A current snapshot of digital reading practices

Digital reading is a topic close to my own heart as I started my research career looking at hypertextual links as the cognitive-aesthetic key to understanding reader digital activity, and have later worked on the materiality of digital reading and the anxieties that the transition from paper to tablets mean for readers. Some of this research has aged dramatically. Unlike in the 90s, everybody reads online now, and hypertext navigation literacy is solidly established among readers, along with more writerly practices related to social media use. We are most definitely no longer in the domain of the avant-garde, but of the very mundane, and digital reading has become sort of invisible as a practice.

Or has it? Because we are still immersed in public debates about how little people (specially children and the young) do read nowadays,  how reading on-screen is worse than paper reading and how we have become unable to engage in deep reading of lengthy texts due too our daily diet of superficial snippets peppered with images and video.

Last week, the Danish online bookstore Saxo published their annual rapport on Danish reading practices, built upon a survey answered by 8000 readers. The main point was that people have read more than in previous years, which is probably not surprising given the pandemic lockdowns. Even though the survey is not representative of the whole population, it contains interesting data about those who do read, like their reasons for reading, favourite genres, places and times to read or book streaming behaviour. For me, the most interesting piece of information this year was the enormous growth of audiobooks in sync with international trends. Readers reported turning to audiobooks (among other things) because it gave them freedom, flexibility, the ability to multitask, an opportunity for introspection, and it was ideal for commuting. I  think it is interesting that a rhetorics of productivity seems to be surging in relation to audiobooks, they are those that free you from the need of sitting down and read, so you can go about and do other tasks.

But is audioreading reading? This was one of the questions hotly debated at the Digital Reading Condition seminar I took part in at Aarhus University. It was organized by The Reading Between Media Project in order to offer an interdisciplinary introduction to digital reading practices. These are some of the questions that we tried to answer together:

• What does it mean to read digitally today?
• How does what we call the digital reading condition encourage us to read in new ways?
• What are some of the key reading practices that have emerged after the first three decades of the world wide web, amidst an increasing number of digital devices and an incessant digitally mediated information flow?

Taking people´s reading habits seriously, it is not really possible to continue to dismiss digital reading as sub par. The seminar looked in depth at how reading is always a mediated practice, and how the senses are also engaged, as digital material often includes images, sounds, movement and interactive elements in addition to text. The keynotes addressed a series of different dimensions of the digital reading experience, bulding upon their many years work in the area.

Jay Bolter gave us a media archaeological overview of the field of digital reading and writing, elaborating on four properties of the new spaces of reading and writing: additive, multimedial, collective, and hybrid. Bolter´s work on this area spans several decades, with such iconic works as Writing Space , Remediation, and more recently The Digital Plenitude.

Lori Emerson did a close reading of the ARTEX network, illustrating her method to trace and interrogate the stories we tell ourselves about our technologies, to debunk the myth of their neutrality. To get to know her work on the technological boundaries of reading-writing techonlogies, I recommend her book Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound.

Nikolaj Elf showed us how digital reading could play a role in a formal education curriculum, taking a starting point in the case of Denmark and arguing for how the notion of reading/literacy has expanded dramatically over the last few years. His research can be found  here.

Lutz Koepnick presented the concept of “resonant reading”, foregrounding how the affective relation between self and world changes with screen mediation, ultimately questioning our current notion of reading altogether. His work on media theory and aesthetics spans over several media genres, I recommend his book On Slowness as representative of his work.

Susana Tosca addressed practices of transmedial reading, presenting an empirical study of young people engaging with a Star Wars comic book. Reading here is multiple, palimpsestuous and writerly, engaging  the reader´s every day life in several interesting ways.

These contributions will be later this year published in a joint volume.