Quotes About Engagement

A polemicist might put it more pointedly: The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.

never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently.

When we're online, we're often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.

Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere."51

Some of the test subjects were given cards that had both words printed in full, like this: Hot: Cold Others used cards that showed only the first letter of the second word, like this: Hot: C The people who used the cards with the missing letters performed much better in a subsequent test measuring how well they remembered the word pairs. Simply forcing their minds to fill in a blank, to act rather than observe, led to stronger retention of information.

when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18% of it.

How do users read on the web?" he asked then. His succinct answer: "They don't."38

Google, as the supplier of the Web's principal navigational tools, also shapes our relationship with the content that it serves up so efficiently and in such profusion. The intellectual technologies it has pioneered promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative.

Automation weakens the bond between tool and user not because computer-controlled systems are complex but because they ask so little of us.

The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.

The results also reinforce something that Nielsen wrote in 1997 after his first study of online reading. "How do users read on the web?" he asked then. His succinct answer: "They don't.

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet. BACK

Sam Anderson, "In Defense of Distraction," New York, May 25, 2009.

their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.

Mothers, wrote Bellamy, would no longer have "to make themselves hoarse telling the children stories on rainy days to keep them out of mischief." The kids would all have their own indispensables.

Automation tends to turn us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit our ability to learn and to develop expertise.

takes a delay of just 250 milliseconds in page loading for people to start abandoning a site.

Internet users can seek out interactions with like-minded individuals who have similar values

those with the helpful software were found "to aimlessly click around" as they tried to crack the puzzle.27

reading books chronically understimulates the senses."11

How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill?

A 1989 study showed that readers of hypertext often ended up clicking distractedly "through pages instead of reading them carefully.

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention

Weber insists that one should not give up or lose faith in the face of this struggle. Indeed, he calls for us to engage in, rather than withdraw from, the problems of this world. He reminds us, for example, that while 'successful political action is always the "art of the possible" ... the possible is often reached only by striving to attain the impossible that lies beyond it'.