To say that skimmers are “fake readers” is to deny reality. People skim because of context: they’re reading on a smartphone, in between tasks, in line for coffee, or late at night before bed. Their attention is fragmented, their time constrained.
In my own reading, I’ve noticed how quickly I move past headlines, barely catching more than a phrase. Maybe you’ve noticed the same. That’s not laziness — it’s survival. With so many headlines, notifications, and updates flooding us every day, skimming becomes the instinctive way to sort, filter, and make sense of the overflow.
Eye-tracking studies show that this survival instinct even leaves a visible trace: the “F-pattern” of reading, first observed by the Nielsen Norman Group. Faced with a wall of text, our eyes dart across the top line, skim further down, and then track vertically along the left margin — tracing out a crude “F.” It’s not fake attention, it’s fast attention. A way of hunting for signal in a flood of noise.
Cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf adds the “why”: humans weren’t born to read — reading is an invention — so our brains build a circuit for it, and on screens we default to skimming as a defense against overload. Deep reading, she says, is a “fertile miracle of communication in solitude.” Design shouldn’t fight the skim; it should meet it, then gently invite readers toward that sanctuary.
Cain critiques skimmers as impatient multitaskers. But beneath that impatience lies a truth: time is the scarcest resource in the modern information economy.
We live in a world of infinite feeds and competing claims for attention. Skimming may look shallow, but it’s really an adaptation, our way of coping with too much information chasing too little time.
Seen this way, skimming isn’t fake. It’s a signal that our design of reading experiences must evolve to meet the reality of time scarcity.
This is where the opportunity opens up. If skimming is the default entry point, then curation is the compass. And design is the map.
The Nielsen Norman Group’s own website leans into the F-pattern: bold, left-aligned headlines at the top, concise summaries stacked neatly below, clear sections separated with whitespace. Readers can scan fast, yet still encounter clarity and depth. That same principle applies everywhere: thoughtful layout and curation turn scanning into orientation.
Good curation goes beyond the surface. It creates a doorway to depth, guiding readers from quick takeaways into the stories and ideas worth sitting with.
And curation doesn’t have to be purely mechanical. It can be deeply human. Sometimes it’s a manual choice by an editor who knows the heartbeat of a story. Sometimes it’s a recommendation engine that learns what resonates with you. The best curation feels like a friend pointing you toward the next thing worth your time, not a machine pushing content, but a guide who helps you stay connected to the story.
When skimming and curation work together, the result isn’t infantilization — it’s empowerment. Skimming becomes the front gate, curation points to the paths worth walking further.
Cain sees a direct tradeoff: substance requires length, logic, and patience — while skimmability cuts away substance and leaves only fluff. But this is a false binary.
Skimmable doesn’t have to mean shallow. With thoughtful curation, short forms can preserve meaning, logic, and imagination. Summaries, highlights, and bullet points can be entry points, not endpoints.
Skimming may look like the enemy of depth, but it can just as easily be the invitation to go deeper.
The task isn’t to shame readers for impatience or to strip everything down into fluff. The real task is to design transitions:
skim → curated doorway → depth
That means building structures where the busy reader still gets value, but the curious one can step further in. It means designing formats that respect both time and intelligence.