Reading in the age of the Internet

Yesterday, the New York Times published a feature article on the changing reading patterns of the younger generation.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

The issue isn't that young people aren't reading, but that they're reading in different ways.

Reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Whatever side one takes on the relationship between literacy and the Internet—and there is significant debate as to whether these young people are even "literate" at all—the changes that the Internet has brought to reading habits are here to stay, and they reflect more fundamental changes in what constitutes a "text."

In a world defined—some would say "disciplined"—by the technology of the printing press, the eye is taught to follow a line of printed words, one after the other, from beginning to end. But the Internet creates a new type of textuality defined by what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls the rhizome. In botany, a "rhizome" is a root plant that creates dense networks of shoots and nodes. Unlike a tree, whose root structure is much more centralized and hierarchical, rhizomes are dynamic and decentralized. Instead of fulfilling a prearranged "plan," they "happen."

Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 1980 collaboration A Thousand Plateaus applied the rhizome to reading. Breaking with "arborescent" reading patterns, they used the metaphor to view texts not as linear arguments that need to be grounded and followed methodically from beginning to end but as dynamic entities that can be entered, understood, broken apart, and repackaged in a multitude of ways. In what would have been a radical move for the time, they remarked that their book wasn't intended to be read straight-through, and they invited readers to pick and choose what they wanted to read and discard the parts they didn't find useful.

Though they may not have known it at the time, Deleuze and Guattari were describing the cultural and intellectual condition of the Internet age, in which knowledge isn't created by a single author and centrally disseminated but is a common project built by many hands.

Of course, this transition is both a blessing and a curse. While the new intellectual culture of reading and textual engagement is dynamic and playful, it also runs the risk of losing track of its grounding. Part of the joy of traditional reading lies in the ways in which it forces readers to go through parts that are at first glance "unnecessary" or "boring" but contribute to the understanding of the whole. Deleuze and Guattari, grounded in the tradition of Western philosophy and metaphysics, may have found the rhizome a welcome release, but for a younger generation who may never sit down and read the ideas that they bounce back and forth on-line, the freedom of the rhizome may be experienced as a sort of intellectual chaos.