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When people don’t read everything you give them, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It could mean you’ve given them a great access structure to use strategically.
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When people don’t read everything you give them, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It could mean you’ve given them a great access structure to use strategically.
The psychologist Patricia Wright1 points out that when people fail to read something it is usually a deliberate and necessary decision, not simply a failure in literacy. Nor need it be seen as a failure by the person who wrote or laid out the information:
We live in a world where the amount of written information available to us far exceeds our ability to keep pace with it. Given the limitations of the 24 hours day, deliberately NOT reading is a strategy that is necessary for survival. Capital letters for NOT are used here to emphasize that the kind of NOT reading we are concerned with is a behaviour in its own right; it is not simply the absence of reading. It is far from accidental. Readers are not ‘overlooking’ information that they had intended reading. The kind of NOT reading we will be concerned with here is the intended result of a deliberate strategic decision taken by the reader.
Strategic reading is the key to information overload. We read what we feel is necessary to solve a problem, or answer a question, and if we do not have a problem or a question we may not read at all.
So a human readable document needs to be NOT-readable as well as readable, exposing its structure and the status of its content to make strategic reading possible.
We might extend this to include NOT remembering. We deliberately and wisely discard most of the information we encounter in everyday life.
1. Patricia Wright (1988) ‘The Need for the Theories of NOT Reading: Some Psychological Aspects of the Human-Computer Interface’ in Ben AG Elsendoorn and Herman Bouma (eds), Working Models of Human Perception, Academic Press.