Rhetorical Situation of The Future of Reading

Rhetorical Situation of The Future of Reading

Jonah Lehrer’s concern that he states in The Future of Reading is that eventually the future of books will be digital and that we wont have a need for paperback books anymore. He even states that with codices going away people will not be as challenged in their reading levels because of the ease of reading on a computer screen or an e-reader.  Lehrer explains how our brain begins to scan the words on the page when the pages become clearer and clearer. We focus more as readers on what we are reading when there are imperfections on a page that require more focus to understand. With e-readers we will begin scanning difficult texts and we will not fully understand them.

Porter defines intertextuality in Intertextuality and the Discourse Community as “All texts are interdependent: We understand a text only insofar as we understand its precursors” (34).  With Porter’s definition we can say that e-readers might not survive without codices and vice versa. Look at pdf files, professors send pdf files to their students for class readings, which most students read on the computer but if the professor didn’t have their printed copy with their highlighted words and annotations on the side, which would later get scanned and sent out, would it be as beneficial to the students? Most eBooks would also not exist had it not have been a preexisting written copy of a book. We wouldn’t have Shakespeare on an e-reader if he hadn’t already written his text in a printed copy and that goes for any writer that was around before the invention of the computer, tablet or e-readers.

Grant-Davie discusses constraints in his article Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.  Constraints defined by Grant-Davie are “factors in the situation’s context that may affect the achievement of the rhetorical objectives” (272).  A constraint with an e-reader is the difficulty the reader will have fully understanding a text when they just scan over the text instead of concentrating to understand the full meaning. Does that mean that people will have to “dumb down” their texts for people to fuller understand their meanings? Or, will the writer just give in and write the way they please knowing that they might not fully be understood by their audience? If the audience doesn’t understand what the text is saying then the rhetor did not accomplish their job well enough.