We all suspect that people read less on the web than they pretend. Not least because if you blog, you can read the analytics and discover that very few people ever turn the page.

I’ve always wanted to see how few people actually reach the end of even short posts and stories. Now someone’s actually using software which does that and more. It’s all explained in this story by Slate’s technology writer, Farhad Manjoo. At some length.

On the face of it, this skipping, hopping, snacking pattern of reading is discouraging if you write stuff in the hope that people will read it. But I suspect that this is a transitional phase and that these habits may change over time. Each new communications technology which increases the amount of information in circulation creates a temporary explosion of stuff to consume which is chaotic and which splits attention into small fragments. Then, we master the new flow and settle down to slower, calmer absorption of what we want and need to know.

It’s easy to exaggerate how much printed news content people actually read. Yes, the minutes logged as newspaper reading are much higher than on screens. A person reading a paper for 20 or 30 minutes will probably reach the end of at least one piece of several hundred words. But how many people read past the first two paragraphs of a printed news story or feature? The more information in circulation, the more we switch off if we suspect we know what’s coming in the rest of the piece. Formulaic journalism now dies quicker on any platform. There was an editor of the New York Times three or four back who is said to have never quite recovered from being told by market researchers that in the category of the paper’s most loyal readers, no more than 10% of those read past page 4.