Electronic Textuality: Introduction

Abstract

Since the advent of the information society, the modalities of reading and writing have changed. The issue of reading and writing, which has been a crucial ingredient of European self-consciousness since the development of vocalized alphabetical writing in the eighth century BCE, has emerged afresh, bringing new questions, paradoxes and opportunities. At first glance, one is struck by the uneven development of reading and writing in the digital environment. Apart from the technique of speed-reading, no technology has been implemented that supports or transforms the process of reading while, by contrast, writing has made enormous gains from the use of the personal computer. The computer has automated, speeded up and thus facilitated writing (Fortunati, 2005). As Fortunati and Vincent show (2014), electronic writing has been enhanced by many affordances,¹ such as the automatic correction of errors of spelling, grammar and syntax, the use of online dictionaries, vocabularies, and so on. Composing texts electronically has also aided the process of editing, with other software devices, although there has been the loss of the ‘writing path’, as the technology has made it possible for writers not to keep track of their successive drafts, for good or ill. By contrast, and paradoxically, the use of the computer, which has facilitated writing so much, has made reading more difficult: what has emerged in the research carried out thus far is that people prefer to read on paper because it is less tiring (Dillon, 1992, 2011 and Baron, 2013).