Nautilus

The Deep Space of Digital Reading

In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,

... the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.

To read silently is to free your mind to reflect, to remember, to question and compare. The cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf calls this freedom “the secret gift of time to think”: When the reading brain becomes able to process written symbols automatically, the thinking brain, the I, has time to go beyond those symbols, to develop itself and the culture in which it lives.

16th-CENTURY INTERNET: The “book wheel,” invented in 1588, was a rotating reading desk that allowed readers to flit among texts by giving the wheel a quick spin.Wikipedia

A thousand years later, critics fear that digital technology has put this gift in peril. The Internet’s flood of information, together with the distractions of social media, threaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, stranding us in what the

Вы читаете отрывок, зарегистрируйтесь, чтобы читать полное издание.

Другое от: Nautilus

Nautilus5 мин. чтенияScience
The Brain Cells That Guide Animals: New evidence the neural rules of navigation are universal.
It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly’s brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very different brains share. As Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute fo
Nautilus7 мин. чтения
Why Shouldn’t a Horsefly Be Named After Beyoncé?
David Bowie and Beyoncé never shared a stage, but they share the distinction of having cleverly eponymous species names in their honor. Bowie, the British glam-rock and pop sensation, is immortalized in the name of a Malaysian huntsman spider, Heter
Nautilus12 мин. чтения
How Geology Can Ease Your Mind: Take comfort that we live on a very old, durable planet.
As a geologist and professor I speak and write rather cavalierly about eras and eons. One of the courses I routinely teach is “History of Earth and Life,” a survey of the 4.5-billion-year saga of the entire planet—in a 10-week trimester. But as a hum
https://ru.scribd.com/article/338357881/The-Deep-Space-Of-Digital-Reading-Why-We-Shouldn-T-Worry-About-Leaving-Print-Behind
ru.scribd.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-10
187360
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JPHPPERTK65YR7Y67RCQX6XRNXB7LUAM
<urn:uuid:fc315acf-0c03-42b5-a9bd-3e050f60f6fd>
2020-02-28T15:58:38Z
151.101.250.152
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:AUDTVSXFPJHHM4WPNRDCFMTMBM7KGW4O
<urn:uuid:a634ffab-3158-4501-ac5b-4fba4026173d>
https://ru.scribd.com/article/338357881/The-Deep-Space-Of-Digital-Reading-Why-We-Shouldn-T-Worry-About-Leaving-Print-Behind
response
<urn:uuid:53992071-11ca-45b6-8d6e-ec19b7bf3955>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-10
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-10.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/