Reading Rabbits

This week, I had to do "40 minutes of uninterrupted reading." No big deal, right? Wrong.

Turns out, I don't pick up a book and just read as much as I use to. Not novels at least. I probably get 40 minutes or more out of reading for school, but it is not on a regular basis.

This time around, I read two articles from a book called Taking Sides, which is for my Mass Communications and Behavior class. These two articles were about violence in video games causing violent behavior and if it is something we should be concerned about; one covered the yes side of the argument, the other covered the no.

Uninterrupted means no background noise, nothing else going on, and no distractions. No music, no looking things up on the internet, etc. Reading without outside distraction is easy enough, I always prefer a quiet environment for reading and writing anyway, but I noticed that I have this habit of interrupting myself.

Now, this may have been because of the content of my reading material. I have taken social psychology classes and have various bits and pieces of information about this video games and violence topic, so every couple of paragraphs I would stop reading and start recapping or connecting the reading to other information. I was still "managing multiple streams of information" as I would be doing online with multiple tabs.

In this case, having multiple information streams wasn't a bad thing, because they all stayed fairly on topic and probably helped me synthesize the information, but the digression did significantly slow down my reading.

I will have to try this 40 minutes uninterrupted again with a novel and see if the same thing happens. I think that it will; I will read something that reminds me of something else, and chase the rabbit down that hole for a few minutes, then come back a read until I find another rabbit hole. I suppose it is similar to what we do on the internet; if something interesting comes up, it is easy to open another tab and explore that topic, and then switch quickly between multiple topics. Has the quick and convenient way the internet provides information changes the way that I think, leaving me falling down mental rabbit holes every few pages? Maybe. Or maybe I just have an active imagination that would being doing the same thing without the speed/convenience priming of internet browsing.