Some remarks on reading habits of printed book and digital text

Abstract

The appeals to intensify the habit of reading are so recurrent and asserted in the name of so different interests that it seems unnecessary to insist on its benefits and its learning is fundamental part of the compulsory education system without objection. The neurosciences, which have taken up the study of reading processes, visualizing the activity of the brain that reads, confirm the importance of writing. However, it is necessary to specify what type of writing we are talking about, without underestimating that even the same alphabet has an instrumental value. It then emerged that its use also led to misunderstandings, one of which was considering it a neutral transcription of the oral message. Instead, the verbal language presents some characteristics of its own such as the inseparability of utterance and statement. From which it follows that the cultural systems that privilege the voice, like the archaic Greek, to which the invention of the alphabet is traced back, assign to the writing quite different functions from ours and a social role to the reader even reversed. Indeed the reader, aloud and for an audience of illiterates, was most of the time a slave, who gave his freedom to the writing to which were not attributed liberating and recreative powers as in the case, nowadays, of a literary text. It therefore appears evident that the reading activity, over time, has been carried out differently and that a first reason of transformation is given by the forms that writing takes on, together with its support, so it must be recognized that digital reading also assumes some peculiar rules. In spite of the cliché that complains a decrease in the number of readers, we read much more than previous generations, provided that one admits as proof not only the canonized texts, while the value of the writing is changing with the multiplication of tools for making it and therefore of the writers. Then the writing, once more, turns out inseparable from the object in which it is produced, revealing that the digital one creates texts that have not yet been transformed into works and while the former reproduce themselves, also mutating into hypertexts, digital literary works remains difficult to identify because their model of use still is the printed book.