Books, powerpoints, tabloids, and tote bags. What do we care about in reading?

Do we really let ourselves be encouraged to present our ideas with flashy powerpoint slides and then wonder why students don’t bother reading books anymore?

Last weekend, I had an inspiring seminar on Hume’s Treatise and so I was just about to write another blogpost about reading philosophy. This time I wanted to try a slightly different angle and focus on what we care about when reading. What is it that matters to us – beyond the issue of what might matter to our instructors in the context of a Hume course? Why do we pick up a book like Hume’s Treatise? What steps might we have gone through in advance of picking up such a brick? What makes us pick up big philosophy books and carry them around? Here are a couple of half-baked thoughts, not on reading philosophy but on some perhaps substantial changes in what figures in our reading practices between different generations.

Signalling readership to others. – The smooth passage from my associations about reading philosophy to ones about why we carry books around eventually transported me to a passage in Deniz Ohde’s autosociobiography Sky Glow (Streulicht) that I recently read: Here, the narrator focuses, among other things, on hopes and fears in her attempts at social climbing. One scene has her getting ready for going to evening school and decidedly picking up a canvas tote bag with the logo of a German weekly newspaper (Die Zeit), hoping she is going to make the impression of belonging to the group of … well, of what precisely? Perhaps the group of serious readers and thinkers. The scene is an acute portrait of how we signal readership to others. Of how we want to be seen as readers. We signal that we read and, even in reading, we signal to others that we read. Reading is a status symbol and indicative of a supposed lifestyle. The creators of adverts on tote bags and elsewhere have known this for a long time. What I find so heart-wrenching about this particular scene is that this person’s signalling happens in a world that doesn’t really care any longer about the status of being a reader. As readers of the novel, we might assume that the narrator, presenting flashbacks of her younger self, has learned this the hard way at some point. But the protagonist clearly doesn’t know this at the time at which the scene is set. She cares about reading and cares about being seen as a reader. But reading is no longer seen as a status symbol, at least not in the same way as it used to be.

Changing signals. – Books used to be indicators of intellectual status, wealth and time, lots of time. Being a reader could be signalled by carrying and hoarding books. I am not sure what exactly has initiated crucial changes in such indicators. (That said, I hope to find out more about changing reading cultures in due course.) But by now even the book-loving scholar in the humanities is more of a distant cliché than a reality. Today’s academics mostly pride themselves on being “busy” or even “stressed”, and many might in fact often be too busy to read or at least to read as much as they list in their bibliographies. ­– Now, I don’t want to complain about decreasing literacy or interest in reading. My point is rather that the indicators of readership may have changed. If this is correct, we’re faced with the the following question: Would we recognize new indicators for what they are? Instead of carrying a dusty book to class your students might prepare a flashy powerpoint presentation. What these students signal to their instructors is still competence (or so I think), but it is not signalling competence in the way I have learned to signal competence in my youth. But even when I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, reading had already become a mass phenomenon. Not only in the sense of many people having the necessary literacy, but also in the sense of the world being a place packed with words. Adverts and signs were populating the streets. Newspapers were everywhere. Children read their comics on the loo. Workers read newspapers for breakfast, pacing through headlines and pictures. (Of course, for most of us this is common, but if you study medieval and early modern philosophy, you’ll find that our common reading culture is markedly different.) Now if reading is happening everywhere, mere (signalling of) reading is no longer a socially distinctive marker.

Reading is not replaced, but happening differently. – This ubiquitousness of reading has simply exploded. Given the recent changes in technology and design allowing for digital reading and bullet-point presentations or summaries of one’s reading, it is plausible to assume that reading is turning into a different thing altogether. Firstly, reading does no longer signal a socially elevated status. Showing off by being a bookish person does make you look old-fashioned at best, but it doesn’t mean you’re wealthy or smart. Secondly, the practice of reading is no longer visible in books or paper alone, but basically baked into every device we see or touch. I can read my phone or in my phone. People send me texts all the time. Every pling sound is a demand to read more. If this is correct, reading doesn’t need to be signalled, simply because it’s everywhere. As my colleague Irmtraud Hnilica pointed out, we “can’t expect [our students] to be just like us.” The difference might just run much deeper than I used to think.

Where do I belong? – If reading neither needs to be signalled nor signals that I’m special, where does that leave me? Me as a member of the group of serious readers? And where does it leave you? We have to accept that reading is nothing special and we have to accept that reading is a practice somewhat different from the olden days. So what? I grew up in a different, somewhat old-fashioned world and now ended up learning to summarize books with bullet-points. Once you’ve learned that and have very little time on your hands, you might want to save time by reducing reading to reading bullet-points even more. And our students don’t do what we tell them. Rather, they imitate what they actually see us doing.

Let me close with two suggestions: Firstly, we need to learn to recognize different practices of reading. The fact that the hallmark of being an avid reader is no longer that you carry a dusty book around doesn’t change that much. Phones do not replace reading, but they affect the way we read, our reading culture. Overall, we read much more than we used to, say, in modern times. Secondly, we need to be cautious in thinking that technological designs of reading are in any way innocent. As Daniel Martin Feige has argued convincingly, especially the digitalized forms and designs of reading and talking about reading are not guided by their aptitude but by the possibilities of monetization: While it might not make a difference to the texts if I read Hegel on a kindle, the increasing transformation of our verbal or written exchanges about such texts into specific formats provided in commercial media (Apple, Microsoft, Google etc.) subscribes to their economic models (see Feige, esp. p. 43 and 55). Put plainly, the fact that our exchanges about books are often happening in the form of showing each other powerpoint presentations (at conferences or in class) might not so much be owing to the advantages of that format, but because some people earn lots of money if that format is demanded everywhere and if further (educational) expectations are driven in line with such a format. I wouldn’t put it past people that they encourage the use of powerpoint and, by extension, other digitally convenient forms of streamlining content for monetary rather than educational reasons. Having our book summaries and discussions done by ChatGPT tightens this transformation. In this sense, the new ways of reading and the new ways of indicating social status aligned with the virtues of reading are still following the money, as much as booksellers might have already done in the past. But the current changes and transformations in our practices might leave us with something of a generational gap. If all of this is correct, we might wonder whether we really have a decline of literacy – or perhaps rather a change in practices.