On Jonah Lehrer's "The Future Of Reading": Why This Work Is A Scientific Discourse and How It Works With Grant-Davie and Porter

On Jonah Lehrer's "The Future Of Reading": Why This Work Is A Scientific Discourse and How It Works With Grant-Davie and Porter

By Lindsey Marcus

Early on in Lehrer’s “The Future Of Reading”, Lehrer gains readers’ trust by making himself relatable to his audience. After all, who hasn't been in the situation where an auxiliary cord was left behind, leaving you forced to listen to the radio? He's extremely casual, clear, unassuming, and as the piece progresses I wonder if he does this to disarm his readers. I mentally prepare myself for him to pull wool over my eyes, metaphorically brainwashing me into believing what he wants his readers to believe. He continues to make himself relatable to the reader, drawing us in moreso with his story about his love for books (perhaps an attempt at forming pathos) and the experience of having an overweight bag at the airport. He confides in his readers about his fear of how our reading technology is changing. Illuminating the prospect of losing the potential for old treasures to exist in the future if new books are exclusively read on Kindles and Nooks. Many avid readers—myself included—share his fear. Lehrer's article becomes publicly mediated when he draws on platforms widely known to the public, such as the eReaders he critiques. He has a strong relation to the public by explaining these experiences that so many have also encountered in their lives.

He also illuminates the reality that is undeniable: the potential of digital texts and e-readers is revolutionary. "For me, the most salient fact is this: It’s never been easier to buy books, read books, or read about books you might want to buy. How can that not be good?" (Lehrer paragraph 4). This new technology is making it easier for us to perceive the content. Lehrer deconstructs eReaders by explaining that by making content easier to attain we trade our understanding and admiration for the novels we love for the ability to perceive the texts, to simply hold them, to read them, but not will not be able to cherish them because they will no longer exist in a physical form. Their words exist on the technology, but will they survive the test of time like Shakespeare's original texts have?

Lehrer breaks down the knowledge of Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the College de France in Paris, explaining the neural anatomy of reading. He explains the two ways to read, the ventral route and the dorsal stream. Reading requires a certain amount of awareness. Books printed in clear, popular fonts or illuminated on bright screens are read effortlessly. Whereas unusual, complicated sentences and personal handwriting require more attending to. This phenomenon leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. "All the extra work – the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words – wakes us up" (Lehrer paragraph 8). His scientific writing becomes a discourse when he analyses aspects of society that affect everyone, and when he voices his concerns and ideas about the influences of the types of reading on the human mind. Something every literate human can relate to.

Thus, Lehrer concludes his argument by clearly stating his exigence. His wish for us to struggle with our reading—for it to be as it once was in earlier times—is actually for our benefit. With less reliance on the ventral pathway there will be no more mindless scanning of words, only contemplation of their meaning and purpose. How better to honor the authors of our beloved favorites.

His scientific discourse: not every sentence should be easy to read. Taking in difficult texts keeps our brain sharp and healthy. Reading something in a physical form inspires analyzation, just like when we read our essay on a screen and don't notice errors, but then print it out on paper and notice a ton.

The rhetorical situation of Lehrer's text is that society is changing in ways that affect the way our brains function, and this is something significant that people need to be aware of. Lehrer's ideas go hand-in-hand with those of Grant-Davie's and Porter's. Essentially Lehrer is deconstructing a medium with which society reads, not unlike how Grant-Davie and Porter illuminate how we understand a text. The theories of these three break down the way society—and the human brain in its neuroanatomy—function. They each illustrate the ways in which historical texts are incorporated into new ones, and also how they can be lost.

This blog post was inspired by Jonah Lehrer's "The Future Of Reading", Grant-Davie's "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents", and Porter's "Intertextuality and The Discourse Community". 

http://www.wired.com/2010/09/the-future-of-reading-2/