Response to Raquel

Question

On page 125 Wysocki states "But reading in our time is changing." I think that it changing in the way that we don't have to physically turn a page if we are reading on line, but I think the act of reading or how we read things is the same whether on print or online. Do you think our reading is changing?

Response:
So I think that reading is constantly changing because literacy does not always mean the same thing. I am sure that compared to societies hundreds of years ago we are able to read faster and more comprehensively. While before education may have relied more on memorizing and an oral component, we have come to rely heavily on the written word so that we do not have to actually memorize as many things since we can easily reference. I think that one interesting thing is the different types of reading we have developed. I really don't know the history of reading but at some point we decided to have different types of reading: pleasure reading, academic reading, analytical reading, skimming...etc. Wysoki definitely touches on how typeface changes our attitude toward reading but what I think we are seeing now is a move towards skimming. We are constantly on the internet, looking things up on wikipedia, and if we are really lazy we won't even read the whole article but go immediatley to a section and read only that and these readings don't stay in our memory. As Walter Ong points out, literacy affects memory. Oral stories are not only entertainment but shared cultural memory banks and literacy changes the way we memorize.