Issue 9. Reading

From early libraries to the printing press to smartphones, audiobooks and artificial intelligence, how has technology impacted reading? Is reading a changing cultural practice or a fixed skill? We asked Klaus Benesh, author of the book The Myth of Reading, to reflect on literacy, interpretation, and shifting formats. Reading habits may change, but real reading still requires human attention and judgement. 

How did you come up with the idea of the book series you’ve been editing since 2020, titled How We Read?

It started with my interest in two literary figures, Henry David Thoreau and Ezra Pound. Thoreau wrote an entire chapter on reading in his novel Walden, while Pound has an early, quite famous text, ABC of Reading.

Writers seem to talk about reading very differently than the larger public. For both Thoreau and Pound, reading is a given. For them, reading is something that you do to imbibe experiences and knowledge and share all kinds of ideas with other people by creating something new. Both make the argument that there's no point in coming up with a list of criteria for a good or bad text.

Another inspiration comes from my interest in the history of technology. The impact of technology on our cultural life and on the way we do things was very prominent in my mind when I read literature or talked about American culture and society, or even political issues. And it was quite obvious to me at the time that with increasing digitization, our reading habits have changed dramatically.

Until a few years ago, I did not believe that technology by itself has a negative influence on our cultural lives and is responsible for the fact that people read less.

The How We Read series came from the idea that reading is not a given: it's not something that comes naturally. There's also a huge difference between academic reading, reading for pleasure, the reading people in technology do, the way the clergy reads, or the reading of a children's book.

This series gives you a pretty good idea of reading as a cultural phenomenon.

What are the most important turning points in the history of reading? Gutenberg's invention of the printing press?

You could actually go back further than Gutenberg. For example, the invention and extension of libraries.

Reading has been around for quite some time. But you have to have the means for ordinary people to access books, to acquire them, and to actually read them. For example, a major shift occurred in the second half of the 19th century, when cheap lenses for reading glasses were invented. Around the same time, you had what are called in America “railroad novels,” a direct offspring of mass transportation. Publishers produced shorter, more concise texts that could be read on a railway journey.

Let’s go back to Alexandria: books were gathered, collected and made available to certain segments of the population – this was a major shift. Until the middle ages, depending on what country or culture you're looking at, reading was restricted to an elite, often a religious one who would study spiritual texts.

Then the printing press appeared, allowing the mass production of books. Newspapers mentioned these books, pointed out which ones were good or not. The reviewing of books played an important role in the production of literature. During the late 18th century, the age of the Enlightenment, particular types of environments and settings became important because people needed places where they could come together and discuss what they had read. The literary salon emerged. It’s interesting that people already complained about too many books being printed, about the lack of selection, or about plagiarism.

Into the 20th century, radio, television and the technology of film became competitors to reading. But even with TV becoming very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, reading and literature remained cultural facts. It was taken for granted that books should be available, read, and taught in schools and colleges.

The value of a literary education was seen as essential. In the 18th century, the German poet and intellectual Friedrich Schiller argued that literature was a moral institution, able to teach people how to behave correctly, have a proper moral stance and be responsible citizens in a society of equals.

A major turning point obviously comes with the computer and the internet. With the advent of television, there was less time to read, but reading would not move to a TV set. To read a novel, you still needed a paper copy. The ability to read on a computer slowly but surely moved people away from the paper book.

Once we started having smartphones, they became portable reading devices. The way we read dramatically changed.

Maybe we should adopt some of these new reading methods or reading habits, also within an academic context, in order not to lose our students. Students don't read the same way that they used to in the 1980s, when I was a major in American literature. Something has changed tremendously. And the question is, what do we do with that? Are we complaining and becoming cultural pessimists? Or are we trying to be creative and adapt to these new ways of reading?

What about the sheer understanding of what is read? Students today can ask large language models to summarize a large book, which means reading what AI writes back to you. Is that good or bad reading?

With AI, reading has really come under attack. And the reason isn’t so much that AI does the synthesizing for you, often providing a very good summary. It’s that there is a very interesting shift, a shift backwards in a way, from written language to oral language.

What people increasingly do is that they ask Siri or any other smart speaker for a summary of a novel or any material. Obviously, it's not the same thing as reading.

There will always be a handful of people preferring the old-fashioned means of reading, a paper copy of a book, and who will take the time to read it in its entirety. But it will probably be a niche market.

Audiobooks were the first step towards returning to oral storytelling. And now you can listen to the smart speakers, and have a conversation with them. Reading increasingly becomes superfluous. It’s as if we were becoming medieval and archaic, using these sophisticated technologies.

So maybe we’re switching back to the much older, oral tradition. Can that democratize storytelling? Maybe reading is too hierarchical, in a way?

I can agree to a certain extent. It's obvious that reading is hierarchical. You have to have the skills, the cultural competence, to be able to read. As surveys show, reading and writing skills are in decline among young people in the USA. In theory, interacting with an AI interlocutor who acts as a person and enters with you in some kind of conversation has a de-hierarchizing effect on everybody.

Oral literature has been around for a very long time. People were always telling stories. Anthropologists or ethnologists say oral storytelling very soon acquired a social function: containing the important information of a tribe or a group of people. Stories were told to make people aware of the history of the tribe, of its episodes of warfare, of disasters, moral codes, what is right or wrong. All that was embedded and contained in stories passed on to the next generation. That meant the stories couldn't change much. If someone tried to be overly creative and changed the story, the information would be lost.

That’s why anthropologists often said that oral literature was less important and less creative than written literature. Written literature enables people to judge which version they like more – there's a competition between versions. But the different versions could be preserved, in a library or in an archive. That's a very important shift, opening the way to creative authors. You do have creativity, obviously, in oral cultures, but it is curbed by social function.

With the emergence of an oral culture via AI programs or smart speakers, new stories don’t vanish. They are still stored on the hard drive of your computer.

In that case, another issue emerges: AI programs have a very bad reputation for manipulating the way people perceive reality. It's one thing to make information more available, it is another to make it also more reliable and dependable. The risk is that you end up with an abundance of information and nobody knows how to sort out what’s true or false. You end up with radical skepticism. Everyone will question everything they find online. That is a real danger.

We could also envision a world in which there is regulation, in which a group of people we’ve elected make smart decisions and see to it that everybody has the same chances of accessing information, and that the information can be trusted.

It’s a matter of what we want, as a society and as humankind, and it's not a matter solely of technology.

It could be a double-edged sword, though. There could be a fine line between curating a library or an archive, and manipulating it. Archives, libraries, museums, are instruments of power. At the crazy end of this spectrum, we see what Donald Trump is doing to cultural institutions. Can libraries be the institutions of “good reading”?

Absolutely. If libraries are independent and you entrust experts with the selection process of what is being offered in them.

If you have AI readers, then of course they also become interpreters. Every act of reading is also an act of interpretation. And if we just blindly follow other people or entities reading for us, then we become victims of manipulation and ideological interests.

When you enroll in a literary class at a university, you have so-called experts, literary scholars and historians, who are entrusted with the task of teaching literature to lay readers and to explain to them the other ways in which you can read, other than lay reading. Close reading, re-reading, any other form of reading – historical reading, Marxist reading, ideological readings, et cetera. And he or she will then explain to you the differences and will make you sensible to ideological manipulation. But you need that kind of environment. If that is no longer there, the question obviously becomes: what's going to replace it? If we entrust that to, say, Elon Musk, I think we have a problem.

Do you listen to audiobooks?

I do. I started listening to audio versions of books I’d already read, particularly classics. The reading process is very different when you listen to an audiobook. Cognitive scientists say certain things tend to be forgotten more rapidly than when you read on paper and take notes. I'm hesitant to say it's a “lesser” way of reading than old-fashioned paper reading. It's different. Perhaps it offers things a paper book can’t.

I often read on my smartphone at night, even though some people say that can be tedious, as it doesn't make you see the entire page. I read an article by a journalist saying she was reading the entirety of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu on her smartphone. Interestingly, she said that by swiping, you read only a few sentences at a time. You swipe from right to left and get another two or three sentences, and again and again. You read in bits and pieces – it's a fragmentation of reading. Surprisingly, this actually fits with how Proust organized his own writing. It is a very consoling and encouraging idea: something that isn’t designed to read long books can provide you with a better sense of how modernist literature works.

The general consensus is that reading is good for us. At what point did we reach this consensus? And why, actually?

It depends on which segment of society you are looking at. I already mentioned Schiller's idea that literature is a moral institution. For him, literature functions as a template for how to behave: reading is good because it instills in us certain morals, a certain etiquette of social interaction.

In a spiritual or religious context, reading is good because it allows you to know the meaning of God's words. Monks would read and reread a spiritual text to really understand its meaning. Here reading is important because it marks a moment of initiation and produces closeness or intimacy with the agency or god you admire and pray to.

Rousseau thought of reading as a part of a rigorous education for young people. To read, you have to muster a certain kind of self-discipline. You have to focus. You have to shut out distracting information. And depending on what you read or what you are given to read, you can learn and increase your knowledge of the world.

So the idea that reading is a positive definitely goes way back to the Enlightenment and the idea that human beings have a capacity to actually learn something about the world.

Do you think there is such a thing as a bad reading, a bad impact of reading?

Oh, yes, absolutely. Think of the unverified and often false content you can find online. So, I think it matters what you read. Pornography would be another example. It could dull your erotic senses and give you wrong ideas about sexuality and intimate relationships.

Also, think of Mein Kampf, or propaganda literature.

That's very interesting. My book The Myth of Reading has a chapter on the idea that reading in and of itself does not guarantee moral superiority. You don’t become a good person because you read. That's not how it works. We know, for instance, that Goebbels was an avid reader, well-versed in German literature. Many horrible people were very erudite and had read a lot of books.

Germany outlaws certain kinds of far-right literature because of our history.

When did private and public libraries appear?

In the United States, private libraries emerged on a large scale in the latter half of the 19th century. People who’d made enormous fortunes were thinking about using some of that money for social projects. The libraries they set up could be open to the public, or restricted for research, or connected to a university.

In general, libraries became very popular at the beginning of the Enlightenment, with the idea that you have to spread knowledge to have responsible civil subjects.

What about your own personal library?

When I was a student, I would make copies of books that were very dear to me. When I got my first job and had a bit of money, I liked to buy first editions of books in secondhand bookstores, when I traveled. I often brought back two or three suitcases full of books from trips to the US.

I love books as physical objects, as design objects, and they smell nicely. But at some point, they can be overwhelming. I don't buy books anymore. I try to read online.