Reading modes and practices, digital challenges

Abstract

Written culture, literacy and schooling mark a long Modernity of more than four centuries in the History of the Western World. Written culture brings together information, knowledge, thought, action. Written acculturation was a condition and factor for knowledge, citizenship and humanity. Since the end of the Middle Ages, with the spread of paper and the mechanization of typography, the world of reading has changed, as a result of the greater dissemination of the printed book. In the transition from the Old Regime, reading and writing were usual practices in the sphere of the State and public administration, and became a condition of citizenship. School made reading mandatory. During the 1800s, the progressive universalization of school literacy and the constitution of the public sphere benefited from new technical advances in the publishing world, in the popularization of books, in the dissemination of periodicals, in the creation of libraries. In the course of the 20th century, mass culture through books, audio and cinema brought the omnipresence of reading. Reading rates grew until the end of the century, but since the 1980s the digital and the new modes to read have only partially made up for the devaluation of traditional forms of culture and reading. Combining the evolution of written culture, books and ways of  reading, a sequence of historical frameworks is structured: i) a cycle centered on the print and the book, which was accentuated with Illustration – book order, speaking like a book, learn from the book; ii) a cycle characterized by new ways of reading and new readers – the school reader and “reading nations”; iii) a cycle that was accentuated in the second half of the 19th century, of mass acculturation centered on the press, books, periodicals and libraries; iv) a cycle that lasted until the turn of the 20th century, of universal reading of print and audiovisual, with emphasis on radio, cinema and television, this in domestic spaces, characterized by mass culture and globalization; v) the current cycle of digital universalization with new modes of acculturation and communication. I will draw an overview of these four centuries of acculturation and sociability through reading and writing, with reference to these cycles.