Technology & reading

This is a transcript of Nicholas Carr talking about the way the that technology of reading has
changed over the centuries, and how these changes have affected the experience of reading

One of the most important things to realize about reading is that it is a fairly new
invention in human history—a couple of millennia old, only after the invention of the
alphabet. And for a long time, reading was really only just a kind of adjunct to oral
communication because you know, most of human history you just conversed and
exchanged information through speech. 5
And so one of the fascinating things about early writing on slates, on papyrus,
even on early handwritten books, is for instance, there were no space between
the words. People just wrote in continuous script. And that’s because that’s the
way we hear speech. You now, when somebody’s talking to us, they’re not putting
pauses – carefully putting pauses between words. It all flows together. The problem 10
with that though, it’s very hard to read. A lot of your mental energy goes to figuring
out where does one word end and the next begin. And as a result, all reading was
done in the early years out loud, there was no such thing as silent reading because
you had to read out loud in order to figure out you know, where was a word ending
and where is the word beginning. 15
And it was only in around the year 800 or 900 that we saw the introduction of word
spaces. And suddenly reading became, in a sense, easier and suddenly you had to
arrival of silent reading, which changed the act of reading from just transcription of
speech to something that every individual did on their own. And suddenly you had
this whole deal of the silent solitary reader who was improving their mind, expanding 20
their horizons, and so forth. And when Guttenberg invented the printing press around
1450, what that served to do was take this new very attentive, very deep form of
reading, which had been limited to just, you know, monasteries and universities, and
by making books much cheaper and much more available, spread that way of reading
out to a much larger mass of audience. And so we saw, for the last 500 years or so, 25
one of the central facts of culture was deep solitary reading. The immersion of
ourselves in books, in long articles, and so forth.
With the arrival – with the transfer now of text more and more onto screens, we
see, I think, a new and in some ways more primitive way of reading. In order to take
in information off a screen, when you are also being bombarded with all sort of 30
information and when there are links in the text where you have to think even for just
a fraction of a second, you know, do I click on this link or not. Suddenly reading again
becomes a more cognitively intensive act, the way it was back when there were no
spaces between words. And as a result, I think we begin to lose the ability to read
in the deepest, most interpretive ways because were not kind of calming our mind 35
and just focusing on the argument or the story.

[from http://bigthink.com/ideas/26566 ]

© David Ripley, Inthinking

www.englishb-inthinking.co.uk