Reading has become a social anxiety that has never been more pronounced than it is today.
The American media scholar Cray Kelly on the other side of the ocean? While Sherkey praised the advent of the Internet, claiming that the new technology was subverting the authority implied by print and criticizing "serious reading as a hoax," Chinese principals, teachers and parents are worriedly admonishing teenagers of all ages to stay away from their phones and read more books. In 2021, the 18th National Reading Survey conducted by the China Press and Publication Research Institute showed that adult Chinese citizens use mobile phones for 100 minutes per day, while the remaining poor reading time is less than 1/5 of the time spent playing mobile phones, only 20 minutes.
Is reading really as important as the ancient sages said? Or as the American media scholar Sherkey said, there is no need for human beings to appear pretentious and sad for the demise of reading. For a long time, the history of reading is almost equivalent to the history of civilization, the East and the West have given reading culture equally important and serious social values, if Western society attaches importance to cultivating the abstract thinking and logical ability of every citizen through reading, and encourages readers to maintain critical thinking and skepticism; then in Chinese society, the tradition of reading heirlooms plays almost the most important role in the knowledge relay and the function of family governance.
At the beginning of the 21st century, digital technology showed a flood of invincibility, reading activities fell from the authoritative altar of the Enlightenment era, and soon fell into the rapid decline of obsession - disenchantment - decline, and even Western scholars further predicted that the decline of reading made it possible for human beings to return to the Middle Ages before Gutenberg - in the medieval era, human intellectual activity and today's digital media have a striking similarity: both equally promote and use participatory and communicative colloquialism, The unquestionable closed authority represented by black and white in the non-print era.
If the future of reading belongs to the Middle Ages, does the reader still have a future? Once the meaning of reading is dissolved, where will people find meaning and give some meaning to our moral life?
The power of reading
Author: Frank Furidy
Publisher: Peking University Publishing Co., Ltd.
Translator: Xu Tao / Li Sifan
Publication date: 2020-11
Platonic Torture: Poison or Conscience?
Since human beings have reading activities, literacy has not only undertaken the important mission of knowledge dissemination, but also has the wonderful function of shaping people's conscience. In the time of ancient Athens, where Socrates lived, reading was seen as a noble and scarce profession as in ancient China, and Socrates believed that written texts were a confusing thing: once the questions raised in the books were not presented to a wise man, the crisis of reading arose.
In Socrates' view, only a few trustworthy citizens of Athens at that time were qualified to engage in such a difficult undertaking as the pursuit of truth, and on this rough path, truth was not reliable by reading written words. On the one hand, the circulation of written books to the masses, if not "correctly understood," the act of reading can only lead to the spread of prejudice on a larger scale, thereby fueling the "exaggerated and stupid pride" of the shallow; on the other hand, the cause of truth is too arduous, and knowledge "is not something that can be written like other sciences", and only "after a long dialogue between the teachers and students who have explored it together" can true knowledge find its way to the soul.
In other words, Socrates' suspicion of reading culture comes from his deep fascination with oral culture. In his view, human reading is not a natural act, and the closed writing system lacks the purity, openness and dynamic vitality of spoken culture. It was from this paradox of communication that Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, issued the first health reminder to all readers, using the Greek word "pharmakon" as a metaphor for reading and writing, implying that there is a hidden natural paradox in the act of reading based on written texts—it can become either a prescription or a poison.
Plato's torture has plagued generations of readers for thousands of years, and with the wave of media change that followed, people's ideas about the importance of reading and its various drawbacks triggered various controversies and never stopped. A sharp tension began to form between the different reading behaviors that focused on the written word: one reading was an inspiration and a tool for effective communication, and the other reading embarked on the dangerous path of questioning the existing moral order.
In China, Confucian sages also did not like to talk about such "sensitive" topics as "strange forces and chaotic gods", which posed a threat to the existing moral order and "incivility", and under the Confucian creed advocated by Confucius of "incivility do not look, do not listen, do not speak, and do not move", classic texts such as the Analects and their interpretations are endowed with a kind of closedness, authority and sacredness with a position of supreme intellectual power. Compared with the attitude of Socrates and Plato who carefully avoided the use of the "philistine" and the ignorant, the Chinese sages clearly had a self-evident elitist pride: in order to maintain the social morality and order of the Zhou Tianzi era, only the sacred nobility of the master's sincerity can do so, and the humble people are not enough.
In maintaining a noble tradition of "speaking but not doing", Suragra and Confucius had the same aristocratic spiritual background. Socrates believed that "in addition to illuminating the essence of things" and making it "visible" to all ordinary people, this noble work actually implies an eternal professional anxiety—Socrates himself never believed that in texts and reading behaviors full of ambiguity and space for interpretation, once the questions asked can bring "any benefit" to ordinary people, "it is at best beneficial to a few, That is, to the benefit of those who, with a little guidance, can discover the truth on their own. ”
Confucius went further and more thoroughly than Socrates in carefully selecting a very small number of "qualified readers" and trying to restrict people's free thinking by making selective readings. In contrast, Confucius's Confucianism was more authoritarian, closed, and aristocratic than Socrates' philosophy, and the two sages, while adhering to the principle of "speaking but not doing," concealed the same distrust of written reading.
In the reading dilemma, it also reflects the class conflict between the intellectual aristocracy and the ignorant commoners in the dark period of mankind, in the Analects? The "Sub-Road Asking for Directions" article of the "Neutron Chapter" is particularly intriguing. Confucius and his disciples Zilu rushed to get lost, so Confucius asked Zilu to ask the two peasants who were cultivating the land, "Where is the ferry port?"? When the farmer Jia Chang was frustrated, he inquired about the famous pedantic master Kong Qiu in front of him, and he sneered at him: he "should" know where the ferry was, and when he finished, he buried his head and continued to work; the other farmer simply stirred up dissension and ridiculed Zilu for following the wrong life teacher. The story of the two peasants refusing to give directions at this moment is precisely a metaphor for confucius's "confused" dilemma of words: "There is a way under the heavens, and the hill is not easy", there is no way under the world, the masters try to rely on words to save the hearts of the people of the world, and in the eyes of these "low-end people" who can only live by farming and despise the master and the reading of texts such as the Analects, the nerds "should know" but do not know, and preach in vain, how can this not be another kind of lost way?
Today, when digital culture is fully covered in the 21st century, socrates, Plato, and Confucius still echo their warnings about the dangers of reading. Under the influence of various false news and unlimited advertising "threshold advertising technology" on the Internet, many users linger in it and are unable to extricate themselves, the only difference is that compared with the "dark age" in which these saints lived more than 2,000 years ago, the phenomenon of people being manipulated by the media has become more common in the digital age, and the anxiety caused by reading has become more serious.
The dissolution of the meaning of reading suggests that human civilization is on a more uncertain path
Reading as a profession: the anxiety of meaning
What is the point of reading? Why is there a so-called "serious reading" and "happy reading" in reading? What is the difference between the two? If in the enclosed space of the text, there has always been a hidden "power relationship" and a powerful obscuration ideology that Foucault called it, how can we let the reader "read correctly", carefully avoid being brainwashed and controlled by all kinds, and thus "act rationally"?
Since Plato and Confucius, people's reading behavior has always been plagued by the above problems, and while reading has become a social "problem", the controversy and various completely different ideas surrounding the meaning of reading have gathered among the rulers, intellectuals and the illiterate class.
At different times in the development of Western societies, reading meant that it was the primary way to open the door to truth. In socrates' time, the prophets saw reading as a wise way to solve the dilemma of human existence; in the early Judaism and Christian doctrine, believers praised reading as a medium of high character and the search for truth; during the Enlightenment, the "qualified reader" became the dominant force in promoting social progress and reason, awakening individualism, and building an active and virtuous public life; from the 18th century onwards, "love of reading" became the ideal life of every ordinary person, and reading itself was found to have a certain "intrinsic value of its own". And the primary means for each citizen to achieve self-improvement, the ability to read and write has also become one of the most basic survival skills of the citizens.
While respecting reading, Western society finds that reading behavior plays a unique functional role in the establishment of social and cultural values, which also sows the seeds of anxiety. It is not only the great sages such as Plato and Confucius who are confused on the issue of reading value, showing all kinds of serious internal conflicts, contradictions and hidden worries, and this anxiety has been carried down all the way, torturing many intellectuals and social elites, until today, more than two years later, people are still full of all kinds of uneasiness and doubts about the uniqueness of reading and writing ability, the value and authority represented by printing culture.
In the case of Britain in the early 18th century, the printing culture represented by Gutenberg technology in the 16th century, like a "brilliant galaxy" (McLuhan's gorgeous metaphor) in the new media era, triggered another wave of "media explosion" two hundred years later, which was no less violent than the digital media transformation we are experiencing today. In the case of the British press, for example, in less than fifty years from 1712 to 1757, newspaper circulation increased eightfold, as did neighboring France, and in the decade from 1789 to 1799, paris published more than two thousand new newspapers!
The new media revolution brought about by the flourishing of print directly gave birth to a kind of public opinion that belonged only to the middle class, a public sphere with a relative consensus, and a cultural torrent or "zeitgeist" called the "age of reason" and the "age of progress" (Hegel invented this term). An important change in the reading syndrome during this period was the emergence of "reading layering"—the storybooks, cheap novels, and vulgar newspapers represented by popular literature, along with the "high works" of Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, which provided the ideological weapons of the French Revolution, and filled the bookcase windows of the middle class. In Britain, the "land of reading," middle-class professionals, merchants, craftsmen, women, to urban civil servants and ordinary labourers, are undoubtedly not keen to read, "and now all the British are readers," one historian put it.
The infinite admiration for reading culture and the boundless anxiety about "reading norms" in traditional Chinese culture are also closely linked. This anxiety reaches the rulers, and it is easy to be infinitely magnified, and the market for speech immediately becomes a place of sacrifice with life and blood. In this thousands of years of imperial tradition of "testing" through reading and classical texts for social indoctrination and taming, the Confucian classics are given the only correctness. Similar to the sacredness of religion, how to read correctly, the meaning of reading, and the legitimacy and uniqueness of interpretation become a "big problem" related to the life of individuals and even the fate of countries.
The controversy between modern and ancient texts, between Han Confucianism and Song Confucianism, between Confucianism and Confucianism, and around the reading and interpretation of Confucian classics in Chinese history, all ended in the form of violent revolution, and the disputes and controversies in them could only end with the head falling to the ground. In the confucian classic closed text known as the "Four Books and Five Classics", the closedness of this text and the sole legitimacy of the interpretation and the sacredness of the supreme power are interdependent and tightly bound together, from the buried body of Qin Shi Huang alive, the Wutai poem case in which the genius writer and reader Su Shi almost lost his life, to the sleepless soul of Hunan Xiucai zeng jing and other intellectual talents in Yongzheng's "Mystery of the Great Righteousness", facing every impulse to break through the social forces that try to break through the intertwined ideological nets of power and texts. Rulers have always used bloody blades to demarcate the boundaries between "right reading" and "qualified readers."
Knowing this tradition, we can truly understand the far-reaching significance of Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu's promotion of vernacular literature and the promotion of "popular literature" - the new boundary demarcation of modernity in Chinese society began by breaking through the old boundary of "old- and old-
The End of Reading: Between Scam and Lost
In the early 21st century, in the face of the impact of digital culture, people have never been so anxious about the uncertain future of written reading. According to the author of "The Power of Reading" and a well-known British sociologist, Furidi, digital culture destroys not only the way of reading, but also the decline of intellectual and intellectual authority brought about by the change in the form of closed to open media. Furidy believes that the era we are now living in is an "information age" and no longer an "age of ideas." "In the context of the lack of attention to the status of thought and the objective meaning of intellectual assertions, literacy itself is considered insignificant." At the same time, the value of written reading is greatly devalued.
In this regard, the digital scholar Sherkey's "reading scam" is just one of the reading anxiety symptoms. The decline and renewal of reading culture is not so much due to the overly free or chaotic speech market brought about by the empowerment of online technology, but in fact, the deeper incentive is the revival of "spoken language culture" that McLuhan longed for. In McLuhan's classic formulation of the culture of the written medium, he describes the most important closed content of the text space as "a delicious and juicy piece of meat in the hands of a thief whose purpose is to distract and distract the 'watchdog of the mind'". In other words, McLuhan is happy to see the expulsion of the digital media from the written medium, in his view, as the most important content and meaning of reading is not important, it is just a kind of interference with ulterior motives, the medium is itself "information" (mediumismessege), the content in the written reading can only show a relative importance, and is the subjective expression of the author's self-talk, of course, the subjective interpretation of the reader in the reading process is also subject to unprecedented praise.
In the eyes of media star scholars such as McLuhan and Sherkey, the era of five hundred years of print information dominance is called the "Gutenberg Interval" - in other words, the hegemony of print culture represented by Gutenberg is actually only a short moment in human history, and after the rapid progress of digital culture, along with the collapse of reading value, as well as the content hegemony manifested in print culture - including all the knowledge, wisdom and cultural heritage of human society, the overall system - Today, they are trembling in front of the digital media, losing their authority.
The dissolution of the meaning of reading suggests that human civilization is on a more uncertain path, or crossroads. From the depreciation of text reading to the attempt to return to a natural state of communication in medieval colloquial culture, this pretentious naïve fascination foreshadows that media changes are about to trigger a new form of civilization that may be budding. When the "death of the author" and the meaning of reading are dying, how to open the sacred authority space of closed written texts, and then jump into a space of information text with infinite openness and the personal exclusive meaning constructed by each netizen, digital reading is inquiring about the emergence of a new "qualified reader" and "correct reading of new media", a new generation of network natives can not surf freely in the ocean of information, but not because of the confusion of free thought (some scholars suggest that various "threshold texts" on the Internet are "substituting texts"). Like the temptations of various banshees on the way home from Odyssey), they lost their way and once again discovered the "path of truth" to the other side of mankind's new civilization.