Users of today’s digital, networked information spend an increasing amount of time each day “reading” online textual and multimedia materials (for example, email, Web pages). Yet the practices of digital reading in online environments are not well understood according to the protocols of reading that arose in the last two centuries to support the individual, organizational, and social needs of late-literate societies.
Instead, reading on the Internet or in other networked environments often places a premium on searching, scanning, jumping, filtering, aggregating, organizing, and other kinds of radically discontinuous, low-attention, peripheral-vision, or machine-assisted reading practices that do not map exactly over predecessor practices of individual or organizational literacy. Networked, digital environments also make more important the social, collective experience of reading (as instanced by Web blogs or the Google search-engine technology that filters hits according to popularity or relevance in a community of referring Web pages, each of which is in effect a “reading” of the referred page). Finally, the new online reading complements the emerging technologies that increasingly allow computers to read/write autonomously to each other across platforms and applications—as in the XML-based technologies that underlie the new online text archives, “Web services,” and RSS newsreaders.
How are people today in fact “reading” online individually, in organizations, with social others, and in league with a burgeoning society of semi-”literate” machines? What innovations in technologies or interfaces are possible to increase the productivity, variety, and pleasure of these new kinds of reading? And how can the historical diversity of human reading practices provide a metric—quantitative and qualitative—against which to gauge the robustness of the new digital practices? Reciprocally, how can contemporary practices provide new ways to understand the technical, social, and cultural dimensions of historical reading?
Can online reading be improved through new technologies in complementarity with an understanding of the history of reading practices?