Orality, the book, and the computer: What happens to 'literature'?

Both the novel and the Internet are purveyors of many kinds of fiction. If one takes fiction seriously, and I do, what one reads is important. We are not only what we eat; we are what we read. Reading becomes part of memory and imagination.

Reading is not on a continuum with the other bodily or cognitive acts. It instigates a shift, a change of state—a change analogous to, but not as totally affecting as, the change from wakefulness to sleep.

Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

it. Reading is a different experience than when we were young—each word offers the possibility for linking out to something else, and the main text just doesn’t have the same gravity it once did. But is this larger network actually providing us with a larger understanding?