It will be said, not without some reason, that reading has always been made possible by the sense of sight, without the way readers relate to texts having substantially changed. And yet, one of the episodes in which the evolution of intellectual habits is most evident and symptomatic is recounted by Saint Augustine, who discovered with astonishment Saint Ambrose reading silently, savoring the words without even moving his lips. Anachronism lurks in the belief that one has always read in silence, a belief that would consider reading as an activity of introspection in which the world somehow disappears, and the reader belongs to the reading in which he is lost. Today, as is known, texts are read on screen, in tactile reading, they are touched and altered, inviting one to turn the page with a single gesture or to be commented on by one or more readers.
Several paintings by Pablo Picasso titled La lectura (The Reading), already in the 20th century, convey this type of participation, comparable in turn to what Julio Cortázar narrated in Continuity of Parks: it produces and reproduces the disappearance of the subject-reader, split and displaced, an actor passively moved by the other who is himself. Ultimately, the novel that inaugurates this fascinating ambiguity is Don Quixote; a novel read and commented on by the protagonists themselves, in an inversion that plunges the reader into the delicious well of fiction. For the novel —the reality of the novel— exists virtually perhaps for the first time, beyond the strange and misplaced physical support, and in three temporalities: it exists by what is said in the present of the narration, by what it implicitly alludes to from the past —that is, the chivalric novels—, and by the expectation of the countless re-readings it promotes. Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, a story by Jorge Luis Borges, summarizes ad absurdum the novel perplexity of the hermeneutic world that Miguel de Cervantes semi-consciously opened: there is no longer a text that is not written over another text or linked to it, with the reader himself acting as a link who "reads himself" from both.
On screen, words look almost like pictograms or icons; they possess their own entity and can be moved or manipulated. Certainly, the visual immediacy enabled by digitalization also carries the risk of an overly automated reading by a reader who would retain little or almost nothing.The visualization of content on tablets or computers seems to update the idea of palimpsest, that textual support reused for the writing of a new text. The virtuality of knowledge is put on the table, the artifactual character of all writing, which forms a network—a library—and a certain way of moving in search of content. On screen, words look almost like pictograms or icons, they have their own entity and can be moved or manipulated. Certainly, the visual immediacy enabled by digitalization also carries the risk of a too automated reading by a reader who would retain little or almost nothing. But it also opens the possibility of the practice of gloss, personal marking or hyperlink: beacons in the virtual text that perform the reading, that materialize the interpretation of whoever knows themselves to be a participant in the (non)existent. In the beginnings of philosophical writing, Plato had intuited the dangers of content fixation that, in the absence of the author, could be understood in a different sense, even contrary to their original intentions. The Internet era has hyperbolized this problem by allying itself with the postmodern death of the author, converted into a premise for a type of interpretation that distrusts arguments of authority.
So, then, where is reading going? Is there a middle ground between rewriting—which implies the interpretation and glossing of passages, a rather intellectual practice—and the mere visualization of content, which is taken as virtually true? Too often, the acquisition and accumulation of virtual information leads to the presumption of its real understanding, as if the effort of interpretation were no longer necessary. Does the digitization of The Brothers Karamazov, its compression into a file of infinitesimal weight, ensure any kind of understanding, beyond confirming the saying that knowledge takes up no space? It may have ceased to weigh, a very advantageous fact, but it is not clear that it alleviates or facilitates the tracking of content that can hardly be assimilated on the journey from work to home that separates many mobile device users. Reading a nineteenth-century novel ten minutes at a time, or fifteen minutes at a time, implies spending months with the virtual copy on one's back; if the possibility of reading is more prolonged, and takes place on a comfortable sofa, perhaps the weight it has and the historical smell of a paper copy do not matter so much.
In any case, thinking about the new generations—always immersed in digital reality—it is more than probable that they feel no nostalgia, or behave in relation to books like someone who today collects vinyl records: objects of veneration, impractical, that evoke an era in which the material support, of beautiful appearance, brought reality to the thing. Something misleading, because there is no more reality in the material than in the virtual. When it comes to debunking clichés, it is also false that digital reading becomes easier and more accessible. It effectively enables greater dissemination, but reading will continue to be a pleasure and a burden, a liberation and an obligation, dissemination of ideas and cloistering in dogmas, openness to life or consolidation of idiocy, without anyone being able to positively guarantee which side we are on.