Page 115 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

The fact that experiments involving children and less educated readers have been found to have a greater impact and more positive effects con- firms the importance of promoting and boosting reading as a form of reward and a means of creating equal opportunities for access to digital reading and all its components.
What do the strategies for promoting reading in the digital context aim for?
In today’s world of transition and digital change, in which the traditional processes of access to culture and texts are being questioned and the long-established book chain has been broken, the task of promoting reading habits needs to be redefined with a series of new approaches:
• Strengthening capabilities and providing opportunities for reading: traditional opportunities linked to the print medium plus those derived from the digital context in which reading and writing are taking
on different forms and natures. The aim is to add to the traditional functions others stemming from the new situation of reading and readers, which lies midway between analogue and digital.
• Plans, campaigns, programmes and activ- ities should be designed with the idea of creating spaces for integrating print and digital culture, and the role of promoting and giving shape to these actions needs to encompass both areas with respect to both content and reading instruments and devices.
• Therefore, the approach taken when devising programmes and activities should bear in mind not only the audience and type of works to be promoted but also the characteristics of the format in which they are presented and the devices needed to read them, which will no doubt require additional actions.
• The uncertainty surrounding the new avenues of books and reading raises chal- lenges which all the entities and agents that promote reading need to address in order to reinvent their role in digital culture. This does not mean a complete break with the previous state, but nor can the transition
be based on merely transferring traditional ways to the new situation; instead, it is necessary to undergo a real transformation process to create new proposals in keep- ing with the times.
It thus seems evident that initiatives aimed at promoting reading in our society, wherever they come from, must encompass both analogue and digital coherently, harmoniously and comple- mentarily. According to the conclusions of the abovementioned annual report by ThinkEPI, educational and cultural spaces and agents related to reading and its promotion need to shift the balance of their work so as to focus on:
• Content as opposed to the documents themselves – irrespective of the formats and channels through which they are disseminated and the particular qualities they have as a result – in order to be able to fragment and customise them.
• Readers, users and customers, as knowing how to listen to them, being familiar with their needs and how they search for and ac- cess information, together with the changes in their ways and methods of reading, will provide mediators with the keys to design- ing new ways of engaging with them and giving them a chance to participate.
• Socialisation, the third aspect of the gradual approach to the new situation of reading and the transformation and adaptation of intervention strategies. Today, as in the past, the drive to communicate and share experiences with others is an important stimulus to reading, whether the contact is actual or virtual.
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
115
Readers in the digital age