Texts as tools. But what for?

Reading books is slowly turning into a very special
skill again, like reading musical scores.

Currently, I’m reading an intriguing book by Lavinia Marin and am struck by a couple of thoughts that answer a number of questions I have been pondering on for the last year. The motto above captures the issue quite well. Drawing on Ivan Illich’s commentary on a 12^th century text, Lavinia clarified how texts, in the context of early universities, might have become abstract “things” that allow us to think about and with them. At some point, then, written texts became, not just records of what someone had written, but tools for thinking. Things that allowed you to distinguish sections, jump back and forth, keep your attention on one paragraph, while side-glancing at another, and so on. Like you might now rush to the final sentence, wonder whether you’re really interested, and decide whether to stay on or go. Will you stay with me for a few more paragraphs? What I hope to do in what follows is suggest that our way of reading written texts might be changing in some crucial ways. And if it’s true that texts have been, inter alia, tools for thinking that might change, too.

Let me begin with an illustration: (1) I just went for a run. After some initial thoughts about the light drizzle my attention returned to a puzzling passage from William of Ockham’s commentary on De interpretatione. I first read this text very intently over thirty years ago when pondering on my MA thesis, but now came back to it with quite different questions. What I’m saying is: the basic ideas in the text stuck with me over thirty years, but now some new questions (about medieval theories of written language) drew me back in and had me wonder again what it all meant. (2) When I came back from my run, I gulped down some glasses of water, while setting eyes on the social media app Bluesky. My attention came to rest on what I took to be a slightly insulting response to a post of mine. I wanted to reply immediately but thought better of it, realizing that it kept nagging me until I wrote a lame retort. (3) Returning to my thoughts about reading books as being a special skill, I inserted a thesis into an LLM, prompting it to list empirical studies on the issue. The summaries the LLM generated had me think a bit, until I realised that the suggested stuff pushed me away from my initial questions and so I closed the pertinent tab.

Now I’m sitting here, writing and wondering what all of this means. Let’s just characterize these moments: Experience (1) is something I had learned at school and uni: I read texts; they stick with me; I think about them – interested but somehow dispassionately. Here, the text is a tool for thinking. Why so? Well, there are many points to be made, but a crucial part is that the text doesn’t come with indicators of immediate relevance. It’s not addressed to me; I have to make an effort to get it; the few relevance indicators that made me read it are kind of remote (like “you should read Ockham’s commentaries on Aristotle”). If linguistic sign use (the production and/or consumption of signs) is generally related to action cycles or to factors of relevance, this kind of reading experience is decoupled from either. Now, my hunch is that this decoupling of reading experience from immediate action cycles or relevance factors is actually what allows written texts to be tools for thinking: in being open to various readings they allow for internal dialogues with myself much more than spoken texts, a conversation for instance, ever could.  

Now contrast this with experience (2). A crucial difference is that, even though it’s written language, the text not only addresses me directly but also elicits an affective response. Reading social media posts comes with lots of social cues (for instance about the desirability of aligning with them), signaling and pressure to respond. If what I recently wrote about so-called fingered speech is correct, this kind of reading experience is very much socially embedded in the way spoken language is, while the written form still suggests that it can be treated like a common written text – which is what I attempted in postponing my retort. My hunch is, then, that such texts are tools for thinking only for those who have undergone other experiences (like 1) with written texts. By and large, however, social media posts are tools for social alignment. If they fail in that, they prompt misalignment, and very quickly so. To see this, imagine yourself in a class or conference setting and think about how you socialize there in relation to a book and what sorts of exchange you might envision. Now imagine that you have just read a couple of outrageous social media posts by some interlocutor in the room. I guess that this might cause some irritation even if the interaction about the book is still sort of fine. Ultimately, the social media experience lures us into a different mode of interaction.

Finally, compare these experiences to the final example (3) with the LLM. The strange thing is that the LLM might be said to look like, depending on prompted style, an experience in line with (1) where the text is a tool for thinking, while at the same time the reaction of the LLM is as fast as the affective social media experiences in line with (2) can be. I don’t know what to make of this, but a first hunch is that this experience (3) drives me to consider both former experiences as meaningless. Why? I kind of see that the arduous production of a text in response to experience (1) can be done in a second, while I’d need days. On the other hand, the LLM also seemingly imitates an affective stance by generating kind sounding sentences on my prompt. I don’t know whether LLMs are tools then. Butr they clearly disrupt known uses of texts.

Summing up, I see three different reading (and pertinent writing) cultures: (1) one that has emerged during some centuries and allows us to use texts with sustained imagination as tools for thinking, (2) social media interactions that still look like written texts but have the relevance indicators and social cues of immediate interaction, and (3) texts that look like interactions and seemingly share elements of both while being neither. There is a lot of food for thought here. But what I wonder now is whether the kind of reading we’re socialized with mostly affects other modes of reading. In other words, has my exposure and upringing with experiences like (1) primed me for other text uses? Will so-called ‘digital natives’ be primed by the more interactive reading culture as illustrated in experience (2)? Will that mean that, for them, texts will no longer work as tools for thinking? Obviously, I don’t know. But it strikes me as a conversation worth having. It seems, then, that written texts can be tools for the various kinds of actions we perfom or undergo: (1) texts can be tools for thinking, (2) they can be tools for social signaling and hence mainly affective tools, or (3) they can be both and none of these tools at the same time, in that the products of LLMs might look like the imitation of either, while they are, in fact, just a distant echo of our reading and writing cultures. (OK, I don’t really know how to end this.)