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Electronic Deep Reading

fawnI read an interview with Will Self this morning in the Guardian. Is the fate of our literary culture sealed? He regrets the passing of “deep reading,” reading in which the reader is fully immersed in the text. The opposite of deep reading is shallow reading, the kind of reading I do when surfing the web, an idle activity. I catch the gist of a piece and flick to the next item, trying to pick out what is interesting to me and move on. This style of reading is the kind I do in the stacks in a library or wandering in a bookstore. Read just enough to decide if I want to check out or buy the book. Then I take it home and read it. If it is good, I read it as deeply as it deserves or resonates with my interests. Reading is a continuum that runs from shallow to deep. I imagine it is the same for most readers.

Do I read electronic texts deeply? Of course. While surfing, when a report or essay strikes me as important to me, I often become immersed and read it as deeply as I read paper books. When I read a book that arrests me on my Kindle, I am lost to world. (Ask my wife.)

I experience many differences between the electronic reading experience and reading a paper book, but they are most similar, I should say identical, when I am most absorbed. Mr. Self writes about forgetting all “the workaday contingencies of their identity” while reading deeply. Among those contingencies is the media itself: desktop display, phone, dedicated reader, paperback, custom leather binding, they all are forgotten when deeply reading paper or an electronic display. Or at least I forget them, and I don’t think I am unique.

Publishing is certainly changing, but I very much doubt that reading itself is changing. Electronic reading is superficially different from paper reading and those superficial differences are challenging because they force readers to change habits they have developed since they were children: the way to hold a book and the how it feels in their hands, turning the pages, using a finger for a temporary bookmark, judging where they are by the thickness of pages already read. These are all parts of the reading experience that are not reproduced in electronic reading, but they have nothing to do with deep reading.

Until readers get beyond these and many other habits, they may have difficulty achieving deep reading electronically. As a software engineer, I have transitioned into electronic reading over at least two decades, so I am not a useful example, but I notice among my friends, the acclimation period is measured in weeks and months, not decades. Also, I observe that better readers, usually the ones who claim to be most attached to paper books, are the quickest studies at electronic reading after they start.

It’s fun to declare that the world is going to hell on a flat screen display and eInk, but I doubt that deep reading is on its way out.

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Riding It Home

When I was a teenager, I bucked bales in the hay fields every summer from June to August. It was hard work, monotonous, dangerous, and working conditions were horrifying by today’s standards. In the fields, the sun beat down relentlessly, but the bale bucks all went shirtless, eight, ten hours at a stretch. Unloading hay in the barns, the air was thick with hay dust; sometimes it was hard to see fifteen feet.

For the first couple of weeks each summer, my back was a sheet of blisters as layers of skin burned, peeled away, and burned again. I slept on my stomach and took aspirin for the burn and fever. After a bad day in barns, I coughed black phlegm. I still associate summer with sunburn and congestion.

The work was picking up, carrying, and stacking forty to seventy-five pound bales onto wagons and into the barn. The cut ends of the hay wore through jeans and slashed skin; arms were red and bleeding by the end of the day. Dousing them with diesel oil soothed burn and seemed to speed healing, if you could take the searing pain when the diesel hit raw flesh. I wonder what a physician would think of that home remedy.

The toughest job was stacking the bales on the wagon. Some bales had to be lifted over your head in a military press onto the top of the load while standing on a jerking wagon on rough ground; just standing up was difficult. Carrying, lifting, and placing the bales on an unsteady platform took strength and skill. Comic tractor drivers popped the clutch to knock the bale bucks over in mid-lift. If an injury stopped you from working, your summer job was gone.

Fifty years later, a dermatologist has found pre-cancerous lesions on my skin. My orthopedist attributes the arthritis in my knees, hips and back to those years of grinding on my joints in the wrong ways.

Do I resent the hayfields when I have trouble standing up in the morning? Or when my dermatologist orders another biopsy? Not often. Would I wish it on a teenager today? No. They have their own learning fields.

But stacking hay on a wagon, you have choices. If you stack a sloppy load, it will collapse and have to be restacked. If you stack a perfect load, your self-serving perfection is a waste of the crew’s time.

The farmers had a way of forcing this tradeoff. They pushed mercilessly to get the hay on the wagons, and then made the stacker climb to the top of the load and ride it home to the barn—often five or so miles on rough county roads as fast as a pickup could pull the load. A stacker could place the bales any way he pleased, but he had to ride his load home. A stacker who wouldn’t ride it home was, well, someone who wouldn’t ride it home.

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A Special Library Service

In my last blog, I wrote about libraries and the concept of a “service” as it is used in IT service management.

A few days ago, I chatted with the manager of the Ferndale Library and introduced myself as a new library trustee. The Ferndale Library is only a few miles from our house and I hang out there often. I mentioned that I am in the Ferndale Library often. My reputation as the new library trustee had preceded me. The manager said she had heard that the new trustee used the Ferndale Library WiFi for writing a book.

I was flattered that I have a reputation, but there was also something in this chat that I tie to service management. The truth is I don’t visit the library for the WiFi. The Internet is so much a part of my life that I have set up a network in our house that provides excellent Internet service, possibly better than the library.

If I don’t come for the WiFi, what do I come for? What service does the library offer that brings me to my favorite seat by the window?

It is a different service entirely, but a real service.

I wrote a good share my book, Cloud Standards, sitting at a table in the library. Sitting in a library helps me focus on writing. When I appear in the library, it is a sign that I have been procrastinating in my office at home and have come to the library to get some work done. I promised myself this summer that in 2013 I would complete a draft of the novel I am working on. Being the person that I am, I had to concentrate on fiction all of December to meet my self-imposed deadline. Consequently, I am a few chapters behind on my current technical book, Cloud Service Management, so the library will be seeing a lot of me this January.

The mission-critical service I get from the library is, for lack of a better word, the atmosphere. I have never seen this service provided anywhere but in a library. The service is complex. It involves the shelves of books, newspapers, and magazines. It grows from the murmur of earnest conversation. I am convinced that lady sitting across from me concentrating on her laptop, the fellow a few feet away studying the newspaper, the folks wandering through the shelves browsing for entertainment or practical information and advice, the varied band of users of the Internet terminals, the students hurrying to finish tomorrow’s homework, the librarians and pages tending the patrons and the collection, all these contribute to something I think Durkheim and later Jung called a “collective consciousness.” I struggled with Durkheim when I was an undergraduate and I’ve never been able to understand Jung, let alone explain him, but I believe the collective consciousness in a library helps me get my chapters written.

All libraries have it. I’ve been to London on business several times. I always skip the sights and find time to go to the reading room of the British Museum. My wife thinks I’m crazy, and she’s more than likely right, but some of the most profound and important concepts and words on this planet have been conceived and written in that space. I love to sit under the gilt and sky blue dome, reading and writing for as long as I can, occasionally pinching myself to check if I am really sitting in the room of intellectual titans.

The amazing thing is that the Ferndale Library, all the other libraries in the WCLS, and libraries everywhere deliver the same service. Can the service be enhanced, increased in value? Most services can, but I confess, I have only one thought on improving the mystery of the library: the atmosphere is collective, the more folks who know and use this service, the stronger it becomes. I’m looking forward to the new Ferndale library building, but even more, the new patrons I hope it will bring in.