INTRO                                                                                                                               

I want to start my post with full transparency and say that before this class, I had never delved into the world of audio books! Reasoning behind this doesn’t stem from any distaste for the medium, it’s just something I haven’t really considered for myself when “reading”. So with no prior experience with an audiobook I decided to hark back to the days of childhood where books were often read to me. Although these reading sessions weren’t professionally recorded the objective of it remained the same as it was still a text being read out loud for me to hear rather than see. With this in mind along with the general knowledge of knowing digital literacy has been prevalent in the modern age, I knew it would be very easy for me to find and access children’s books in audio format. Although I am not all too familiar with how the youth of today consume their literature, I assume prerecorded texts are a favorable method for parents and/or teachers who are inclined to introduce their children/students to reading methods that don’t require their direct assistance. I want to note that this isn’t a bad thing, audiobooks are often used as a form of convenience so why not use it in all aspects? I imagine children’s audio books are a great way to keep the child engrossed when the caretaker in question is preoccupied with other tasks.       

AUDIOBOOK/QUALITIES     

Through a quick google search I was led to a bevy of YouTube channels littered with “read aloud” versions of popular children’s books (Storytime Anytime, Toadstools and Fairy Dust, Storybook Nany Read Aloud etc.) Luckily I was able to find the very particular children’s text I was hoping to discover through one of these channels. The book I decided to present in this post is Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes. A book that I’ve read and had read to me numerous times as a child. The general premise of the text revolves around a young mouse who is consistently teased at school due to her unique name. Through the help of her parents and teacher she learns to accept the name she once loved so fondly. The book revolves around themes of self acceptance and bullying from peers and is a text  I recall heavily relating to as a youngling, as I also unfortunately suffered the wrath of bullying due to my name (being an ethnic kid in America kind of sucks). Nonetheless I remember taking solace in the fact that this was an issue not specifically delegated to me. Although I was aware the book was a work of fiction I felt a special connection with that little mouse. Hearing the audio for this book again definitely tugged at my heart strings a bit. 

The audiobook itself was taken from the aforementioned channel Storybook Nany Read Aloud. The female voice behind the audio enlists the use of various auditory accompaniments to bring the story to life. Background music, the sounds effects of objects moving, background noises as well as voice distinctions between characters were all utilized. Below are some time stamps of when these effects were used 

0:30- 0:40 (Mother and Father speaking)

1:05 (Sounds of Birds Chirping)

1:16 (Sound of faucet running)

2:15 (Sounds of taunting giggles)

2:30 (Voice of Main bully Victoria)

6:43 (Sound of dice)

6:50-7:07 (Music change indicating nightmare)

The production value of this video definitely made for a mentally stimulating experience. Although the video itself does feature still images of the illustrations taken from the book I decided to minimize the window for a complete auditory experience (I hope this doesn’t count as cheating, I know it’s not a legit audiobook but I figured it used the same elements). Even without the images I felt as if I could picture every scene of the book inside my head. The background noises coupled with the descriptions provided by the narrator made “reading” this text all the more enjoyable. Reading a print copy of a children’s book can be a delightful experience unto itself, but there’s honestly something about having a children’s book read to you. I believe in order to read children’s literature the speaker kind of always has to have an air of enthusiasm and animated whimsy in their tone and delivery. Although I feel these voice modulations can sometimes be a distraction and cross into “cheesy” territory, in the context of children’s’ books it always works! 

This assignment has sparked my interest in audiobooks and I look forward to discovering more in the future. 

A/N: I’d like to formally apologize for the length.

I started my reading for today’s class with “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books” and felt immediately at home in the topic Price is discussing. I’ve so recently found myself a Master’s student in Digital Humanities, which, being a humanities, has quite a bit of reading involved. And therein lies the problem… I don’t generally read. Now, of course, I just said “I started my reading” so perhaps I’m being too critical of myself. I read. I read some. I definitely read more now than I did last year. But I certainly don’t read in the way I did when I was a child hopped up on Adderall. I could spend this entire blog post lamenting “the ADHD generation” and how none of us can focus anymore and it’s an epidemic blah blah blah. Or I could talk about how awesome, yet tinged with a hint of sadness, it is to see librarians advocating for anything that has words in it to count as reading (see here – seen at Decatur Library, Alabama). Which, as a brief aside: I love libraries. I love how they are becoming a space that is truly public and has everything as Price talks about. I think it’s a beautiful thing. And I think it’s interesting how she’s bringing in all these statistics that say in the 20-teens that reading was actually on the up-and-up again, and without even Googling it I know that in the aftermath of 2020 reading climbed its way back up to the top of entertainment. I think it’s also worth another blog post entirely of its own to discuss how bound books are combatting the ephemerality of the Internet.

But what I actually want to talk about is based on my experience as a Linguist: reading is not natural.

Yeah, I said it. Reading isn’t natural to humans. Spoken word far predates written word by a few thousand years or so. Writing was often restricted to the highest classes and their scribes for most of early history. Of course, this all changed with the printing press. When all this knowledge that had previously been restricted to a certain class of people with private tutors became essentially public, it fundamentally revolutionized how learning itself works. Instead of needing to apprentice with someone in your field, you could read books on your own and become an autodidact, which many societies quite admired (as tough as it is to be successful that way) as we still do today in the Western world. So, reading became the standard. Now, however, we’re seeing a return to the spoken word. Written word takes time that we in our late-stage capitalist era haven’t much of. Written word takes effort that we can’t sacrifice. Price talks about the ‘myth of exceptionalism’—the idea that we’re not living in the ‘unprecedented age’ we believe we live in. She continues to talk about the rise of TV, and the rise of radio, and this is exactly what we’re living through all over again. When these new technologies become widely available, we see people shift to using them more than books, and then books prevail once again after those technologies have been around for a while. But personally, as I’ve said in my topic sentence, I believe this is because audio technology is, for most of us, more natural to us than reading. What we’re also seeing, though, is remnants of the original mentality that the Internet was this thing that was… well, cringe, because it was for nerds. Ew, nerds! Who would want to be educated?! Losers. You read fanfiction that’s longer than any book you’ve ever read? And it’s about some… fictional characters?! Laaaaame. That’s not real reading.

What I’m talking about, dear readers, is the ever-present gatekeeping. Why it is that humans like to cage their stuff up so much for no one else to enjoy I’ll never be certain. But reading (not books) is thoroughly gatekept. Books themselves are old news. Widely available, widely owned. But reading can only be done in books—if you do it anywhere else you’re doing it wrong! Truth of the matter is, those librarians are right: all reading is reading. As Price calls it: the myth of the ideal reader. However, there is something to be said for the art of the written word. Graphic novels don’t have that, most often they have the art of… well, art, more so than they do the written word. Magazines aren’t known for it, though there are some particularly good pieces I’ve read in The Atlantic. I’m getting side-tracked, but point is: if it’s ‘easy’ to understand and readily available, it’s not books, and so it’s not reading.

Reading, and reading of specifically books, is equivocated with intelligence just as it had been pre-printing press and now post-so. If reading becomes widely available, and no longer so gatekept, it can’t be a mark of intelligence… how can it be that someone who reads exclusively grocery store romance novels is intelligent? Simply impossible! Preposterous! Not all of us can be blessed with such intelligence as to be capable of reading. As Price says, “this [is] the latest version of the centuries-old attempt to distinguish trashy escapism from intellectually challenging and therefore morally respectable fiction”. But the reality is that with the advent of public schooling, reading became not only common amongst all classes but also second-nature. We as a people became more intelligent because we were more educated. But on that note…

The notion that Google makes us stupid is absolutely ridiculous. What we’re actually doing is reducing our memory recall, which… well, we don’t always need it anymore. And that’s totally fine. There are people who work on upping their memory recall for things like trivia shows or to prevent dementia. Personally, I think it’s a fun exercise to try and just remember that actor’s name from that one TV show all on my own. But the argument can absolutely be made that Google has actually made us smarter by giving us access to almost literally every bit of knowledge in the world. Surely that must count for something.

And of course, this is all at the detriment of our attention spans. Yep, I couldn’t avoid talking about it as much as I want to. It’s unfortunately just the truth- it’s not that we don’t need our attention spans anymore, it’s that algorithms are literally designed to keep your attention for as long as possible by tapping into that short-term reward part of your brain. ‘Ooh, a piece of candy’ scroll ‘Ooh, another piece of candy’ scroll. Except that’s happening faster than you can even process. Some of these algorithms have even been outed as using the same mechanics as drug addiction. Not having an attention span is definitely a side effect of all of this, and unfortunately only feeds into…

The death of the book.

Just kidding! You think I really believe books are going anywhere? No way. Not anytime soon. But reading in the traditional sense—what Price calls the idealist sense—is definitely taking a dive. And maybe that means it’s high time for it to. I’d love to be able to argue that we’re living in a very proletariat era with widespread access to knowledge, but the reality is that that access to knowledge is actually skewed by the companies that spread it. Google is chock-a-block with ads, and the companies at the very top of the results are major monopolies. It’s not just a search engine anymore; long gone are the days of Googling a hyper-specific question and finding niche forums at the top of the list (DuckDuckGo is really your guy if you want that-though those forums are usually pretty old and outdated now). Not to mention, you really need to know exactly what you’re looking for to use Google now. It used to function more like an encyclopedia, you search for ‘vampires’ and bingo, top result of azvampires.com and you’re reading about every kind of vampire mythology known to man. Now you have to search for ‘define vampire’, ‘vampire Wikipedia’, ‘what is a vampire’ to get anything of use. And I could spend more time than I already have talking about why Google’s algorithm appears to have changed so much, but my point is really this: it may seem as though this widespread access to information is a good thing, but our widespread access to information is painfully biased in favor of whatever it is that large corporations want you to think, and if you actually want to do any meaningful research on a topic with a wide variety of opinions, you’re best off Googling ‘vampire mythology books Reddit’, because the last major forum on the Internet will give you 20 opinions/suggestions for one question. So while the notion that Google is making us stupid is total baloney, what’s not baloney is that Google and the Internet as a whole cannot replace books. As much as I’d love to say I can find anything I want to learn on the Internet, there is SO much of my undergraduate degree that I would have never learned about on the Internet. Some knowledge is still gatekept… and that might be for the better given our current political climate.

Finally, I’ve reached my conclusion. I know, I’m quite long-winded. In its current state, the Internet simply cannot replace books. Rather, in its current state, the Internet shouldn’t replace books- but it is. And that’s scary.

The rise of technology has long been said that would diminish physical copies of books, affect our reading habits, and exhaust our attention spans. Price, in the book What we talk about when we talk about books, argues against this prediction by discussing various reading patterns in history that always seems to be challenged by lifestyle changes. She gives historical examples like multitasking readers, bedtime stories, and bookshops selling non-book items (Price, pp. 9–11) to present us with an image of a less ideal reader and a more realistic world of readers in the history of books. I support her ideas on multiple ways in our history people can get distracted when reading and also would avoid the word “golden age” in describing any periods. Besides her point on distraction, I would like to raise the issue of literacy and reading as a luxury. Price writes about certain kinds of reading experiences like the “aristocrats had their hair curled while listening to a servant read aloud” (Price, pp. 9) and “poetry lovers scissored pages apart to paste scraps of one collection into the margins of another.” (same as above) There might be a golden age in the past for people who could afford this reading habit and lifestyle (even for some working classes’ lifestyles mentioned by her in the introduction) but technologies in the digital age do help to enable more accesses to content and information.

But are we in a golden age of reading now? My answer is no. Even with the support of accessible media, I still see status indicators in our reading experiences. The decrease in our attention spans could be a by-product of our digitalized and digital-born lifestyle. However, I do not think technology is the only one to blame. On a digital platform, the requirement for productivity has been further enhanced so that free time is unfairly distributed and racial, gender, and other inequalities are shaped along the way. Productivity and the increased requirement/desire to obtain the most updated information to make a living sometimes force people to give priority to “useful” information over immersive mental and emotional simulations, an experience we often acquire through reading novels and stories.

Liu’s article “From Reading to Social Computing” provides another perspective examining the “roles of literary sociality.” (Liu, paragraph 22) According to Liu, marginal ones in reading and literary activities are more visible thanks to the development of social computing. I think it will be possible to discover invisible nodes in the social networks of reading practices if we use some of Price’s examples. My question on Liu’s article is about how to balance “distant reading” (Liu, paragraph 39) and close reading and how to organically combine social science methodologies with more conventional literary approaches. Moreover, in the last paragraph, Liu asks a question for further studies: “what is the differentia specifica of literary social computing.” (Liu, paragraph 53) I think this methodology is facing great challenges brought by Web 3.0. Will our reading habits and literary experiences be transformed again by a decentralized and permission-free world in Web 3.0 built on blockchains and supported by the VR, AR, and metaverse? Pressman’s article and introduction of the three novel types in book-based or book-like formats inspired me a lot while I imagined a world of Web 3.0: how would ergodic literature and our understanding of the materiality of literature change as the literary social computing and Spatial Web develop?

Additional notes: The game Disco Elysium might be of interest to you. The digital novel Pry (2015) reminds me a lot of Disco Elysium.

“Aren’t we after all the vanguard of what’s known as print culture? And isn’t print the natural enemy of pixels?” (Coady, 12). A recurring theme kept surfacing for me in this week’s readings on reading – the dichotomy between the printed and the digital as forms of media. Printed books have a physical presence “as hunks of paper, ink, and glue” (Price, 7) whose survival is constantly being questioned in our digital age of electronic books, the internet, and technology. However, I would argue that digital media also has a kind of physical presence, one that cannot be measured by weight, length or number of pages, but a presence nonetheless.

While I appreciate Pressman’s three case studies of novels in the digital age, the examples are mainly focused on the materiality of the format, reiterating the differences between print and digital instead of demonstrating how these lines can be blurred to afford new reading experiences. Danielewski’s twenty-seven volume narrative The Familiar takes a new approach by using digital technology for production, distribution, marketing, and perhaps some digital humanities tools for analysis, but it’s still a printed book whose presence is marked by its bigness. Its size is emphasized while the digital methods employed are subsequent. Dominguez’s “it-narrative” novel The House of Paper highlights books as objects which are used as bricks to build a house, a commentary of the fate of books in the digital age. Pressman equates power with a physical presence, “The book is not presented as a medium for reading; it is powerful just by being there.” (261). Can the digital also have a physical presence which is just as powerful?

I believe Pressman’s last example, Pry, a digital novel/app, has such a presence. It encourages the reader to interact with the text by pinching and zooming in to find more layers to the story, “Reading between the lines is literalized as an activity… which is particularly poetic and ironic because this reading machine (the iPad or tablet) is flat. Unlike a book, the reading medium that inspired depth-based metaphors of reading, the digital tablet is not comprised of physical layers or, of course, paper pages.” (262). Instead of lauding the qualities of the digital tablet which allow the experience of Pry to exist, Pressman instead compares it to the physicality of paper. But, are digital tablets flat? Sure, the latest version of the iPad is 0.25” thick but the technology behind it (and Pry) is composed of layers upon layers of code which can either come to the forefront or move to the background depending on the reader’s gestures. This is a dimension and physical presence created by technology which enables readers to (physically) use their fingers to get information and experience text in new ways. Innovation here creates a different kind of tangible encounter with text that doesn’t involve wood pulp. Pressman begins to ask these questions but did not address them in the examples, “at a time when data and scale are configured on databases and interfaces that don’t seem to possess any heft – when Google Books and the World Wide Web can contain the content of infinite bookshelves within a slick machine whose girth measures little less an inch in width – the physical presence of information becomes an ontological and epistemological subject as well as an aesthetic one.” (256)

Similarly, Lui describes databases as an important component of social computing. Databases can be measured in size and have a physical presence – they can be as small as 50 kilobytes of information or as large as 100 megabytes of information. While they cannot be put on a scale to be weighed or measured with a ruler, do these facts negate their physical presence? Even perusing the internet, we have some perspective of size and physicality simply by noticing the difference between a tweet and a Medium blog post, both types of text readers today are familiar with.

Both Coady and Price also mention the physicality of “curling up with a book” (Coady, 59 and Price, 10), how readers take pleasure in the book’s object-ness, “Human beings are sensual creatures. We like things — objects we can touch, smell and hear” (Coady, 40). While this may be true, are phones, tablets, and laptops not objects? Personally speaking, I admit to having “curled up” with my digital devices, even looking forward to it sometimes.

Don’t get me wrong, a book’s object-ness does indeed make it special and worthy of discussion in the digital age. However, instead of wondering whether these physical objects will survive, let’s appreciate the physicality of the digital too. And, recognize how both forms continue to transform reading experiences. As Coady points out (via Margaret Atwood), digital technologies produce more opportunities to read various types of text, “the variety of reading we can do online is endless. You can read texts, emails, The New Yorker (which has a splendidly designed app for this purpose), newspapers, Twitter, Facebook and— yes— books.” (Coady, 26)