Paying Attention to Reading

While you should, of course pay attention to WHAT you are reading, I'd like to make a case for paying attention to the contexts of reading. We read to navigate the world, amuse ourselves, learn, but we rarely think about reading itself. As we think about the significance of reading in large historical terms (for this unit), it is also important to think about the many ways this act can be performed and experienced.

To get a feel for this kind of thinking consider studying. While studying is not always reading, it often is. And you probably know what conditions--or contexts-- work best. Do like to study in a quiet room? In a coffee shop? At the library? Do you listen to music or have the tv on? Do you find yourself distracted or calmed by other people's voices?  Do you sit at a desk or on the floor or your bed?

Does the presence or absence of any of these conditions change your level of concentration?

We can ask some of these kinds of questions about reading and observe the way differences in context-- the where, when, and how of reading--influence the what of reading.  Sven Birkerts argues that physical books help us understand history--not because they are about history, but because they physically represent or reconstruct history: when we read printed, paper books "we form a picture of time past as a growing deposit of sediment; we capture a sense of its depth and dimensionality." While you may not agree with his exact point about history and printed books, the larger point, as he puts it, is that "context cannot but condition the process."**  Again, where and how we read has a relationship with what we read.

Test this out. Watch yourself as you read for a day or simply imagine different reading situations.Where are you when you read for class? When you read the newspaper? If you read the news online, is that different from where you might read for fun? How much attention do you pay to shades of meaning when you read Facebook updates? How much when you read an essay or a novel? What does it feel like to look at your computer screen while reading? What does it feel like to read a printed book? How is that different from holding an e-reader? What different ways can you get at the words, ideas, chapters, indices in these two forms? Test this out--find a book that is available in both electronic form and as a bound paper copy. Read them and notice what you do differently--and how that changes the way you process what you read.

Asking these questions is, obviously,moving toward analyzing reading in different contexts which is part of what you will do in your essay. It is key to remember that these differences don't necessarily mean one way is better than another.  We should take our analysis of the contexts of reading further and as better for what? better for when? better for whom? 

** 128, 129, "Into the Electronic Millennium" in The Gutenberg Elegies. New York: Ballantine, 1994.