Episode 7: Reading into the Future

Summary Keywords

reading, book, read, reader, text, literature, important, works, writing, physical, world, digital, non-fiction, information, publishers, printing press, press, Singapore, instinctively, meaning

00:03 Professor Tommy Koh

Human beings need stories. We love stories. We’re inspired by stories. So, the platform may differ, but the book will never die.

00:15 Host, Loh Chin Ee

The passage of time is how we mark our past, our present, and our future. The most accurate timescale for each passing second is International Atomic Time, accurate to one second every 100 million years. It's derived from the combined output of over 400 precise atomic clocks, which use Cesium-133 atoms. To measure time in the past, we use a different atomic technique called uranium-thorium dating. It helped date the cave art in the Altamira cave in Northern Spain to 35,000 years, and the limestone cave paintings in Sulawesi to 44,000 years. These time periods are considered pre-historic, yet the people of that era demonstrated their yearning for recording and sharing their experiences through their primitive art. In this episode, we look back to the history of writing and reading to imagine what the future of reading would look like. I'm Loh Chin Ee. Welcome to the How We Read podcast.

01:24 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Chapter One: Tablets and Scrolls.

01:29 Host, Loh Chin Ee

We can only understand the present and get a sense of the future by looking into the past. The history of reading is inextricably tied up with the history of writing, and various technological tools that make reading possible. In ancient Mesopotamia, the technologies of writing with simple. Damp clay would be shaped by hand into a tablet. The scribe used a stylus, often made of reed, to inscribe cuneiform characters. Baking this clay tablet made the notes permanent, or one could “erase” and reuse the clay. Other milestones in the development of writing tools would be the creation of vellum, a fine parchment meat from calf-skin; ink made from soot mixed with gelatine; and the humble pencil, which came into widespread use with the discovery of large deposits of graphite in an English mine in the 1500s.

02:24 Host, Loh Chin Ee

One of the most significant developments was the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century. Page output was increased by almost 100-fold compared to hand printing, and the associated cost reduction allowed the printed word to travel across time and space. Ng Kah Gay, publisher at Ethos Books.

02:46 Ng Kah Gay

When we talk about a printing press, the word is very indicative of press. In the earliest days, a printing press would really comprise of a platen. It's a movable block that is then pressed onto a base with the paper in between to take the ink. That's why it's called a printing press. In the earlier days, it was the mechanization of the process of putting ink on paper that the press revolutionized how writing can be made popularly available.

03:25 Host, Loh Chin Ee

New printing technology made access to reading materials ever more convenient. The newspaper that we know today, consumed as a physical broadsheet or online, is a product of technological advancements and growing literacy rates. Its forerunner was public announcements, distributed as posters or pamphlets, often focusing on a single piece of information, such as a battle, disaster or celebration. Printing press meant that more news could be captured and disseminated to larger audiences.

03:57 Ng Kah Gay

When we move to digital printing, we are talking about two things happening. The software evolving so that you can now represent image and text using digital data and then you talk about the printing press itself. So, the current printing presses, they have evolved such that it is no longer single sheet fed. In the past, we feed it one piece by one piece but now, if you are printing newspapers, you have roller paper. So you need to also develop paper such that it can now come in this roller format. The presses that print newspapers, you can imagine how many copies they need to generate. It’s about 20,000 per hour. I suspect it can even be even higher than 20,000, but you can see that it’s an exponential increase already.

04:43 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Reading is dependent on having a sizeable readership. Where there is a market for information, for news and for stories, publishers can earn a profit.

04:53 Ng Kah Gay

Prior to this kind of mass dissemination, you need to be able to produce en masse. With the development of printing presses that can churn out 1000 impressions per hour, that was the next jump if I'm not wrong, from 250 to 1000, you start to then have the concept that I can actually create a market where I am linking content producer to readers.

05:18 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Beyond economic benefits, publishers are driven by their sense of duty. Newspapers fight for freedom of the press, and authors and publishers insist on giving voice to diverse individuals to ensure public hearing through publications. Books are embedded with values, and publishers see themselves as movers and shakers of ideas.

05:39 Ng Kah Gay

The press made that possible. The idea that you have a common pool of knowledge, and then (we) can build on this shared knowledge to create a sense of unity and identity. It’s more than just publishing. I find that in a way when we work with media and publishing, we are dealing with concepts of community, of the individual in relation to society. Reading then becomes really important because it is the common act that can bind you to more than who you are individually.

06:13 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Through reading, we come to share a common view of the world or see diverse perspectives around a single issue. It is one way to open our minds and to learn more about the world around us.

06:29 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Chapter Two: Reading to Understand

06:34 Host, Loh Chin Ee

The history of reading is that of widened access, increased reading materials and improved literacy rates. Historians have pointed to World War Two as the impetus for higher literacy expectations, and the beginnings of systematic mass education in the United States. Reading rooms were created in the mid-19th to 20th century in England for the working class to access books as a way to educate themselves and for leisure. In Singapore, the first library, the Raffles Library, opened to the public on 4th September 1874. And for an annual fee, subscribers could loan books to read. Angelia Poon is an Associate Professor from the National Institute of Education. She researches Singapore, Asian and post-colonial literature and is the co-editor of various anthologies, including Writing Singapore: A Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature.

07:33 Dr. Angelia Poon

Reading is a process of making meaning from texts. Reading is a pleasurable, solitary process, initially solitary, until we discuss what we read, discuss how we make meaning from the text collectively. And that's also an enjoyable process, but I think it's the next step after you have, as a solitary reader, processed what you have read.

07:56 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Though often seen as a solitary pursuit, reading can create a sense of community as a good book can generate meaningful conversations.

08:06 Dr. Angelia Poon

Discussion allows you to bounce ideas off someone else. It's always good to talk to another reader to get a different perspective. Hearing from someone else, a different reader who comes from a different background from you, who's had different life experiences and who may have a different interpretation of the text will allow you to reassess your sense of the text, and perhaps give you a new opinion. You could revise your opinion or you could, perhaps, come to a firmer sense of what you originally felt about the text.

08:38 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Book clubs let like-minded individuals come together to read and talk about books of literature, the news and politics of the day, or even their favourite romance novels.

08:49 Dr. Angelia Poon

They serve quite a big, important social function in building a sense of community. If everybody gets together to read a book, or if you listen to the BBC’s World Book Club, that gives you a very nice feel like because you have a bunch of people from all over the world calling in to talk about a text and asking questions of the author. That social process that comes from reading is actually very important, and it helps to heighten that sense of community.

09:19 Host, Loh Chin Ee

While we can read just about anything, reading literature, imaginative works, or poetry and prose examining deep issues of human interest is a way for us to understand the past and envision the future.

09:33 Dr. Angelia Poon

Reading literature is about thinking deeply and often feeling deeply too. It's very deliberate reading. That's how I would describe it. It's not really reading to pass the time, and it often involves re-reading and deciding what you think the text means. So to me, reading literature is about thinking deeply. Reading literature is also what the post-colonial theorist, Gayatri Spivak, calls patient reading because you immerse yourself in a world. And she describes patient reading as suspending oneself into the text of the other. In reading literature you encounter worlds that you may not be familiar with. But you're open and willing to take a chance to learn more about that world and to put yourself into that world. And in reading and encountering these worlds, you have to negotiate with meaning, you have to ask questions of yourself, of your own assumptions. So it's very far from being a kind of passive consumption of a text. Passive consumption usually occurs when the text is formulaic and predictable. The literary text challenges you and so the reading process is also different in that sense.

10:44 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Professor Tommy Koh, Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Rector at NUS Tembusu College, spent many years as Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. Reading literature helped him understand America.

11:03 Professor Tommy Koh

I spent over 20 years of my life in America and I keep up to date with America, because one of my lifelong quest is to understand America, which is not easy. It’s a complicated country. One of the ways to understand America is through reading. So when my younger friends come to see me and said, “I'm being posted to America, can you share with me some insights?” I try to share with them my understanding of America, but I also give them two reading lists. First, a list of non-fiction books, which is obvious. But less obvious, is a list of fiction books. And I explained to them that the works of fiction are as important as the works of nonfiction, because works of non-fiction tend to be very dry. There's no blood and spirit and soul in them. When you read great works of fiction, you not only get the facts, but you understand the complexity of the human situation. And you begin to understand, therefore, how America thinks, because of their history, how America looks at the world, and what are the American values, which is the result of centuries of heritage, you know. Reading books of fiction are as important as reading books of non-fiction.

12:15 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Reading literature is especially important because it helps us to see things from different perspectives. The human capacity of empathy, to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires that may differ from our own is known as theory of the mind. A 2013 study suggests that reading passages of literary fiction, as opposed to non-fiction or popular fiction can enhance your empathy quotient. EQ is a crucial skill for getting along in a complex and multicultural world.

12:49 Dr. Angelia Poon

Reading literature is important for the future in two ways. One, we need literary texts to help us imagine the future and the possibilities for social change. Because literary texts are challenging texts, they are usually inventive. They provide different perspective on things, and they give you a singular kind of experience. Secondly, reading literature is important because it helps us to establish a past and a tradition. A lot has been said about tradition and the canon, but it doesn't mean that it's not there, right? We can talk about inclusive canons, shared traditions. Reading literature is important for the future because we need to build shared traditions. And I say that in plural so that we can be as inclusive as possible.

13:41 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Chapter Three: Reading through Screens.

13:46 Lianne Ong

We still all prefer hardcopy, especially me. I mean, I really like the tactile feeling of turning pages and the smell of new books.

13:57 Tan Tarn How

I hated reading on my phone or on the computer. In the last year, I found that I actually enjoy reading on the phone as much as reading real book. Old people can see change, right? Yeah, it has surprised me that the tactile experience, very important, but maybe perhaps it has become less important for me.

14:16

I prefer reading digital books because then you can have unlimited bookmarks and you can search, so that in case you can't remember your page and you didn't put a bookmark, you can remember one part and search it.

14:30

Usually I will read online because it's more convenient. But I prefer reading physical because I like the vibes of the library. I like to go there and like, pick a book. Due to the, like, the time constraint, I downloaded the Overdrive app on my phone. So sometimes when I'm bored, then I'll just go in and see what books they recommend.

14:50 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Surprisingly, age is not the determinant of whether someone prefers physical books or e-books. My interviewees focus on their experiences of reading and what they appreciate about different technologies. Book lovers like the tactile feel of the physical books but acknowledge that the digital medium allows quick and convenient access. The idea of bookmarking with a physical bookmark versus a digital bookmark may seem alien to one person, but natural to another. Regardless of their preferences, it is inevitable that readers will now read more on screens. Digital reading requires the skills of navigation, finding and evaluating. It's different from reading a physical book cover to cover. A literate citizen has to know how to read many different kinds of texts using different devices and technologies. Victor Lim Fei is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education, where he researches and teaches on multi-literacies and digital learning.

15:57 Dr. Victor Lim Fei

Reading and writing has always gone hand in hand. It's just that the relationship was not as immediate and straightforward as what digital technology enables it to do. So for instance, in the past, we would read, and then there's also that opportunity for you to but many a times, they are discrete activities, and not immediately following one another. With digital technology on digital platforms, reading and writing has become almost integrated. There's this term that has been coined, called prosumers, right, that you are no longer just consuming information, you're also pursuing information in the same breath. That is the kind of literacy practices that our young people are increasingly more involved in. Even ourselves, I think.

16:37 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Digital reading is mediated by the screen and requires a different set of reading skills.

The communication environment today has changed tremendously in the last four decades I’ve been alive. So as a child, my only medium for reading was really just in print. But today digital reading is more common than ever due to the access and affordability of mobile devices, the prevalence of multimedia communication and the prevalence and the pervasiveness of social media in our lives in this digital age. People have described this as the multimodal turn.

17:07 Host, Loh Chin Ee

This multimodal turn has led to a change in the kinds of texts and images we consume on a daily basis.

17:14 Dr. Victor Lim Fei

Scholars have described this as a multimodal turn, where information, the things that you read is expressed not only just with language, but an orchestration with other modes of meaning making. He did a study in the early 2000s, where he looked at university textbooks, science textbook in particular, and you will think that they are largely unchanged, but it's not true because he says that decades ago, the science textbook was filled with words, but now you have a lot more images, photographs, diagrams and figures in (a) science textbook at the university level. So the big question he had was what is gained and what is lost in this shift towards a greater multimodal way of representing information?

17:55 Host, Loh Chin Ee

The predominance of the visual means that individuals need to process these hybrid texts differently from word-heavy text. Reading Charlotte's Web as a physical book or as an e-book might be similar, but reading the news or a research article through different mediums may result in us arriving at the information through contrasting routes. We have to account for attitudes, comprehension levels, and reading tendencies when using devices.

18:22 Dr. Victor Lim Fei

There has been some studies that look at how readers will instinctively activate skimming and scanning reading strategies when they are reading via a screen. We are also habitualised because most of the time when we are reading on screens, we will be reading where we're actually scrolling through social media feed or just surfing through the internet. Instinctively, the skimming and scanning strategies will work. But when it comes to, for instance, the need for close reading. So when students are doing comprehension assessment via screen, many a time they will also instinctively activate their skimming and scanning strategy, which is an issue because we want them to be guided by the purpose of reading rather than just be influenced passively or instinctively by the medium in which they're reading through.

19:05 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Readers today need to be multimodal readers to handle diverse kinds of texts and use appropriate skills to read them.

19:13 Dr. Victor Lim Fei

When we think about print reading, for instance, the main way in which meaning is made is really through the words, the language. But when you think about a digital text, you will find that there are other ways in which meanings are expressed. So, for instance, a photograph can be used together with the words to express the meanings. So it's useful for us to also think about why the photograph, for instance, was chosen. What is the meaning behind the photograph? Digital text also allows for different reading pathways through hyperlinks and connections. So the reading experience can be very different, and it’s again important for the reader to be aware of the potential of the different reading pathways that a digi-text can bring about.

19:58 Host, Loh Chin Ee

People today are reading more than ever. However, we tend to read shorter texts and to read more quickly. New technologies have improved access to information and reading resources, and we often feel compelled to get through as much information as possible without deep thought, or reflection. While the skill of skimming and scanning is vital for quick processing of information, equally important are the skills of patient, slow or deep reading. Prof. Koh believes we can read intelligently for different purposes.

20:36 Professor Tommy Koh

I read for pleasure, but I also read for work. When I write a paper and to do research, I consult many books, you know. Fortunately for me, when I was a student at Harvard, I was forced to attend a course on speed reading, because coming from Singapore, we tend to silently verbalize when we read and as a result, speed very slow. Our comprehension is good, but our speed, less so. So the Americans wanted me to double my speed without reducing my comprehension. So I learned some tricks from them. First, don't verbalize silently. Don't read word by word, but sometimes phrase by phrase. Sometimes you will take in a whole paragraph. And when you're doing non-fiction books, you should be an intelligent reader. You don't have to read every book from cover to cover. First, read the introduction. See, is this is a book that you want to spend time on? Read the first chapter, last chapter, and then decide, do you want to read the rest of the book? Sometimes I read the first and the last (chapter), I say, no, this book is not relevant to my research or it has low value, you know, for me. So I put it aside. Other books, once I read the first and last chapter, I say, wow, this is really an important and insightful book, and I want to read it from cover to cover. For fiction, it’s different. When I acquire a book of fiction. First, I start reading and I ask myself, is this a writer I want to read? Can I connect with it? Do I like the story? And if I say yes, then I read it much more slowly than a book of non-fiction. Sometimes I will pause and say, wow, this sentence is so beautifully written, I want to think about it, you know. To be a smart reader means you read books of fiction (and) non-fiction differently. You read books of non-fiction in an intelligent way, so that you can read many books, and get the gist of the book.

22:37 Host, Loh Chin Ee

As we come to the end of this podcast, we return to the ancient clay tablet. The word tablet takes on new meaning in our modern society. The tablet is now a portable computer device with a large display that can be used for reading, writing, and various other tasks. While the ancient clay tablet was heavy, and limited to holding a fixed amount of information, the modern tablet is a portal to worlds of information, accessible from anywhere on our planet. In a world where readers are shifting their consumption of books from printed to e-books, and trends indicate a preference for shorter texts, is the future of the book under threat? Is there a world coming where literary work that invites deeper consideration by the reader is no longer needed?

23:25 Professor Tommy Koh

Some years ago, NLB invited me to accompany them to the first summit of the book which had been convened by the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The librarian of the Library of Congress was an old friend, NLB wanted me to accompany them, and he in his old age, felt anxious. The reason he convened the first summit of the book is he was worried whether the book was in peril, because people are reading books now on Kindle, on your phone, you know. So my message to him is that the book will never die. The platform on which you read a book may change, but the book will never die as long as we are human. Human beings need stories. We love stories. We are inspired by stories. So the platform may differ, but the book will never die.

24:19 Host, Loh Chin Ee

Thank you for listening to the How We Read podcast episode on The Future of Reading. This episode was written and hosted by me, Loh Chin Ee. Many thanks to my guests for taking precious time to share their insights with us. If you would like to hear more about Professor Tommy Koh’s views on literature, do tune in to the bonus episode. We've come to the end of this seven-part series on reading. Thank you for staying with me and I hope it's been a meaningful journey for you. If you've been inspired to read something or read with someone, I would love to hear from you. This episode was produced by Kenn Delbridge of Splice Studios. Swipe on the cover art to see show notes with links and references. And for more information, please visit lohchinee.com.