Abstract
It has been widely argued that digital technologies are transforming the nature of reading, and with it, our brains and a wide range of our cognitive capabilities. In this article, we begin by discussing the new analytical category of deep-reading and whether it is really on the decline. We analyse deep reading and its grounding in brain reorganization, based upon Michael Anderson’s Massive Redeployment hypothesis and Dehaene’s Neuronal Recycling which both help us to theorize how the capacities of brains are transformed by acquisition of new skills. We examine some of the difficulties in comparing reading using technologies such as the web-browser, the tablet and E-Reader, with reading using the pre-existing print culture. While learning to read undoubtedly changes the brain, we examine what evidence there is for this being tightly tied to particular material substrates and find this lacking. Instead we attempt to situate cognitive changes around the new reading within the context of the specific new cognitive ecologies incorporating both screen and page. This involves a reconsideration of the role of material culture in the cognitive abilities.
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In fact, neuronal recycling is supposed to explain not just our ability to read but a host of other skills where our brains appear to have exquisitely developed mechanisms to deal with a particularly culturally dependent ability. See Dehaene (2009, Chap. 8).
Indeed, see Dillon (1992) for an early discussion of the problems of ecological validity in the context of screen reading.
There is a complex but interesting discussion to be had about the nature of technological mediation and transparency. Mangen claims that when reading for narrative, “the physical and technical support—the book—are ideally transparent in order to facilitate, and not disturb, phenomenological immersions.” (Mangen 2008, p. 406). In fact, even in a computer game it is generally desirable to have the interface become transparent (Clowes 2015a) or the sense of immersion is likely to be broken. In my discussion here I have therefore emphasized the different types of agency involved. There may be other circumstances where interface opacity is very useful as we shall go on to discuss.
Mangen was already skeptical of the hypertext novel in her 2008 study as it appeared to foster a different sort of engagement i.e. not the desired hermeutic transparency.
We know this precisely because of the surprise or notability of the few occasions when figures from antiquity attest to silent reading as something uncommon and notable. For example, Augustine was so surprised by Anselm’s ability to silently read that he wrote in his diary: “his eyes moved but not his tongue”. Julius Caesar is also supposed to have been a silent reader.
Richard Heersmink points out (in private communication) that casting these very recent changes in how we read in the broader historical context risks committing the naturalistic fallacy. That is just because reading has transformed in the past does not mean that we should not be worried about contemporary changes in our reading behavior. This is a valid point, but the argument here is that reading has been different in the past, and that many contemporary critics seems not to notice. And in the meantime they idealize what reading is. This idealization gives us neither an accurate picture of what reading is, and also tends to obscure the ways that material reading substrates can support different sorts of readerly activities. The latter is of importance because we can only consciously re-engineer technologies to better meet our needs if we properly understand those needs.
To reiterate the argument from Sect. 2, part of the claim about the decline in deep reading was that it might be triggering an overall cognitive shift towards, e.g. what Hayles (2007) calls shallow attention. Such claims are frequently made, but seldom as specific as that made by Hayles.
All this said, for this user, there are several problems with the institutional framework in which the Kindle operates and how this tends to undermine certain aspects of how we traditionally swapped and lent books to one another, and indeed the very idea that we own a book. Problematic though this might be it is all fairly distantly related to the nature of our readerly minds, so we will pass over these questions here.
NB – Malafouris, for one sees technologies as being material agents. There are complex questions to be worked through here that go beyond the scope of this paper.
See Malafouris (2013), especially the section of Chap. 5 on “Making Numbers out of Clay”.
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Acknowledgements
This production of this paper was funded by a grant from Fundação para a Ciencia e a Technologia (FCT) for the project: Virtualism and the Mind: Rethinking Presence, Representation and Self:—(SFRH/BPD/70440/2010). I want to thank Richard Heersmink for his detailed and pertinent comments, along with the comments of an anonymous reviewer which have much improved this paper. I also want to thank Paul Smart for some useful discussions about cognitive ecology. This paper is based upon an earlier conference paper presented at the Barcelona conference on social intelligence which is archived at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1283/paper_23.pdf. The work also benefitted from presentation in several drafts to the Lisbon Mind & Reasoning Group and also as part of a workshop on values for IFILNOVA and to the COGS group at the University of Sussex.
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Clowes, R.W. Screen reading and the creation of new cognitive ecologies. AI & Soc 34, 705–720 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0785-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0785-5