I will be honest. It took me more than 50 minutes to finish reading Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? As a non-native speaker of English, I am a slow reader for English texts but the real reason it took me nearly an hour to finish this article lies behind the true nature of internet: DISTRACTIONS!
Here’s what happened. When I started to read this piece, I suddenly remembered that books I ordered from Amazon have not arrived yet even though it should have by now according to the shipping schedule. So, I checked my e-mail to get the tracking number and visited UPS.com to see if the estimated shipping date has been changed. When I logged in to my e-mail account, I saw an important e-mail notice from my advisor, so I had to write a reply, which probably took about 5 minutes. Then I returned to nytimes.com to continue reading the article. I barely managed five paragraphs before I opened a new window to check my blog simply because I am sort of addicted to blogging. A couple people left interesting comments, so I had to leave replies. This delicious moment took about 5 minutes. I thought I was finally ready to concentrate. But my desperate hope was scattered when a friend of mine messaged me on MSN messenger.
So, this is my typical adventure when reading stuffs online. The shocking thing here is that all of these distractions came from internet itself, not my dogs, roommate or cell phone. If these external distractions are added while I read online, the activity is going to be a massive chaos.
As I’ve expressed so far, I find myself extremely distracted when reading things online, so whenever I have to read important documents, I always print it out. Otherwise, I basically read multiple Web sites at the same time going back and forth from a window to another window. Oddly enough, this works better for me as long as the contents I am reading are not scholarly journal or difficult-to-swallow-readings. I guess jumping back and forth from a web site to another makes me less boring, which ironically end up helping me focus better.
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