Brady, Alison M; (2025) Negotiating attention: An ecology of reading in the digital age. Educational Philosophy and Theory 10.1080/00131857.2025.2486651. (In press).

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Abstract

What does it mean to read in the digital age? Undoubtedly, how we consume information has radically shifted in the so-called ‘attention economy’ of the modern world. Surrounded by artificial technologies that force us to be ‘hyper-attentive’ to endless streams of information, the idea of reading as a slow and sustained process appears to many to have been displaced. In this paper, I complicate the belief that attention in reading is threatened by digital technologies. I do so by inviting readers to think with Italo Calvino’s experimental work, ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’. This novel is precisely concerned with the nature of reading, and arose within the context of the then-burgeoning field known as the ‘digital humanities’. It does not offer us a straightforwardly cautionary or celebratory rendering of reading in the digital age, but instead, showcases reading in an ecological sense – namely, as that which has always involved (a) dynamic forms of attention, including what we might call ‘hyper’ as well as ‘sustained’ and (b) a deep and inescapable entanglement with the socio-material world. With Calvino, I argue that this ecological view better captures the complexity of reading in the digital age, insofar as it undermines the monolithic view of reading suggested in concerns surrounding these perceived threats of digitization, and thereby allows us to rethink the implied binaries between the natural and the artificial in educational practices and experiences.

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