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Negotiating Attention: An Ecology of Reading in the Digital Age

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Title: Negotiating Attention: An Ecology of Reading in the Digital Age
Language: English
Authors: Alison M. Brady (ORCID 0000-0002-1410-2572)
Source: Educational Philosophy and Theory. 2025 57(10):942-955.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 14
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Evaluative
Descriptors: Reading, Novels, Attention, Media Adaptation, Electronic Publishing, Technology
DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2025.2486651
ISSN: 0013-1857
1469-5812
Abstract: What does it mean to read in the digital age? Undoubtedly, how we consume information has radically shifted in the so-called 'attention economy' of the modern world. Surrounded by artificial technologies that force us to be 'hyper-attentive' to endless streams of information, the idea of reading as a slow and sustained process appears to many to have been displaced. In this paper, I complicate the belief that attention in reading is threatened by digital technologies. I do so by inviting readers to think with Italo Calvino's experimental work, 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller'. This novel is precisely concerned with the nature of reading, and arose within the context of the then-burgeoning field known as the 'digital humanities'. It does not offer us a straightforwardly cautionary or celebratory rendering of reading in the digital age, but instead, showcases reading in an ecological sense -- namely, as that which has always involved (a) dynamic forms of attention, including what we might call 'hyper' as well as 'sustained' and (b) a deep and inescapable entanglement with the socio-material world. With Calvino, I argue that this ecological view better captures the complexity of reading in the digital age, insofar as it undermines the monolithic view of reading suggested in concerns surrounding these perceived threats of digitization, and thereby allows us to rethink the implied binaries between the natural and the artificial in educational practices and experiences.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2025
Accession Number: EJ1481423
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0187437655;54l01sep.25;2025Aug22.05:48;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0187437655-1">Negotiating attention: An ecology of reading in the digital age </title> <p>What does it mean to read in the digital age? Undoubtedly, how we consume information has radically shifted in the so-called 'attention economy' of the modern world. Surrounded by artificial technologies that force us to be 'hyper-attentive' to endless streams of information, the idea of reading as a slow and sustained process appears to many to have been displaced. In this paper, I complicate the belief that attention in reading is threatened by digital technologies. I do so by inviting readers to think with Italo Calvino's experimental work, 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller'. This novel is precisely concerned with the nature of reading, and arose within the context of the then-burgeoning field known as the 'digital humanities'. It does not offer us a straightforwardly cautionary or celebratory rendering of reading in the digital age, but instead, showcases reading in an ecological sense – namely, as that which has always involved (a) dynamic forms of attention, including what we might call 'hyper' as well as 'sustained' and (b) a deep and inescapable entanglement with the socio-material world. With Calvino, I argue that this ecological view better captures the complexity of reading in the digital age, insofar as it undermines the monolithic view of reading suggested in concerns surrounding these perceived threats of digitization, and thereby allows us to rethink the implied binaries between the natural and the artificial in educational practices and experiences.</p> <p>Keywords: digital humanities; attention; ecological approaches in education; Calvino</p> <hd id="AN0187437655-2">Introduction</hd> <p>In <emph>The Ecology of Attention</emph>, Citton ([<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref1">18</reflink>]) discusses the so-called 'attention economy' which posits attention as a scarce commodity persistently depleted by an overload of information in the modern world. This particular rendering of attention is intimately connected to issues around technology, and related questions as to the changing nature of being human in the (post-)digital age. Concerns here centre not only on how our attention is 'manipulated' by digital devices, but also the extent to which we are 'losing' the capacity for deep attention. Indeed, for many working both within and beyond education, technology has become a 'weapon of mass distraction' (Citton, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref2">18</reflink>], p. 33), depleting our attention as well as limiting our capacity to disengage from digital enthralments, even momentarily. Rather than simply calling for schools to help students adapt to this new reality, there is often a deep sense that something fundamentally 'human' is being lost in this new technological regime.</p> <p>In this paper, I explore these concerns in relation to the practices of reading.[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref3">1</reflink>] By this, I am not explicitly referring to arguments around schools' responsibilities to prepare students for this ever-changing technological landscape in which new forms of reading are made available. Nor am I discussing the salience of these concerns in terms of <emph>what</emph> we read—the fears that attentional vectors are nefariously manipulating us into ascribing to fake news, for instance. Rather, my focus here is on discerning two main understandings of reading that are at play within these debates, and by extension, two models of attention they suggest.</p> <p>The first concerns the idea that we cannot avoid reading nowadays because information-bombardment has become an intimate aspect of our daily existence. One response to this is to ensure that we are equipping students with skills that enable more efficient digestion of information, including the capacity for 'hyper-attention' (Hayles, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref4">27</reflink>])—for instance, the ability to rapidly switch focus between different information streams, or perhaps to use of artificial intelligence tools for the purposes of mitigating the intensive labour and time required to read everything in full. In some circles, such approaches are celebrated, but they are also cautioned against. Indeed, a second position argues that reading is not simply the quick digestion of information but involves a slow and sustained process irreducible to such techniques (e.g. Birkerts, [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref5">7</reflink>]; Waters, [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref6">48</reflink>]).</p> <p>Both understandings are in part underpinned by a relatively intuitive set of assumptions around what being human (in the digital age) actually means—i.e. an autonomous, conscious subject who serves as the locus of agency engaging with the inert, material world, and who can therefore be thought of as extricable from their (digital) environment (e.g. Gourlay, [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref7">24</reflink>]). In positing the human as a 'user' of digital tools for the purposes of knowledge extension, or indeed, as somehow corruptible by digital regimes, the human is positioned as distinct from rather than as intimately and inescapably bound up with their digital environment. It is on the basis of such distinctions that dualisms between 'artificial' and 'natural' are also implied—for instance, in the contrasting use of artificial rather than human intelligence in broader practices of study.</p> <p>But rather than summarily dismissing either position, I will suggest that it is more accurate to render reading <emph>ecologically</emph>, and that in doing so, we avoid any monolithic sense that overlooks (a) the dynamic forms of attention that orient reading practices, including what we might call 'hyper' as well as 'sustained' and (b) the socio-material entanglement that any event of reading involves. In order to explore this, I will invite readers to think with Italo Calvino's experimental novel, <emph>If on a Winter's Night a Traveller,</emph> which at various points (and also in the metatheoretical sense) is precisely concerned with the nature of reading in ecological terms. As I discuss later, the wider context surrounding the novel showcases our inevitable entanglement with technology, and it is in being sensitive to this that an ecological understanding of attention might also be offered—namely, that in the context of reading, a hierarchy of attention is insufficient because attention is always conditioned by the material context in which it emerges.</p> <p>Indeed, Calvino's novel presents a heterogeneous understanding of reading practices, with an acute awareness of how such practices are shaped by and embedded within particular situations, thereby complicating the binary views underpinning debates about reading and attention in the digital age. By this I refer to the binaries between modes of attention and orientations (e.g. speed- <emph>or</emph> slow-reading, or indeed hyper- <emph>or</emph> sustained attention) as well as the hard and fast distinctions between the digital and the human. Before exploring this, let us outline these debates more fully, particularly as it relates to the 'grand mediological displacement' (Carr, [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref8">17</reflink>]) that readers seemingly experience in the digital age.</p> <hd id="AN0187437655-3">The death of the literary brain</hd> <p>With the influx of digital technologies, there are, perhaps, many of us who wish for a simpler time, a sentiment that is not confined to 'older' generations alone.[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref9">2</reflink>] This nostalgia for the pre-digital age in education arises for many reasons, in some ways heightening during the Covid-19 pandemic and the mass movement to online instruction. In his impassioned plea against online education, Agamben ([<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref10">3</reflink>]) saw the digital as a threat to the future of embodied co-presence of teachers and students in the classroom, described as the 'cancellation from life of any experience of the senses as well as the loss of gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen'. Whilst the influx of technology has endangered 'studenthood' for some time, Agamben specifically polemicises the 'dictatorship of telematics' and the 'technological barbarism' of our age. One might easily imagine that his concerns here do not merely relate to the temporary fact of having to run online classes, but the wider influences of technology in both teaching as well as research in the university today.</p> <p>Many of Agamben's sentiments echo the fear of the so-called 'grand mediological displacement' that relates to reading practices specifically, not only in terms of <emph>what</emph> we read online but <emph>how</emph>, a fear that has also manifested in the growing panic related to AI use amongst university students (Butson & Spronken-Smith, [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref11">11</reflink>]; Crompton & Burke, [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref12">19</reflink>]). Whilst the former concern might be solvable through institutional rules and practices—for instance, cultivating critical literacy skills that enable greater awareness of the limitations of AI-produced information (e.g. Wandera, [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref13">47</reflink>]) - the latter is altogether more complex. Indeed, one of the challenges here relates to what the digital does to our <emph>capacities</emph> to read—and if we consider technology to be a 'weapon of mass distraction' (Citton, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref14">18</reflink>], p. 33), then in what sense might it disable us from actually reading in the way we conventionally understand it - namely, as a slow and often solitary process that involves a deep sense of immersion with a text (Brady, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref15">9</reflink>])?</p> <p>As Carr ([<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref16">17</reflink>]) quite crudely argues in his popular book <emph>The Shallows</emph>, there is a common belief that the internet is, in fact, 'making us stupid', which for Carr specifically connects to what he terms the 'death of the literary brain'. Reading, for Carr, is above all else a meditative act that replenishes the mind, but only insofar as we are able to disengage from external stimuli in order to immerse ourselves in the flow of words. Since any suspension of time is constantly interrupted by digital distractions, readers are prevented from fully availing of the imaginative riches within texts. Perhaps this helps to explain the qualitative differences between reading a physical book and reading from a computer—a physical book does not 'tempt' us with hyperlinks, does not encourage us to continually switch back and forth between different streams of information, does not lead us down seemingly bottomless rabbit holes.</p> <p>Carr's ideas here are reminiscent of the so-called 'slow movements' seen across various consumptive practices—from gastronomy to tourism to cinema to the very design of cities themselves - many of which overtly resist the logic of efficiency underpinning digital life (Capatti, [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref17">16</reflink>]; Knox, [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref18">29</reflink>]). Although criticised for implying an unhelpful set of binaries (real/inauthentic, traditional/faddish, and indeed, artificial/natural), and for also perpetuating a neo-Luddite mentality dismissive of insurmountable technological developments, they speak to a growing trend that harkens back to a time when technology did not so fully integrate itself into our lives (Morris, [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref19">33</reflink>]; Parkins, [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref20">37</reflink>]). Similar ideas have also taken hold in relation to everyday reading practices. For instance, some years ago Waters ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref21">48</reflink>]) was already decrying the so-called 'reading crisis' in modern society, arguing that young people no longer read (itself an empirically dubious claim) because of the way reading is taught—i.e. through 'artificial' approaches such as 'speed-reading', which aim to get through a text in the quickest, most efficient way possible. For Waters ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref22">48</reflink>], p. 6) these approaches reduce the task of reading to 'large-scale bureaucratic analyses of literature', in contrast to the relatively intuitive claim that one must read an entire text slowly and fully in order to understand it. Birkerts ([<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref23">6</reflink>], p. 6) similarly laments how the '"feel" of literary engagement is altered' in the digital age for this reason, where 'the old act of slowly reading a serious book [has become] an elegiac exercise'. In a later piece, Birkerts ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref24">7</reflink>]) distinguishes between what he terms the 'analytic' and the 'contemplative' mind along these lines. Since the analytic mind is 'transitive' and goal-oriented, one is encouraged to use of digital tools such as artificial 'thought machines' to gather, sort and isolate factual information. The contemplative mind, on the other hand, is 'intransitive', positing reflection as an end-in-itself, a 'means of testing and refining [our] relation to the world', and is primarily concerned with insight over truth. It is on the basis of this that Birkerts argues for not only the difference between engaging with literature versus sidestepping this through the use of artificial tools, but also the radical opposition between the two experiences.</p> <p>What Waters ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref25">48</reflink>], p. 8) calls 'slow reading' too involves contemplative practices with the text that produce a 'deeply profound quiet that can overwhelm your soul, [in which] you can lose yourself in thought for an immeasurable moment of time'. Indeed, there is a unique 'wisdom' that literature affords us as a serendipitous encounter, and just as urban spaces designed with slowness in mind seek to preserve opportunities for such forms of encounter (Brady, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref26">9</reflink>]), the reading of a physical text, without the endless distractions of hyperlinks, also affords the reader similar opportunities. 'Slow reading' thus prioritises a particular model of attention, what might be called 'sustained' and 'deep'. Think: pouring over pages, relishing every word, losing track of time. In contrast to this is <emph>hyper</emph> attention, characterised by the speed-reading techniques that Waters discourages—'switching focus rapidly among different tasks... seeking a high level of stimulation [with] a low tolerance for boredom' (Hayles, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref27">27</reflink>], p. 187). Instinctively, one might equate this to the form of attention that is encouraged by digital interfaces, insofar as online sources often encourage us to flit between different information sources through the use of hyperlinks, an act that is impossible when reading physical texts. Hyper-attention is also fostered through the use of GenAI tools and their ability to quickly and efficiently summarise texts at the expense of slower forms of reading. Indeed, although writing prior to the burgeoning use of such tools amongst university students, the defence of 'slow reading' here speaks directly to the concerns around how AI has not only radically altered the ways we read, but has in fact disincentivised us from <emph>really</emph> reading in the first place—at least in the sense that both Waters and Birkerts advocate.[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref28">3</reflink>]</p> <p>When it comes to reading particularly challenging texts, it may be tempting to say that hyper-attention is above all ineffective - it appears to lack any intentional directedness or success conditions, and is thus more akin to what Lewis and Hyland ([<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref29">30</reflink>], p. 38) describe as 'skimming along a flat surface that lacks peaks and valleys'. By extension, the digital environment that surrounds reading practices might also be thought of as problematic insofar as it encourages hyper-attention at the expense of something more sustained, an argument that is often heard in common parlance around the digitization of modern life (Citton, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref30">18</reflink>]). Implicitly, these claims imply that there is something 'artificial' about reading in this context, or at least, that reading as it naturally occurs is threatened by artificial tools. But whilst there may be some truth to this claim, we might also take the point that Hayles ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref31">27</reflink>]) argues—namely, that whilst the ability to consider complex problems in a single medium is indeed important, so too is the ability to navigate between multiple foci within a text. In what sense, then, might we argue for a more pluralistic understanding of reading instead?</p> <p>Without denying the significant ontological differences between reading a physical book as opposed to navigating large streams of information online, it would nevertheless be misguided to suggest that the practices of reading have <emph>ever</emph> been fully disentangled from artificial devices in this broader sense. Indeed, although it might seem obvious that hyper-attention is, in fact, a more superficial and reductive avenue for learning, 'operative in the way our digital screens stimulate, activate and structure our attentional capacity' (Citton, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref32">18</reflink>], p. 143), there are plenty of examples of 'devices' that have always aimed to make our experience of reading more attentionally efficient—chapters, paragraphs, Table of Contents. Relatedly, the attentional orientation deployed in reading has never been <emph>solely</emph> slow and sustained, in conflict with or threatened by the hyper-attentiveness we experience in online settings. In their discussion on study, which could also be extended to the practices of scholarly reading as well as reading in a more everyday sense, Lewis and Hyland ([<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref33">30</reflink>], p. 34) speak of how in study, one is experiencing something in-between 'summiting' and 'browsing'—namely, <emph>drifting</emph>. Retrospectively, reading seems like 'summiting'—we can see very clearly where we started and the path we took to the peak of understanding, we know how to guide others along the same path—in other words, study for all intents and purposes appears to be a sustained endeavour. In contrast to this is 'browsing'—that which is wholly incidental, and which seems to be more characteristic of our engagement with digital texts. And yet, when we are 'lost in the ritual of study', where we experience the dual temporalities of slowing and acceleration, reading is not a linear process but a 'rhythmic <emph>driftin</emph>g back and forth'. As Agamben ([<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref34">2</reflink>]) himself remarks:</p> <p>Those who are acquainted with long hours spent roaming among books when every citation, every codex, every initial encountered seems to open a new path, immediately left aside at the next encounter or who have experienced [its] labyrinthine allusiveness... know that not only can study have no rightful end, but does not even desire one.</p> <p>Might this also be true of the hyper-attention that characterises the practice of reading in online settings? Despite similarly bemoaning the 'rapid erosion' of our attention due to the prevalence of artificial tools, with literature serving as the antidote to this, Birkerts ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref35">7</reflink>]) too speaks of 'swerves' in our engagement with literature, the 'flickering awareness' that circumscribes that experience rather than a full punctuation into the density of the text—unwittingly, perhaps, describing something that is not dissimilar to our engagement with the digital world.</p> <p>The arguments that favour slow and sustained attention in reading are often based on the premise that reading entails a solitary actor, in a moment of suspension from the material and the social world, including many of its digital distractions. And yet, as Ingold ([<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref36">28</reflink>]) discusses, reading rarely consists of a solitary reader in this sense, insofar as one is not simply transported to some immaterial, 'dream-like realm' because reading is always in some way collective as well as embodied (Gourlay, [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref37">24</reflink>], p. 126). And although Ingold ([<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref38">28</reflink>]) maintains a sharp distinction between reading from digital versus physical texts, it is worth noting that reading on digital devices is also physical (rather than simply virtual), as Gourlay ([<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref39">24</reflink>], p. 127) helpfully describes:</p> <p>Although the digital text does not explicitly show the trajectory of the writer's hand, hands have nonetheless been at work to produce it, tapping on a keyboard, handling paper books, writing sticky notes, writing in the margins, and so on. The act of writing a digital text remains intensely physical, and intertwined with the analogue, material world – the body has not been removed from writing, but is simply less directly evident.</p> <p>Like Lewis and Hyland ([<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref40">30</reflink>]) concept of 'drifting', Ingold ([<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref41">28</reflink>]), too, discusses the idea of reading as 'wayfaring' rather than 'navigating', a metaphor I will return to below. Whilst the navigator has a complete view of the entire territory beforehand, on the basis of which he charts a course, the wayfarer, by contrast, relies solely on the path that has been etched by others before them. In following in their footsteps, the wayfarer reconstructs the journey as he embarks on it—the path, in this sense, is emergent rather than pre-planned. Similarly, even when we appear to be in the act of sustained attention, we are not simply engaging with the text but always in some sense moving <emph>beyond</emph> and <emph>around</emph> it - in our search for deeper meanings, in the development of unexpected thought processes and habits. Sustained attention is therefore not just a matter of sitting still in deep immersion, but exudes a kind of energy not dissimilar to what we characterise as hyper-attention—the excitement when a passage resonates with us and we are moved to reflect on relational aspects of the text beyond what the author intended, or when the text emerges before us in a flash of understanding and connection, inviting us into new imaginary spaces where we experience the world around us in radically different ways.</p> <p>Thus, the idea that reading is a sustained activity is now superseded by digital distractions is questionable, in part because of the various forms of attention it has always involved, including the hyper-attention encouraged in the digital world. Instead, what is needed is what might be thought of as an <emph>ecological</emph> conception of reading which appreciates both the dynamic forms of attention that are part of reading practices as well as its embeddedness within the socio-material world. In order to navigate ourselves towards this position, let us first turn to 'Calvino's new novel' and what it offers us in terms of rethinking reading along these lines.</p> <hd id="AN0187437655-4">'Calvino's new novel' and humanistic computing</hd> <p>Calvino's ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref42">14</reflink>]) <emph>If on a Winter's Night a Traveller</emph> very much centres on the nature of reading. In presenting a radically heterogeneous and situated picture of what it means to read, it also supports the ecological picture this paper seeks to advance. In simple terms, <emph>Traveller</emph> is a story (if one could call it that) of a reader's encounter with 'Calvino's new novel', who discovers he has purchased a faulty copy and is faced with a series of interruptions consisting of the beginnings of other, incomplete stories, each written in their own style and genre as if by entirely different authors, each concerning different social, political and historical contexts (both real and imaginary). Sandwiched between these stories are the experiences of the Reader, initially the very person reading the book at that moment in time (as if this were a 'Choose Your Own Adventure Story'), later a third person character (the 'Reader') who searches for the missing novels. The Reader encounters various other readers, writers and teachers of literature, who represent different reading practices and approaches. Importantly, these approaches cannot be easily shoehorned into the typical ways we might categorise reading (e.g. reading for pleasure vs. scholarship). This is because within each approach a vast assortment of practices is at play, i.e. (micro-)gestures stemming from intimately connected exercises, such as the art of positioning oneself comfortably in preparation for reading. On top of these are constant interactions with the socio-material environment, including digital distractions as well as interruptions from others and from wandering thought processes that persistently move the reader beyond the page.</p> <p>Sometime before publishing <emph>Traveller</emph>, Calvino was part of the experimental Oulipo group in Paris, who developed 'constrained writing' techniques inspired by mathematical and geometric models (Andrews, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref43">1</reflink>]; Botta, [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref44">8</reflink>]; Duncan, [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref45">21</reflink>]). One of its founders—Raymond Queneau—famously likened their process to 'rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape'. In the production of works of fiction, the Oulipo group imposed strict, systematic restrictions on their writing. For example, Perec's novel <emph>A Void</emph> employed a 'lipogram constraint' and was written entirely without using the letter 'e', or Calvino's own work in <emph>Invisible Cities</emph> which was structured around a pre-determined mathematical matrix.[<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref46">4</reflink>] The purpose of these constraints was in part to emphasise the role of the reader rather than the writer in narrative construction, and the group was also inspired by wider developments in technology, which began to take seriously the suggestion that creative literary scholarship could continue even if the 'human' is replaced by machines.</p> <p>As Shephard ([<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref47">42</reflink>]) discusses, it was during this time that the 'digital humanities' was establishing itself as an academic field, even though the term seems to be a kind of buzzword that is relatively recent. The term itself might seem oxymoronic, for surely there is a distinction to be made between the 'digital' and the 'human', and by extension, the 'artificial' and the 'natural'? Yet, there is a long history of computer-assisted scholarship that can be traced back as early as the 1950s when many literary scholars began to use technological tools for well-established critical practices.[<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref48">5</reflink>] Both then and now, many other scholars were concerned about complex humanities research being reduced to computerization, but at the same time, there were also many advocates who believed that technology would lead to a 'radical improvement on existing humanities work by its own standards' (Shepherd, [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref49">42</reflink>], p. 6).[<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref50">6</reflink>]</p> <p>For the Oulipo group specifically, computerization was not simply about helping readers to better understand and engage with literary texts, performing a similar function to how GenAI tools might be thought of in some circles today. Rather, it serves as a means by which texts could in fact be produced. In this sense, the Oulipo sought to extend this scientific-humanistic intermingling by actively experimenting with technological-aesthetic approaches not merely as an end but as the very means by which to create fiction. In his 1967 interview <emph>Cybernetics and Ghosts</emph>, Calvino similarly dissuades us from taking a dichotomous view of the digital and the human, which for him centres on the perceived finitude of technology versus the infinite creativity of human thought. Writing, he ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref51">12</reflink>], p. 22) argues, inevitably occurs within finite structures, and yet new potentialities can nevertheless emerge in spite of this:</p> <p>Literature is a combinational game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material... a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we are working but has slipped in from another level.</p> <p>For Calvino ([<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref52">13</reflink>]), technology is not simply a neutral utensil but is inherently <emph>speculative</emph>, an idea that is reflected in posthumanist renderings of the digital as not merely an inert 'tool' but always an extension of, or at least intimately entangled with, human practices (Gourlay, [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref53">25</reflink>]). Although we might reasonably assume technology works within constraints that the creative human mind can transcend, Calvino and the Oulipo group more broadly demonstrated the possibility of imaginative fiction flourishing despite restrictions. Crucially, we might characterise their work as <emph>playful</emph>—not aiming to 'reify' human thought but to play with form and structure, with a radical openness to what could be produced despite the author, in essence, disappearing. And whilst these constraints mainly refer to the art of <emph>writing</emph> the novel, they also say something interesting about the practices of reading, too.</p> <p>At one point in Calvino's ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref54">14</reflink>], p. 186) novel, we meet Lotaria, a student of literature who offers this description of how she approaches the task of reading:</p> <p>[Lotaria] explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. 'That way I can have an already completed reading at hand', Lotaria says, 'with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of the frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests in my critical study. Naturally, at the highest frequencies the list records countless articles, pronouns, particles, but I don't pay them any attention. I head straight for the words with the richest meaning; they can give me a precise notion of the book'.</p> <p>As Shepherd ([<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref55">42</reflink>]) discusses, there is some ambivalence as to whether <emph>Traveller</emph> could be described as an Oulipo novel, one that encourages us to embrace the role of technology in literature, or indeed, to be wary of these developments. When disclosing his own plan for writing the novel, Calvino ([<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref56">15</reflink>]) certainly constrained its overall structure through a very sophisticated geometric pattern. And yet, as Shepherd argues, he appears to have become fatigued with the focus on form over (author-centred) content. Instead, <emph>Traveller</emph> can be read as a reaction to, rather than an extension of, computer-assisted literary scholarship, most notably the work of Mario Alinei.[<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref57">7</reflink>] In basic terms, Alinei believed that by using computers to group words in literature in order of frequency, one could unlock the ways in which language changes in accordance with important developments in wider society. As Shepherd convincingly shows us, Lotaria's approach was very much modelled on Alinei's work—indeed, the list of words she ends up producing was, in fact, taken directly from one of his projects.</p> <p>Perhaps in that sense Calvino's ironic presentation of Lotaria suggests some level of disappointment with the influences of digitization on literature and literary scholarship, inviting us therefore to similarly dismiss the 'artificial' method of reading she demonstrates. Indeed, as I discuss elsewhere (Brady, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref58">9</reflink>]), it is easy to relegate Lotaria's method as insufficient insofar as it sidesteps the labour of reading, much as we might accuse students of in their use of GenAI tools. At the same time, might we also read her approach as something less controversial - a caricature of literary critique, perhaps, which too involves the recognition of patterns in order to make claims about the relationship between the text and its wider context? Indeed, as Mazzoni ([<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref59">32</reflink>], p. 65) argues, for Lotaria, 'the text becomes a microcosm of intertextual relations, a model in scale of the literary network of influences and determinations'. In this sense, whilst Lotaria's approach might initially seem similar to the limiting use of artificial tools and as dubious for that very reason, it nevertheless makes visible common 'analogic' practices that are encouraged in scholarly reading, further implying that the binary therefore between the 'artificial' and the 'human' is not as sharp as we might like to think.</p> <p>As playfully demonstrated in the opening of the book, however, reading is not merely an orientation that is found in the (technical) transaction between the reader, the author and the text as in Lotaria's method, but is always fundamentally <emph>embodied—</emph>i.e. in interaction with the wider socio-material context in it occurs. Indeed, a second criticism we might raise of Lotaria's method (and by extension, students who sidestep the labour of reading through the use of GenAI) is the extent to which she misses out on the physical and embodied elements that come from a sustained reading of the text in full. And yet, it is within this very embodiment that, for Calvino, moments of distraction become so pertinent, as well as the kind of wayfaring that Ingold describes. He ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref60">14</reflink>], pp. 3–4) begins:</p> <p>You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel... Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want you to watch TV!' Raise your voice – they won't hear you otherwise – 'I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!' .... Find a comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the desk chair, on the hammock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally. Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find...</p> <p>These moments in preparing oneself for reading are not just physical, of course. They are also accompanied by various 'gnawing shadows'—of your initial expectations and intentions for reading this particular book, of the sudden reminders of the books you haven't read and have been planning to read for ages, the new books that await you, the old ones that have been cast aside—and, suddenly, after some time, the fact you seem to have <emph>drifted away</emph> for more time than you had initially planned. Reading, it seems, is so often like this—amidst a complex interplay of human and non-human actors, it facilitates an entry not only into the world of <emph>one</emph> particular book but all the books that are related to this in memory, an experience in attention that at times wayfaring and multiplicitous, at other times sustained and individuated.</p> <p>This dual notion of sustained- and hyper-attention also appears towards the end of the novel, when we meet seven 'readers' who offer an equally rich description of <emph>everything</emph> that reading can involve. One reader is unable to read more than a few lines, which shows themselves to be whole universes that their mind inevitably starts to explore. Another feels reading is 'discontinuous and fragmentary', their mind honing in on 'minimal segments' of semantically dense linguistic forms on the physical page that they are unable to detach themselves from. Another digs between the words 'to discern what is outlined in the distance'. A fourth reader cannot help but see a scattered landscape of the books 'without a thread that ties them together', while a fifth sees all books as the sum of everything they have read. These rich descriptions of reading not only point to the interrelationship of different forms of attention in reading, but also showcase how the practice of reading is not something monolithic that can be easily quantified or pinpointed, since it always relies on an embeddedness within the complex socio-material world. What is offered here is not a typical picture of the solitary reader completely engrossed in their novels in the library or the café. In many ways, it is not so dissimilar to the kind of hyper-attention we seem to especially experience in our interactions with the digital world. Indeed, each description speaks to distinct and yet overlapping ways of experiencing literature, a radical heterogeneity that not only relates to forms and genres, but within the various micro-practices and their related gestures, as fundamentally embodied act embedded within a wider socio-material ecology that conditions these dynamic forms of attention.</p> <hd id="AN0187437655-5">Towards an ecology of reading</hd> <p>In offering a catalogue of reading practices, Calvino is not simply taking a relativistic view but showcasing the vast heterogeneity of practices and environments through which we inevitably engage with books. In this sense, Calvino's catalogue supports the idea that, rather than being threatened by the hyper-attention encouraged in the digital age, reading has always entailed some element of this, and in order to appreciate this, it is best understood <emph>ecologically.</emph> I turn here to Schildermans ([<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref61">39</reflink>]) discussion of the university in terms of an ecology of study practices, since this serves as a good model upon which to think about reading in both scholarly as well as a more everyday sense.</p> <p>For Schildermans ([<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref62">39</reflink>], p. 19), an ecological approach to (university) study foregrounds 'interdependency (instead of compartmentalization), indeterminacy (instead of fixed goals), generativity (instead of planned productivity) and mutual co-becoming (instead of exchange)' with acute sensitivity to the concrete and symbiotic ways in which human and non-human actors interact. As with Stengers ([<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref63">44</reflink>]), he argues that practices are local, always partially and temporarily enacted, existing in-between 'totalizing social... [and] individualistic ontologies'. Drawing on Haraway's ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref64">26</reflink>]) concept of a 'cat's cradle', Schildermans thinks of practices as ways of creating interlinking patterns that then necessarily co-exist and connect in mutually constitutive ways, even where there are tensions between them. As an approach, an ecological understanding of reading practices in this vein does not seek to debunk or to override these tensions (as is the case with those who might advocate slow, sustained attention over hyper-attention). Whilst of course, it may seem intuitive to claim that sustained attention and hyper-attention are in competition with one another, thinking of both as part of a wider ecology allows for an appreciation of the ways in which we negotiate between them in the context of reading.</p> <p>What might be suggested then is not simply an ecology of reading in the sense of the varied practices that co-constitute what reading means concretely, but also an ecology of attention as distinct from how we conventionally understand our diminishing capacity to read in the digital age (Citton, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref65">18</reflink>]). But rather than thinking of attention as a resource that is depleted or replenished through transactions between the individual and their surroundings, understanding it ecologically appreciates the extent to which attention is (a) collective (since what we pay attention to is shaped by social valorisations of what is worth noticing); (b) joint (in terms of how attention centres on things that have been 'pointed out' to us by other people); and (c) individuating (in relation to the times when we are fully immersed within the task at hand, suspended from social relations). Importantly, the attention in this sense is never one 'thing' but must instead be understood in interaction with the 'ensemble of scientific, political, environmental, social and mental ecologies' that surround us (Citton, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref66">18</reflink>], p. 31), including our embodiment within the socio-material world.</p> <p>In certain camps in literacy studies, ecological approaches have burgeoned in relatively recent years, which, as Nichols ([<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref67">35</reflink>], p. 171) defines 'generally signals an inclusive, holistic orientation'. These set themselves apart from the dominant cognitive psychological approaches that see reading mainly in terms of 'information-processing' (Neirouz, [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref68">34</reflink>], p. 262), which present an overly mechanistic view of what it means to read.[<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref69">8</reflink>] Insofar as gaining knowledge does not simply involve a singular event or point of entry but exists 'in various forms and interactive dimensions' (Neirouz, [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref70">34</reflink>], p. 261), an ecological view promotes the idea of reading as 'what happens in distributed networks and assemblages of both [the] human and non-human', helpfully described by Nichols ([<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref71">35</reflink>], p. 109) as follows:</p> <p>In a literacy event, the book can be considered as part of an assemblage which also comprises the human actors who select, carry, handle, process, talk about and otherwise interact... Material and discursive qualities of the book promote and even compel particular activities... Conventional book pages have to be caught between finger and thumb... on a digital tablet, pages must be swiped... thus [calling] on the body to respond. Books may also attract other objects to the assemblage such as the easel on which a 'big book' is displayed. The assemblage of book, easel, teacher's chair and teacher operates as an attractor to bring an assemblage of children into place on the floor.</p> <p>In this model, reading occurs within environments that are already 'saturated with texts' (Syverson, [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref72">45</reflink>]), as opposed to the typical view of reading solitary act concerning a direct relationship between the reader and an (inert) book. This is not to say it does not involve elements of what Citton ([<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref73">18</reflink>]) calls 'individuating attention'—namely, moments of enthrallment with a text calling for our sustained attention, whereby the world (often quite literally) recedes into the background. And yet:</p> <p>... even when I seem to be alone looking at the page of a book... this is the result of a very complex inter-play of... social relations within the apparently isolated relationship that my eyes maintain with the page (Citton, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref74">18</reflink>], p. 83).</p> <p>In this sense, reading is inescapably collective as well as material. Importantly, when Calvino offers his catalogue of reading practices, these are not 'options' to choose from. Rather, these point to elements that are present in all manner of reading, understood as an entanglement with materialities both beyond and within the endeavour itself—sometimes Lotaria's crude and determined searches for patterns, sometimes a joyfully useless endeavour, sometimes an outright subversion, sometimes a pinpointed focus, a wandering, a memory, still and slow, hyper and neurotic—sometimes all of these and more, at the same time.</p> <hd id="AN0187437655-6">Afterword: Of what use is a map?</hd> <p>To conclude, then, this paper has argued for an acknowledgement of reading as a practice that is embedded within a wider socio-material ecology and that inevitably involves the negotiation of between different forms of attention therein. The reasonably valid concerns about the possibility and experiences of reading in the digital age is underpinned by an altogether different assumption, however—namely, that what was once 'natural' for humans engaging in such practices has been and continues to be eroded by our deployment of artificial tools, which in turn threaten our capacity to read attentively. As I have tried to show throughout, this assumption is based on a misguided understanding of what it means to be a human engaged in these very practices in the first place. In positing the reader as a solitary actor fully immersed in the sustained practice of reading, the wider socio-material context is suspended, and a dualism between the natural (human) and the artificial (digital/material) is introduced. This dualism has paved the way for the argument that our 'natural' orientation towards reading and related learning practices has now been supplanted by artificial distractions, tools that disincentivise us from engaging in these practices uninterruptedly.</p> <p>But reading has never been (solely) this. Instead, it inevitably involves not simply the <emph>interjection</emph> of artificial materials but is, in fact, <emph>conditioned by</emph> this very relationship. Indeed, the book itself is a technological device of sorts, without which the act of reading in this sense could not ensue. Moreover, reading has always involved hyper-attentiveness, or indeed, what Birkerts ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref75">7</reflink>], p. 35) describes as 'fractured attention'. In fact, as I will now discuss, it is precisely this sense of hyper-attentiveness that we might advocate for, insofar as it points to an idea of reading that, in my view, Birkerts and other pre-digital proponents wish to protect—namely, reading as a process of (inefficient) wandering.</p> <p>Indeed, it is not that those who advocate slow reading in the digital age are wrong, nor that we can deny the distinct experiences between reading a physical text versus reading online. But perhaps the target of this critique can be rethought along these lines. In this short afterward, I will reflect on the idea that the issue here is logic of efficiency similarly promoted through 'learnificiation' (Biesta, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref76">4</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref77">5</reflink>]) rather than these experiences as a disentanglement of means and ends. I do so by engaging with a 'cartographic' image of reading and the extent to which this might support ecological understandings of this and related practices in education.</p> <p>A central metaphor in Calvino's <emph>If on a Winter's Night a Traveller</emph> is the idea that reading is like travelling. The analogy of 'maps' in education is certainly not new or unique. In the <emph>Child and the Curriculum</emph>, where Dewey deliberates on the relationship between learning as a set of planned activities and learning as something enacted in the classroom, he (2011, p. 45) discusses the idea of the map as follows:</p> <p>The map does not take the place of an actual journey... [but is] a summary, an arranged and orderly view of previous experiences serves as a guide to future experience; [giving] direction, [facilitating] control; preventing useless wandering.... Through the map every new traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of the results of other's exploration without... the wanderings which he himself would be obliged to repeat.</p> <p>Dewey's map, it seems, is a technology that serves to <emph>prevent</emph> wandering, in contrast to Calvino's traveller who seems to flourish precisely in the fact of getting lost. There is nothing wrong with the 'map'– indeed, as Calvino himself remarks, there are always particular constraints in reading and in writing that one must abide by if they are to produce anything intelligible, and yet those constraints, just as the map, cannot pre-determine the experience one has whilst wandering.</p> <p>In a similar vein, Masschelein ([<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref78">31</reflink>], p. 44) discusses the idea of walking as comparable to 'opening one's eyes... taking a new look' rather than 'arriving at a <emph>particular</emph> perspective or vision'. By this, Masschelein is referring to the idea of walking as a renewal of attention to the things around us, rather than the education of one's gaze, where the subject learns to see things from a more critical, emancipated perspective. Whilst the latter is central to the intentions of critical pedagogy, where the purpose is to enable a more enlightened view of the world by (in part) being aware of larger perspectives and one's own positionality, walking occurs in the <emph>midst</emph> of the world and requires a renewal of our attention towards what is there before us—that is, the entire <emph>ecology</emph> of things in which we are situated. This, for Masschelein, opens us up to the opportunity to displace our gaze and to enable transformative experiences. Importantly, with walking, the road 'imposes itself on us... [commanding] our gaze', invoking us to relate to what is immediately present before us. This is distinct from taking an 'aerial' view which surveys the world in a way that puts our perspective at the centre. This relates to the ways in which we conventionally put the 'solitary human' as the locus of agency in the act of reading rather than fully appreciating how reading occurs in the midst of this wider ecology, an idea that reminds us of Ingold's distinctions between navigation and wayfaring. For Masschelein, '[m]apping is then not about reading and ordering or re-presenting, but about... "cutting a road through"'.</p> <p>In Calvino's novel, however, reading is in fact more akin to walking. Indeed, reading is that which emerges and is embedded within the present moment, always in relation to the socio-material ecology in which it occurs, and where although we are in some ways guided by the gestures of the author, we are nevertheless free to 'roam'. Learning, too, might be understood in a similar vein. As several authors have argued elsewhere (e.g. Biesta, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref79">4</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref80">5</reflink>], Lewis & Hyland, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref81">30</reflink>]; Selwyn, [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref82">40</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref83">41</reflink>]), the issue with our current deployment of artificial tools (including but not exclusively GenAI) relates to what Biesta describes as 'learnification'—namely, the assumption that they can serve as the means to achieve particular predetermined ends or (to use educational terminology) 'outcomes'. By thinking of artificiality not as distinct from learning but as part of its wider ecology, what might be possible instead?</p> <p>An ecological understanding encapsulates a sense of reading, and indeed learning, as 'wandering' - the moments of waiting and anticipation, and of the 'pull' of the material world that commands something of us, rather than a sustained act of aiming towards our own predetermined destination. As Orr ([<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref84">36</reflink>], p. 218). remarks: 'reading, the Reader discovers, is a dynamic activity performed together with other readers and with writers and with a book that is itself the product and producer of many readings'. In an ecological understanding, we are not solely concerned with the Reader or the Learner at the centre of the activity but with the symbiotic interactions mediated between them and their environment, including the (other) human and non-human elements that are part of the process. As with reading, learning is also conditioned by different modes of attention that are and always have been an intimate part of the experience, albeit perhaps more visibly in the digital age. It is in understanding this that a new appreciation and rich description of what it means to read—and indeed <emph>learn</emph> - in the digital age might be offered, beyond the slow/speed, hyper/sustained, natural/artificial binaries that characterise many of these discussions.</p> <hd id="AN0187437655-7">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <ref id="AN0187437655-8"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref3" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Andrews, C. (2022). How to do things with forms: The Oulipo and its inventions. McGill-Queen's University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref9" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Agamben, G. (1995). The idea of prose (M. Sullivan & S. Whitsitt, Trans.). 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Experiments in decolonizing the university: Towards an ecology of study. Bloomsbury Academic.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Selwyn, N. (2010). Looking beyond learning: Notes towards the critical study of educational technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26 (1), 65 – 73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00338.x</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Selwyn, N. (2018). Moral than tools? Making sense of ongoing digitizations of higher education. International Journal of Technology in Higher Education, 15 (22), 1 – 10.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Shepherd, D. L. (2012). Parsing fiction: humanistic computing and the postmodern novel [PhD Thesis]. University of California Los Angeles. Retrieved November 8, 2024, from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85x154gw</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Standish, P. (2016). Empiricism and the avoidance of philosophy. European Educational Research Association Conference.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Stengers, I. (2005). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Australian National University Research Centre.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Syverson, P. (2008). An ecological view of literacy learning. Literacy, 42 (2), 109 – 117. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4369.2008.00491.x</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Vadakul, A. (2022). 'Luddite' teens don't want your likes. New York Times. Retrieved November 8, 2024, from https://<ulink href="http://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html">www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Wandera, D. B. (2024). Skewed artificial intelligence: Flagging embedded cultural practices in children's stories featuring "Alice and Sparkle". Reading Research Quarterly, 59 (1), pp. 651–664. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rrq.572</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Waters, L. (2007). Time for reading. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 53 (23), pp. 1–5.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Yang, G., & Kim, J. (2025). The ethics of reading revisited in the age of artificial intelligence. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, January, 1 – 9. https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2025.2453815</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <ref id="AN0187437655-9"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibtext> Whilst my discussion is primarily concerned with reading in a scholarly sense, at times there may be some slippage between this and reading as an everyday endeavour. I accept that are important distinctions between both, but it is not something I address directly in the paper. This is largely due to my belief that, as with Felski ([22], p. 13), the dualism between the two need not be so sharp, given that 'theoretical reflection is powered by, and indebted to, many of the same motives and structures that shape everyday thinking'. See: Brady ([9]) and Felski ([23]).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> For instance, the increasing trend of so-called young 'Luddite' groups worldwide. See: Vadakul ([46]).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> This understanding is not universal, of course, and there are many who celebrate the advent of AI tools for the purposes of more efficient forms of knowledge extension, as well as for increasing our capacities for critical engagement with texts. See: Yang and Kim ([49]) for an interesting discussion on this and, in particular, what the production of texts through AI tools means for the reader-centred modes of interpretation prominent in literary criticism.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> A compendium of Oulipo constraints can be found in Brotchie and Mathews ([10]).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> One advocate, Stephen Parrish ([38], p. 3) argues that these trends can be traced by even further – e.g. 'improved standards of textual editing' at the turn of the century. Like any such changes, I do not wish to suggest that these arrive out of a vacuum.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Similar concerns can be found in literary fiction – e.g. a common trope in science fiction writing imagines largely threatening or dystopic outcomes of technology (e.g. Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley). In philosophy of education, these are less dramatically portrayed in many critical debates on the ubiquity of empirical data collection methodologies, which arguably overshadow the radical complexity of the study of education (See, e.g. Standish ([43]). At the 'Literary Data Processing' conference in 1964, however, which sought to marry the discrete disciplines of 'science' and the 'humanities', discussions largely focused on the promise of technology for greater precision in the process of interpretation –for instance, 'concordance-making... automated biography and abstracting' but also in 'analyses of [literary] metrics', measuring the texts in order to stockpile 'parameters of style' (Parrish, [38], p. 3). This conference marked one of the earliest introductions of technology into literary criticism. As Parrish ([38], p. 4) claimed, computerisation was in any case inevitable, and (thankfully), it would make certain labour-intensive tasks obsolete, including 'studies that rely on the judgment and the memory of one poor fallible human scholar', whose analytic powers were no match to a computer's. Importantly, most agreed that computers are purely tools to aid rather than replace human thought (Parrish, [38], p. 5).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Alinei is perhaps most notable for developing the <emph>Atlas Linguarum Europae</emph> (ALE, or Linguistic Map of Europe) which used technology to produce a phonetic transcription of rules governing European languages, undermining the dominant Sausarean model of linguistics. Perhaps most significantly for Calvino, however, was his SEILC (<emph>Spogli Elettronici dell'Italiano Letterario Contemporaneo</emph>) and SEOID (<emph>Spogli Elettronici dell'Italiano delle Origini e del Duecento</emph>) projects, which involved 'feeding' three emblematic post-war Italian novels into a machine (including Calvino's own <emph>Path to the Spider's Next</emph>) to show literary concordances between them. The purpose for Alinei was the show how linguistic forms shift across different periods in Italian history.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Interestingly, those who disagree with this dominant approach to literacy often use a 'computer' metaphor in a pejorative sense (i.e. in arguing for the human mind as working in a way that is distinct from computers 'ingesting' information).</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Alison M. Brady</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib48" firstref="ref6"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref8"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib47" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref17"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref29"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref36"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref42"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref45"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib42" firstref="ref47"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref51"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref52"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref53"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref56"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref59"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib39" firstref="ref61"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib44" firstref="ref63"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref64"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref67"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref68"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib45" firstref="ref72"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref78"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl30" bibid="bib40" firstref="ref82"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl31" bibid="bib41" firstref="ref83"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl32" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref84"></nolink>
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  Data: Negotiating Attention: An Ecology of Reading in the Digital Age
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Alison+M%2E+Brady%22">Alison M. Brady</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1410-2572">0000-0002-1410-2572</externalLink>)
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  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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  Data: 14
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Reading%22">Reading</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Novels%22">Novels</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Attention%22">Attention</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Media+Adaptation%22">Media Adaptation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Electronic+Publishing%22">Electronic Publishing</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Technology%22">Technology</searchLink>
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  Data: 10.1080/00131857.2025.2486651
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  Data: 0013-1857<br />1469-5812
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  Data: What does it mean to read in the digital age? Undoubtedly, how we consume information has radically shifted in the so-called 'attention economy' of the modern world. Surrounded by artificial technologies that force us to be 'hyper-attentive' to endless streams of information, the idea of reading as a slow and sustained process appears to many to have been displaced. In this paper, I complicate the belief that attention in reading is threatened by digital technologies. I do so by inviting readers to think with Italo Calvino's experimental work, 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller'. This novel is precisely concerned with the nature of reading, and arose within the context of the then-burgeoning field known as the 'digital humanities'. It does not offer us a straightforwardly cautionary or celebratory rendering of reading in the digital age, but instead, showcases reading in an ecological sense -- namely, as that which has always involved (a) dynamic forms of attention, including what we might call 'hyper' as well as 'sustained' and (b) a deep and inescapable entanglement with the socio-material world. With Calvino, I argue that this ecological view better captures the complexity of reading in the digital age, insofar as it undermines the monolithic view of reading suggested in concerns surrounding these perceived threats of digitization, and thereby allows us to rethink the implied binaries between the natural and the artificial in educational practices and experiences.
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