Instagram Writing and the Decline of Reading

We’ve traded depth for superficiality everywhere.

There’s a new form of writing. It goes something like this:

You need to make your point. Emphasize it. Command it. Own it.

Keep it short. Use declarative sentences. But throw in just enough length to keep them thinking that they’re reading something important and profound.

Every sentence should be quotable and punchy. Every paragraph should be a few sentences max. White space is your friend.

And always finish with a flourish. Make it count. Leave them with a high. Hit that share button. Or else.

Welcome to what I call Instagram writing, which can be found on Twitter, LinkedIn, or any social media site. No, it isn’t all just AI driven slop, though some surely is.

It’s a form of writing that is designed for divided attention. It’s short, punchy, with lots of space because whoever is consuming it on their phone isn’t taking the time to read the whole thing, they’re just skimming.

Researchers have a name for the skimming version of reading, they call it the “F-pattern.” Readers sweep across the top, drop down, sweep a shorter line, and then run their eyes down the left margin. Essentially, we read the first line and then “word-spot” the rest of the writing. It’s not some new thing we’ve developed for the online world. It shows up when we’re only moderately interested and optimized for speed of reading. When researchers coined this type of reading in 2006, they came up with a way to deal with it: use prominent headings, bold keywords, short chunks, and front-load the information.

Instagram writing was designed for the skimming brain. And when you’re consuming something on your phone or your digital device, skimming is the norm. It’s the rational response to a world where the F-pattern of reading is the dominant one. Which is the real issue.

Our divided attention is changing how we consume just about everything. We’re actively designing our world (and training our brain) for quick superficiality.

It’s akin to one of those Netflix shows that is designed for you to consume it in the background. So they make any plot points super obvious. Netflix reportedly told screenwriters to have characters “announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” Which is a much different experience than sitting down for a Christopher Nolan film and being engrossed in the movie for the next three hours.

This isn’t some boomer doom and gloom take. There’s nothing wrong with a Netflix show on in the background, just like there wasn’t anything wrong with Sportscenter on in the background of every college male’s dorm two decades ago. I use the social media writing style. Even though I write long carousels on my Instagram, I know that it won’t take off unless I use a variation of this style to hook readers (I’ve tested it…). But I do think it comes with a cost.

Comprehending the World

For almost two decades researchers have argued whether reading comprehension is worse on digital devices or not. It’s surprisingly not a straightforward answer. A new meta-analysis gives us the best answer to date. When they looked at what came out on top for comprehension it was paper. Then came tablets, e-readers, computers, and in last place: phones.

So far so good. But when they looked at when the gap in comprehension showed up it was when scrolling was required. That might sound strange, but think about it. When the target for our eyes doesn’t move, and there’s not something pulling us to something else, we can mostly focus and pick up whatever the words are putting down.

Another meta-analysis that found comprehension differences found that under time pressure the gap grew. And secondly, the disadvantage in comprehension showed up in expository texts but not narrative. Meaning, stories read fine on screens, but arguments and deep dives don’t.

Other researchers came to the same conclusion. Virginia Clinton — the same researcher behind that new analysis, seven years earlier — found the same split across 33 studies. But more interestingly, she found that readers judged their own comprehension more accurately on paper. Meaning, that they didn’t notice they weren’t taking in as much when reading on a screen. As the authors put it, “Readers may be processing texts from screens less efficiently ... as they think they are understanding the text better than they are.” If skimming felt like skimming, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. We’d know when we weren’t picking up the full argument. But in this case, it feels the same as reading. We don’t notice what we’re missing.

Nuance doesn’t go viral. It simply can’t, because any well constructed argument demands that we engage with the text. We’ve got to understand each sentence, see where the writer is taking us, and perhaps even figure out what they are deliberately leaving out.

So we face a problem when writing for online platforms that demand skimming. We’ve got to simplify it, cut the fat, so that it reads more like a punchy short fictional story than anything that’s trying to make a nuanced argument. It’s why nearly every study described online swings for the fences and tells us AI is destroying our ability to think, Zone 2 is the best training for mitochondria, or whatever other hot take there is. And in each of those declarations, there may be some or a lot of truth in it. But in preparing them for the Instagram style, we have to ditch any hints of qualifying the statement or admitting that this was for a small sample.

Even for many well-meaning folks, the nuance goes out the window when the platform demands that if you want an audience, you’ve got to write in this way.

The medium is the message to the cortex. Reading researcher Maryanne Wolf explained what’s going on in our brain "We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to that environment's requirements – from different writing systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used. If the dominant medium advantages processes that are fast, multi-task oriented and well-suited for large volumes of information, like the current digital medium, so will the reading circuit."

And while we’ve always skimmed and always will, when that balance shifts to an absurd degree, our brains follow. If we scroll 90% of the time, the “deep reading” circuits atrophy, making focused thought physically harder to access. We don’t build the neural pathways for contemplation.

When we read long-form content, our brains engage in focused, deliberate thought. When we scroll, we fragment our attention. And over time, that becomes the default way our brain thinks.

And as a writer, I struggle with how I’m contributing to this. If you want your book to sell, you’ve got to be on social media. For all but a handful, it’s a necessity. But if that medium pushes folks to skim always, and in order to get that hook, even the best of us have to start with some form of Instagram writing, are we not just contributing to the problem?

Captured by Optimization

Audience capture occurs when you start crafting your content around what you know will resonate. You move from expressing your genuine views to saying or writing whatever will get likes and shares. We get lost in the trap of approval, and over time, that means you hand over your thinking to the audience. Whatever they demand is what you start to believe.

In some ways, I think our writing is getting captured. For most of humanity, there was no direct feedback line from a writer to the audience. You wrote the book, got a handful of reviews out of tens or hundreds of thousands of folks who read it, and went on your merry way. In some ways that space made it where you didn’t have to improve or engage with the reader. But in others, that space protected the actual craft.

Now, if you write on social media or even here on Substack, you get immediate feedback. You’re incentivized to alter your style to whatever gets the most likes. So in turn, your style becomes more and more what works on the digital platforms: short, punchy, exaggerated claims, little nuance, and dumbing down an argument because everyone is skimming.

Punchy declarative sentences are structurally incapable of 'this is true under these conditions and not those.' Which is what is actually true in just about every study, and also real world performance situation. As I’ve written before, in the world of performance everything works and doesn’t. It’s almost always context dependent. So a performance scientist writing in the Instagram voice is almost always choosing between being accurate and being read.

This isn’t a story about just writing or reading. It’s the same story everywhere, the medium changes and pushes us towards being captured by optimization. Just look around. In music, the invention of the skip button helped lead to song intros dropping from 20 seconds on average in 1986 to only 5 seconds by 2015. The time to the first hook decreased by ~18%. What changed? As the researchers concluded,"If people can skip so easily and at no cost, you have to do something to grab their attention."

But perhaps most interestingly, we see it in the very place where I’ve been drawing information from: Science. Researchers analyzed abstracts from 1974 to 2014 and found that positive words went from 2% to 17.5%. The words "robust," "novel," "innovative" and "unprecedented" rose by up to 15,000%. Why? In a competitive environment where everything is online and citations and impact factor drive your career, you’ve got to stand out.

In a strange way, science got to their own version of Instagram writing before Instagram did.

When attention becomes the currency, it pushes anyone using that medium to optimize towards it. And somewhere along the way, we lose the messy stuff that may have seemed extraneous, but served a vital role.

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I’ve been working on this piece for over a week. It has subordinate clauses in it, a paragraph that tries its best to explain the nuance of what decades of research has found on reading comprehension (and still left most of the details on the cutting room floor), and little punchy definitive statements. By almost every measure, it will not go viral. It’s made badly, especially for Instagram.

And yet, when I post it, I’ll write something short and declarative to try to draw a reader in. And if I feel adventurous, I’ll turn it into an Instagram post, with much more white space between lines.

I don’t think that makes me a hypocrite. I’m just a writer adapting to the medium that currently exists for us. But I can’t help thinking about the cost. I’m getting better and better writing punchy sayings. But is that balance swinging too far, where the ability to make a coherent, complex argument is slowly atrophying.

And with the rise of AI, the medium is shifting again. We have slowly optimized from something read on paper to a screen to a phone on a social media app. What happens when the primary way people consume writing is from a model that compresses and summarizes the whole thing?

The circuit adapts to the environment’s requirements. Wolf was describing readers. I don’t think she meant it only about them.

-Steve Magness

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Research I’m Thinking About:

A California county tried to improve school attendance by mailing 15,000 students a certificate for perfect attendance over the past month to reward them.

They were randomly split into three groups:

• Nothing

• A letter offering an award for perfect attendance next month.

• A certificate for their already achieved perfect attendance.

The award offered in advance did nothing. The one given for past performance made attendance worse. Recipients were absent 8.3% more than the control group and perfect attendance dropped slightly. It was a small but significant drop. And the lowest performers were hit the worst.

When the authors tested why it happened, they found it shifted the students expectations and standards. As the researchers concluded, awards “cause the recipients to infer that they have exceeded the institutional expectations.”

They essentially thought, “Great. I’m way ahead of everyone else on attendance. I can slack off a bit.” We spend a lot of energy arguing about whether to give awards at all. That’s the wrong idea. It’s what the recognition tells them about themselves and where they stand.

So before you hand anything out, ask what the person will conclude about themselves when they take it. If you’re giving an award, you need to make sure it’s communicating the right thing.

Quote I’m Pondering:

"The great majority of flow experiences are reported when working, not when in leisure. Regardless of the quality of experience, however, respondents are more motivated in leisure than in work."
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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