Copyrighted Material

Reading Cultures and Education

william a. johnson

In this essay I wish to invite reection on reading or, more precisely, on reading culture. As a cultural historian and a classicist, I naturally want to ground my thoughts historically, and I propose to do so by means of contrapuntal sketches from the reading culture of classical antiquity. Indeed the reader will have to grant me some indulgence in rooting this set of reections so particularly in my own deepest scholarly interest, which is the reading culture of the ancient Greeks. But I hope to convince you, rst, that consideration of the otherness of an ancient reading culture can help to sharpen considerably our perspective on reading cultures generallyincluding our contemporary technologically driven one. Second, although most will readily grant a broad relation between reading and education, I hope also to convince you that the understanding of reading culture is central to perceiving in its particulars not only how technological change may aect education but also how educators, and in particular instructors in the humanities, may be able to derive clear advantage from technological change. But what do I intend by speaking of reading as reading culture? Reading, I will insist, is a social rather than an individual phenomenon, one that develops over time, with deep roots in the traditions of a given society. Reading is not, in my view, an act, or even a process, but a system, a highly complex cultural system that involves a great many considerations beyond

Copyrighted Material

10

William A. Johnson

the decoding by the reader of the words of the (authors) text. I therefore speak deliberately of reading culture rather than of literacy or of writing technologies, both because that is my preferred focus and because I think mistaken the sort of analysis that starts from the viewpoint either that writing is a watershed phenomenon, and thus the world divides into literate and nonliterate, or that writing is a technology that can be studied in isolation, as though the whole of reading were the interaction between the technology and the user of that technology. That reading involves many variables, that there are in fact many types of reading, that reading is a complex cultural system, may seem very obvious propositions. But these points have been so willfully neglected by such a long and distinguished line of researchers that I do not think they can be overemphasized here at the start of these reections. Indeed, what prompts me to this more general and theoretical consideration of reading culture is my deep dissatisfaction with the terms in which researchers have typically sought to describe both ancient and contemporary reading cultures. As I ponder these matters, I come increasingly to believe that the very missteps made in analysis of the ancient world, some of which are generally recognized as missteps today, are being repeated, mutatis mutandis, in contemporary commentary on the great paradigm shift going on about us, often called the electronic revolutiona central aspect of which is, in my view, a shift in the paradigm of the contemporary reading culture. As a cultural historian, I have come to hope, then, that a better understanding of how best to describe ancient reading culture may help as we seek to understand the changes in our own. But more detail on that after I have done a bit of historical mortar as background for this inquiry.

Some Typical Fallacies in the Analysis of Reading Culture

A prominent strategy in the analysis of reading culture has for a long while been a focus on literacy, usually opposed to the oral culture, or orality, that literacy is said to replace. Much of the early debate on this subject concentrated, remarkably, on classical Athens, and one thinks in particular of that annus mirabilis, 1963, which saw seminal publications by the anthropologist Jack Goody (The consequences of literacy, written with Ian Watt, a professor of English literature) and the classicist Eric Havelock (Preface to Plato ). These scholars and their followers have presented a variety of formulations over the years, but in essence their mode of analysis seeks to establish a consequential relation between, on one hand, the so-called rise of rationalism in classical Athens and, on the other, the introduction of the alphabet and of literate modes of thought into the previously oral society. Because the

Copyrighted Material

Reading Cultures and Education

11

use of writing leads to a self-consciousness about elements of the spoken language (Havelock 1963; compare Olson 1994), or because writing sets statements in a form in which the texts can be compared (Goody and Watt 1963, pp. 30445), or because writing lends itself to dierent habits in the accumulation of information, such as the creation of lists (Goody 1977), writing is taken to be directly causative in the genesis of an analytic, critical frame of mind and thus causative of things like logical analysis and detailed proof. It is, then, this self-conscious mode of analysis that leads to the cataclysmic moment when (we are told) myth is replaced by history, rhetoric by logic and philosophy, magic by sciencewhen by virtue of the rise of rationalism the traditional mythological way of looking at things is cast o in favor of the modern conception of the world. At the most speculative reach of this set of theories, the liberalizing eects of the new rationalist intellectualism are taken so far as to account for the rise of democracy. The specic problems with these theories scarcely need rehearsing (see Thomas 1992, pp. 1528). For one thing, it seems fairly obvious that, if literacy is in itself such a powerful agent, we might expect the eects in ancient Greece to show up outside of Athens and Ionia. In any case, detailed research into oral cultures has not been able to arm the sort of clear-cut, essential dierences posited between literate and oral societies (for example, Finnegan 1988). Likewise, cognitive psychologists (I think in particular of the classic 1981 study by Scribner and Coles, The Psychology of Literacy ) have failed to nd general cognitive dierences in memory, classication, or logical abilities following the introduction of writing systems into an oral society. Theories that rely on literacy as an agent of change are therefore not in good repute these daysbut they continue to be enormously inuential. Perhaps, then, it is worth a brief look at what is wrong, in methodological terms, about this sort of analysis. First is the easy misstep into technological determinism. Whether the focus has been on the alphabet, on literacy generally, or, as more recent and nuanced studies have done (see especially Olson 1994), on the technology of writing itself, there is a tendency to see cultural change as the immediate and indeed necessary result of the introduction of a technology. This reductionist tendency among researchers is hardly restricted to studies of ancient Greece. Amusingly similar conclusions about what causes the development of the modern conception of the world can be found, for instance, in Eisensteins book on the printing press (Eisenstein 1979), and, most recently, in Saengers account of how the introduction of spaces between words in medieval manuscripts led directly to the rise of complex, abstract thinkingthis time in the twelfth century (Saenger 1997). In commentary on our era, a similar tendency presents itself. The computer

Copyrighted Material

12

William A. Johnson

is made the cause of a great many developments: loss of memory, loss of the ability to attend oral discourse, loss of expertise in reading. But, we ought to ask, in what sense is the introduction of technology directly causative? The second methodological fallacy I would like to highlight is that of the replacement technology. In the orality-and-literacy debates I have just reviewed, a major problem has to do with the terms of the analysis. What is oral is seen as opposite to what is written. Thus oral society is taken to be opposite to literate society, and we coin a term, orality, to oppose to literacy. We can now say, although the meaning is not very clear, that literacy opposes orality and that as literacy rises, orality falls, that is, that literacy replaces orality. This may sound reasonable enough, in its vague way. But culture is not a zero-sum game. Scholars have spent a great deal of eort establishing exactly that: oral culture changes as literate culture is established and changes, but oral culture hardly goes away or even diminishes. Literacy and orality are simply not contrastive terms in any strict sense. (For striking medieval examples, see Carruthers 1990, and, more generally, Thomas 1992 and Finnegan 1988.) Once again this sort of misstep is replaying itself in the contemporary debate. From Marshall McLuhan onwards, we encounter repeated suggestions that we are moving away from a fully literate era back to a more oral (or sometimes more visual) society (McCluhan 1962). This sort of observation, which we now see to be problematic in itself, is often linked to predictions or anxieties about the demise of the printed book. In 1981, for example, I sat in a conference at UCLA in which the chair of the Classics Department condently declared that the printed scholarly book would be unknown by the end of the decade and that new printed books of any type would soon be rare; more recently, in the Times Literary Supplement I read of the anxieties about what will happen as CD-ROMs (inevitably, it seems) replace printed books (Miller 1998, p. 7; compare Bolter 1991, pp. 13). But in contrast to the hype of the paperless oce is the reality of oces awash in paper; in contrast to our anxieties about the demise of the book is the fact that more books are published and sold today than ever before. This is the replacement technology fallacy. The paradigm shift of the electronic revolution is often compared to sweeping changes brought on by the printing press and the automobile. We must be careful, however, about the terms of the analogy. The horseless carriage did replace the carriage with horse, and the printing press did replace the handwritten book. But electronic technology is not a replacement technology for printed materials in the same way. The automobile, after all, did not usher in a new age of proliferation of countless horses; nor did the printing press engender the production of numberless handwritten manuscripts. But the computer has accompanied an explosion

Copyrighted Material

Reading Cultures and Education

13

in printed textsalongside an explosion in digital texts. Likewise, in ancient Greece the use of writing and written records over time surely interacted with and helped change the use of oral discourse, but it did not obliterate it by any means and arguably did not diminish it. Written discourse is no more, for most purposes, a replacement technology for oral discourse than, for most purposes, CD-ROMs are a replacement technology for books.

The Sociocultural Construction of Reading

If we reject the sort of sweeping cultural analysis that charts movements from oral to literate and back to oral or onward to visual, or that focuses reductively on one part of the reading system, how then do we go about our analysis, and how does that analysis intersect with the topic announced in the title, namely, education? In analyzing the reading culture of the ancient Greeks, I seek to move from the known to the unknown, to see what dierentiates reading in antiquity from the reading-from-a-printed-book model so familiar to us. As my work in this area has continued, I have found that the basis of analysis grows ever wider, for I must look not simply into cognitive models of how the reader interacts with the physical text but also at the physical setting of reading, the aesthetics of reading production and apprehension, the sociology of the groups participating in the readingin broad terms, the negotiated, sociocultural construction of reading. In trying to understand what may be dierent about contemporary reading experiences in the new techno-culture, a similarly broad-based analysis seems to me essential. Andwhat makes the analysis important for the topic before us as an educator, I am increasingly struck by how this broad-based analysis intersects materially both with problems in learning and with the sort of sociocultural dynamics that are central to the educational enterprise. Again, I take as my starting point an example from ancient Greece. To begin, let us focus on how the physical tool, in ancient terms the book roll, interacts with our understanding of the system of reading. It will help simplify matters if we focus on a subset of ancient reading culture, so I will restrict my remarks to literary prose texts. Now, the ancient literary book is striking in several respects. (For full details on the ancient book, see Turner 1987; Johnson 2003.) The sort of book I have in mind is, of course, not a bound, printed volume but a handwritten roll, held horizontally, written in columns that were regular, left- and right-justied, and very narrow (about fteen to twenty-ve letters, that is, two to three inches, in width, and six to ten inches in height). The letters of the text were clearly, often calligraphically, written, but otherwise undierentiated: that is, there were no spaces between words. The main sentence breaks were marked by a horizontal stroke at the

Copyrighted Material

14

William A. Johnson

left edge of the column, but there was otherwise little or no punctuation. And nothing to mark larger structures: no paragraph breaks, no running heads, no page or column numbers. The lines were divided rationally, at the end of a word or syllable, but otherwise the column was organized as a tight phalanx of clear, distinct letters, each marching one after the other to form an impression of continuous ow, the letters forming a solid rectangle of written text alternating with narrower bands of white space. The visual eect was, then, not unlike a strip of 35 mm lm. The product seems, to the modern eye, something almost more akin to an art object than a book; and, with its lack of word spaces and punctuation, the ancient book roll seems spectacularly, even bewilderingly, impractical and inecient as a reading tool. This may seem an exceedingly strange way of putting together a book. But it was no ash in the pan. This idea of the literary book prevailed for almost one thousand years in the Greek tradition and was eventually adopted by the Romans in the early empire. How do we account for this type of book within the context of a stable and sophisticated reading culture? How is it that the Greeks were unable for so many centuries to adopt such obviously useful aids as word spaces, punctuation, paragraphing, and the like in their literary texts? Surprising as it may seem, the conclusion is hard to avoid that there was something about the reading culture that felt no need for these things, that in terms of the total system of reading, such habits as omitting spaces between words worked, and worked well. We cannot suppose that the Greeks were too nave or primitive or stupid to think of word spaces or punctuation or structural markers. In ancient elementary school exercises, word division and punctuation are often found (Cribiore 1996). Ancient documentary texts often have elaborate visual structural markers, as needed. In the earliest Roman texts, word separation is the norm; in fact it is universal so far as we know (Wingo 1972), and it is telling that the Romans in imperial times chose to discard word spaces in the writing of their literary manuscripts, a choice they would hardly have made if it interfered fundamentally with their reading system. Such a development todaythe discarding of spaces between wordsis simply inconceivable. We see clearly, then, that there is something essentially dierent about the ancient reading system, that the paradigm of reading was dierent.

Dening the Dierence: A New Paradigm of Reading

How do we dene this dierence in the paradigm of reading? Without going into too much detail, I will summarize briey a few ways in which I approach the denition of the paradigm for ancient reading, because it is

Copyrighted Material

Reading Cultures and Education

15

important as model and background to dening the paradigm shift in our own reading culture. One model I use is the cognitive one. I nd, for instance, very interesting and probably signicant that the extremely narrow column of text in an ancient book matches the amount of data that we tend to pre-process as we read. Our eye, as it reads, takes in chunks of about fteen to twenty characters beyond the point of acute focus, and our brain uses this advance data for preliminary decoding of the scriptand indeed fteen to twenty characters is also how far ahead the eye typically keeps in front of the text as we are reading aloud (Saenger 1997, pp. 117 and bibliography). To this compare the fteen to twenty letters that constitute the width of a prose column in an ancient book roll (Johnson 2003, pp. 16777). We nd, then, at least one possible reason why the lack of word spaces in literary texts did not seem to bother readers in antiquity: the text was already broken up into suciently digestible chunks by the narrow column widths. But this sort of technical observation is of limited use in and of itself and must be combined with other ways in which ancient reading dierentiates itself if we are to make sense of the reading culture. The strangeness of the book roll intersects with the fact that literary texts were commonly read in the sense of a small group listening to a performance (as it were) by a lector (often a slave trained for this very purpose). Thus a performer, in eect, was usually interpreting the text, and the sort of direction for pause and tone given by the authors punctuation in our texts was left to the readers professional interpretation of the lines. We need also to consider the fact that ancient literary books were hardly ever consulted in part or for reference. Thus the need for a text with clear structural markers did not exist. We might note, nally, that the very act of the calligraphic and expensive book being read to a group of the educated elite acted as a symbol of what bonded and validated the group as Greek, educated, cultured. That is, the physical aspect of the book, taken as an element in the reading system as a whole, seems to make sense in its own terms. How, then, do we turn this sort of analysis around and use it in the understanding of reading today and in particular for our understanding of reading in an electronic environment? My rst step is hesitating, unsure, treading well beyond my expertise. But it seems widely assumed in cognitive studies that the experiences of reading in an electronic environment and from a printed text are essentially the same. In fact, computer-controlled reading experiments form the backbone of a certain thread of research in cognitive psychology. Of course many parameters must be approximately equivalent, such as the way in which the eye in reading lines of text jumps at intervals across the page or virtual page (the saccadic movement) or the amount of text on the periphery of the point of acute focus that the eye is able

Copyrighted Material

16

William A. Johnson

to take in. Yet computer screens are visually complex in a way that the printed page is not (Bolter 1991, p. 11), and reading on a computer screen seems, to me at least, cognitively somewhat dierent. Most computer users, for example, rarely read long, continuous text from a computer screen. Why is that? I for one would like to know a great deal more about how the interactions with the electronic interface do or do not aect the mechanics of the reading experience, that is, to what extent reading within the context of a hypertextually linked environment, a multiple-tasking environment, or an environment with a heavy emphasis on icons in lieu of text changes the very way in which our eyes move about and attempt to read the virtual page in front of us. Cognitive studies of such matters are (so far as I have been able to nd) mostly lacking, but even as we mark this down as a desideratum, we have already come to recognize that the cognitive model will be but one facet of the complex reading system I seek to describe. Even in the context of the physical (or virtual) printed text, cognitive models will only get us so far. In the discussion of the way in which the ancient physical text interacted with the system of reading, we found at once that it was necessary to discuss not simply the way in which the reader cognitively processed the narrow columns of letters without word division. We needed also to think about how the physical features of the text, not simply lack of word division but lack of punctuation or structural markers, interacted with the demands made on the textas for example the fact that the text was read aloud by a trained reader and the fact that the text was not used for reference. This striking contrast, the utterly undierentiated unstructuredness of the ancient physical text, suggests, by virtue of its radical dierence, what seems to me the most characteristic feature of the contemporary reading experience. Our habit of reading is so dierent that we nd it hard even to imagine a reading system that lacks physical structural markers, whether at the level of sentence, paragraph, or chapter. Essential to our own idea of reading is detailed, authorially controlled structure. I will go further: there seems today to be an increasingly radical focus on the structural components of texts, and in many ways it is exactly the prominence of these structural features, or what I will call navigational aids, that in some ways strikes at the core of the contemporary reading culture. I highlight this feature because the strong presence of navigational aids seems to me not simply characteristic of contemporary texts but fundamental to many contemporary reading experiences. That the Internet is often cruised by Netscape Navigator is no coincidence in the metaphor I am proering: it seems quintessential to much reading today that we are browsing, that is,

Copyrighted Material

Reading Cultures and Education

17

looking over a huge amount of written data in order to digest the information, or, more commonly, to nd among the deluge of data the information we seek. This habit of information seeking is, I think, profound. But let me emphasize, again, that the computer does not cause it. In classical scholarship we nd that the elaboration of structure and indices designed to facilitate information retrieval rst became prominent in German texts of the end of the nineteenth century. It is simply that the electronic media are particularly well adapted to this sort of reading habit and in turn promote exactly these habitsthis is one aspect of the synergy that I seek to dene in describing the various aspects of our changing reading culture. Thus, to give a very particular instance, the sudden and wide adoption of frames in Internet sites can be seen as a way of taking the information in a site and exposing it structurally on a constant basis. As the reader works through the specic pages of information, there is always at hand this exposed structure, this navigational aid to the site, since the table of contents or indexing function is no longer an optional helpful feature for the reader but essential, on an ongoing basis, to the system of reading. That is, the navigational aid has in some sense become primary. Much of what professors in the humanities seem to have to teach their students is how to read more slowly, more linearly, with more attention to the details of the text as it plays out, since these reading habits are increasingly uncommon and, for many tasks, sad as it may seem, rather irrelevant. A couple of years ago, a student, to my astonishment, told me that she found it easier to read, and easier to remember the things she read, on an Internet site than in a book. At the time, I was oored. It assaulted every idea I had of the advantages of print, of the metaphor I held to be dominant of the permanence of the printed book versus the transitoriness of the computer screen, of my internal picture of the frenetic, interrupted, distracted nature of computer reading, in which one is constantly tempted away from the text toward a new link, a new text. But I am belatedly coming to understand, I think, that a computer text, with its exposed structure and sound bitesized bits of text, can facilitate comprehension and retention for someone growing up under the new paradigm of reading, where the navigational aids are primary, the informational digest secondary, and the text itself only tertiary. To a certain extent, that is, my student and I were talking past each other, since we meant something very dierent by reading, being in, as it were, rather dierent reading cultures. It is this sort of thing I mean when I state that the electronic revolution seems in part informed by a basic change in the paradigm of reading.

Copyrighted Material

18

William A. Johnson

What the New Reading Culture May Mean for Education

The educational consequences of the paradigm shift, if I am right in my own cultural reading, cannot be underestimated. A strong awareness of this shift in the way students process and retain text can help in eective learning. For example, in accommodating to the reading culture of the Web, I have found that my class notes (which I routinely post to the Web) become increasingly organized in a top-down fashion, increasingly structured, increasingly oriented toward the presentation of a radical synopsis of the material, even in the teaching of linear texts such as Homer or Vergil. Jay Bolter has argued, perhaps rightly, that the hypertextual environment encourages an aphoristic tendency, since each structural element in a written text becomes a linkable unit, thus potentially segregated from the linear sequence (Bolter 1991, p. ix). The tendency to aphorism, to expression in kernels of thought, need not be reductionist. In my own experiments with Web-based teaching of classical literature, I have found that use of on-line lecture notes has had the following consequences: 1. The weaker students nd it easier to absorb and understand the material, since they no longer have to rely on their own muddled outlines and digests. The passivity may not in every way seem desirable, but I can report not only that many weaker students perform better but also that they pay more attention in class and seem much more involved in, and thoughtful about, these dicult ancient texts. 2. Since the information is available on the Web, I feel free both to include a great many more items, such as examples from the text, or links to other resources, than we could ever work through in class. Moreover, I have increasingly felt free to skip simpler sections altogether when class time seems better spent exploring one section in more detail. 3. Since the students are explicitly responsible for the Web materials, rather than what we may or may not cover in class, all the students are exposed to many more ideas than we can cover in class, and the stronger students work through the many exampleswhich is the only way to begin to get at the richness of texture of the literary text underlying my schematic analyses. The professorial narrative becomes, then, reduced and restructured on one hand but expanded and made more open-ended on the other. It no longer matches what goes on in the classroom. I can teach both at an elementary and an advanced level more or less simultaneously. Much more of the learning, suddenly, begins to take place outside of the classroom: the grappling with the Web-based professorial narrative seems to lead to a great deal more interaction among the students outside of class, as they work through these

Copyrighted Material

Reading Cultures and Education

19

materials, and the class becomes at times almost like a commentary on the virtual class in which we are all studying. That this sort of class can be so successfula class where linear presentation is constantly interrupted or ignored altogether, where kernelized analysis is given precedence, even though we are studying literary texts, where there is constant diversion toward illustrative or related materialsbegins, however, to make sense in the context of the new reading culture. It is not, in truth, the kind of class that I would prefer to take, but it is the kind of class that most of my students seem to prefer. The success of the class, in short, stems from the fact that I am attempting to work with, rather than ght against, the new habits of reading.

Sociocultural Aspects of Reading and Education

The physical and conceptual text is, however, only one part of the reading system, and arguably not the most important part. I want to turn back now to broaden the description of reading culture, for I have repeatedly broached, but never fully entered into, a discussion of one of the most fundamental aspects of the reading system, namely, the sociocultural construction of reading. As we shall see, I consider the sociocultural component not only crucial to reading culture generally but of special importance to the question of education. But rst we need to gain a more vivid idea of this dimension of reading. As is my wont, I will start, this time quite briey, with the ancient reading experience, again focusing on the reading of a prose literary text. The ancient reader (by which I mean the educated person listening to the trained lector) is comfortably disposed: lying on a couch, relaxed, and often, perhaps usually, among friends. The attitude is not one of digesting information, or of a scholastic critical reaction, but either pure aesthetic pleasure or that sort of intellectual contention familiar to us in its extreme (and idealized) form from such sources as Plato and Athenaeus. The enjoyment of the lection is perhaps often interrupted by remarks or even debate: the text is a guide and springboard to conversation and discussion, constituting intellectual and aesthetic pleasure in a tightly bound, elite group. Note how social and textual event interlock. The physical text is beautiful, the reading is slow, the lector is well trained for the task of bringing the text alive to the hearers, the reading unfolds along with the book roll itself in a sequential and leisurely manner for a limited time, the comfortable setting bespeaks the wealth, culture, and renement of those sharing in the experience, the diculty of the text bespeaks their education. As a sociocultural system this reading experience begins to make sense, to take on esh.

Copyrighted Material

20

William A. Johnson

Now let us at a leap jump from antiquity back to our own time and compare and contrast this ancient scenario with a type of reading we all know well, namely, reading within the context of a humanities classroom. There are no couches, no continuous oral reading from the text, no luxuriousness (at least not at my university), but the scene is oddly similar in certain ways: the use of a text as a springboard to intellectual discourse; the tightly bound group that validates itself using a text that is important to a shared sense of culture; the comfortable feeling of the selectness of the group. But now lets turn this scene around and ask, pointedly: Why is it that students so commonly nd dicult texts such as Homers Iliad or Platos Republic (or Dante or Baudelaire or Goethe) deeply exciting within the context of a class? If they do not read these texts in college, most of these same people, after all, as forty-something stockbrokers or business executives, are not likely to nd these texts very engaging. Why do young men and women who nd Greek or Sanskrit or Swahili captivating as students rarely read these languages once they graduate? What specically is the nature of the magical web that a good teacher is able to spin? A great deal, I think, depends on the sociocultural construction of the reading group, and much of what we do in higher education, both institutionally and individually, is to work toward the construction of particular types of reading groups. In a successful humanities class, we are not so much teaching texts as creating a reading society, which nds self-validation in the negotiated construction on meaning from these texts. That is, institutionally we work, for instance, toward creating the disposition that knowledge of and directed engagement with particular humanities texts is socioculturally important: it is part of what you need to know to be educated, to become part of the cultured elite of society. Individually, we as teachers work toward creating the disposition that a particular text (the one we are studying in the class) is meaningful and relevant: it is part of what you need to apprehend the knowledge and to experience that sense of meaningfulness that bonds the group together as a productive, self-validating unit. These group dynamics the construction of the attitude in the reader that Plato is important, that Plato should be interesting are fundamental to education and fundamental to the high intellectual experience. Reading is the individuals construction of meaning, but it is never wholly interior; rather, sociocultural inuences always inform the meaning that the reader seeks to construct, as anthropologists and linguists increasingly recognize (compare, for example, Heath 1983; Street 1984; and Finnegan 1988). It is here that I nd the new techno-culture so deeply exciting for education. Techno-culture seems to me a rich opportunity if looked on in light of

Copyrighted Material

Reading Cultures and Education

21

the construction of reading communities. Although central to what we do as educators, construction of communities is tough in the context of much humanistic education, whether the less common languages and literatures (today comprising once-popular languages such as French, German, and Russian) or the many other subjects increasingly perceived as impractical (including philosophy, world religion, or art history) and thus often wanting for students beyond the introductory level. What I have in mind goes, however, beyond courses that use the Internet to link up solitary or small groups of students into a virtual class. The sense of a techno-culture that underlies many contemporary reading communities, from chat rooms to discussion groups to loose networks of e-mail correspondents, is potentially a powerful tool that can extend beyond the construction of typical class activity and a tool that can be used to access groups beyond the eighteen-to-twenty-two set that American education typically targets. American arts councils, whether they promote opera, symphony, art, or theater, have long been successful at creating a life-long sense of engagement from targeted persons. Interestingly, many of these people do not in fact have a profound passion for art or music or theater; rather, they share an interest that seems to them culturally important. For our purposes, what is interesting is the participation of the arts council itself in the negotiation and construction of the cultural group, in promoting and indeed exploiting that important sense of a culturally selfvalidating society. Imagine an America in which it becomes part of the social scene of the educated not simply to go to the occasional opera or play but to do cool intellectual things over the Internet, an America in which a normal cultural aspiration for any educated personthe cool (that is, socially validating) thing to dois to get together with your intellectual group and discuss language, literature, and culture. Imagine a set of educators who conspire, as it were, to use the Internet to link and organize persons with specic shared interests, to facilitate and promote directed techno-cultural communities, who spread many seeds in the hope that various small techno-cultural communities will take root. Imagine intellectual groups, be they speakers of Ukrainian, students of antiquity, or alumni of Oberlin, who use the technocultural community to get that sense of an ongoing, broadly shared mission, even as they are also able to identify local people with whom they could share more conventional social intercourse. I am a classicist: I am no seer, I bear no words from Apollo, and this scenario may well seem fantastic. But let us turn, one nal time, to the ancient Mediterranean. In a provincial watering hole deep in the Egyptian desert, at a town named Oxyrhynchus, a group of ancient Greeks, in the

Copyrighted Material

22

William A. Johnson

midst of an Egyptian culture for generations, used the reading of Homer, Euripides, Sappho, and Aristotle as a means of maintaining their sense of cultural identity, of keeping their Greeknessbut also as a means of maintaining their sense of education and civilization even while the desert encroached on all sides. Two millennia later in Britain, in the early days of the twentieth century, the Egypt Exploration Fund, a nonacademic, professionally diverse club of the intellectually curious, would meet frequently, and with great excitement, to study these same texts as they were being dug from the sands of Oxyrhynchusin part an expression of their sense of belonging to the educated class of a great imperial power. If sociocultural groups could nd life-long intellectual community in provincial Greco-Roman Egypt and in Edwardian England, why not in technologically sophisticated America? The sense of belonging to an educated, cultured group can be a powerful force and is one that we, as educators, labor to construct but one that we let pass out of our hands the moment our charges leave the university. We may be able to make better progress both in our ability to connect with undergraduates and in the goal of life-long humanistic learning if we start to think of the use of technology not simply as a classroom or research tool but as a part of how contemporary people negotiate the construction of reading communities and if we try to think through specically how to use to advantage the cachet and sex appeal of the technoculture to facilitate the construction of broadly based, continuing, specialized communities of readers. In this brief essay, I have taken time to look at only a couple of aspects of our contemporary reading culture, a culture that seems, if I am right, to be shifting in an important way. Obviously, to do a proper job I would need to look at the reading system from a greater variety of viewpoints, to try to see what other elements I can isolate that dier from the reading-from-a-printed book paradigm. These would include the use of graphic symbolism, the inuence of video and audio technologies, the aesthetics of electronic tools and how aesthetics inuence sociocultural constructions, the intersection of virtual and interpersonal communications in the reading society, and so forth. But I hope that even this very prolegomenal treatment of our contemporary reading culture suces to suggest some ways in which thinking through reading as a system may be able to help as we try to sort out the paradigm shift going on about us. This written record developed from two oral papers delivered in the fall of 1998, one at Oberlin College (a celebration of the career of Professor Nathan A. Greenberg), the other at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Copyrighted Material

Reading Cultures and Education

23

(a conference titled Transformations: Technology, Foreign Languages, and Undergraduate Education). The sections on ancient reading culture rely on, and in some cases summarize or paraphrase, the more detailed presentation of evidence and analysis in Johnson (2000). The comments on teaching with Web-based materials reect in particular my experience in a series of classical civilization courses taught at Bucknell University from 1997 to 1999. References
Bolter, J. D. (1991). Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Carruthers, M. J. (1990). The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cribiore, R. (1996). Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars. Eisenstein, E. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finnegan, R. (1988). Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Goody, J. (1977). The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J., and I. Watt. (1963). The Consequences of Literacy. Contemporary Studies in Society and History 5: 30445. Republished in Literacy in Traditional Societies, edited by J. Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 2768. Havelock, E. (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, W. A. (2000). Towards a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity. American Journal of Philology 121: 593627. . (2003). Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Miller, K. (1998). Tough Luck for Editors, Times Literary Supplement 4970 (July 3), 7. Olson, D. (1994). The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Reading and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saenger, P. (1997). Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, R. (1992). Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, E. G. (1987). Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World. 2d ed., revised by P. J. Parsons. London: Institute for Classical Studies, University College London. Wingo, E. O. (1972). Latin Punctuation in the Classical Age. The Hague: Mouton.