A Digital Future?

The main claim of this book has been that reading is a philosophical activity. I’ve looked at several different ways in which reading provides an opportunity to work through philosophical questions: that is, fundamental questions about distinctively human capacities. In doing so, I’ve been guided by the reports of common readers themselves. I’ve taken my cues from their own accounts of how reading has helped them to think through what a self is, what our moral responsibilities are and how we relate to things. Because of this focus on common readers, I’ve paid special attention to the reports of well-known readers from the past—sometimes the quite distant past. To shed light on how reading lets us reflect on the nature of things, I turned to texts by Lucian of Samosata and George Orwell. To help make sense of the idea that reading is a social practice governed by moral responsibilities, I looked at Machiavelli. Even when discussing newer documents, I’ve tended to discuss them in language borrowed from earlier stages in the history of reading. In the last chapter, for instance, I used the word “book” as an umbrella term for all the things we read. This old-fashioned language might suggest that the practice of reading and the practice of reading printed books are one and the same.

But as everyone knows, reading is changing. We appear to be living through one of the most dramatic shifts in the history of reading: a shift in which electronic screens are replacing paper and ink as the main way of encountering texts. It seems likely that this technological shift will lead to dramatic changes in the practice of reading, and thus in the experiences of common readers. The move to electronic texts is so new that we don't yet understand it very well, and it's unwise to make many assumptions about it. But the early evidence suggests that the experience of reading onscreen is quite different from that of reading paper and ink— sometimes in troubling ways. Some studies suggest that the brain processes electronic texts quite differently than texts printed on paper, with screens making it harder to form memories and to pay sustained attention to what we read.