How the Internet has changed the way I read. Or has it?

It's not so much a case of the Internet giving different materials to read as of the same materials being read in a different medium: & actually not even read so much as skimmed for main points (as studies of typical Internet reading patterns have shown) and regarded primarily as a technologically updated version of the Illuminated page that's responsive more to software than human 'wet ware'. But I'm not interested in the question of the displacement of traditional literacy by an e-book environment of Kindle readers, e-ink and continual information distribution, with the likelihood that whole libraries with no bound books will one day appear. The growing demise of big-box bookstores  (like 'Borders', 'Barnes and Noble') is almost commonplace now. Nothing's really changed if just one type of book is being replaced by another: under these changing conditions nothing's really at stake for literacy at all. It's just a different type of hardware subject to the same rules of commodity exchange.

Even computer-generated texts must accommodate themselves to what I see as a daunting digital presence: actually an emerging Other with its own unique context, relatively recent history and rules of engagement. Something we've created out of a radically changed field of reading & writing, one to which media technologies & the Internet businesses (Google, Intel Corp, Apple Inc.etc) that exploit them have, of course, contributed greatly. A reading public, attuned to the allurements of a globalized  economy, also stands to profit greatly from a system in which to participate is to win the prize almost instantly . And the prize is access to network models of communication that have all but undermined traditional hierarchies of established viewpoints & the priesthood of 'experts' they keep in place. Network connections (usually of the social Facebook, Twitter types, etc) and the emergent Internet technologies that facilitate them have virtually effaced any qualitative differences between print and online communication.

Yes, we've become the competition, competitor and victor since networked selves follow the same exploitive global capital agenda. And the thought of losing in a competition of our own making is virtually impossible. It's ourselves we've embraced as the gargantuan devourer of information in a post-print world. And even if we're led by humanitarian gestures (as in the case of recent Humane Reader and One Laptop Per Child initiatives to spread the benefits of e-literacy to developing nations) the e-reader phenomenon can scarcely be seen as anything but a disguised techno-mastery distributing largesse to classes of e-illiterate poor it's helped to create. Reading, and it doesn't matter whether it's of the print or online type, is faced with a digitized 'alterity' comprised (in my view) of all the values of an unbounded capitalist mania for production, expropriation and domination.  Informed citizens are walking mirror-images of an unrelenting process of knowledge accumulation and distribution abetted by multimedia and a growing trend to make even democratic processes subserve a "communications and collaboration technology" model.

We've stepped out of ourselves (in the sense of having lost contact with a deep underlying aesthetic core to which we privately gain access), entrenched in a vicious self-referentiality from which there's no escaping. Because of (and not just in conjunction with) Internet technology we read primarily to set up our own little private cultural fiefdoms & become their chief interpreters & scribes: producers, consumers & editors all rolled into one. Robert Philbin in an online article entitled "Zizek, Poiesis, and Politics" makes a similar point about the cynicism of literary aesthetics in the age of "exhausted multi-media techno concepts":

Modern, Postmodern aesthetics appear redundant, insecure, self-annihilatingly cynical, while the art itself is largely passe, an accumulation of market-driven fetish models of commodities, collectables, and exhausted multi-media techno concepts, which momentarily delight or distract from the obvious mundane schizophrenic state of corporate global ideology.

The schizophrenia to which Philbin refers is precisely a condition caused by this radical intermixing of world & hyper-reader. Slavoj Žižek himself in his book First as Tragedy, then as Farce talks about a new global class of people with a penchant for privacy & exclusivity: "gated superrich" consumers who "are thus creating a life-world of their own to solve their anguishing hermeneutic problem" .(4) I'm sure he would have said the same about their reading habits. We seemed to have created a similar type of radical privacy for the act of reading and built barbed-wire fences around contents of consciousness themselves, reserving the right to exclude everyone but ourselves from straying beyond the borders of the page. In fact, we've kept firmly locked in our own heads the whole universe of discourse. The pains of interpreting the world aright (Žižek's "hermeneutic problem") can be alleviated considerably, of course, if the range of competitive viewpoints is reduced to a single globalized 'Other' whose interests and ours coalesce completely.

I've found in Jodi Dean's Thursday, 23 September I cite blog post entitled "Communicative capitalism and the commons" a very compelling list of the ways in which "networked communications" can turn into tools of exploitation & appropriation vis-à-vis a discussion of the views of Italian Marxist philosopher Cesare Casarino. I'd agree with most of it except that the enemy is not the traditional "owners of the means of production" but rather the workers themselves. The presence of the digital other has almost made the Marxist critique outdated. I think the network-user, rather than Internet corporate villain (such as the ones identified in Casarino's analysis) is the sole cause of the "self-reproducing excess" of the capitalist system, not the other way around: communication networks comprising of software, cell phones, laptops, etc cannot be seen as the generators of "surplus value" and those who use them as dupes.

I'm interested in this topic of Internet reading because I wonder if it applies to me at all. Is there, in other words, a sense in which I can consciously absent myself from the unbounded egoism spurred on by e-book literacy? Am I exempted because I understand it? Am I an exceptional reader in that sense or is the phenomenon too menacingly ubiquitous to avoid? Questions I'd like to address in my next blog post.