What writers and others say
“WEB RAGE: When Net frustration turns into violence. Most harmless form: A computer monitor gets whacked. Most serious: A cubicle mate gets whacked.”
— BuzzWhack
“Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle. That’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“The computer screen bulldozes our doubts with its bounties and conveniences. It is so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
The web “turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”
— Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
“If television’s a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.”
― Dorothy Gambrell, cartoonist, creator of online comic strip Cat and Girl
“I’ve had people come to our clinic saying they were going to quit their jobs because they couldn’t take [reading on the screen].”
—David Grisham, optometry professor at the University of California
“With print, at least they have to pick it up to throw it away.”
— Pat Jones, senior administrator,
employee communications, TDS Telecom
“People use the web. They read paper.”
— TJ Larkin, founder of Larkin Communication Consulting
“It is reasonable to think that if you spend your days indoors under artificial lights, staring at a screen, sitting in computer electromagnetic interference (EMI) fields and exposed to radio waves, that you may eventually develop a strange form of radiation sickness.”
― Steven Magee, author of Toxic Electricity
“It changes your body, using the computer so much. Your jaw drops into your shoulder. It shortens your calf muscles and elongates your thighs. So I’m evolving into a monkey.”
— Olivia Munn, author of Suck It, Wonder Woman! The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek
“I don’t know how to read any more. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.”
— Gary Shteyngart, author, Super Sad True Love Story
“Stay away from screens, especially those LED screens. Those blue-light emitting devices fool your brain into thinking that it’s still daytime, even though it’s night-time and you want to get to sleep.”
— Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology, University of California, Berkeley
“There’s no question that our children’s attention and memory is changing when they are reading too long, too much, too early on digital screens.”
—Maryanne Wolf, professor, Tufts University
How can you reach readers on smartphones?
More than half of your audience members now receive your emails, visit your web pages and engage with your social media channels via their mobile devices, not their laptops.
Problem is, people spend half as long looking at web pages on their mobile devices than they do on their desktops. They read 20% to 30% slower online. And it’s 48% harder to understand information on a smartphone than a laptop.
In this environment, how can you reach readers online?
Learn how to overcome the obstacles of reading on the small screen at Reach Readers Online — our web-writing workshop. You’ll master a four-part system for getting the word out on mobile devices.
