading this book, because I found this to be true myself. Like a lot of you, a very bookish person and I found when working in Silicon Valley in the tech world I was spending a lot of time on screen. And not much time reading books for fun. It was just everything was online and I felt like I felt it after I started to realize it that something was missing and I just wasn't reading the way I was used to so I started to really wonder about this. I thought I was just sure it's a good overview of many things, but kind of fast forwarding to the present. I wonder about so most of this talk is on distraction the idea of like, you know, the question I posted on Twitter for anyone that still wants to take the ball can we can we still get lost in a good book on a screen. You know, there are distractions, distracted from distraction by distraction. I won't take credit for that that's TS Eliot. But there is a poll today it was kind of interesting. This is totally unscientific but I thought it was just kind of neat to see like, you know, in case you'd like to register your thoughts your experience. Your preferred way to get lost in a book and by that I mean like the immersion the flow kind of process so we've got to, you know, print is still overwhelmingly in our crowd and the people that saw this on Twitter. A good number of not sure is a no preference. I'm curious about this that it's the no preference part some of the research that I've been doing. Are we going to become more media agnostic over time and that's the idea that maybe we'll have no preference, maybe the best book experience is the one that we can access. Maybe Prince not going anywhere we're past that stage of those discussions but it's interesting to see kind of like you know where where there is a little bit of flux and these sort of things. Personally if I had to answer I still prefer print, just because it gives my eyeballs a break we've all got digital fatigue at this point. Sometimes I do prefer a Kindle at night when going to sleep. The Kindle light setting depending on which one you have is is is much preferred over any of the blue light emitting devices if we're going to read something in the dark before bedtime Kindle is the way to go so I have my nighttime reading hence why I'm reading the sort of or well book right before bedtime. A little bit of situating of context because that's what we do and research and academics and these sort of things we're just going to touch on this briefly but when we talk about distractions and reading technology of all of these things it's all relative. I'll post a link to this later if you're curious but I like and this is just one example of many but the idea that you know we have the book wheel book will in the 1700s so that was like the Atlantic calls it the Kindle 19th century how could you read all these different books at once or have access to all of them. The idea was basically take two tables and stick a bunch of books in between them and put it on a wheel. So we've come a long way since that. But the reason I bring this up the idea of like technology and the idea of reading behaviors now is that again, it's so contextual right there's another one that I'll share but this is one of many examples that novel reading Charles Dickens reading of all of these things was considered you know we're talking Victorian era this this was bad for our attention spans the cliffhanger ending or you know heaven forbid putting pictures or something at a book was considered very distracting so that was the Victorian era version of what we're hearing now and for anyone that's kind of looked into this or heard some of these things it's kind of it's really interesting to see how if you just switch out the terms. The same debates are happening then happening now as they were 300 years ago 200 and 200 to 300 years ago. So again, let me let me talk a little bit about distractions on the individual level and like I said it's a little bit of you know relativity going on here. Distraction distraction sensitivity I guess the best way to put it is it's again it's. It's hard to make blanket statements because everyone is a little different. Some people prefer the kind of like background noise of a coffee shop which I used to remember when coffee shops were used to be a thing I really enjoyed going to coffee shops and reading digital format. Some of us are very sensitive to background sounds to the idea that like we like total silence when we read and different times a day that's the other thing that we're noticing too is that some of it is temporal in the sense that some of us depending on our chronotype which is fancy we have saying like are we a morning person or a night person we're just more focused or more distractible at various times various times of the day. So there's a lot of factors here but I thought I would talk a little bit about digital distractions themselves kind of in our everyday life and we'll kind of broaden it out to the role of readers and libraries. So this is just one statistic I grabbed this from a talk that I attended. Leigh Ann Curlin is one of the research scientists at BBC, and she cited this is one number amongst many, but the idea that you know we pick up our phone and keep in mind this was about a year ago. We pick up our phones or devices about 150 times a day. Just within the adult demographic we're talking about close to four hours. Teens are close to double that. Since lockdown and since so much of our lives. Such a portion of our lives is done through work and work and play on screen. I strongly suspect the numbers are up since then. 150 is a lot. 150 is like you know and like the idea what counts as a digital distraction I'll talk about kind of like a hierarchy of distractions a little bit but even just like the simple act of like picking up your phone just to see if there are notifications that's a pickup that counts as a pickup and something that we do probably have consciously at this point. I thought I would talk about very briefly noticing that again this is the tech side of me coming up but digital distractions and why we're so digitally distracted 100% intentional. I mean all of the tech companies have an army of engineers and PhDs and psychology and user experience and decide this is the shade of red that is going to make you want to click on that thing. I mean everything is intentional. I mean like you know this is probably goes without saying especially if you've seen documentaries like the social dilemma and all of these things but the idea is to kind of not digital distraction has kind of picked up more of a moral charge lately. I have a good attention span. I'm not anti digital distraction and I think we need to give ourselves a break because we are spending all of our time online just understanding some of the mechanisms in ourselves in our readers is usually a good first step but kind of realizing that there are different degrees. Some of us respond to kind of like you know if something feels urgent. The one thing that I'm researching more and I'm very interested in so this started at Google this is the idea if you've ever used Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, YouTube all these things it's called infinite scroll right so that's the idea this this was originally designed to make web pages load faster so rather than having to go through clicks and taps and all of that the content would just keep going effectively forever for our purposes. Social media companies and other types of other types of content providers nowadays have really mastered this. I wonder about this one. When I said all digital distractions aren't necessarily equal. I find this one particularly particularly mind numbing I guess and I'm not anti that either but I strongly suspect that there's a correlation between the amount of time we spend on infinite scroll and how we feel afterwards because at some point we do zone out and we're just kind of doing this intermittent reinforcement box thing with it and it's like bad bad bad I'm not even looking or paying attention why am I still on this. After all of this time so some are different for some of us you know news itself as a distraction for me personally it's phone calls. I hate phone calls like the interrupted by phone calls if I'm working on something important. I just as part of life in lockdown I just don't answer phone calls now until later it's like oh email me or get to me later. Everyone's got their different things right everyone's got their different distraction threshold for what is considered somewhat distraction or very distracting. So there's a little bit of nuance we'll be talking about digital distraction. What does it have to do with reading and reading behaviors so again there's a lot of debate kind of ongoing about some of these things and I'm curious in your perspective working with readers and working in libraries and these sort of things. We've seen a number of things and this is still kind of an ongoing thing Marion Wolf who's one of my favorite researchers and authors. I believe she's at UCLA now, I think as a visiting researcher but she's a neuroscientist you wrote Proust and the squid, and you may have seen this Guardian article from a little while ago in terms of like are we doing more skim reading plans by default kind of a little shorter because there's so much to read that we're just trying to get through it. Another Guardian article this is a while ago but on the one hand we have is it making us more shallow readers like Nicholas Carr talked about in his book in the beginning. On the other hand there's the idea that well it actually isn't harming deep reading. There are different ways to look at this. This is the I'll share again I'll share both of these articles because I think it is good food for thought to think about respond to. I think we both encounter various versions of the everyday life so this is a cartoon I really like this cartoon. This is the one that kind of summarizes Marion Wolf's thesis in a little bit. A lot of us have heard TLDR too long didn't read. Unfortunately that's become more salient the longer we go. Because we're in attention span economy right we're in an idea where like one of our limits isn't access to stuff so much as it is like you know what's worth our time. So this cartoon kind of humorously but also like fairly on the nose describe some of these things it's very short we still didn't read it. I should read it should I think this a lot myself probably won't read it but I'll keep it in a bookmark or I'll keep it on my you know bookmarking service things read a bit got bored skim read totally missed the point see this on Twitter a lot a lot read the headline posted angry comments oh boy. Yeah, so there's a little bit of that like this is kind of the what's at stake when we talk about this distractions and attenuated attention spans and readers and all of these things it's a humorous way to describe some of these things but also a fairly accurate representation of reality in some ways we see all of this you might have noticed for those of you that use Twitter that they're rolling out the feature in terms of if you share an article built there's a little prompt now that'll come up did you actually read the article would you like to read the article before you share it which is generally a good practice. Anyway, that should be more of a thing so it's interesting to see tech companies doing math multitasking is the other part I'd be curious about like if we have a conversation towards the end here. There's a lot to say about multitasking specifically I'm interested in this in the context of reading and studying. We all multitask at various times might multitasking right now during this talk. In general, we're all multitasking really is closer to task switching. Task switching is the idea that we jump quickly back and forth between their different things. Listen to this talk reply to this email, you know, posting this thing online. And it's become I feel like it's become easier since lockdown since everything is online I feel like that's true. I've done it. And I try to limit myself to it just because the science is fairly clear at this point we're all much worse get any two tasks that we switch between then we would on a single task we could focus on. They've done studies. This is just one example of many where they had students you know reading and studying for a thing. They could go about five or six minutes in between tasks before they had to check something any kind of digital distraction that attacks for these sort of things. Those were students, those of us are age, we're not much better I think we were in the eight or nine minute range so we can't blame younger generation so much. There are different ones in case anyone's more interested in kind of the science behind some of these things I think this is fascinating, but there's a very small percentage of the population. Who can apparently effectively multitask and do things equally as well statistically speaking it's tiny so it's probably not me friends probably not you. I was a big group maybe like one or two of you maybe, but I wouldn't take that chance so when you we know when we come to multitasking and learning and all of these things that it's a bad deal for us productivity and thought wise for what exactly it is we're doing. I'll post those things online. These are just passing thoughts. The idea since we're talking about audio books over Twitter a little bit just before this talk started. I get this question a lot in terms of attention span. You know how do we improve our attention span there's multiple ways to do it. My shorthand answer is try audio books, like if there are some people who, you know, fully say that I can't focus on a book for five minutes of my life dependent on it but it's not a that's not like a bad thing so much is like these are habits that we've learned in terms of multitasking and digital distractions but the great thing is we can unlearn those habits as well. I like audio books, I think a good audio book would be like as good a way as any to kind of like a verse yourself and get lost in a good book that way. It depends of course I think a good narrator makes all the difference. I wish Neil Gaiman narrated more books if I was super rich I would have to pay him to narrate everything. So a good narrator makes all the difference. In general, they oops, in general they say science fiction and fantasy tend to be the genres that most promote getting lost because there's a lot of world building of course and a lot of, you know, vivid detail that helps. For me for whatever reason Charles Dickens has been my thing lately long audio books but I don't know, it just kind of works for me when it terms of lots of characters also world building of course. This applies to nonfiction as well everyone's a little different but that's my short term. There could be a whole talk about attention span and these sort of things but like kind of rediscovering the pleasure of getting lost in a good book in an audio book. Or while listening to an audio book while you might be doing other things like exercise or taking a walk. Nowadays, very briefly I thought I would mention some of these things since I was just talking about multi tasking. Often, when we're reading and writing go hand to hand. There's been some stuff that some studies that have shown and I tend to agree with this that typing typing tends to turn us into stenographer and turns attendants into kind of like transcription writers more than actual note takers. So something slower is better I found for meetings in general now I've actually switched back to paper because I feel like it's helps me pay attention better it helps me be able to say like oh, that guy's talking really fast. I'm not going to be able to type right down all of these things but I got the just a bit paper good typing bad. Alright, whatever, etc, these sort of things. And I mentioned the kind of slowness which is kind of something that me 10 years ago in Silicon Valley would have thought was kind of really, all of the affordances that are built into, you know, a lot of the digital things the fact that we can look up links to Wikipedia and hyperlink and jump into different search windows and all of that isn't always a good thing for the reading experience. For distraction and any distraction both in the reading sense and really a lot of the work that we do on an everyday basis I'm proud of this the. Oh, let me look that up or let me research this. I usually write these things down just to like help with my focus and not get pulled down to many different directions at the same time. I'll keep a little posted or a little thing and I use it as my, my information triage my distraction triage system. I found that about half the time I didn't really want to look it up. It's like a novelty that like our brains kind of crave the novelty and we do want it we distract ourselves or it's like oh this feels important in the moment, it's actually not important. So half the time I would say when I write something down is like look up this or what does that mean 1030 minutes later. I'm fairly consistently seeing those like I don't really care about that. It's just the idea that like there's some part of this like an itchy part of our brain which does want to be distracted and jump into a different topic. That's the idea sometimes slower is better. Let's talk about some of the interesting things stuff here and then we'll open up to discussion a little bit. I'm fascinated by kind of the temporal element that's like kind of come into a lot of reading time and again this goes back to what I said there's so much to read, and not enough time to do it that we're seeing things like on media and all sorts of different things you're getting into reading times, basically to help you make an informed decision. A lot of things are doing this I'm seeing this more mainstream publications to sell. It's the, you know, is this worth my time to read it, quantifying the reading experience is a hard thing to do the tech and data part of me would have loved this. And I still find it kind of interesting in terms of like indicators of something right how much time we're spending on something reading experience is a very complicated thing to understand. I like when it was one of my favorite books by the way, if on a winter's night of traveler by a tallow Calvino, super weird and super meta fiction but great. But it talks about the reading experience in a really sensible way it's the idea that, you know, reading, the idea of reading the experience of reading is always this that there is a thing that is there, a thing made out of writing a solid material object which cannot be changed and through this we measure ourselves again some something else that is not present something else that belongs to the immaterial invisible world, because it can only be thought imagined or because it was once is no longer, no longer past lost or unattainable. And really, the idea behind that is just that there is this kind of intangibility of the reading experience like you know we've seen studies nowadays where they stick grad students in an MRI tube and have them read Jane Austin is like right so that's one way to get in the sense of like what's going on in there when we're reading. It's harder in terms of like you know the data can only take us so far right I'm going to come back to this in a second, but the idea of like how do we do this how do we really capture what's going on during the experience of reading a click can only tell us. It tells us something, certainly, and that's why I've been kind of thinking about textbooks this was actually going to be in my original research because my background was in digital textbooks before coming to Cambridge. So there's a lot of potential here I'll share this one from Junco and clam about the, you know, kind of the learning outcomes or some suggestions of learning outcomes through textbook metrics data. I think some of you probably are already doing some of these things you can see like checkouts, where people dropping off users reading these sort of things. Like course smart for instance give your very client granular approach to these sort of things number of minutes spent on it so it's something it's data, but what do we do with this data. That is the question that interests me right now is that is the question that interests me right now. You may or may not have seen this the thing from John from Los Angeles originally but this was a big one one of the biggest school districts in the United States second biggest Los Angeles unified school district basically the idea was let's spend a billion dollars on iPads and this will help education and learning outcomes, but no other plan that was the plan. They didn't lose a lot of money from that they didn't lose the whole billion fortunately but that's one of the things I'm interested in so it's not just the data and usage stuff it's actually the everything that goes around, making these kind of decisions. Yeah, that was horrible. That was basically I was so mad about this that I wanted to get a PhD was actually like try to prevent these sort of things from happening. You know these kind of like crazy decisions about like well tech isn't in itself digital isn't enough, you know, tech isn't enough on its own it's the kind of people stuff that goes into it behind it. Again, Silicon Valley me never would have said those words but it's true. There are different ways to do this I'm particularly interested in jellybooks if anyone's heard of this they're based in London. But it is basically analytics for reading and these sort of things we have different ways we can get this information now but this takes books that you could read on like a Kindle or you know any commercially bought reading device and it can kind of get a sense of reading profile so the little blue bars in this case are kind of like, like reading sessions longer bars or longer amounts of time reading. And I was like, I'm going to pick up the book and I was like all right so I'm hypothetically in this graph that we're looking at below. Nothing on weekends, looks like weekend evenings are later in the day tend to be popular times for reading these sort of things but again, it's information it like paints some kind of picture or the outlines of the picture when it comes to reading behavior and all of these things I find it fascinating. I have a little bit more to say about this is get through the next few slides paradoxically my favorite reading app is not a reading app at all. It's an anti distraction app. I really like this one called freedom there are other ones but the idea is that you can set time limits you can set limits to the amount of time you spent on an app or a website, you can also block out the internet and entirely which is exactly what I do. It's the best whatever her to describe was in the Odyssey when Odysseus is going through the, like knows he's going to be lured by the sirens. This is the 21st century version of that that knowing that we're going to be distracted by things ahead of time we can actually plan ahead and say like okay, you know this is my reading time or this is my time but I'm not going to be distracted by the siren call of social media and all of these things. I use it a lot. I even I like this app so much actually wrote a little blog post them because they asked me to I'll share that online in case anyone wants to hear how I use that specifically so I will put that on on later to my second second app that I thought I'd give a shout out to is on iOS so any Apple device macOS and iOS. I feel like it's really not talked about that much but the reading shortcuts are actually pretty cool. So under the shortcut menu that they introduced in the last major or two iterations ago for the iOS version they actually have kind of like a reading mode sort of thing where it's like okay, it'll turn it into airplane mode for you it'll open your reading app for you, and it'll like you know kind of keep everything quiet turn off all the notifications until you kind of gotten out of it. I think that's really cool. I don't hear a lot of press about these sort of things I'll share a link to the iOS reading shortcut things but I just really like that. And it feels like it's not that big a deal but I use it all the time actually it's a good way to kind of like, buy a time for reading for our student readers and people that are trying to work on ways to kind of like, you know, foster more of that quiet reading time. I'm a big fan of Pomodoro's. I don't think, you know, like we need to necessarily prioritize the kind of reading for hours straight not moving around. We do have a natural limit on our attention span sometimes depends on what it is we're reading but knowing when to take breaks the Pomodoro timer is basically work for a number of set minutes and then take a break. Excuse me distractions whatever you want during the five minute break but you can do this and stay relatively focused. It's just one way it's a way to kind of like a method of kind of like working within the limits of our attention span and also learning to increase it if it's sort of like yeah I tend to not be able to pay attention super long but I'd like to get a little better so you build in attention span is almost almost kind of like a muscle or a skill that the more you use it the more you train it maybe 10 or 15 minutes of concentrated reading is hard at first, but after a month or two all of a sudden 30 minutes of 40 minutes of concentrated reading becomes much much easier so anyways, in a practical way I thought I would share some of the apps. For more on this, I will share some links to books that I really like in case people are interested in kind of the history of that. Natalie Phillips and when I talked about the Victorian era concerns about digital distraction, not a new thing, not necessarily but it's fascinating to hear what people worried about back then and kind of like the, you know, the right the new era of modern modernity and all of these things. What similar concerns. I'll share the article to this, this one about why digital devices, what's different isn't so much the questions but the quantity certainly is different now than it was back then the fact that all of these things are so prevalent. I mentioned Marion Wolf and a couple of these just in case you're interested I'll post links all of these books but if this topic really peaks your interest. These are all books that I really like. I think Marion Wolf is a neuroscientist we sure wrote this lovely collection of kind of mini essays on like you know reading in the brain and she talks about by literacy in the sense that maybe wall kind of the equally as comfortable with screen reading screen based reading is print reading, possibly, maybe Naomi Baron wrote the book for OUP on another one that I thought was kind of interesting in terms of attention stand and distractions and these sort of things. Before we open up to questions I was thinking my program that I managed here at Cambridge is the think lab we've worked at the reading agency before which I really like I think the reading agency is great as a nonprofit organization. I can share some of the stuff that we've done with them but I'll kind of talk about it as well in terms of like what libraries and reading organizations can do so basically I kind of ran through different scenarios for them and some of it was just thinking in terms of I'm not I don't think social media is antithetical to reading behavior necessarily there are ways that a lot of reading in book organizations and get a lot of information from where your demographics going go where your users are that was the thing that they said at Google from the very beginning which is super true still true today when it comes to kind of like how do we reach our audiences you go where they are go where they're spending their most time. So having an understanding of what platforms actually work well, what kind of platforms are encouraging bookish behavior. It's just something that I'm interested in, in case people want to chat about some of these things. It's, it's one of the things of my radar to think more about. I love what the New York public library did for example they took the example of, they took Instagram stories and converted a few public domain books into like really flashy novels they did Alice in Wonderland through Instagram. It looks great. Facebook has done this to they released a couple of books through messenger with fictional character profiles. I think experimentation. I think that's neat and who knows where some of these things will go. I'm curious about book clubs because I've seen libraries do this the World Economic Forum is one of the ones that I've been paying attention to, in terms of reaching wide varieties of readers, I think socially the book clubs are a great idea. I think that's interesting to me, like in terms of just being able to facilitate some of those readerly encounters in different ways. I'm just curious. I'm throwing out different topics of conversation. The other thing I would think about too is, we probably all have data, like that's part of the reason I wanted to like kind of chat with you all for the rest of the time too is like, what are you finding? Like are there ways we can kind of combine some of these like pool or collective knowledge on these things and like we don't, we know some things about readerly behavior digital distractions attention span and all of that. But this is still a big question mark. I kind of want to just see like, you know, I'm curious to learn what you're all thinking about this, what you've noticed in your roles, what kind of questions still need to be asked and like, you know, what kind of future research needs to be done on this. To me, it's a huge question. Still, even after all this time, it's something we've got to work on together. So I think that's it for me. I think we can go about to questions or these sort of things. So again, I'll post a Twitter, got my email. I love talking about these things. So anyone can reach me at any time. Yeah, anyone can reach me during these things. But yeah, Susan, what do you think we have questions and comments we should get to. Yeah, we have some questions that are posted. So I just want to say thank you. Thank you that interesting talk there and there's lots of comments and responses in the chat as well that we can take a look at. I want to remind people that you can post your questions, but also we are going to be interactive at this point. So if you want to join Tyler and myself as the panel and verbally ask your question, as opposed to writing it and you are able to do that you just need to raise your hand to do that. So I wondered if I can be bit cheeky and just kick off with one of my own questions that I had there. What I was thinking about Tyler as we're talking is that quite often this this kind of value judgment I think value in academia about close reading and deep reading that being the academic sort of seal approval and what we should be striving towards. What do you feel from some of the other strategies of the shallow reading, hyper reading, skimming and scanning that we might have adapted from use of technologies. All the benefits to that or should we be seeking to address the skills and help our learners with that deep reading is the gold seal of approval. I mean it's tricky I feel like there is value in being able to do both. I don't think deep reading is going anywhere even though they're certainly with younger generations like there are skills that seem to come more naturally than others but yeah there is a lot of stuff out there so like if we're going into the research mode or we don't even individually amongst like ourselves we don't necessarily read all the things the same way. I don't read a, you know, a research article or a book that I really need to study in the same way that I do. You know, a news article and these sort of things we evolve our own strategies. I think deep reading and the kind of the immersive reading and historical contacts does help because it does sort of sales like we've always been distracted readers like we just have there was no period when we're just sort of like, you know, sitting like monks with books changed to the library walls and would only do that like the monks did but like you know for everyone the rest of us like you know we've always had our natural limitations for reading in these sort of things. We do see something some indicators that for longer books of fiction. It seems like we enjoy them more when we're doing them in print and we kind of take it at our own pace and these sort of things so maybe there's a slowing down feeling immersed in these kind of things. If we're truly losing the capacity for engaging in books long term that simply doesn't explain why long books are still popular and actively read we've got books by like Thomas pinkity or 1000 pages we've got all the Game of Thrones books which are several hundred pages so we can still do it. That hasn't gone away if anything I swear like longer books are becoming more popular in some ways so it's just interesting I wonder if we're just being more selective now than we were before about what we choose to do deep reading on. Maybe that's not necessarily that thing, maybe. Yeah, it's maybe as you say that strategy that we just need to cope and learn to read we learn to read things in different ways for the purpose of our reading so it's not completely. I can see that we've got Laura here who's joined us on the panel so I will hand over to Laura for her question first. Good afternoon thank you so much for the amazing talk. And so, let's say that I have a bit of a concern I always had this that we are all losing this ability to read or focus and everything. And I don't know if you watch the movie, Idiocracy, and it's about this dystopia where in 500 years people are not able anymore to think or just pressing a button because technology is making everything so easy for us. And it's kind of, it's almost like using our laziness. And I don't know, I read those thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman. Also the point there is that we need to engage and not just take, you know, answer the first instinct things. So I always had this. And you know as an educator, I find myself in the position where I want to know, okay, people want shorter videos, people like shorter sessions, people like shorter stuff and flashy and everything. On the other hand, I feel sometimes that that doesn't necessarily teach so much and I also think about the impact of this kind of easier forms of communication. So I don't know if you have any thoughts about this, you know, kind of the trade off between yes, people are going to click it, people are going to see it, but are they going to get something out of it? Or maybe we should actually ask people to make more of an effort and obviously helping them, you know, with resources and everything, but you know, kind of not necessarily making things easy because easy is not always the solution to everything. Yeah. No, that's true. That's a very much. I'm glad you asked that question because like, yeah, it is hard. Like, you know, attention span because we're used to it and because these habits change gradually over time. Our reading habits and our ways that we engage with content have changed so gradually with every update, every new device that we get. So it's hard to notice these things from what was different three, four, five, 10 years ago. There's a book and I think it kind of relates, but Cal Newport, who I think is really interesting wrote a book called Deep Work. That sort of applies, it sort of applies to all the work that we do on an everyday basis, but some of it applies to deep reading too because he essentially says, Deep Work and focusing like truly focusing is hard work and we should feel tired at the end of that and I was like, yeah, I think that's true, but he's basically saying is like we have to treat it as something serious. The number of times that I've heard like when I was doing the PhD people are like, oh, I worked like, you know, 10, 11, 12 hours a day is like, but I saw you on like WhatsApp and Instagram like at least half of the time was like that's not work. That's like, you know, half, half doing these things. So even kind of just like reconceptualizing what we think of as like what we choose to pay attention to do is something to think about. It is hard. And I think there are ways kind of when I was talking about the attention span stuff like whether it's through just reading for the sheer sake of reading to kind of get ourselves lost in these things. I 100% believe that we can kind of gain these habits and train our brains to do these things. It doesn't mean it's easy. But I do think it is something that can be worked on. It's something we should support in a larger sense. And now I'm kind of just like thinking, like in a very general thing what I've noticed in terms of the attention span. So these are a bigger picture of questions. I'm not even talking about reading per se at this point, but at least in the last several years I've noticed that in terms of like online discourse. Something has certainly changed right in terms of we've heard all the stuff about polarization and all of these things. Some of that I do attribute directly to the format which we're getting content bite size little things hot button headline see these sort of things that cartoon I shared was a little bit jokey but also a little bit. People do get angry based on very little information now. I don't know when this happened. I think short attention spans aren't only just like a limiting factor they're also potentially dangerous like I've noticed and I worry about the fact that the average person or the average conversation nowadays seems to be not just I'm reading this and I disagree with it. More is like I read a little bit of this and now I hate you as a person. When did this happen. When did this become a thing like I feel like shorter attention spans has meant like you know kind of like we've lost a little bit of our capacity for empathy for the idea to kind of like tolerate things that are ambiguous or uncertain and all of that so yeah that's that's a larger way to think about it but there's a lot at stake. Yeah and it came up in the chat actually that idea that now we're asking Twitter ask if you've actually read the whole article share and things like that is that in response to some of our polarized views and sort of you know our reception of that reading and that kind of thing actually there's a question in the on the questions that kind of relates to this kind of it's at the use of technology that someone's posted here. How does your research on digital distraction kind of intersect with the kind of research on addiction and that kind of thing and I think that some of the thing of that addiction links with the use and the design of that attention design that you were talking about in terms of the technology companies or competing for attention. Yeah, this is a tough one and this is kind of more of a like a psychology neuroscience distinction but like, I will say like it's tricky between addiction, I guess dependence is a better way to describe it. Like it does feel like addiction at times because we certainly go through like withdrawal type symptoms if we ever try to just stop doing some of these things but I think dependence is a better way to describe it in the sense that we talked about like oh I need to check Facebook I can probably deal without it, but it's that sense of like you know, we did another talk actually last month and I kind of just very generally called it internet points, and I was like, why do we need internet points it's this virtual currency that keeps us coming back. And the amazing thing is and this does come to the addiction party is there are never enough internet points in the world. I had this really good post, and it got 5050 likes, you know would be really good is 51 or 52 likes. That's just, it is the perfect mechanism for kind of keeping us hooked to these sort of things so I wonder about that. Sometimes that is a form of dependency and it does feel like, I mean gosh Instagram for a while, they've been experimenting with hiding likes on videos and these sort of things rolling out to different countries because there were actually people who were suicidal when if you feel like this is your livelihood and you're an Instagram influencer or whatever the hell that is. But like when you're not getting the views, all of a sudden like your, your sense of self is being attacked and I was like oh there's something wrong with me I found only getting half the number of views I used to look like that was clearly demonstrating some kind of harm in terms of like this was how people were getting their sense of self work. That's dangerous. That's very dangerous when it comes to like you know these sort of things. What was the original question. Sorry. That combination with addiction actually if you're sort of inter intersected your research and intersected with that. Yeah, I mean I only come at it from the angle of in terms of like you know how much you think about a post how often do you check and refresh and I've done that, we're sort of like this picture is really good and it gets like two likes and I was like, Oh, oh well. It's not how it works sometimes. Just because of the nature of social media but so I'm interested in from kind of a psychological sort of like what does it do to our sense of self, especially our online self, especially now when our online self feels like more of our real self since everything is online in the past year or so. But yeah so that's kind of a partial answer to that question is that I think it's it's it's certainly a kind of dependency and it's not easy. It's not easy to disentangle from our habits. Yeah, we'll invite Clemens. Would you like to. Yeah, hi, hi, very, very short provoking ideas there. And I'm very grateful for you actually do just bringing in what what I wanted to raise, which is the the angle of addiction but also the you know, in the good old days you could say you go to bed and nothing will happen but of course we're all connected and it's just a sheer amount of possibilities of having somebody you know in a different time zone slagging you off or or even making committed positive comments about what you said, and you basically the pressure to to take as much in. But I think the one thing which is really really hitting us badly and that goes back to the distraction with which of what you said, you can probably probably never read enough, whereas before when you had a book like you know I'm here in Cambridge as well. Over the road, 9 million books okay you could never read them, but everybody would accept that physically you couldn't actually deal with them but now it comes on the screen, and you could read like 30 articles read 30 articles a day. And that would be quite easily possible whereas in the good old days maybe maybe in 20 or 30 years ago. You would have find the journal, you would have opened up find it in there that would take time then go to the next bit of the shelf. So I think we are also suffering from something which when I did my masters, somebody called infobesity. So we have too much so much information that is actually to the grotesquely obese stage. And we're all suffering from that because, you know, we're trying to cut things down and it's so easy to them think oh I must get more of that and must get more of that and it's much more simple and to actually say hang on a moment I'm actually going to focus on, you know, looking at the Guardian are looking at the times or, and not anywhere else even so I could look you know, an American newspaper use today or wherever I could watch end of the program and I think that that is something I can see how students from that. It's not that they don't have enough to read to have too much to read, and then giving them more digital can freak them out even more because they will never be able to read properly. Sorry, I hope that makes sense. Oh, it totally makes sense. Yeah, I like I like the information obesity I haven't heard that but if anything that highlights the kind of curatorial function of you as librarians and people in libraries have what I recommend books like their books that I've read and actually digested I will just say I just read this thing that you know I just did a random Google search on like that is like library function is more important than ever now finding those trust trusted reliable sources so that people can cut through all of the noise. And just being able to like teach students like you know it's kind of an information literacy thing but more like a 2021 version of information leader literacy. And when I was at Google and working with like the news publishers and these sort of things. I use is a. That's a tough industry to be in like their sole purpose is like get the clicks get people to get the views on raise advertising revenue so they can see and business and survive. The downside for us is that I mean come on, like half of the news isn't even new news, it's just sort of repackaged stuff. When CNN first started in the 90s, the concept of a 24, 24, 24 hour news cycle was just a thing they made up. Remember when the news used to be like morning and evening that was the news you find out the news in the morning and evening. Now it's whenever we want all the time. I mean sometimes there are, but sometimes it's just kind of like we all fall into the trap I did it during the presidential election would stress me the hell out. But I was doing that I was just reading every single thing is like wait is this new wait it's not new, but it sounds new because they change the headlines so news industry is getting very good at that when it comes to just sort of like you know, I feel like some of the time things that I mentioned like the iOS shortcuts and like carving out reading time and a finite amount of reading time to because we all do have a finite amount of reading time and it's like oh, I got to read these 300 articles in my saved a bookmark to or something like that I was like, you know, like after a while like we have to kind of do that information triage we're all doing it now too is like is this worth my time is it still timely we're not going to be able to read everything. That's a hard question the reading guilt thing is kind of like something I still deal with in terms of should should I read this, but we can't. Yeah, I think linked to this actually there's been a question in the chat which is asking about that need for critical reading and should we be looking at critical reading and that actually with the distractions has that undermined our ability to critically appraise what we're reading and is that something that we need to focus on as democratic responsibility actually into you mentioned the US elections and things like that is that should our focus include that critical and. Yeah, I mean one way I can answer that question is saying that we're all in our filter bubbles if you've heard the term of like you know a lot of the things that we vote with our clicks that is the simplest way to describe it in terms of like when we are checking out news on social media Twitter and Facebook all of these things when you click on that that is a vote for that essentially essentially I'm oversimplifying a little bit. That's how you train the algorithm to say like I like stuff like this show me more stuff like this. That's just how it works. We vote with our clicks and sometimes we have to be able to like you know, step outside of our filter bubble. That's easier said than done but sometimes that does mean looking at other sources that we don't necessarily agree with. It's almost become like a, like especially politics this this kind of weird team sport phenomenon, we see the stuff that we want to see for our team, necessarily but sometimes that we all have blind spots we just we have to admit that like you know we don't always see those things that don't always put our team in the best light so we kind of have to look for you know BBC. Like, like you know is is sometimes my go to for objective things but not everything Al Jazeera like I'll look at like having a healthy diverse diet of news sources I think is a way to go. This is a big issue in itself like the idea of like kind of fake and polarized news and sort of like having these echo chamber things. It's a big topic but just knowing that like getting outside of our, our normal habits of information consumption can be a very good thing sometimes. Yeah, and on habits you mentioned actually about that idea of unlearning habits, and that kind of thing and I thought as we're nearing to close might be a positive if you could share any tips on like sort of unlearning some of these habits where we might fall into digital distractions. Okay, let's see. One of my favorite ones that's helped me is kind of like quiet mornings and I did have to teach myself this I totally have the habit of just sort of like first thing in the morning basically just looking and checking social media or emails or news and all of these things. I feel like that puts us in a really reactive state of mind. It's not good for us either when you think about it first thing in the morning before you had your to your coffee, and you get the email that kind of stresses you out and it's like I have to worry about this but the problem with that is that we're not really making us to like react on something so instead what we're doing is kind of like thinking about those things without while we're still waking up. I found quiet mornings to be something that's made my life a lot better, especially since pandemic. You know I feel in the same habit of kind of like I check the news I got to see what's going on. That was really hurting my well being in mental state so I just decided I used a habit app actually there's a lot of free habit apps but it's basically you can pick any habit, and then you try to keep a street going for as many days as you can. And that's what I did I was sort of like alright 1520 minutes for like or 30 minutes of quiet time my time, or whether it's like leisure reading or jotting down my to do list for these sort of things, not social media is time, not like news news is time for these sort of things but actually like carving out the silent thing. Gosh, I feel like you know carving out leisure reading time for yourself is like a gift, be able to do that and just sort of like it puts you in the right frame of mind. That's one the other one I'll say it is like the opposite turn is nighttime. So that's the big one like the less social media we can like kind of use and consume before bedtime the better off we're all going to be. It keeps us up later. Some some researchers at Cambridge are actually we're doing some stuff on COVID nightmares, which I thought was really interesting and that's the idea that because COVID is this, you know, kind of like amorphous like abstract thing like we would have more dreams that we're being chased by something because that's how our brains process like a threat and these sort of things if we were reading more news on COVID stuff close to bedtime I was like so it actually affects our quality of sleep possibly our contents of our sleep and dreams and these things. So limiting news and social media towards the end and being able to just end with a good book is probably better for us. I'm not a health person so I can't say that for sure but that's it's what I would prefer it just gives a chance to slow down. Thank you for that. I like that idea of like that quiet in the morning and then quiet in the evening as well just that gives you that space that gives you that time that is away from those distractions of the rest of the day so thank you for sharing that.