Reading Ourselves Reading Digitally–Response to Trask
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 I think there’s real value in thinking through our conception of reading as an activity. It’s something we do so constantly, and something that, as Hayles shows, changes us in the process.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Thinking back on previous conceptions of reading may help us realize we haven’t always read the same way we do now, and that perhaps no method should be invisible or not subject to scrutiny. A brief look at the past might help contextualize some of the concerns Hayles discusses in her article.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 Really, the history of reading—at least reading done by the average person—doesn’t stretch back that far. Literacy has only in past several hundred years become widespread, so concern over how and what we read as a large society are only as old as the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Some of the first noticeable hand-wringing over reading habits come from the Victorian period in England, where critics were pointing to the Victorian novel as making readers dumber, lazier, and less critical. Critics thought Dickens and Thackeray, and perhaps even more-so Collins and Reynolds, were encouraging through their narratives a less-than-substantive reading practice that was doing serious damage to our attention spans in addition to our other mental faculties.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 3 The great irony, of course, is that Victorian literature is now, 200 years later, held up as a high standard of literary engagement. We see Dickens and Thackeray’s work as demanding the most serious and sustained kind of reading. The complexity of the plots and characters, to say nothing of the sheer length, demand the kind of reader that, as Hayles points out, is hard to find these days. Still, it is interesting to see how history’s concerns are washed away by shifting contexts, and we might imagine the same thing will happen with concerns over our growing inability to read “closely.”
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 An interesting counterpoint to that, though, is in our biology. I was incredibly interested in the studies discussed briefly by Hayles that explained how our reading is determined in part by our biology and how our biology is in turn shaped by our reading. And if our reading of digital texts is in fact decreasing our already-frayed attention spans and tending to further cripple our ability to delve into a text’s mucky complications, then I think our concern is warranted. The plasticity of our minds–in a biological and figurative sense–might be running up against various blocks as our technology and its demands on our abilities continue to expand and change. So far we’ve managed to adapt beautifully, and Hayles suggests we’ll continue to do so, that reading digitally has not and will not hinder our ability to think in complex ways about texts, but the fact that we’ve so far been able to adapt does not promise a continuing ability to do so.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 3 At the end of the day, while I’m a little worried we might toss the baby out with the bathwater in moving away from more traditional modes of reading, I’m not convinced we’re approaching a mental precipice. Like Hayles, I think we can and should use digital tools to help us read in different ways than we have before. So long as we remain aware and critical of our own practices, and do not come to rely on technology to think for us, it seems we stand only to gain from pushing our reading into new and interesting places.
I agree with you that understanding the past can help us develop the way we read.