/ The End(s) of Reading Subscribe

多年来，我们文化的观察者一直在悲观地宣告阅读的死亡. Yet, precisely because of the digital devices that go with us everywhere, 那些发光的屏幕可能会使传统的书籍和报纸过时, aren’t we doing more reading now than ever before?

A quarter-century ago, writers such as Neil Postman, in 《皇冠体育官网》(1993)，斯文·伯克茨著, 《皇冠体育官网》(1994), 难道你已经在哀叹“阅读敏感性”——一种专注于语言和逻辑的心态——的衰落了吗, 根植于对过去的集体记忆中——在新媒体的冲击中. Postman and Birkerts, for whom these “new” media were things like TV, audiobooks, and CD-ROMs, could scarcely have foreseen what was about to come. In the current flowering of the digital era, 因为我们的设备上不断有互联网的无限干扰, 我们似乎经常失去了沉浸在杂志文章中的注意力, let alone a novel. Giant online retailers have killed the neighborhood bookstore, taking away a wellspring that once nourished our reading lives. And who has the time to read, anyway, when our jobs demand that we remain connected 24/7, the news cycle updates every few minutes, and our social-media personae require regular tending?

我在这里不是要反驳波兹曼或伯克茨或后来的思想家(如雪莉·特克尔(Sherry Turkle)或尼古拉斯·卡尔(Nicholas Carr))，他们一直在警告数字革命的阴暗面, 人类交流和认知的某些方面的萎缩. I’m inclined to agree, in fact, that something has been lost. 即使我每天都在使用在线研究数据库和其他数字资源, I persistently hate reading on screens. I prize all the artifacts of the print age: the texture, smell, and weight of paper, the visual harmonies of typeface and layout. 我还记得当我得知亚马逊Kindle无视纸质书的页面设计，只提供纯文本选择时的惊讶和失望, dull fonts. 哇，我想，那些产品设计师真的不懂阅读.

Yet I can’t help but notice that in our daily lives, in this moment of the “death of reading,” most of us seem to do a lot more of certain kinds of reading, more interacting with the written word broadly defined, than we used to. Once, families tuned in to watch the nightly news on TV; now we read our news on websites and apps. 我们经常通过Facebook和Twitter的链接来访问这些新闻网站, one experience of reading leading on to another. Even when we do watch CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News, the screen is filled with things to read: logos, captions, banners, chyrons, category labels like “Breaking News” or “Developing Story,” and the ticker, 在屏幕底部运行的动画线，提供主框架中正在讨论的故事以外的故事的更新. 主持人和记者在屏幕上的谈话在什么时候变成了背景噪音, “看”电视变成了一种阅读叠加在电视上的文字的行为?

当然，阅读和写作几乎已经取代了电话交谈. 现在很少有40岁以下的人喜欢拿起电话，用老AT的话说&T ad, “Reach out and touch someone.” From ordering pizza and buying plane tickets, to making appointments with doctors and hairstylists, 大多数人更喜欢在网站上阅读和选择，而不是和任何人交谈. 现在，我的手机可以自动将语音邮件转录成我能读懂的一段文字，这让我感到无比的安静. And who calls a friend these days to make or change plans? Instead, always and for everything, for flirting, for “could you pick up milk on the way home,” for news of deaths and births and public disaster warnings, we have texting, 这种与亲朋好友和陌生人的持续不断的交流永无止境地展开 stichomythia, 希腊戏剧中人物对话中交替出现的诗句. 住在一起的人有时甚至在房子的不同房间发短信, rather than shouting. 短信这个名字的核心就是文本的首要地位，即打字高于口语. 当你的通讯员写信息时，会出现起伏的灰色省略号, iPhone甚至把纯粹的虚无——等待的空白空间——变成了一种文本约定, into typography, into something to read.

That ellipsis, which Apple calls the “typing awareness indicator,” is only one of countless ways in which digital communications, such as texting and social media, have reshaped our language to make it more based in writtenness; they have even given birth to verbal idioms that are hybrids between text and speech. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of “pwn,” the common typo for “own,” which became slang for “soundly defeat” in online video gaming in the mid-2000s; it was an in-joke that depended on the fact that everyone in the group was communicating through a QWERTY keyboard. Online acronyms such as “lol” and “idk” have moved into speech. Among my students, I first heard these text-speak expressions uttered ironically, with invisible quotation marks around them, 但后来，它们似乎真的融入了我学生的词汇. 另一个转换成口语成语的基于文本的表达方式根本不是音素, but a typographical symbol. “Hashtag-blessed,” my students will say, with a sarcastic tilt, when they’ve been particularly unlucky, 或者“韦尔斯利话题”，当他们埋头苦干学术工作的时候. They’re parodying the Twitter/Instagram/Facebook convention of adding category tags to posts; they’re parodying the smug self-regard of much online self-representation; they’re enjoying the absurdity of vocalizing something purely textual; but at the same time, 他们正在创造一种新的话语，这种话语深受书面和阅读的影响.   

All this is to say that reading and a readerly, textual sensibility are far from dead; instead, they seem to be insinuating themselves into, even replacing, our spoken communications and media at all levels. 的确，这种阅读方式看起来与不插电的阅读方式不同, immersive reading, the extended communion of book and mind, that I still prize above all others. But we would do well to remember that that kind of reading itself has a history; it is not natural, but culturally shaped. 在中世纪的欧洲，阅读是一种典型的公共活动. 它发生在很大声的场合:在教堂礼拜中，在宗教团体中，在宫廷娱乐中. The book was a social medium. Sometime in the transition from medieval to early modern culture, with the advent of print and the spread of literacy, readers’ encounter with the book became more individual, private, and intimate. 阅读变得沉默，不再涉及嘴唇和舌头，而是一种眼睛的工作. 在媒体技术进步的关键时刻，一个与我们自己的时代相当的时代，阅读发生了变化. 学者们提出了一些有趣的问题:这种转变对小说等新体裁的兴起意味着什么, for the evolving idea of the author, for the history of cognition and brain function. 也许未来的历史学家会把这些研究延伸到我们这个时代, in which a media revolution is again setting the world aspin, 口述和书面语的分类似乎正在失去清晰的界限. The history of reading is still being written.