Roughly twenty-five years ago, I witnessed a heated exchange on just this topic. It was the mid-1970s and I was attending a demonstration of an experimental window-based programming environment, called D-Lisp, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Windows — the framed, rectangular portions of a computer display screen that are now ubiquitous — were still a novelty then. Personal computers hadn’t yet been successfully commercialized, and windows were still only a reality within the walls of the research laboratory. The system being demonstrated wasn’t the first to make use of windows — that distinction belongs to the Smalltalk system, which had been developed at Xerox PARC several years earlier — but it was the first such environment for the Lisp programming language.
The presenter, Warren Teitelman, demonstrated how multiple windows could be opened and moved around on the screen. At one point, as part of the carefully scripted demo, he received an e-mail message. He shifted his gaze from the window in which he had been programming to the window in which the e-mail message had just appeared. He typed a reply and sent it off, then returned to the programming task that had been interrupted. The point was to show off how a windowing environment could facilitate “multitasking” — performing several tasks at the same time.
In the audience were thirty to fifty computer scientists. One of them, an eminent computer scientist visiting from abroad, was visibly upset by what he had just seen. And in the boisterous, often contentious atmosphere of the early PARC, he made his unhappiness immediately known. This was no way to program, he objected. Why in the world would you want to be interrupted — and distracted — by e-mail while programming? Clearly, more was on display than just a new technology. For here was a conflict between two different “ways of working and two different understandings of how technology should be used to support that work. What Warren Teitelman considered a useful feature of the new system, the visitor apparently viewed as a hindrance and a distraction. While Teitelman was eager to juggle multiple threads of work simultaneously, the visiting researcher saw his work as an exercise in solitary, singleminded concentration.
No doubt all of us in the room that day believed that personal computers, networks, and e-mail would become a vital part of future work practices. But I doubt that anyone could have imagined how e-mail traffic would grow, or how its use, along with cell phones and pagers and other communication technologies, would vie for our attention and further complicate our lives. Yet more than twenty years later, many of us are coming to suspect that these technologies are a mixed blessing. Certainly they allow us to stay in touch with friends, partners, children, and colleagues at a distance. They make it possible to do several things at the same time — driving and talking on the phone, for example. But it is becoming clearer that we use these technologies at a cost: they can interrupt us at any time. Although in principle we can choose to ignore the latest batch of e-mail messages or the ringing cell phone, many of us have great difficulty doing so. And thus, although promising to connect us, by contributing to the fragmentation of our lives, they also seem to disconnect us — from our tasks, from our relationships, and even from ourselves.
It is a question of how we use one of our most precious resources: our attention. More than a hundred years ago, the psychologist William James observed that attention “is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.”1
Every moment of our lives, whether consciously or not, we are choosing what to attend to and with what depth of focus. In talking with a friend, we may at one moment be deeply attending to her words. At the next moment our attention may be split between what she is saying and the sight of someone walking by, or we may be momentarily lost in our own thoughts and oblivious of everything else. At any given moment our attention may be highly concentrated or focused on its current object, or we may find ourselves in the “confused, dazed, scatter-brained state” to which James refers, in which we are simply incapable of any real depth of focus. Anecdotally, at least, it does seem that our modern, high-tech world increasingly encourages distraction and fragmentation over extended concentration. Many of us long for a remembered — or perhaps a mythologized — past in which life was simpler, time was more abundant, and we could attend more fully to the dimensions of life that most mattered to us. We also long for those opportunities, perhaps on our next vacation, when we can recover, if only briefly, our composure and concentration.
Like all the objects around us, documents vie for our attention. Whether we are on the Web, sitting in our offices surrounded by stacks of paper, or driving down a freeway lined with endless road signs and billboards, we are faced with constant decisions about which ones to attend to. All of them have the potential to draw and shape our attention, not just because we may focus on them as physical objects but because we have the potential to see through them. Indeed, as information-bearing or representational artifacts, they direct us beyond themselves and speak to us of other aspects of the world. Much like a window — or, perhaps even better, a crystal ball — they direct our gaze and our imagination elsewhere. Reading, the name we give to this form of directed gaze, thus has a double attentional quality: by attending to certain properties of the artifact literally at hand, our attention is drawn to other places and other worlds. (In an essay famous in typographic circles, Beatrice Ward suggested that fine typography, like fine crystal, should be invisible, all the better to reveal its contents.)2
As literate members in a literate society, we read all day long, mostly unconsciously. We glance at the headlines of a neighbor’s newspaper as we ride on the bus. We read road signs as we drive to work. We scan the menu in a restaurant, our latest credit-card bill, the ingredients on a can of soup, the headers of newly arrived e-mail messages. These forms of reading tend to be shallow and of brief duration. Yet there are times when we read with greater intensity and duration, when we become absorbed in what we are reading for longer stretches of time. Some of us, indeed, don’t just read in this way but think of ourselves as readers. And although we have the potential to read any form of material in this manner — newspapers, magazines, journals, even the backs of cereal boxes when necessary — it is books that are the primary target of our attention.
I have long loved Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” for its reverential (and, to my mind, accurate) portrait of just such a reader. In a mere sixteen lines, Stevens describes a man sitting alone, reading late into a summer night. There is no mistaking the focused, contemplative quality of this practice. In the stillness of the evening, the calm of the night, the reader seems to merge with his object of study:
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, . . .
For this reader at this moment, there is a graced unity of experience. The quiet and calm, far from being the background for this experience, are inseparable from it. Book and reader, quiet and calm are one.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
There is even, I would venture to say, a sacred quality to this act of reading. I don’t mean to suggest that the reader is reading “religious” scripture. Nor do I mean to suggest that he is engaged in an overt act of worship, prayer, or meditation. But there is a reverential quality to this act, an aliveness and attentiveness, which I think of as sacred, even when the material being read or studied is of the kind we would normally call secular. It has more to do with the quality of attention and care being brought to bear than with the nature of the object of study
The book of course has its roots in distinctly religious territory The codex — the form of the book made by binding folded sheets of paper or animal skins together into a single volume — is about two thousand years old. It was first adopted for use within early Christian communities as a vehicle for their version of the Bible. Jewish communities wrote their sacred scripture on rolls or scrolls, and by moving to the relatively new codex form, Christians may well have been visibly demonstrating the rupture with their Jewish roots. At any rate, Christian communities seem to have embraced the codex by about 100 c.e. Its adoption took much longer in other communities and for other forms of content. Two hundred years later, Roger Chartier reports, a full fifty percent of Greek literary and scientific works were still being produced as rolls.3
If reading can be a sacred act, it can be many other things as well, and recent scholarship has been exploring its multiplicity of forms and functions. An interdisciplinary field of study known variously as the history of the book, print culture history, or just book history has taken reading as one of its central preoccupations. In earlier eras, literature was thought of as a succession of books — or, more exactly, texts. Much scholarly attention was devoted to studying the transmission of texts as they were copied and recopied, printed and reprinted. Textual critics and scholars collated and evaluated variant manuscripts and editions, attempting to reconcile them and to ferret out errors. Using highly sophisticated sleuthing techniques, some even managed to determine the exact order in which pages were printed, locating individual pieces of type (say, a letter n with a broken serif) and watching where they were reused.
Practitioners of the new book history — historians, literary scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, and librarians — have been less concerned with books or texts per se than with the human activities within which these are embedded. As Robert Darnton, one of its preeminent practitioners, explains, this new field “might even be called the social and cultural history of communication by print, if that were not such a mouthful, because its purpose is to understand how ideas were transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind during the last five hundred years.”4 From this perspective, to study books is to attempt to reconstruct how they have been made, used, and viewed at particular times and in particular communities — and how they have been read. “Literature itself,” says Darnton, “no longer looks like a succession of great books by great men, or ‘l’homme et l’oeuvre,’ according to the old French formula for imposing order on it. It is not even a corpus of texts. Instead, it is an activity: readers making sense of symbols printed on pages, or, in a word, reading.”5
What this new focus has brought to light is how little we actually know about past reading practices, and, for that matter, how little is known about the range of reading practices people engage in today As the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov has observed: “Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter of course that, at first glance, it seems there is nothing to say about it.”6 Yet it is exactly such practices, invisible in their ordinariness, that have the potential to be rich sources of insight. Recent books with titles like Reading the Romance, Reading in America, Reading Books, Listening for the Text, and The Ethnography of Reading point to an expanding set of investigations into the range of reading practices in different eras, among different classes, and within different communities.
Reading, it turns out, is far more than the simple transformation of visible letterforms into meanings; it is a complex set of physical, cognitive, and social practices that have varied with time and place. Wallace Stevens’s silent, solitary, intensely concentrated reader, far from illustrating the one true form of reading, represents instead a particularly modern archetype of what it means to read. Until the twelfth century for example, most reading was done aloud. A text was akin to a script — something to be spoken. (In this respect, a book really was a talking thing, made to speak through the reader’s mouth.) Even when someone read alone, to himself or herself, it was still generally by vocalizing. To read was therefore to hear: to hear one’s own voice and thus to hear “the voices of the pages.”7 Monasteries were hardly the silent places we now imagine, but were instead “communities of mumblers,” in Ivan Illich’s words, since the practice of devotional reading, an essential ingredient in monastic life, produced a constant murmur.8
To be sure, silent reading was known and practiced as far back as Greek and Roman times. But it seems to have been a relative rarity. Although silent reading was known in ancient Israel, Daniel Boyarin notes, the principal meaning of the Hebrew verb that we now translate as “to read,” was to call out — that is, to read out loud, to proclaim in public.9 And in his Confessions, Saint Augustine reports his surprise at discovering that Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, could read without making a sound: “When he read, his eyes followed the pages and his heart pondered the meaning, though his voice and tongue were still.”10 The adoption of silent reading as a normal and unremarkable practice from the twelfth century on seems to have been occasioned by a number of factors, including the introduction of word separation.
In our modern cultural idealization, as illustrated in Stevens’s poem, reading is a solitary activity. We may be surrounded by others — an a library reading room, on a train, in bed beside our partner — but we are “alone with others.” For many centuries, however, reading was not only a vocalized process, it was an explicitly social activity, accomplished with and for others. If you read aloud, you were likely to be reading to others. And those listening were themselves considered to be reading — not because they were looking at the text, but because they were hearing it. “All those who, with the reader, are immersed in this hearing milieu are equals before the sound,” says Ivan Illich, speaking of monastic reading. “It makes no difference who reads, as it makes no difference who rings the bell.”11 (Of course, reading is still at times a group activity: parents read to children at home, librarians read to children in public settings, authors read to adults at public events called “readings.” It is also worth noting that solitary reading always was, and still is, inherently social: how we read is ultimately determined by social conventions and community membership.)
We also take for granted easy access to large numbers of books. To be a reader today — and certainly to be a serious reader — is to read many books, to compare them, to browse, peruse, skim, and scan them. But for many centuries, reading was generally a kind of rereading. Few books were available, and those that were — most notably the Bible — were read deeply and repeatedly Today’s reading habits — which scholars call “extensive reading” to distinguish them from earlier “intensive” practices — are the product of a number of changes over a number of centuries: the shift from vocalized to silent reading and from a meditative to a more scholarly approach, the greater availability of books thanks to the invention of the printing press and the adoption of paper, and dramatic increases in literacy.12
But changes in the technologies and the character of modern life may be putting an end to reading in depth. That’s the fear, at any rate, in some quarters. In a short essay called “The End of Bookishness?”13 the literary theorist George Steiner suggests that the five-hundred-year history of modern book culture may be coming to an end, and, with it, certain habits of deep reading. It isn’t that the book has gone away, but rather that the cultural conditions for this kind of reading — “the economics of space and of leisure on which a certain kind of ‘classical reading’ hinges” — are fast disappearing. (“Already the silences, the arts of concentration and memorization, the luxuries of time on which ‘high reading’ depended are largely disposed,” he puts it nearly a decade later, in a review of Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading.)14 And yet, even as Steiner sees the writing on the wall, he looks to the survival of that thread of deep reading which has stretched over centuries, if not millennia. “I would not be surprised,” he says in the penultimate paragraph, “if that which lies ahead for classical modes of reading resembles the monasticism from which those modes sprung. I sometimes dream of houses of reading — a Hebrew phrase — in which those passionate to learn how to read well would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship.” Ivan Illich echoes Steiner in hoping that people “who discover their passion for a life centered on reading” can be initiated “into one or the other of several ‘spiritualities’ or styles of celebrating the book.”15
Steiner and Illich seem to suggest that the reading of books can only survive as a marginal, almost cloistered, practice. Theirs turns out to be a surprisingly moderate position, at least as compared with the hyperbolic extremes in the ongoing debate about the future of the book. On one side of this debate are the technological visionaries, for whom the book is a technology, like the gramophone or the typewriter, whose time has gone. Book lovers, according to these technophiles, are simply “addicted to the look and feel of tree flakes encased in dead cow” (as one commentator, William J. Mitchell, so provocatively put it in his 1995 book City of Bits).16 They just need to get over it.
The bibliophiles are equally fervent, however, and equally intransigent. They see themselves as defenders of one of humankind’s greatest sources of wisdom and light. For them, the technophiles are uneducated and misguided engineers (for God’s sake!) — hardly a group to be trusted with the divine gifts of truth and beauty. Simon Jenkins, a columnist in the The Times of London, sees digital technologies — specifically the Internet and the Web — as just the latest in a series of grand, overblown visions that are doomed to failure. “The history of technology is littered with such crassness,” he says.17 All the current talk about hypertext as a medium that will liberate the reader from the tyranny of the author is pure hype. He cites The Future of the Book, a collection of essays edited by Geoffrey Nun-berg,18 as one of the sources of such “rubbish.” Yes, the Internet has its place, alongside the microfiche, the Filofax, and the telephone. But take a good hard look at the way it is really shaping up — as “a sex-and-shopping medium, plus intranets for specialists.”
Besides, and most important, the book’s future is secure simply because of what it is. The book is “an artifice of undying appeal.” It is eternal, “a shelter for the human spirit.” It “stands as the supreme artifact of human creativity.” “The book needs no helping hand,” he concludes. “It stands majestic on its own two covers, a thing of beauty and a joy forever.”
And so it goes, back and forth. The technophiles are for progress, for human evolution, for the solution of humankind’s social and economic problems. The bibliophiles are secretly (or not so secretly) Luddites, hoping to return to an idealized past. Or is it the bibliophiles who are the true social prophets, the caretakers of the human soul? Perhaps they are the true visionaries, seers of the civilizing function of the book. In which case it is the technophiles who are the Luddites, afraid to embrace the true sources of human evolution. As Deborah Tannen has pointed out in a recent book, we live in an “argument culture,” in which the complexities of life are conveniently reduced to the play of polar opposites.19 Both sides represent extremes, and in this dispute, as Nunberg notes, each camp is guilty of fetishizing the book.
This has the feel of a religious argument, and not just because each camp sees itself as true believers struggling against the infidels. The book does indeed have religious roots, as I’ve already noted. If in our bodies, in our genetic material, we carry traces of our ancestors, then there may be a sense in which the form of the book also carries resonances of its sacred content and uses. (Form may not be so easily divorced from content.) Certainly Steiner and Illich see modern bookish practices drawing on earlier, explicitly religious forms of reading. And Carla Hesse, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, sees in the makeup of the modern system of book production and consumption a bias toward a slower, more reflective approach to life. The book, she argues, is a form of deferral — “a slower and longer form of expression than a pamphlet or a broadside.” Libraries, “the places of many books,” carry these values too, for they “are modes of configuring reading that are slower and longer still. Libraries . . . are not simply points of access for documents, they are places of deep investigation, concentration, reflection, and contemplation. . . . Libraries are the cathedrals of the modern secular world. They are our most cherished spaces of contemplation and reflection upon human experience.”20
If the bibliophiles are operating from, and defending, religious values, so too are the technophiles. For technophiles, the materiality of the book is an encumbrance (“tree flakes encased in dead cow”). Its pages, its binding, its general weightiness confine and limit what is ultimately most important about the book: its information content. If we could only liberate this information from its physical circumstances, like liberating the soul from the body, then it — and we — could breathe and operate with greater ease and freedom. Indeed, digital technologies now seem to hold out just this possibility. Paul Duguid has labeled this hope liberation technology. “Technology,” he says, “is . . . called upon to do for information what theology sought to do for the soul. But this liberation technology is quite distinct from liberation theology, for where the latter turned from tending the soul to tending the body, liberation technology turns in the opposite direction, away from the text’s embodiment toward information’s pure essence.”21 He cites various technologists and hypertext aficionados who give voice to this view — among them Jay Bolter, who talks of “freeing the writing from the frozen structure of the page” and “liberating the text.”22
Indeed, information seems to have become a kind of god for many of us today. Our assumption is that if we can just get the right information at the right time, good things will happen. (We will be liberated?) This is such a central plank in our information society that it is hard to see it as an article of faith, no less so than the belief that books will set us free. But what exactly is this stuff, information, that has such remarkable properties? In some ways it is like the ether, the hypothesized, invisible substance once thought to fill the universe. Information is all around us, morsels of fact and data. In itself it is pure (hence “pure information”): it has no shape, size, color, or weight. But it can be embedded in, or poured into, physical containers or carriers: documents, databases, and human heads. And it can be transferred from one container or vehicle to another, as when I read a document, thereby gleaning the information in it.23
Unfortunately for us, though, there seems to be too much of it. Daily, we face information in such abundance that it threatens to overwhelm us. Twenty years ago, long before the Internet had become a household utility, Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate in economics, was suggesting that it might just be possible to have too much of a good thing. “In a world where information is relatively scarce,” he said, “and where problems for decision are few and simple, information is always a positive good. In a world where attention is a major scarce resource, information may be an expensive luxury, for it may turn our attention from what is important to what is unimportant. We cannot afford to attend to information simply because it is there.”24
More recently, Richard Lanham, a professor of English at UCLA, has pointed to a certain irony in the phrase “information economy.” Economics, as he understands it, is concerned with the management of scarce resources. But “[i]n a society based on information, the chief scarce commodity would presumably be information, not goods.” Sounding a good deal like Simon, he goes on to say, “we are drowning in information, not suffering a dearth of it. Dealing with this superabundant flow is sometimes compared to drinking from a firehose. In such a society, the scarcest commodity turns out to be not information but the human attention needed to cope with it.”25 His point is that what we lack are tools and strategies for managing this scarce resource.
Observations of this kind have in recent years led to calls to formulate an “economics of attention.” Warren Thorngate, a psychologist, has proposed six principles of attentional economics.26 The first of these, the principle of Fixed Attentional Assets, states that “attention is a finite and non-renewable resource.” The second, the principle of Singular Attentional Investments, states that “attention can, in general, be invested in only one activity at a time.” Whether we think of these as noble “principles” or simply commonsensical observations, together they serve to remind us that we are finite creatures with a tiny attentional capacity. The implication is clear: that we should spend our attention well, that we must make careful decisions about what we will pay attention to if we are to live well and fully But Thorngate’s fifth principle adds an important cautionary note. The principle of Exploratory Attentional Expenses states that “whenever we search for and choose attentional investments, the acts of searching and choosing themselves require attentional investments.” To spend our limited attentional budget well, we must make wise choices, but the act of choosing will cost us too, sometimes dearly
And so we come back to the sad truth that there is too much to read and too little time, so that we are continually being faced with decisions about what to read, when, and to what depth. On airplanes and trains you see people with book bags and attache cases filled with books, papers, and newspaper and magazine articles, which are being carried about in the hope that they will finally be read. Ours is certainly not the first age to be overwhelmed by masses of materials. (Geoffrey Nunberg notes that this very complaint has been raised in a number of eras, stretching back three centuries at least.)27 But we live in an age where the reading we practice seems more and more to involve short bursts of shallow attendings.
Michael Joyce, a professor of English at Vassar and a hypertext author and enthusiast, has suggested that this will be our primary mode of reading in the future. “[I]n an age like ours,” he proposes, “a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attend-ings.”28 It is not so much the books that threaten us (who has time to read books?) but the information fragments — sound bites, factoids, data — flying at us from all directions and all media. The Web seems to be the latest manifestation of this: a technology that can link and lead us to endless information fragments. “Reading what people have had to say about the future of knowledge in an electronic world,” Nunberg observes, “you sometimes have the picture of somebody holding all the books in the library by their spines and shaking them until the sentences fall out loose in space.”29
Under such circumstances, reading becomes a kind of a mining operation. We dig into and work with the materials before us to extract their essence, their information content. (Or someone else does this for us: the editors of Reader’s Digest or Cliff’s Notes.) Always in a rush, we want to liberate just the information we need, as quickly as possible: to find that clients phone number or e-mail address, to get the latest stock quotes for the companies we’ve invested in, or the weather report for the city we’re about to fly to. The more efficiently and effectively we can do this, and the less we are distracted by, or beholden to, the physical embodiment of the materials before us, the better off we will be. No wonder that the technophile sees the physical properties of the book as an encumbrance, a restraint.
But it should be clear enough that Wallace Stevens’s reader is doing something else. In his reading practice, it is perhaps not so easy to distinguish the essential from the inessential, the wheat from the chaff. For this reader is more concerned with the experience of reading than with the (mere) extraction of information. As I find when I read Leaves of Grass, it is the whole that matters: the weight of the book as held in the lap, the texture of the paper, the sound the pages make when they are turned, the look of the typeface, the nature of the illustrations, will all inevitably contribute to the reading experience. That the book is a physical object and that the reader is a sensing, material being are integral, and unavoidable, dimensions of the experience. The qualities of the surrounding environment matter too: the light, the air, the furniture (how it supports the book and the reader’s body).
All these features come together — the material being read in its form and content, the reader’s state of mind and body, the physical environment — to produce a unique reading experience. And as any serious reader knows, the states of attunement and awareness that sometimes arise can have a transcendent character. Indeed, transcendence isn’t a bad word to characterize both kinds of reading. Reading for information aims to transcend the physical properties of the document, the reader, and the reading process to glean the essence of what is being read. Reading as experience aims to enter into the reading itself — the reading process, the material being read — and thereby to achieve, in its own quite different way, a measure of higher, or transcendent, understanding.
But in a world in which the acquisition and manipulation of information is primary, deep reading as an experience appears to be a luxury. It has no justification in the language of information; it is something we simply can’t afford to do. The reader “leaning late and reading there” (in Wallace Stevens’s words) is doing something else, which can’t be explained as information-seeking or foraging, or even as knowledge management. And when George Steiner and Ivan Illich express the hope that houses of reading might be created, it is because they see the need for, and the possibility of protecting, this mode of life.
If the contrast between bibliophiles and technophiles is extreme — and, to a large extent, artificial — then so too is the distinction between reading for information and reading as experience. Surely when we read for information we needn’t ignore all properties of the reading experience. In fact, we can’t. Whether or not we’re conscious of it, the visual — and, more generally, the physical — properties of the document provide us with clues, with information, which help us interpret what we’re reading. And when we read for experience — for pleasure, for insight, or perhaps even as prayer — we needn’t ignore the information content of what we’re reading. Just as our attention is continually shifting when we’re in conversation with a friend — between her words, her person, our thoughts, the environment — so too will attention continually shift in any act of reading.
Still, this stark and somewhat overdrawn distinction between two kinds of reading has its uses. In the endless discussions about books, computers, information, and the Internet we all seem to be having these days, someone inevitably leaps to defend the book. “You can’t take a laptop to bed,” that person will say Or he will make reference to the feel of paper, or even the scent of a book. Remarks like these tend to be the kiss of death. The speaker is immediately labeled as suspect — as soft, romantic, retrograde. The problem is that we don’t have the language for talking about these dimensions, and so, when people begin to wax poetic about, say, the smell or feel of books, they are immediately marginalized (a curious expression). To be sure, in such statements there can be a clinging to the old simply for the sake of familiarity. But that needn’t — indeed, isn’t — all that is being said. Unfortunately we are now so oriented toward information-seeking and use that we have increasingly become blind to other, equally important dimensions of reading — and, I would even say, of living.
What’s more, to voice any concerns about the direction in which technology is taking us is taken to mean that you are necessarily an extremist; it suggests you are a Luddite, wanting to pull the plug on the whole enterprise. But this needn’t be the case, and it certainly isn’t the case for me. By pointing to other forms of reading and other bookish practices, my aim is to contribute to a healthier mix and a healthier balance. There is no denying that information-seeking and reading for information are important skills. But when taken to an extreme, they lead to the atomization of our written forms and to the corresponding fragmentation of attention. We need a more varied diet, I am convinced, and it is helpful to be reminded that our bookish roots still carry the resonance of other ways of reading and other ways to spend our limited attentional budget.
In arguing about the future of the book, we have a tendency to talk past one another. When we are attacking or defending the book, which book are we talking about? What exactly is it that we care so fervently about, whether for or against? Is it the form of the book, the codex? Or certain kinds of traditional bookish content, i.e., literature? Or are we perhaps arguing about certain modes of approaching the world, more-contemplative ways of reading and thinking? (This hardly exhausts the possibilities.)
Certainly the book functions as an important symbol in our culture, and it can symbolize many things, among them the weight of history, cultural authority, and modes of knowing. Unless we are clear about what we are after, and which values we wish to preserve, we risk losing by winning. It is possible, for example, that the codex will survive the onslaught of digital technologies having been stripped of the bookish practices that, to my mind at least, make up its heart and soul. It is also possible that the codex will disappear but we will find other vehicles around which more-contemplative forms of reading can arise. (Who is to say that e-books won’t serve this purpose? Surely it is too early to tell.) And it is even possible, although I doubt it, that reading itself in all its various forms will disappear, but our culture will find other arenas in which to exercise its need for reflection. (Reading is hardly the only guise in which reflection and contemplation appear today) What is it we want to hold on to, and what is it we want to move toward?