Of course, onscreen text will change and improve. But the physical side of reading depends not on the bad aspects of computer screens but on the brilliance of the traditional book—sheets bound on end, the “codex”—which remains the most brilliant design of the last several thousand years. Technologists have (as usual) decreed its disappearance without bothering to understand it. They make the same mistake clever planners have made for half a century in forecasting the death of cars and their replacement by spiffier technology. The problem is, people like cars.

David Gelernter, in "Does the Brain Like E-Books?"

 

As many researchers have pointed out, reading is not natural; it is a repurposing of brain circuitry, a utilization of object recognition and motor regions (among others) of the brain that came about relatively late in human history. When we read, there is a connection between the abstraction of representational systems and the material reality of our brain's work: "The brain literally goes through the motions of writing when reading, even if the hands are empty" (Jabr). Reading is itself a structural, tactile orientation to the world(s) we inhabit.

 

These days I'm thinking of reading as a type of orienteering, being confronted by a text when I have only an old compass and a vague sense of the stars. As I map myself onto my texts, I feel a profound sense of dislocation, of touching but not quite grasping what's there. The sense is physical, spatial. Indeed, as Ferris Jabr writes: "Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of [geographic] terrain." ("The Reading Brain").

 

But with the advent of newer reading and writing technologies, the terrain has shifted for me, or at least there's been a shift in my ability to navigate. I'm having a crisis, that is, in orientation. I have a hard time reading long print texts any more, and I grieve this loss. There are ironies, inconsistencies in my reading process: I have an easier time reading an actual bound codex than scanning an iPad or scrolling on my laptop—something about native fit of genre to habitat. But still, I can only make it through half a book, fully immersed, and then I put the thing down and don't finish. Next to my bed, I have a stack of such half-read, unconsummated texts: Atkinson's Human Croquet, Lamott's Traveling Mercies, Ehrenreich's Living with a Wild God, Ravitch's Reign of Error, Harjo's Crazy Brave, Drucker's Graphesis, and many others. My bookcases, both at home and in my office, suffer similar attentional neglect. As N. Katherine Hayles might say, I have lost a good deal of my "deep attention" to text and have moved toward "hyper" attention. She explains:

 

Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom. . . . Each cognitive mode has advantages and limitations. Deep attention is superb for solving complex problems represented in a single medium, but it comes at the price of environmental alertness and flexibility of response. Hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a noninteractive object such as a Victorian novel or complicated math problem. ("Hyper" 187–88)

 

Using the computer science term open architecture to describe the plasticity of the brain, Maryanne Wolf writes that the human brain constitutes a system "versatile enough to change—or rearrange—to accommodate the varying demands on it. . . . We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs" (5). And yet, as I fumble my way through a book these days, I'm still waiting for that breakthrough; I find myself in some liminal space, a borderland between print and digital, marked by frustration and nostalgia.

 

As I read online, my eyes flicker in time with the digital glow, and I move from screen to screen, never sitting still although my physical body, like a telemediated lump, just sits and sits, an homage to Laurie Anderson's convict in Dal Vivo. It’s not that I’m incapable of focus—when I compose, I will work for twelve solid hours without budging—it’s that the input I crave has to move, like my brain now moves, a fish breathing and sleeping in motion.