READING — A DOUBLE-EDGED BLESSING OF LANGUAGE
Reading, as a means to access knowledge, has gone a long way, from loud reading to silent, and then to close reading.
1. A novel and yet powerful mean
Silent reading has more or less become something so bread-and-butter and so easily doable; we do silent reading nearly any time and any place, and on all kinds of documents on all kinds of difficulties. But when compared with the 300,000-year history of homo sapiens and 5000-year that of reading, counting from the earliest discovered trace of a writing system that is the Sumerian cuneiform, then the 1000-year history of silent reading feels much like that of a toddler.
The trace, and also the proof for the relative novelty of silent reading, could be found in the autobiographical work The Confessions of Saint Augustine, written around AD 400, where Augustine expressed his amazement at bishop Ambrose as he saw the bishop reading without moving his lips at all; the best explanation for this peculiar practice of Ambrose, in Augustine best guess, was that the man wished to preserve his voice [1]. The bafflement and the rather hilarious explanation proposed by this ancient scholar told us how uncommon silent reading was during these times, even among academia.
Indeed, just like how the children from our age start when they learn how to read, in the early days of reading, the ancient people had to read everything out loud. Reading back then was a much communal and noisy activity, instead of being solitary and tranquil like how it is nowadays.
Silent reading only began to gain popularity when the writing style scriptio continua finally got abolished entirely. Scriptio continua is a style where texts are written continuously without punctuation, diacritics or spacing, so ITSGONNABESOMETHINGLIKETHIS. And even though there were existing writing style that used punctuation, scriptio continua remained the standard for writing all the way until the XIII Century when it finally died out completely.
Scriptio continua is, at its core, a form of textual record of speech, originating from the fact that during these times the authors would say out loud the lines so a secretary could note them down, instead of writing the book by himself. The people to do the noting were mostly slaves so they could not come up with rules in writing, while the authors also did not feel the need to have rules at all because they already had full grasp of the content of their own book even without reading it.
Scriptio continua’s lack of spacing also posed the risk of mistakes when someone is asked to silent read the piece. For example, the sentence COLLECTAMEXILIOPUBEM could be understood as “collectam ex Ilio pubem” (a man from Troy) and also as “collectam exilio pubem” (a man came in exile); when the author said this line out loud, on the other hand, with the breaks between the words being there, the listeners would be able to identify which out of the 2 version was correct [2].
As it turns out, reading back then was an extremely tedious work, and for someone to do a good job of it, he needed to understand very thoroughly the context in which the text was written; and when someone did the reading, the act was more of a performance, than an act of absorbing knowledge and building up wisdom in solitary.
It was due to these inconveniences that the invention of a set of rules to optimize and unencumber the task of writing had become an absolute necessity. And this was a job for academia. Once the academic world managed to come up with a strict set of rules for the writing systems, and the punctuation, diacritics and spacing were invented and widely adopted, the practice of silent reading reached a completely new height in popularity. The rules for reading were then made into a consensual set of tangible symbols (like how a space represents a break between words) instead of word of mouth lesson, thus making it much easier to learn.
It was then that reading culture began to flourish, and so did solitary reading; this in turns paved the way for the individuals’ wisdom accumulation. Till nowadays, the highest known order of reading is close reading, a practice where the readers focus on the material so much they isolate their minds from their own sound as well as that from the surrounding environment, and even that inside their head. In this practice, the readers completely immerse themselves in the material so they can direct their thoughts on the ideas and images that the author conveyed instead of a text-to-speech version of it. Not only enables deep understanding, close reading also helps to stimulate your imagination as well as your mind for rationality and analytics.
While the benefit of close reading was indeed undeniable, and the change in writing practice had worked to pave the way for its development and popularization, the practice didn’t immediately reach popularity, as, at the time, all books were by hands and hence were extremely costly and rare. Only until the XV century were this hurdle finally overcome, as a German called Johannes Gutenberg came up with a great invention, something so great not even in a million years could the inventor have guessed the true significance of it.
Originally a goldsmith, Gutenberg was very skilled at smithing pieces of metal into shapes of letters. His idea was to install raised metal letters onto a printing surface in an arrangement resembling that of a book page, and then ink the said surface, and then put it face down on a white sheet of paper, and then have the printing press to press it evenly over the sheet. As the paper absorbed the ink, it would give us a complete book page, and for the same page to be printed again, it would only require another session of inking and pressing. And for a different page to be printed, one would only need to rearrange the types. This invention pretty much breathed a new life into silent reading, as books, for the first time, could be mass produced and thus popularized.
The consequent popularity of press-printed books or, to be more precise, the popularity of close reading as a habit was not about the readers alone. The practice of close reading also helped to create a reading culture operated on the belief that there are messages waiting for the readers to decode underneath the deliberate sophisticated, metaphorical expressions of the piece of writing, and the reader can crack those open by focusing and working patiently. Not long after Gutenberg’s invention, the late XIX and early XX century is also the period of time where humanity started to witness a generation of great authors characterized with particularly difficult to read writing styles, such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust who relied on the Stream of consciousness technique. And there was also the fracturing and disruption of traditional narrative structure: Even the thickness of a Marcel Proust’s book alone would discourage readers who couldn’t focus.
Reading, as a means to access knowledge, has gone a long way, from loud reading to silent, and then to close reading. Along with other revolutionary occurrences, the influence of close reading reached beyond the practice of reading or, at a larger scale, beyond the matter of access to knowledge. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that it was thanks to this that humanity managed to where it’s at nowadays.
2. The blessing is also the curse of the mean
However, reading is not entirely a flawless blessing. Ever since the time of Ancient Greece, Plato already had slight concerns, which were reflected in the dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus in his famed work Phaedrus. There, Socrates told a story where he implied that writing was not a good news for thinking, as it caused them to become independent on materials and neglected memory training, eventually materials would generate in humans the bad habit of being overconfident about the knowledge they possessed, while what they really possessed was just the empty husk of knowledge, so there were not much of anything valuable inside their mind [3].
While the remarks of Socrates (or Plato) on writing are in general not so correct, there were some aspects to it that were appreciable. The first was that a quite a large proportion of the modern day readers dread memorizing: we do not memorize great epic poems like our ancestor did, or other much shorter materials, as we don’t feel the need to do so because we can always take a fast look through literally anything on the internet. However, psychologist John Sweller, who spent 30 researching the matter, had concluded that humans had two types of memory: short-term and long-term, among which the long-term memory is precisely the cradle of each individual’s wisdom. Long-term memories help us link the accumulated pieces of knowledge together to create a system of knowledge, the more extensive and air-tight this system is, the greater the person’s wisdom is [4].
So to build up personal wisdom means to accumulate knowledge into our long term memory, and the only way to do so is to memorize the pieces of knowledge, so they could later be recalled and collide against each other, get linked together to form a system of knowledge in our mind. If we only kept in mind the method to look up for knowledge, then our brain would then be just full of the signposts that point to the sources of knowledge existing outside of our brain (specifically, on the internet). Humans would then fall into the dilemma of possessing a lot of knowledge but struggle to analyze and reason to sieve out the junk information while leaving actually useful knowledge.
The second appreciable point was that some of us had become completely bewitched by the culture of book-worshiping and book-hoarding instead of knowledge-seeking. Socrates (or Plato) had once again showed their transcendent wisdom as they managed to predict that humans would be more than likely to equate knowledge itself with the husk that is the books, as well as humans’ gaining the bad habit of taking pride from owning a lot of those husks.
The reason for me to say Socrates’s remarks were generally inaccurate was that it would mislead some people from today into believing that knowledge taught by word of mouth had ahead-of-time value and superior than written knowledge. The emergence of writing, silent reading and close reading, along with the universal ambition to eradicate illiteracy had led to the expansion of humankind’s knowledge pool beyond all memory capacity of humankind, as well as the specialization of the knowledge with the pool. Word-of-mouth knowledge, on the other hand, seemed to do more harm than good for the progression of humankind (we will elaborate further on this in another article).
3. The age of Internet and the rise of scanning
Marshall McLuhan in his book Understanding Media proposed that the means are the amplification of the parts of the human body. Just like how the car was an amplified version of the legs to help us move, or the plough was the amplified version of our hand to help us plough the soil. In the same work, Marshall also proposed a rather ambitious idea that these means, while providing the amplified functioning of the parts, also immobilize those parts of our own body [5]. The cars while indeed helped us move much fast and brought forth great efficiency in our mobility, it also weakened our legs as they worked much less when driving than when walking. The plough, while brought great boost in productivity the activity of ploughing, was no good news for the farmer’s health as he would just sit in the cabin all day to operate the machine.
The birth and advancement of means (cars, ploughs) is an irreversible process. Even when the users are made aware of the externalities generated by these means, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that they would accept to give up on those cutting-edge technology and the utilities they could bring to go back to the earlier times’ inconvenience.
Humankind, as the species, does not have a choice in deciding to or not to use these innovative and constantly-evolving means, because it is inevitable for us to use them. And to deal with the problems newly created by those means, we tend to invent even more new means to resolve them. For example, we resolve the health problems caused by the lack of physical activities at work by introducing new forms of after-work physical activities, instead of giving up on the non-physical (but productive) works.
Back to the case of reading, the recent emergence of the Internet had influenced reading in ways more profound than ever before, even more so than the invention of Gutenberg’s printing process. The Internet, with its nature of an unlimited and yet extremely accessible pool of information, along with the later invented social network characterized with the information not being able to remain visible without plenty of reactions. All of these working together had generated in humans a syndrome called the Fear of missing out (FOMO) [6]. It greatly influenced the way people read: scanning became the primary reading method in the age of the Internet as people had to read quickly to move on to other information, so the more and faster you read the more desirable.
Scanning in fact boasted a history and significance hardly inferior to close reading. While the ability to absorb knowledge is indeed crucial, the ability to identify knowledge worthy of absorbing is just as important. Scanning in the old times was done to quickly identify keywords so the reader could use them to identify whether the material is readworthy; however, nowadays, the mean that is scanning is gradually turning into the final goal. The same is true for the purpose of summary, which initially served as a means for readers to verify the suitability of the materials for their goals before dedicating the time to read the material in detail: has nowadays been deformed as some people consider the summary of knowledge as the knowledge itself.
Unlike books, the Facebook posts do not remain there forever for us to read: They will disappear to give their spots to another post in our endless news feed; as a result, we certainly read a lot, but it’s just once, and it’s scanning. The social network, as a means, is defining the way we read, and in turns defines the way we think, as reading always possesses an incredible power, like we discussed in part one. Or, as McLuhan would put it, it is a means that amplifies the efficiency in our collecting information, but at the same time immobilizes the processes that help build up our personal wisdom.
The Internet is incredibly convenient for looking up information. For example, we could easily find the name of a variation of Chess using unconventional pieces being a combination of different chess pieces like a rook-knight or a bishop knight, or the name of a movie or a book that we remember only a few details of; without internet it would be so much harder to find those things because there weren’t many books written about them. However, being able to find a lot of information doesn’t necessarily help our thinking. The Internet encourages us to look up pieces of information individually, separated from its system — something that should only be done as auxiliary activities; In the morning we would learn a bit about chess, another bit about quantum physics at noon, another bit about postmodernism in the evening, and another bit about intellectual property at night, all are so fresh and interesting to learn, and yet also so disjointed.
Let us together revisit the studies of psychologist John Sweller on the relationship of knowledge with long-term and short-term memory. Individuals’ intellect depends on the accumulation of long-term memory, but for short-term memory to become long-term memory, it has to undergo the stage of working memory. And according to Sweller, our minds were not designed to work on 4 different topics in such a short amount of time. What’s more, new knowledge had to be repeated without disruption in order to enter the long-term memory [7].
And lastly, various studies also pointed out that the brain is something that can reshape itself very quickly. [8] It operates the same way as a trail: the one that’s frequently tread tends to remain clear of grasses, while the one not so frequently used would quickly be overgrown by grass and then disappear entirely. The emergence of the means that promoted close reading had helped us change to create and then promote the solitary reading culture along with the practice of self-learning, while the Internet has been bringing forth changes just equally profound and intensive. But given the current state, it is difficult to know for sure what these changes will lead us to in the future.
In fact we don’t even know for sure whether close reading and wisdom accumulation is a necessity anymore, as those who only scan and have no interest in accumulating personal wisdom seem to live just as fine as anyone else in this society, where machines can just handle every problem without them doing anything.
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References:
[1] Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 114.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua
[3] Phaedrus (Oxford Worlds Classics) by Plato, trans. Robin Waterfield, 68–69.
[4]. John Sweller, Instructional Design in Technical Areas (Camberwell, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1999).
[5] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 63–70.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
[7] Tài liệu đã dẫn ở [4]. Ngoài ra có thể xem thêm về trí nhớ hiệu dụng ở Nelson Cowan, Working Memory Capacity (New York: Psychology Press, 2005).
[8] Schwartz and Begley, Mind and the Brain.
R. L. Paul, H. Goodman, and M. Merzenich, “Alterations in Mechanoreceptor Input to Brodmann’s Areas 1 and 3 of the Postcentral Hand Area of Macaca mulatta after Nerve Section and Regeneration”.
Further Reading:
Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows : What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains = the Shallows : How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. New York, N.Y., W.W. Norton, 2011.
