THE READING CULTURE IN THE INTERNET AGE

Abstract

Since Marshall McLuhan's prediction of the emergence of a global village in 1964, the world has further shrunk into a closed Internet community. One of the major fallouts of putative globalisation is the fundamental change to reading habits and culture, with the strong emergence of electronic books in different forms (laptops, kindles, mobile phones, blackberry and other mobile gadgets). Thus, an entire library can be accessed on a palm-top device at the touch of a button. This has led to the facile conclusion that the physical book may have steadily given way to the electronic book, with vast implications for changes in reading habits and culture. However, as this paper goes ahead to argue, the physical book, with its aesthetic and psychological values, still holds the key to the revival and promotion of the dying reading culture and a more enduring and dependable form of literary documentation. The paper also goes on to provide useful hints on play reading as a uniquely different literary experience and advocates for the preservation of the physical book format as the most stabilising factor in promoting reading and intellectual communication in the shifty and ephemeral literary culture of the Internet Age.