As at least some of you know, I work on reading, specifically reading as a social practice. My basic idea is that the meaning of texts is not determined by the text itself or by the individual reader, but by the interactions among readers. This thesis rests on numerous assumptions. Today I would like to focus on one of them and show the extent to which our reading practices depend on the condition of what is called reading competence. Reading competence is itself a form of situatedness. The abilities required for reading are not innate, not hard-wired, but laboriously acquired. Reading competence is therefore a form that has developed slowly and can also disappear again. In what follows, I want to discuss the development of a book culture, its transformation into an online culture, and the possible disappearance of these cultures.
Reading competence – the interplay of decoding ability and understanding written texts – is often understood as a cultural technique. By contrast, I see reading competence as a historical yet contingent condition of a particular way of being-in-the-world, which in turn gives rise to cultural techniques. Referring to Thomas Bedorf’s conception of situatedness, I would say that it is a decisive factor within a historical apriori, that is, within the “structural conditions of possibility of a situation, which are historically variable and organized through regimes of power/knowledge” (11). Reflection on historically different contexts – contexts in which reading competence was not, is not, or may not be a universal given – makes it possible to recognize this form of situatedness. The point is that reading competence, in this sense, is not itself a practice but rather the condition for the emergence of certain practices. Different forms of reading may indeed be conditioned by different forms of situatedness. Yet I want to emphasize that reading competence, or readership itself, is a form of situatedness that first makes certain practices possible, and whose disappearance could cause those practices to disappear as well.
Let us begin with the following observation: we share a particular practice, namely, the ability to read. Let us add another observation: when we read the texts of others and when we write, we generally assume that others can and could do so as well. But can we read just anything? Medieval texts, musical notation, or logical formalizations, for example? If not, it is because we have not acquired certain abilities. The idea behind this is that we could simply acquire them. But could we really? Might we not instead imagine that the reading competence we share is something we can lose? What exactly would be lost then? Presumably certain ways of accessing the world, certain forms of world-disclosure, certain epistemic possibilities. As I will argue, above all a particular capacity for taking distance in thinking and imagining. Two questions arise here:
- What does it mean not to possess this competence and to acquire it gradually?
- How could it also be lost again for us?
Accordingly, I want to develop two scenarios: one past and one future. Let us begin with reading competence and its acquisition.
What Is Reading Competence?
Reading is notoriously difficult to define. According to a common definition, reading means “mentally or aloud reproducing written or printed words by following symbols with the eyes or fingers.” Whatever definition one adopts, the concept seems to oscillate between, on the one hand, a physiological and perceptual process of “taking in” or “reproducing” what is written and, on the other hand, the process of “understanding” the text. The term “reading” refers to both aspects, and the two are connected. Nevertheless, one may arguably do one without the other. One can read without understanding, and one can understand without currently “taking in” text. Anyone who has ever tried to translate a difficult passage in a foreign language can easily recognize this phenomenon. One takes in the written words without understanding them, stores them in memory, and only later does the correct translation “dawn” on one. Reading is therefore not a success verb; yet experienced readers today often no longer notice that the processes of decoding and understanding can come apart. The distinction is easily overlooked but important. The perceptual intake of written signs is usually described as decoding, which in turn refers to the internal or external “pronouncing” of written words. Watching children learn to read—slowly producing the sounds of a word until they recognize its spoken form – quickly reveals how much effort is required to acquire this type of decoding competence. Understanding what a word means (whatever exactly that may entail) is a very different process. Sometimes recognition of the sound coincides with the word suddenly making sense. Sometimes the sound is there, yet it obviously cannot be connected to a meaning. To grasp how these processes diverge, we must make a little effort.
The Discovery and Objectification of the Written Text
Imagine monastic life in the twelfth century. Reading was presumably often tied to looking at a manuscript page, a page filled with a stream of letters and abbreviations, frequently lacking punctuation, paragraph breaks, and all the structuring features to which we are accustomed. How, then, does a text become an object in the sense we know it—something abstracted from the physical page on which it appears? Ivan Illich, who studied this tradition and its transformation, writes about the shift from the murmured reading of monks, bound to the manuscript page, to the structured scholastic text:
“With the separation of the text from the physical object, the Schriftstück, the world itself was no longer the object to be read but became the object to be described. Exegesis and hermeneutics became interventions into the text rather than into the world. Only now, when the world is understood as coded information, can the history of the ‘readability of the world’ become an object of research.” (Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 1991, p. 124)
This idea radiates in many directions. What seems decisive to me is that, at a certain point in history, the text itself could become an object. For that to happen, a certain fluency in reading had to develop. Compare musical notation or formal symbolic languages. Some people can “read” an entire piece of music or a logical inference. Beginners like me must laboriously translate notation into actions on an instrument. Before a melody emerges, I must play each note slowly, one by one. For a melodic flow to arise, I have to memorize the notes – much like a child learning to read.
The difference is that today’s child grows up in a culture surrounded by adults who read fluently. According to Illich, medieval monastic reading before the development of more organized textual structures should be imagined as similarly laborious. Yet in that culture, competent reading had not yet become a habitual adult skill. What I mean is this: we find here a reading culture in which reading remains closely bound to contact with the material carrier of the text, a culture in which the text as an abstract object – something one can simply think about – is not yet available. As Illich suggests, a form of world-disclosure that is ordinary for us simply did not exist there.
What changes with the rise of the scholastic form? Written language is distinctive: together with acquired reading competence, it enables distance and thereby playful, dialogical, and systematic forms of engagement – not least epistemic and imaginative reading, both of which require a certain distance from the physical text. Scholastic texts typically require readers first to understand their organization. The quaestio format follows a set of rules that became increasingly refined over time. Today we may find this tedious, much as we may find the structure of a standard academic article tedious: thesis, counter-thesis, one’s own position, argumentation, and responses to objections.
The form may seem dull, then as now. But the point is that it structures the text in such a way that the structure itself becomes readable. We can abstract it, recognize it, and transfer it elsewhere. Reading becomes a structure that can be stored and carried away. The text becomes an abstract, tool-like instrument of thought or imagination, no longer tied to the immediate reading of a page. You know – or at least expect – what comes next. The reduction in cognitive load produced by this structure is immense.
As Lavinia Marin has shown, the text became the university’s epistemic instrument. The history of this kind of text is inseparable from the history of the university itself. The text became the instrument of thinking par excellence. For this to happen, the text first had to become abstractable through structure. Consider what this means. Perhaps you are like me: when I think about an idea or phenomenon, I often make progress the moment I remember a particular formulation or passage that strikes me as insightful or problematic. If I want to think about situatedness, I turn to Thomas Bedorf’s book, locate relevant passages, and remember them. This may seem ordinary, but it is not without presuppositions. How do we know how to use books this way? How do we know to read from left to right, to jump around and return to passages, to make notes and reflect on them, to remember them later?
These are all techniques of book culture, made possible by abstracting from the physical page to something we assume describes reality and can be appropriated by us. We who are gathered here learned this laboriously, step by step—from identifying letters to skillfully navigating books, cross-referencing other books, recalling passages, and writing our own texts. But because it was learned, it is conceivable that we—as a group, perhaps even as a species—could unlearn it. And this brings me to a possible future.
Foundations of Distanced Reading
Looking back briefly, the abilities I have emphasized depend on a certain condition: texts that are structured as epistemic instruments and can be grasped through that structure. Crucially, such structures allow distance from the physical page or from a particular act of reading aloud. We are so proficient in this distanced relation to texts that we can discuss them without having read them fully or linearly. Given the contingency of these abilities, it is conceivable that they could fade away. But why should they? I want to prepare an answer with two thoughts about the preconditions of our reading culture.
1. Text Use Requires Shared Purposes and Contexts of Action
Following Ruth Millikan, I assume that linguistic expressions are cooperative signs that arise and stabilize through use by producers and consumers of signs. Greeting rituals provide a simple example. If I say “hello” and no one ever responds, the sign will not become established. The same applies to written texts. Reading is only one half of a cooperative process involving readers and producers. These signs stabilize because they serve shared functions and purposes. They belong to contexts of action in which certain functions can be fulfilled. If I handed you a shopping list, you would probably understand what I wanted from you. That you do not go shopping for me simply reflects the absence of the relevant context of action. The point is this: text use becomes stable only where shared functions and contexts of action exist.
2. Text Understanding Is Guided by Relevance Markers and Affective Components
But how is cooperation between users of signs established? Following Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, I would answer: through relevance. Suppose I say, “It won’t be much longer.” You will likely relate that statement to my lecture. You interpret my words under the assumption that I am saying something relevant to you. Nothing in the sentence itself specifies that reference. Without relevance, the words are undecidable. You can decode them however you like, but the text remains uninterpretable. Often such relevance markers are tied to affective components that direct attention. The statement is not only relevant to your estimate of time; it may also address your boredom and produce relief.
From these two thoughts I draw the conclusion that written texts, too, are cooperative signs whose intelligibility depends on relevance markers and affective framing supplied by producers for consumers. Shared purposes and relevance markers explain both how texts become interpretable and why people undertake the effort of learning to decode them in the first place. If nobody around you used texts for thinking anymore and that function were delegated to large language models, your motivation to use texts in this way would likely diminish gradually as well. If canonical texts were no longer supplied with relevance markers – or were negatively framed – you might cease paying attention to them altogether and no longer understand why anyone ever struggled through Kantian anthropology.
From Book Culture to Online Culture
If the increasing fluency in handling texts during the rise of the medieval university transformed books into epistemic and imaginative instruments, how might digitization and social media change our relation to texts? The key difference, in my view, lies in linguistic form. Book culture follows the grammatical and pragmatic rules of written language. Online culture follows the grammatical and pragmatic rules of spoken language.
This may sound surprising, since online communication is written. My thesis, however, is that online culture rebinds writing to features characteristic of spoken language and oral culture. Digital culture produces a hybrid form: a written language that functions more like speech and is therefore sometimes called fingered speech. Why? Consider speed and affective embedding. Books are often used at a distance from immediate contexts of action and affective engagement. Online culture works in the opposite way. Written texts are directly connected to affective markers and prompts for action. You immediately see how many likes a post has received, who endorsed it, and what you are expected to do next – like, comment, share. Texts are surrounded by relevance markers resembling those found in face-to-face conversation. This has significant consequences for reading, decoding, and understanding.
The spread of literacy allowed texts to become increasingly detached from immediate contexts of action and relevance markers. Spoken language remains closely tied to such contexts. Written texts also depend on them, but in a distal and decoupled form, such that producer and consumer need not share a situation. This is one reason book culture allows abstraction and distance. Books do not simply land on your desk. They are recommended by friends or introduced through educational canons. Compared with online communication, books are associated with relatively few and relatively distant relevance markers.
Online communication is fundamentally different. Texts are embedded in a thoroughly affective environment. Not only are you told something is important and worth reading; you are also confronted with gamified evaluations and visible group affiliations. In book culture, texts can be handled creatively as instruments of thought or imagination because of this decoupling. Online texts, by contrast, are immediately embedded in affective and action-oriented contexts. Consider a tweet quoting another tweet. In book culture, quotations often function as evidence to be considered. On social media, they are instantly connected to in-group and out-group markers. The gamified context encourages immediate responses such as comments or likes. Of course, book culture is not free of affective framing. But these framings are far more detached from the act of reading itself. One can simply close a book without doing anything. This means that the decoupling of reading from immediate action contexts is a distinctive feature of book culture, even though books are never entirely detached from social contexts.
Conclusion: Consequences for Reading Competence
What effects does this have on decoding practices and text comprehension? In online culture, decoding occurs alongside markers of group membership, avatars, images, and indicators of social approval. Before reading the words, you already know a great deal from names and pictures. Understanding is then displayed not primarily through interpretation but through a follow-up action: a comment, a repost, a like. Reading comprehension is made visible through responses similar to those found in ordinary spoken interaction, where one nods, replies, or otherwise signals understanding. In genuine written communication – in book culture and, if you like, newspaper culture – these contexts of action and affective markers remain at a distance.
At first glance, one might think book culture and online culture compete, with one replacing the other: here distance and epistemic engagement, there affective communication marked by features of orality. But matters are not so simple. Online culture presupposes book culture. First, affectively embedding written texts requires the prior ability to abstract texts from their original contexts. Just as medieval monks first had to detach texts from the physical page before using them as structured tools of thought, we must first detach articles and texts from their distant contexts before reinserting them into the affective environment of social media. Second, although our understanding is increasingly organized through performative responses, the competence for distance-taking acquired through book culture does not simply disappear. At least for current generations, both cultures coexist, even if book culture already carries the scent of nostalgia.
Yet the affective embedding of books and screens differs profoundly. Whether digitization and the rise of typed speech will ultimately lead from the dominance of literate culture back toward a culture of orality – one that causes the possibilities of distance-taking to disappear—is something we cannot know today. What is clear, however, is this: If the culture of distanced reading, together with written language, is the precondition for the techniques of both book culture and online culture, then the form of situatedness bound up with it is contingent and therefore vulnerable.
In my view, what is ultimately at stake is not book culture as such, but the possibility of epistemic and imaginative distance—the possibility through which some of our most important capacities are realized. Whether that possibility will continue to be realized remains an open question.
Handling Ideas 