But the digital revolution has changed the terms of the problem. Never before have we had so many texts within reach. Never has it been so easy to access a library, read a newspaper published thousands of miles away, or find information on virtually any subject. And yet, never has it been more pertinent to ask what having access to reading actually means.
Access to texts does not necessarily mean being able to do with them everything that reading makes possible. This distinction is fundamental if we are to think about literacy through the lens of equity. There is a risk that we understand equitable access to books simply as the guarantee of a floor: ensuring that everyone acquires sufficient reading skills to navigate everyday life. That is an essential goal, but an insufficient one. Equality certainly requires a floor; what it does not require is a ceiling.
There is a considerable distance between deciphering a text and inhabiting it intellectually. Understanding a complex argument, sustaining attention over an extended period, connecting ideas that are far apart, detecting a contradiction, temporarily accepting ambiguity, or allowing someone else’s perspective to challenge our own are also reading skills. We are not born with them. They are learnt and developed and, above all, require conditions in which they can flourish. These are the capacities championed by the “Ljubljana Reading Manifesto” through its concept of ‘higher-level reading’. Much of the significance of the concept lies in the way it shifts the conversation towards the cognitive quality of reading.
I have always thought that Walter J. Ong offers a particularly useful perspective from which to understand this apparent paradox. In writing about the “technologies of the word”, Ong reminded us that writing itself is a technology, and that the great transformations in communications -from orality to writing, from manuscript to print- do more than change the medium through which words reach us. They change our relationship with words and, in doing so, also alter certain ways of thinking. If there is one lesson to draw from Ong, it is precisely that technologies open up possibilities while simultaneously encouraging particular uses, habits and structures of thought. I do not believe, therefore, that the issue is one of paper versus screen.
Naomi S. Baron has spent years studying what happens when reading moves into digital environments. Her research has helped reveal a reality more complex than either technophile or technophobic narratives allow. As readers, we use different media differently; we tend to associate screens with particular habits of speed, searching and fragmentation, while paper, in many circumstances, continues to foster a different relationship with longer texts. But none of these relationships is predetermined by the medium itself. Context matters, as does the purpose of reading and, above all, the practices we learn.
This makes reading education today something more complex than teaching people to decode words, or even to comprehend texts, because it also means teaching people how to manage their attention.
Artificial intelligence now takes this question a step further. In her recent book “Reader Bot”, Baron asks what happens when machines no longer merely store, transmit or locate words but begin to ‘read’ on our behalf. We can ask a tool to summarise a book, extract its main ideas, compare two documents or answer questions about texts we have not ourselves read. But how much of reading can we delegate without losing what happens only in the act of reading itself?
A summary can give us the conclusions of an argument, but not necessarily the intellectual experience of following it. It can spare us a difficulty, although sometimes it is precisely the effort of working through that difficulty that produces understanding. It can take us quickly to an answer, but reading also consists in discovering questions we did not know we needed to ask.
It is no coincidence that this concern is also entering the international agenda for books and reading. As UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Education and Book Culture -and a former President of the International Publishers Association- Bodour Al Qasimi has placed literacy, access to culture and the capacity of reading to create opportunities at the heart of her mandate. Her *Reading for the Future* initiative points precisely towards a conception of reading that requires educational and cultural institutions, publishers and policymakers to act together. The challenge is not simply to broaden access to texts, but to create the conditions in which reading can continue to be an effective tool for learning, participation and autonomy.
This is where a new dimension of equity emerges. For centuries, the great inequality in reading was determined by access: who could learn to read, who could afford to buy a book, who had a library nearby. Digitalisation has made a powerful contribution to removing some of those barriers. But it would be paradoxical if, while democratising access to texts, we allowed the conditions necessary for reading them deeply to become more unequal.
Attention, too, is unequally distributed. If schools limit themselves to guaranteeing functional skills while complex reading is left to each individual’s family and cultural environment, ‘ambitious reading’ risks becoming a new form of cultural capital: abundant for some and scarce for others.
The fundamental goal of any literacy policy remains to ensure that no one is excluded from reading. But our ambition should not end there. An equitable society is not one that provides everyone with minimum skills while leaving the highest levels of competence to those who can acquire them through other means.
At a time when machines are beginning to offer us even the possibility of reading in our place, might democratising reading now mean ensuring that no one has to give up the opportunity to read for themselves?