The Future of Reading

A New Series at The Hinternet

Since its founding in 2020, The Hinternet has not only been a place for reading and writing. It has also been a place for dwelling on reading and writing, a place to ask, and to ask again and again: what are these activities, anyway? What do we think we’re doing when we engage in them? And, most pressingly, what are their prospects for the future?

Our founding editor has been unrestrainedly pessimistic, most of the time, about the suggestion that reading and writing have any future at all. He has been heard to say, in fact, that literacy had a pretty good run of it for five millennia or so, but that now, plainly, we are moving into a very different phase of human history. The upside to this, he sometimes notes on his happier days, is that in any case writing is only a very superficial and late-coming addition to the suite of skills associated with human language, a technology that suited a particular phase of our species’ development. We got by just fine without it for perhaps 95% or so of our history, and if we are leaving it behind now, this may be, in the larger picture of things, only because something better has come along to replace it.

What is that something? The great historian and media-theorist Walter Ong, whose work spanned the history of literacy from ancient Chinese oracle bones through Renaissance Ramism (Substack’s subliterate internal dictionary just autocorrected that last word three times to “Racism”) all the way to desktop computers, introduced the helpful notion of “secondary literacy”: a form of reading and writing that proceeds through visual signs, but that otherwise unfolds much more in the sphere of orality. Think Snapchat. The kids are writing, but this writing is in important respects an extension of their speaking.

And indeed at least some of the kids are writing an awful lot: hundreds of thousands of words of fan fiction inspired by their favorite corporate IPs, for example, which, however rooted in the cynical manipulations of the culture industry, nonetheless serves, it cannot be denied, as the occasion for the free play of these young people’s imagination. It may be, then, that our founding editor is simply an old fart, who mistakes what is in fact both real continuity and healthy transformation in the history of literacy for its death. He thinks back wistfully on the undergraduate course he took on Tolstoy in 1993, where the uncompromising professor said on the first day of class, “You are to have War and Peace read by Week Two, Anna Karenina by Week Three, Resurrection by Week Four”, etc., and says to himself: “I wish I could do that to my students!”

Our managing editor, meanwhile, a generation or so younger, and therefore not yet in that stage of life characterized primarily by the constant ache of loss and regret, is a good deal more sanguine. She tends to think we can hold onto literacy not only as a vehicle for young people to spin out delirious new sub-genres of fan fiction, from erotic Chewbacca epopees to K-pop talmudism, but, even now, as a skill useful in cultivating appreciation of the likes of old Tolstoy. In one of her more entrepreneurial moods, she even came up with a plan to get her generation to appreciate War and Peace — which happens to be the novel her fellow Britons lie most about having read. Her solution is simple: split that doorstopper into three slender editions, and market each individually, preferably on #BookTok. The first, Pierre’s War, featuring only battlefield scenes, would appeal to the disenchanted Fight Club fanboys, with blundering, blubbering Bezukhov (literally: “Without Ears”) a herald of today’s so-called masculinity crisis. Next would be Natasha’s Choice, a love story with some seriously risqué Bridgerton-style cover art. This one for the romance-starved Gen Z women, weary of dating apps, polycule politics and Prince Andrei-level “sad boys”. As for those young fogies into Great Man Theory, or perhaps the nobility of the Russian peasantry — well, you oddballs can pick up Tolstoy’s Offcuts, a selection of meandering essays for a bargain price.  

She reports that she can hear your cries of protest all the way from her perch in London. But it’s that, she fears, or soon enough nobody will be reading War and Peace at all.

A recent article in The Atlantic entitled “The elite college students who can’t read books”, which was one of the principal triggers for our launching this present series, found that English literature students have given up on the classics altogether. Forget Crime and Punishment, Moby-Dick or The Iliad, some can’t even keep their eyes on a sonnet. While novices in America’s ivory towers once cited Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre as their most beloved book, they now exalt that demigod of young-adult fiction, Percy Jackson. (JSR comment: “Who’s that?”)

Our solutions, we hope, will go well beyond tearing up Tolstoy. In particular, our forthcoming series, “The Future of Reading”, will look at why the present generation seems to have gone off reading, what we can do about it, and whether we should even bother to intervene. We’ll start, this coming Sunday, with a work of auto-ethnography from D. Graham Burnett, a long time collaborator of our founding editor, as attested in such publications as Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses and In Search of the Third Bird. As you’ll soon see, even an attention expert can find himself lost in a warren of distraction.

We hope to feature authors in this series writing from several different perspectives, and coming from all points on the continuum that runs between pure pessimism and gleeful optimism. If you think you have something new and compelling to say on the topic, please consider pitching it to us.

Finally, if this series, along with the other work we do here at The Hinternet, is interesting to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. In part because of our founding editor’s uncompromising insistence on writing in a “high literary” key, or some strange imitation of that, in part because of the natural cycle of credit-card expirations, we have been absolutely hemorrhaging paid subscribers in the last weeks. This could not come at a worse time for us, as we expand our operations and take on real expenses — not least the payment of our guest contributors and of the skeleton crew of real people who constitute our editorial team (most notably, Olivia and David). In case you haven’t noticed, we’re working our fingerprints off over here. Continuing to operate at this level will simply require more paid subscriptions, so if you read and enjoy our work, and you are in a position to support us, please do so.

—OWJ and JSR