The Future of Reading

The Future of Reading

110 pages

Softcover

Genre: Humanities, Literature, Essay, Nonfiction
Reading after reading: Toward an age of post-literacy

Reading is in crisis, writing is being automated by generative AI: literacy is in a state of flux. Publishers, educational institutions, the press and other institutions of written culture find themselves on the defensive. Their fixation on literacy overlooks the fact that AI has enabled platforms to renegotiate the relationship between orality and literacy. On platforms, the spoken and written word are recombined with far-reaching cultural, political and social consequences: where AI can process verbal utterances and texts in equal measure, oral formats are beginning to dominate over literary ones. As a result, reading runs the risk of becoming a cultural technique of the few.

 

In The Future of Reading, Christoph Engemann shows how the new platform orality of podcasts, online video and TikTok is not only changing reading, but how their AI-supported monopolization is also calling the openness of language into question.

German title: Die Zukunft des Lesens
ISBN: 978-3-7518-3041-6
Publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Publication date: 17.04.2025
Series: Fröhliche Wissenschaft Vol. 250

Licence

Essay

Christoph Engemann, born in Paderborn in 1972, is a media scientist and, after working in Bremen, Stanford, Austin, Weimar and Hangzhou, conducts research at the DFG Collaborative Research Center “Virtual Lifeworlds” at Ruhr University Bochum. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, media of statehood, graphs & graph assumptions, genealogy of the transaction, rurality and barns.