A Future Where "Complete Reading" Disappears? / Sato Takumi

May 11, 2020

Requests for permission to use my work in this year's university entrance exams have started to arrive from Kyogakusha, publisher of the "Akahon" series, and from preparatory schools. My book " The Media History of Rumors " (Iwanami Shinsho), published last year, was used in exams at many universities. All of them included multiple-choice questions that ask test-takers to select the statement that aligns with the main point of the text. As an example, here is one from Waseda University.

A. Media rumors are a one-time phenomenon that occurs only in specific eras or situations.

B. Confronting ambiguous and troublesome information is necessary to decipher modern media.

C. AI-based evaluations are accurate and objective, making them a versatile selection system for society.

D. The "transformation of reasoned public discourse into popular sentiment" refers to the mainstreaming of the masses' emotional feelings and opinions without the formation of a logic-based consensus.

E. The internet as a medium can disseminate information instantly, but it does not have the function of controlling information.

A and C are probably incorrect, and the others are correct. The students search for the corresponding sentences in the text and judge their validity. Such information processing skills are indispensable for research at university. On the other hand, it is undeniable that this kind of training for entrance exams has had the adverse effect of instilling a view of "complete reading" in students. This view of "complete reading" is a form of rigorism which holds that a book must be read from beginning to end and its content must be understood accurately.

Having mastered the techniques for solving these exam questions, I too was a believer in "complete reading" during my student days. I thought that I should eventually read my entire book collection from cover to cover. That is why I was so deeply moved when I first saw the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in my professor's study.

A scene I witnessed as a new student in Professor Noda Nobuo's office at Kyoto University's College of Liberal Arts (now the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies) is still burned into my memory. Steel bookshelves packed with Western books reached the ceiling, and a complete collection of Burckhardt's works was piled on a table... I longed to live in such a reading space.

During my undergraduate years studying modern German history, I often borrowed research books in English and German from Professor Noda's office. Faint pencil marks in the margins of every book showed that he was reading them. For me, reading a book in German, my first foreign language, was a struggle, and I could only manage one or two pages a day with a dictionary.

"I can only read a few pages a day. Can I really become a researcher like this?"

The professor, sitting deep in his sofa, told me this story. Behind him, the clock tower, a symbol of Kyoto University, was visible through the window.

"Can you say you truly understand everything even in a Japanese book? Probably not. But you don't usually read with a Japanese dictionary in hand. It's the same with foreign books. It's natural not to understand some things, but you don't need to stop there. In the end, what you can use in your papers is only what you've understood well."

This was nearly forty years ago, so I am not confident that I have reproduced his words exactly. However, it is certain that this conversation saved me. Looking back now, it was my escape from the illusion of "complete reading." Of course, his words were persuasive because I heard them in a book-filled study from a man of culture like Professor Noda.

But can today's students have the same kind of experience? The administrative chores of faculty members have increased, leading to the "office-ization of the professor's study." I often hear the half-joking, half-serious comment, "I don't have time to read books in my office." Furthermore, as ICT becomes more widespread, "bookless studies" with only monitors and tablets will likely increase, even in the humanities, just as in the sciences. This year's coronavirus crisis is bound to accelerate the "loss of a sense of place" at universities, along with a shift to "browsing e-books," which is far removed from "complete reading." Is this really for the best?

To help students escape the illusion of "complete reading," I have long recommended Pierre Bayard's " How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read " (Chikuma Gakugei Bunko). Some may frown at the frivolous-sounding title, but it is an excellent book that considers the effects of the book as a medium.

Bayard defines the rigorism of reading with three norms: the obligations of "sacred reading," "reading from cover to cover," and "accurate reproduction." He argues that this norm is harmful because it creates self-deception about reading. According to the author, a professor at Paris 8 University, it is not uncommon for scholars of French literature to have not properly read Proust. Of course, there are likely media theorists who have not read McLuhan.

To be honest, I myself only recently finished reading McLuhan's "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man," having only "nibbled" at it before. Of course, I do mention McLuhan in my "Introduction to Media and Culture Studies" course. In that sense, by the norms of rigorism, I too was practicing lecturing on "how to talk boldly about books I hadn't read." But my lecture content has not changed significantly before and after my thorough reading of "Understanding Media." No matter how meticulously one reads, one does not remember all the content. Reading is, in essence, an incomplete act of information intake. Isn't it possible to say you have "read" a book just by skimming it, or even just by looking at the table of contents, or the title?

Is this "incomplete reading" a bad thing? First, what is needed for an introductory lecture is an overview of the entire academic field, not the details written in individual texts. Culture means having a good overall perspective, and it cannot be reduced to an accumulation of fragmented knowledge. Bayard quotes the following words from a librarian who appears in Musil's "The Man Without Qualities" as an "active attitude" for grasping the essence of the positional relationships between books.

"The secret to being a competent librarian is to never read any of the books in your charge, except for the title and the table of contents."

Since our time for media engagement is limited, reading one book means not reading another. A librarian who needs to know the entire collection should not fixate on individual texts. This attitude should be applicable not only to a library but also to a single book.

In fact, when we discuss books, do we do so after having read them completely? And is the act of discussing a book inseparable from the content of the book itself? That can't be right. We often cite books as a starting point for our own thoughts or as material to support them. Bayard calls this the "book as a screen" onto which the speaker projects themselves. By repeating this self-projection onto books, individuals come to possess their own "inner library." A reader is precisely a person whose identity is centered on this "inner library," and the collective image, the "shared library," is the subjective reality of culture.

Bayard names the communicative space (public sphere) where readers with "inner libraries" discuss specific books and enrich the image of the "shared library" a "virtual library." It is described as "virtual" because in this space, it is forbidden to ask whether the other person has actually read the book. This social space is the antithesis of the school space that demands "complete reading." Indeed, a situation where the same members read the same content at the same time is hard to imagine outside of a "classroom."

The public sphere where we discuss books is a "space of play" where we arbitrarily, or benevolently, assume that the other person has also read the book; it is not suited to the logic of true/false or right/wrong, as in university entrance exam questions. The creativity of reading is also guaranteed by the freedom of playful interpretation. What is important in this public sphere is to talk about oneself through books—that is, through "the words of others"—which is an attempt to write one's own "inner book." A book you have not yet read is a present "other," and the attempt to talk about it is the starting point for a dialogic communication that holds the potential for self-discovery.

In this context, Bayard's stance of not questioning the truth or falsehood of one's reading is extremely media-theoretical. This is because the primary interest of media studies is the effect on the reader and the influence exerted.

To begin with, the significance of a book is determined more by the reader than by the author. Whether a book is a "masterpiece" or a "good book" is decided by the reader's attitude, not the author's skill. Since a book is also a medium, Stuart Hall's "encoding/decoding" model can be applied. The term "active audience" can be loosely translated as "readers of television," and it applies to both television viewing and book reading. This means that the same book can become a good book or a bad book depending on the decoding code the reader adopts.

Needless to say, literacy is an educational concept that indicates the unity of reading and writing—that is, the potential for the reader to become an author. Therefore, discourse about books one has not read is open to the process of talking about one's own future, which is to say, the process of the reader becoming a creator (author). When a dialogue is established between readers who each possess different "inner books," the "virtual library" will emerge as a creative space.

Can we apply Bayard's arguments in the same way to reading in the digital space? Bayard defines the "desacralized book" as an "immaterial collection of meanings" that exists between the physical book and its reader, and also among the readers themselves. At first glance, this seems applicable to a future of reading where e-books in the digital space are the default. But is that really the case?

Physical books, where a reading history is accumulated as a collection, are a physically stocked medium. As a child, I could "boldly talk about TV shows I hadn't seen" with friends at school. This was because I could read the TV listings in the morning newspaper and lead the conversation. With such flow media, proving whether one has actually accessed the content is even more difficult than with books. On the other hand, even if the access history for an e-book is accurately recorded, whether one has actually read it is more ambiguous than ever.

On top of that, can physical books and e-books be considered the same kind of book for a reader's "inner library"? The significance of a physical book existing externally as a real, single entity is likely greater than is generally thought. With a physical book, the reader could naturally become aware of the totality of the "other." With an e-book, however, what the reader confronts is always disjointed text data displayed on the same monitor. The task of reconstructing a real "other" from this fragmented data must be unexpectedly difficult.

This is precisely one reason why "careless" copy-pasting is rampant even in academic papers where source citation is essential. Furthermore, when reading e-books, there is a strong temptation to escape into a self-centered world that does not require dialogue with an "other." It is also well known that communication on the web, which bypasses the image of the other, tends to induce cyber-cascades (group polarization).

If that is the case, we cannot deny the possibility that the image of the "shared library"—that is, of culture—will become increasingly impoverished in the digital space. In order to protect the creative public sphere of readers, policies to protect physical books are probably still necessary.

*Affiliations, job titles, etc., are as of the time of this journal's publication.