An Analysis / Interpretation on Katherine Hayles, ‘How We Read’, ADE Bulletin 150 (2010), pp. 62-79
Close Reading in our brave new world seems to be, indeed, an act of bravery—rarely practiced and disfavored by contemporary multimedia. Technology has stripped reading of its old contemplative value, scattering it across illuminated fields of tabs and battering it with the relentless chime of notifications, deeming it problematic—almost unnatural for the 21st century android man.
A maximalist society with a particularly minimalistic core—expressive as ever but reduced to 140 characters or fewer, through a virtual friendship chain of less than six degrees of separation. Reading repurposes brain circuits, develops neural connections, and enhances existing paths. But alas, entropy! Unexercised neural paths degrade with time. The shortening of our species’ cognitive ability through reading deprivation seems to go hand in hand with digitally imposed word-count restrictions. Archetypal symbols that fundamentally defined the architecture of language have once again taken over, as the spectrum of human emotions was mapped, packaged, and transformed into a modern monothematic iconography, globally adopted to represent feelings.
The limits of our language are the limits of our thoughts. In Greek, the word for human, “Άνθρωπος” (the one who looks up), carries a sense of aspiration, a reaching toward something higher. But as we forged simplicity into a blade, we dulled our capacity for reflection, for complexity. Somewhere along the furious trajectory of advancement we lost the need for words, letters, thoughts. When we looked back down we had to blink— the screen was too bright.
