When wishing to understand textual communication today, it can be helpful to start out from an understanding of currently occurring cultural shifts. Reading and writing surround us every day and... Show moreWhen wishing to understand textual communication today, it can be helpful to start out from an understanding of currently occurring cultural shifts. Reading and writing surround us every day and everywhere, but there are fundamental changes in how long, deep, and careful we read nowadays. In times of ever faster and shorter instant messages, articles, and information snippets available to the modern reader, the question arises which new responsibilities this introduces for the reader. How can we theorise these developments in order to come to a more adequate understanding of reading, writing, and textual communication today, and consequently formulate practical means of engaging with this ‘hybrid form’ of digital and analogue texts? Whereas one might believe that reader responsibility came into this world when Barthes proclaimed the “birth of the reader”, I would like to argue that reader responsibility is an integral part of every reading process and every engagement with text. What Barthes announced in 1967 thus, was rather the birth of our awareness of the responsibilities of the reader than the birth of the reader her- or himself. It is this awareness that has received a further extension in contemporary times. Through the investigation of digital reading, we can retrospectively determine the properties of ‘analogue texts’, and also compare reading ‘then and now’. Contemporary reading practices are often seen as more flexible: readers can choose from a variety of gadgets and media how to access their desired reading material. They might be able to interact with authors and publishers more quickly and directly. And while this notion also needs to be evaluated critically, overall reading has come a long way from the formerly more hierarchical and one-directional mode of communication. It is this realisation that enables the ‘birth’ of reader responsibility or rather, the understanding that without the active interpretation of the reader, a text cannot come alive. But are texts really more freely and democratically accessible nowadays? The apparently self-evident nature of reader responsibility can also be considered one of its greatest obstacles. When taken for granted, it is no longer actively sought out or fought for. Readers might then ‘lose’ their own agency when faced with the author and her or his text(s). In an awareness of potential limitations to reader responsibility, I thus wish to investigate how the reader can bring a text to life, and how a more wide-spread embrace of reader responsibility can lead to a more fruitful and healthy reading behaviour and culture. Show less
