Comments on Hayles, “How We Read”

The three concepts

  1. Close reading. A defining skill for literary studies that has helped literature departments justify their existence to university administrations, that has led to the development of “symptomatic reading” (i.e. when reading between the lines isn’t enough, read against the text), and that may now be losing favor among a new critical generation of “surface readers” and a new young generation of screen readers. Insofar as close reading has led critics to advance their ideologies against the goals of the text, it’s getting to be a tired method; but insofar as close reading can still encourage analysis of affect or cultural importance, it may remain vital.

  2. Hyper reading. Reading skills (and, possibly, weaknesses) developed co-dependently with the rise of computer screens and web pages. Hyper readers are good at moving quickly among varied information and processing salient details in longer pages quickly by skimming (often, it seems, in an “F” formation), but they are less good at sustained concentration or catching all the information available. As studies continue to describe hyper-reading practices with more and more accuracy (in spite of Hayles’s justifiable reservations about fMRI studies), creators of digital content often adapt their material to hyper readers, which cements behaviors further.

  3. Machine reading. Hayles makes the provocative argument that humans and machines do not read differently enough to warrant the assumption that the two forms have nothing to do with each other. Rather, drawing on classroom experiences and scholarship by Moretti and others, “How We Read” proposes that the relationship is dynamic and interactive: humans teach computers what to be interested in, and computers show humans patterns and questions they may not have anticipated.

Just this morning, I told my World Literature students one of my favorite maxims (which I may have invented or may have stolen from somewhere–I can’t remember): “close readers are close writers.” My belief in continuing to teach close reading, even if it’s sometimes considered passé, is that it makes students better at expressing their own ideas, since they begin to apply the same analytical tools to their own diction, tone, style, syntax, figurative language, etc. So I’m specifically curious as to what writing benefits Hayles imagines arising out of teaching these other kinds of reading. Certainly, I can believe that by practicing hyper reading and machine reading, we become more effective at writing digital content in a way that our readers will capture in turn–but at a more fundamental level, can it teach good habits of word choice, argumentation, or description?

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