Welcome to the Digital Age

After solely reading your prefaces this, I can tell you that our opinions on your sanity were mixed. But after carefully reading the rest of the book, I found that your prefaces’ usage makes sense and that you are actually a master at your craft. You presented some of the most startling points in the book early on then masterfully made us, the readers, find out where you are coming from and showed us well supported facts that led to the whole concept of the elegies.

The first time I identified myself with you was when I found out you went to the University of Michigan about the same time as my father did. Often when I thought of the reading processes that are now obsolete, I would think and sometimes ask what my Dad, who is an English major, needed to do in an English class when he attended school in the early 1970s. He told me that it was far more in depth. Meaning that things would take longer than they do now.

We have truly “abruptly replaced our time-honored and slow-to-evolve modes of communication and interaction with new modes”(pg. 29). Many people see the down sides to this transition. We often lose “true” reading when interacting with a computer screen rather than printed script and this is where I can see your most valid point. In “The Shadow Life of Reading” you give us a new way to think about reading or maybe just show us processes of reading that we have never thought of before. After gaining an idea of what reading actually entails, I am able to confidently say that the transition to a digital age will change the way we perceive literary works. Whether this transition will be destructive to literature or not is what I questioned.

You say that, “the act [reading] only begins with the active deciphering of the symbols”(pg. 96). While it is hard to argue that this is how vivid descriptions get processes in our brain, I believe that often the process ends there. As a college student in the pre-medical program, I do not always see “reading” as a process. With subjects like science, math, and practical business, reading turns into a chore. When I read given material in these subjects I simply find the lesions and key points that the written work is trying to put across. That is why I see a new form of reading.

To me, the new form of reading revolves around ease of use. There is no question that this is where literature is headed. Currently, about 6 million E-Readers have been sold to Americans; opening a world of books at the tap of a screen. As a practical science man, I am thrilled to see this new technology making books easier to access. That is why I need to ask: How does this transition into an electronic era affect the non-literati? Looking back at my novel reading career (if you can call it that) I just do not think my thoughts on the material would change if they were not presented in a book-form. Call me a cynic of my class, but I believe that the electronic age is simply inevitable. Rather than trying to shed light on the processes that it eliminates, we must see what new things this opens up and perhaps learn to cope with different forums for literature.