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Punctuation marks, which further eased the work of the reader, began to become common too. Writing, for the first time, was aimed as much at the eye as the ear.
The emergence of word order standards sparked a revolution in the structure of language—one that, as Saenger notes, “was inherently antithetical to the ancient quest for metrical and rhythmical eloquence.”
As the brain becomes more adept at decoding text, turning what had been a demanding problem-solving exercise into a process that is essentially automatic, it can dedicate more resources to the interpretation of meaning.
Readers didn’t just become more efficient. They also became more attentive.
The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness.
“Stationary or unchanging objects become part of the scenery and are mostly unseen.” But as soon as “something in the environment changes, we need to take notice because it might mean danger—or opportunity.”
To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object.
They had to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater “top-down control” over their attention.
What was so remarkable about book reading was that the deep concentration was combined with the highly active and efficient deciphering of text and interpretation of meaning.
In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.
Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions.
Their works immediately became more personal and more adventurous. They began to give voice to unconventional, skeptical, and even heretical and seditious ideas, pushing the bounds of knowledge and culture.
The arguments in books became longer and clearer, as well as more complex and more challenging, as writers strived self-consciously to refine their ideas and their logic.
The nature of education and scholarship changed, as universities began to stress private reading as an essential complement to classroom lectures.
Book production, long the realm of the religious scribe working in a monastery’s scriptorium, started to be centralized in secular workshops, where professional scribes worked for pay under the direction of the owner.
Originality of thought and creativity of expression became the hallmarks of the model mind. The conflict between the orator Socrates and the writer Plato had at last been decided—in Plato’s favor.
He was carrying a secret—a big one. For at least ten years, he had been working covertly on several inventions that he believed would, in combination, form the basis of an altogether new sort of publishing business. He saw an opportunity to automate the production of books and other written works, replacing the venerable scribe with a newfangled printing machine.
With remarkable speed, at least by medieval standards, movable-type printing “changed the face and condition of things all over the world,”
The steep reduction in the cost of manufacturing books was amplified by the growing use of paper, an invention imported from China, in place of more costly parchment.
Just as the miniaturization of the clock made everyone a timekeeper, so the miniaturization of the book helped weave book-reading into the fabric of everyday life.
The first great flowering of printed literature arrived, with works by such masters as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, and Milton, not to mention Bacon and Descartes, entering the inventories of booksellers and the libraries of readers.
Printers, striving to fill the public’s demand for inexpensive reading material, produced large editions of the classics, both in the original Greek and Latin and in translation.
Along with the high-minded came the low-minded. Tawdry novels, quack theories, gutter journalism, propaganda, and, of course, reams of pornography poured into the marketplace and found eager buyers at every station in society.
By accelerating the spread of books into popular culture and making them a mainstay of leisure time, the cruder, crasser, and more trifling works also helped spread the book’s ethic of deep, attentive reading.
“As books became common, men could look more directly at each other’s observations, with a great increase in the accuracy and content of the information conveyed.”
The social and cultural consequences were as widespread as they were profound, ranging from religious and political upheaval to the ascendancy of the scientific method as the central means for defining truth and making sense of existence.
They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences.”
“All great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain,” said Emerson. “They knew that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them.”
The vocabulary of the English language, once limited to just a few thousand words, expanded to upwards of a million words as books proliferated.
The ideas that writers could express and readers could interpret became more complex and subtle, as arguments wound their way linearly across many pages of text. As language expanded, consciousness deepened.
As our ancestors imbued their minds with the discipline to follow a line of argument or narrative through a succession of printed pages, they became more contemplative, reflective, and imaginative.
The book made possible the delicately nuanced self-knowledge found in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Emerson’s essays and the equally subtle understanding of social and personal relations found in the novels of Austen, Flaubert, and Henry James.
The literary ethic was not only expressed in what we normally think of as literature. It became the ethic of the historian, illuminating works like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It became the ethic of the philosopher, informing the ideas of Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Nietzsche. And, crucially, it became the ethic of the scientist.
The shift began during the middle years of the twentieth century, when we started devoting more and more of our time and attention to the cheap, copious, and endlessly entertaining products of the first wave of electric and electronic media: radio, cinema, phonograph, television.
The electronic revolution is approaching its culmination as the computer—desktop, laptop, handheld—becomes our constant companion and the Internet becomes our medium of choice for storing, processing, and sharing information in all forms, including text.
Turing explained how the existence of programmable computers “has the important consequence that, considerations of speed apart, it is unnecessary to design various new machines to do various computing processes. They can all be done with one digital computer, suitably programmed for each case.” What that means, he concluded, is that “all digital computers are in a sense equivalent.”
Constructed of millions of interconnected computers and data banks, the Net is a Turing machine of immeasurable power, and it is, true to form, subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies.
The first information-processing machine that the Net replicated was Gutenberg’s press.
The very term we came to use to describe what we look at online—pages—emphasized the connection with printed documents.
As the cost of memory and bandwidth fell, it became possible to incorporate photographs and drawings into Web pages.
Soon, simple animations began to play online, mimicking the herky-jerky motions of the flip books, or kineographs, that were popular at the end of the nineteenth century.
The earliest sounds to be heard online were spoken words, but soon snippets of music, and then entire songs and even symphonies, were streaming through sites, at ever-higher levels of fidelity.
Finally, video came online, as the Net subsumed the technologies of cinema and television.
THE NET DIFFERS from most of the mass media it replaces in an obvious and very important way: it’s bidirectional. We can send messages through the network as well as receive them.
Most studies of media activity indicate that as Net use has gone up, television viewing has either held steady or increased.
What does seem to be decreasing as Net use grows is the time we spend reading print publications—particularly newspapers and magazines, but also books.
Because of the ubiquity of text on the Net and our phones, we’re almost certainly reading more words today than we did twenty years ago, but we’re devoting much less time to reading words printed on paper.
Once information is digitized, the boundaries between media dissolve. We replace our special-purpose tools with an all-purpose tool.
NEW MEDIUM is never an addition to an old one,” wrote McLuhan in Understanding Media, “nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”
When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium’s physical form; it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.
