After the article about the ‘books You Haven’t Read’, here is another one about the Internet content you haven’t read either!
A recent study from Jacob Nielsen demonstrates that users are reading on average only 20% of the words on a visit. They are indeed more likely to scan the text in order to find the information that interests them.
This is actually what I am doing most of the time, I find an article / post I like on my Netvibes, and then I save it to Delicious if I think it can be useful for later. At this moment I would have only read 20% of the content of the article. I will then read it more carefully if I need the article for a specific reason.
If you really think about it, reading articles on the Internet is pretty similar to read a newspaper, you scan information for titles, what you consider as important and then dig deeper once you’ve found something interesting. This study shouldn’t be interpreted as people reading less because of the Internet but that people are actually looking for information not reading online for the sake of it. It would be interesting to see the number of people printing online articles to find out if they are less likely to read long articles on screen…
Anyway, as Pierre Bayard demonstrates in his book, it’s not because you have read the entire content of a book (or article) that you would have understood it better than someone that hasn’t!
Well said …