Hacker News Books

I highly recommend you check out "The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains", by Nicholas Carr [0].

[0] - https://www.amazon.ca/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...

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edit: grammar

I'm reading it right now and, if nothing else, can totally relate to "I can't concentrate on things very well anymore" feeling.

Comments like yours make me think that, if people are really capable of so blithely discounting the value of focussed, solitary long-form reading, maybe it wasn't.

For search terms maybe: instant gratification, short term rewards, dopamine.

It was written 7 years ago, but it's still relevant as Android and 4G were rapidly rising in usage around then.

In a nutshell, the solutions involve mindfulness, making deliberate choices in regards to checking e-mails, Instagram, etc., meditation or just concentration practice, exercising the hippocampus by reading longer books.

Like a novel, the reading of an article is meant to be an experience. It follows the "show, don't tell" dictum pretty well. The critique of perfectionism hits at you viscerally, instead of being an academic argument. That good writing necessarily requires a more productive use of audience's time (or follows some economics of the form of insights communicated/time spent), is the optimizing/perfectionist thinking that Ms. Schwartz has taken aim at in her content. So the form follows content in a way. The writer feels that in today's self-improvement culture, we do not appreciate something for its own sake. For example, when we read, we think of "what is it saying? Why does it not say it quickly?", rather than imagining possibilities, chewing on the words of a sentence, or relish the turn of phrases, or appreciating the metaphors employed to communicate a feeling.

You do seem to be right in suspecting that you are wrong about the article. Her concluding paragraph, for example, states that the one should be able to enjoy experiences for their sake alone, rather than the sake of self-improvement. "Things don’t need to be of concrete use in order to have value." This is contrary to the assumptions shared by the two self-help books you allude to: The Shallows and Deep Work. These argue for disconneting FOR the sake of having some value in the dimension of self improvement: for being able to improve the quality of your work (Deep Work), or increasing reading comprehension, e.g. (The Shallows).

Changes in technology have a fundamental impact on the way humans interacting with the world (for better or worse), an interesting book called The Shallows [1] highlights some of these points. Is the technology we're utilizing moving us in a direction that is long-term beneficial or harmful? People can access information more easily, but at the expense of what - lack of focus? Problems with deep thought and long-term planning?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...

Deep Work is more of a how-to book - about how to get ahead in world that's losing its ability to focus (due to the stuff described in The Shallows).

A good read on this topic is "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr

A notable fact about this book is that 20% of the entire volume are references to various scientific studies used throughout the text to substantiate the author's position. It's not a fluff piece.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393339750

The book start strong with this thesis and then goes into a very interesting detour on the history of writing, from the egyptian to Gutemberg all the way to Vint Cerf.

Very well researched book and well written.

a) no real counterclaim had been made yet, and
b) I was only 1/4 of the way through this article

Her concluding paragraph is that you should do non-productive tasks sometimes, disconnect, and enjoy yourself. The great irony in this is that I recall being given the same advice in the last couple of self help books I read, Deep Work and The Shallows.

This article seems to be a mountain of words to broad brush a genre, but then I could be wrong, as I only read a quarter of it.

Your message started with "What wouldn't I give to have such attention span!", and it turns out that you don't need to give all that much. Getting started is difficult, though.

If you do start down this path, consider reading Deep Work by Cal Newport to give you some ideas about how you can use the focus and concentration abilities you're building. Again, it's not perfect, but if you take the book as a list of suggestions rather than a strict prescription of what you should do, you'll probably find that you can adapt its lessons to make your life better.

I suspect that nonfiction is often more palatable to summarization than fiction because its main purpose is to convey facts. I don't think it's a coincidence that so many books start as magazine articles but then don't quite have enough material to sustain 200 pages of information. This is part of my problem with The Shallows: http://jseliger.com/2010/06/28/the-shallows-what-the-interne... , Rapt: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/16/rapt-attention-and-the-focuse... and some other books.

It does, actually. Read Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' [0], it's a pretty decent book about the subject. It also starts off with comparing our usage of the internet with the rise of reading - you know, books and the like. History lesson; humans needed to adapt their brains to be able to read attentively for longer periods of time. The book contrasts that with the ADD nature of the internet, and yet, indicates how it's actually going back to where we were before. Or just a change similar to when books became publicly accessible.

tl;dr, yes there is a change, but I don't think it's necessarily good or bad; just different. And shocking / to be resisted by the older generation, just as how their parents were shocked and resisting the Beatles and similar long-haired freaks. :p

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/...

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...

I think Nicholas Carr had a great point in The Shallows (2010) [1] -- our brains have a lot of plasticity, even into late adulthood. The way we use the internet probably has a much larger impact on the way we think than we are currently willing to acknowledge. There is a healthy way to integrate electronics into our daily lives, but I don't think many of us have found it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)

I've also read Nick Carr's "The Shallows"[2] and other authors about about the web's effect on attention span, distractions, etc.

With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.

I also enjoy getting lost in Wikipedia articles and jumping around hyperlinks without fully finishing the wiki article I was reading. (Wiki articles are not ever "finished" anyway so there's no guilt trip in leaving the page to head down another rabbit hole.)

15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? I think so. I don't hold my traditional reading method for C++ to be superior; it's simply what I did before the internet was available in 1995. I certainly did not learn Golang by reading a book cover-to-cover.

Books certainly have benefits but I think they are overstated in relation to non-book forms of consuming words.

[1]http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...

Personally, while I consider myself pretty disciplined, I feel deeply frustrated (almost angry at myself) whenever I'm actually trying to focus on something and feel the need to also do/see/check/read something else. Not exactly a facebook feed, but I've come to Hacker News while reading. I don't know what's the most commonly accepted definition of addiction, but this certainly feels like it.

http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...

"Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic," Carr explains. "They're very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning ... the more adept we become at that mode of thinking."

I highly recommend The Shallows[1]. It's a look at the way the internet is changing our brains. It really might be a good idea to limit exposure to the internet. As a programmer and geek it's worth spending some time thinking about these questions and least being aware of the affects of the medium.

[1]: http://amzn.to/Ofpbd2

Kansas State University scholars conducted a similarly realistic study. They had a group of college students watch a typical CNN broadcast in which an anchor reported four news stories while various info-graphics flashed on the screen and a textual news crawl ran along the bottom. They had a second group watch the same programming but with the graphics and the news crawl stripped out. Subsequent tests found that the students who had watched the multimedia version remembered significantly fewer facts from the stories than those who had watched the simpler version. “It appears,” wrote the researchers, “that this multimessage format exceeded viewers’ attentional capacity.”

http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16

If I had to summarize a few takeaways:

* Books are read in a linear fashion. Following a simple linear path helps us focus our attention on the content in a book and digest it. Reading cultivates habits of focusing and thinking deeply about a single topic.

* The internet is full of rich sources of information but is also full of distractions. People browsing the web simultaneously digest content and make decisions about how to navigate through that content, which distracts from the ability to absorb the content and form associations with it. Compared to book reading, web browsing also encourages quick-pleasure-seeking rather than focused, intentional, sustained attention that books help cultivate.

You're absolutely right. These things seem to make the assumption that you can't get the same satisfaction from crafting something digitally as you can from say working on a motorbike.

I would be interested to see a study, if it's not already available, on the psychological experience between people carrying out both, and the sense of satisfaction received when they determine a "job well done" in either medium.

But that's not to say I don't agree with him in many ways. I'm a software developer and often, and as I'm getting towards my 30s now, feel like I've totally surrounded myself in the digital and have put the physical on a shelf that is only continuing to gather dust.

I find myself yearning for something more "substantial" and to be able to come to old age knowing I've done more than written a few programs or whatever but then I find myself so distracted when it comes to actually seeking out things of substance, often simply falling back on the comfort of the digital.

I've a massive stack of books I've been trying to get through and can see myself adding more to it with this, and probably some similar books like "The Shallows" and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

I'm glad to see this sort of content appearing on HN regularly though, as it's a sign I'm not alone in how I'm feeling and that others are working through the same issues.

Between things like this, the massive growth in interest in craft beers, the middle class worker fueling an interest in things like drinking in warehouses, farmers markets, etc. there is obviously a significant amount of people in the rat race who are grasping for something of "substance" and not the bland, mass produced, formulated and heavily marketed lifestyle we've somewhat fallen into in the last few decades.

This house project, some other mini-projects that i’ve done and the 2/3 books I read since last month is something i can now do because now I avoid HN (and the whole internet) by default..

[1] https://hackernewsletter.com/