Getting Ready to Read

Before you read, do at least one of the following activities:

As you read, consider the following questions:

1

Not long ago, I sent a colleague at another university an electronic text of paper that had been posted on a listserv. The next day I received a message from him asking if I could mail him a printed version of the paper because he found reading lengthy texts on a computer screen an unpleasant experience. Though it was inconvenient, I sent him the requested printout. When I began to draft this essay a few days later, I was reminded of how often friends remark to me that they don’t like to read from their monitors and I realized how telling an incident this was. Aversions to reading on screen, I suspect, are widespread; few persons of my acquaintance enjoy reading long texts on their monitors. Nonetheless, reading electronic texts on screens is likely to be the predominant mode of reading in the very near future. This essay reflects upon that possibility and the ways in which computer-assisted reading is already beginning to dominate our practices. Future advances in technology are likely to bring us pocket computers with the look and feel of books and to provide for us not only the text but also loads of complementary materials. This technology will probably begin with the conversion of heavy, unportable manuals, encyclopedias, and other reference works into disks which can easily fit into pocket computers not much heavier than most wallets.¹

2

Leaving these possibilities aside, however, let us consider the computer-assisted reading we currently do. Most persons who work with word processing software read quite a bit from their computer screens and their reading is often of the book-length variety. Though many persons print out a final draft because they prefer to revise their work in print, they probably have read the texts they print out twenty or thirty times beforehand in the process of composing on the screen. If the trend continues, few persons will print out their own manuscripts in order to revise; but this is only “the tip of the iceberg” of change. There are innumerable other instances of screen-based reading and they are increasing at a rapid rate. Need I mention that the World Wide Web is a vast (hyper) text that we read with such increasing frequency that it has become difficult as the day wears on to dial up one’s account in order to access the Web because so many of its readers are already online.

3

Though at present only a few persons read extensively from computer screens, their number will surely increase. I feel certain that many persons will come to prefer computer-assisted reading (CAR). Not only do I read my own work (this essay for example), but I also read the work of colleagues from my computer screen. Thousands of email messages arrive in my account, some of them papers sent to me from colleagues that I read as word-processing documents downloaded to my hard drive. Though I used to print long documents out, I no longer do so. In fact, I prefer reading them from my word-processing program because I usually am asked to comment on them and I like to insert comments in the file sent to me and return it to its author or editor. For me, computer-assisted reading infuses my work. For example, I wrote an article on the work of the same colleague who asked me for the printout of the paper I had emailed him. It was constructed by searching for “themes” common to his many essays and books which I was able to assemble quite rapidly since I had all of his work scanned into my computer. I used Zyindex, a commercial indexing program, to find everything he had said about the issues I planned to discuss. In this instance, Zyindex was a crucial extension of my reading act. This experience left an indelible and very positive impression on me. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it inspired this essay since my reading was extended by what is commonly known as a “search engine.” This seems to be a type of reading which has emerged from our uses of the technologies of reading but little is known about it.

4

In “The Effect of Hypertext on Processes of Reading and Writing,” Davida Charney reviews educational and psychological research on reading that bears on hypertexts, pointing out that “little research has been conducted of the actual effect of hypertext on reading” (250). Most of the research she surveys is based on reading print and she has to draw the implications from it for designers of hypertexts. But even in the research that is available on readers’ responses to hypertexts, it should be noted that the research is conducted on hypertexts that are designed to accomplish a particular goal—usually to convey specific information to a target audience. The kind of computer-assisted reading to which I refer goes beyond situations in which persons access a “discrete” hypertext designed with them as a target audience, for instance “expository” hypertexts aimed at upper level college students which feature information related to course materials.² The essays published in online journals such as Kairos are instances of discrete hypertexts read on screen. I find that my own screen-based, computer-assisted reading practices go beyond these scenarios. Searching the Web is probably the best example. When I employ a search engine to deliver information for me on topics such as “cultural studies,” my reading experience, as I visit the sites listed in the search results, is not so well defined as a visit to the Kairos or InfoWorld sites. The experience is closer to what Johndan Johnson-Eilola cautions us about in Nostalgic Angels or to what Geoffrey Sirc articulates in chapter ten of this book.

5

In Sire’s account, reading a teleintertext is not an event structured by the ‘efforts of hypertext designers who attempt to create appropriate paths for readers.³ This type of reading “allows for no logic—anything [that] comes across the screen is neutralized into electronic information. We are in a post-exchange-value-apocalypse in which the only value is use-value” (9) In such reading experiences, “Material is chosen not because it’s a privileged text, a ‘difficult’ masterpiece from the ‘history of writing,’ but because it’s easily available. It’s whatever you notice out of the corner of one’s eye from the endlessly-shifting screen in front of you” (9). In “X-Ray Vision and Perpetual Motion: Hypertext as Postmodern Space,” chapter five of his Nostalgic Angels, Johnson-Eilola describes the textuality of the reading experience to which I refer:

The normal hierarchical arrangement of reading time regulating spatial movement becomes inverted in this articulation of postmodern space, with space portioning out time, regulating time (the time of the railway passenger).Thinking about hypertext in this way, readers are no longer reliant on the writer to lead them temporally from border to border in the span of a tale (Chaucer’s travelers to Canterbury covering space with time); readers walk around, deconstruct and build, move over and under, exterior and interior.⁴

6

It seems fitting to refer to the practice of reading the postmodern space Sirc terms the “teleintertext” as “hyper-reading,” However, we probably should introduce a distinction among hyper-readings that parallels Michael Joyce’s distinction between exploratory and constructive hypertexts (41-42). The exploratory (or expository) hypertext is a “delivery or presentational technology’ that provides ready access to information. By contrast, constructive hypertexts are “analytic tools” that allow writers to invent and/or map relations among bits of information to suit their own needs. The type of hyper-reading I describe here is “constructive.” Understanding that when I use the expression “hyper-reading” in this essay, I refer to its “constructive” aspects, we can say that it differs from reading printed texts or expository hypertexts in several ways. Hyper-reading is characterized by:⁵

7

In many anti-tech quarters, these differences will be perceived as losses. Though I am not of this opinion, I wish to remain alert to the limitations of hyper-reading which can be viewed in a number of contexts (for instance, in teaching research methods) as a loss of authorship, of coherence, of meaning, of depth, of context, and so on. In Nostalgic Angels Johndan Johnson-Eilola reminds us that “Dismantling the technology of the print book does not necessarily remove the social forces that articulated the classic book-text. Hypertext might be capable of orchestrating the reader/writer movement more effectively than a print text.”⁷ In this essay, however, I am concerned with the ways in which hyper-readers can “dismantle the technology of the print book.” I subscribe to the notion that we live in a postmodern era and that we cannot operate on the conventions that governed the reading practices of previous generations.⁸

8

Baudrillard remarks that “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning” (79).

Rather than creating communication,... (information) exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: “You are concerned, you are the event, etc.” More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. (80)

9

Though Baudrillard makes his point in a somewhat hyperbolic manner, it is well taken. For example, presidential debates are no longer meaningful communications; they “stage the desires of their audiences” (e.g., lower taxes). One might add that public listservs more often stage performances of their discussants than meaningfully contribute to our understanding of the issues under discussion. Synchronous “talk” in computer labs, MUDS, MOOS, and interactive Internet games might be described as integrated circuits recycling in the negative of our institutional traditions. And, finally, the World Wide Web may be the ultimate “antitheater of communication.” As Baudrillard puts it, “information devours it own content” (80). Because readers characteristically navigate textual landscapes by searching them for key words and thus often omitting passages that do not “match,” hyper-reading will be labeled “subjective,” “superficial,” and “de-contextualized.” The changes in academic writing and reading brought about by computing are a minefield for scholars. We need to locate these traps in order to make our paths navigable. The effort to chart viable routes through the wilderness of information that surrounds us will surely be worth our time and energy.

10

In what follows, I configure my hyper-reading practices as a way of delineating a new terrain for future investigations. Though I readily acknowledge that many persons do not like to read from their screens at this time, I assume that over a period of time, the practice will become so habitual that it will seem “natural”—just as it now seems customary to use a computer rather than a typewriter. Because I enjoy reading from my screen and prefer it to reading print, in my account, hyper-reading is a rewarding experience because it extends my ability to read. (I might add, for the record, that has not displaced my reading of printed texts.) After delineating the practice of computer-assisted reading, I balance the sunny picture I draw of the hyper-reading horizon by inserting some rain clouds, concluding with reflections on the implications of acquiring new habits of reading. I begin my sketch with the characteristics of constructive hyper-reading I listed above.