Page 126 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

126
digital: producción, usos lectores, recepción
y prácticas docentes” (Digital literature for children and teenagers: production, reading habits, reception and teaching practices),52 which studied the reception of digital stories by young readers. It is an essential means of gaining a more thorough knowledge of new storytelling
in relation to readers and exploring the keys to digital reading.
As Mireia Manresa Potrony points out:
The configuration of a literary product with characteristics different from traditional fiction brings about changes in how the reader reads literature and in turn forces mediators to explore the most suitable strategies for accompanying the recipient in this type of reading. The new forms of electronic fiction, despite displaying a considerable specificity compared to other digital expressions, are an integral part of the current cultural and communicative paradigm that makes it possible for people to access knowledge, interact with others, communicate their own ideas or obtain information in a virtual and virtualised world that nevertheless coexists with the analogue world.53
An attempt was also made to answer the ques- tion of how we read in digital society in a recent report presented by Fundación Telefónica, in which an interesting group of experts examines today’s readers from different angles.
In the presentation it was is stressed how the reading scene changes at the speed of light and how
diverse and plural new forms of reading appear which are added to individual reading. Reading is becoming more social, holistic, active, emotional and corporeal, marked by an inseparable relation- ship with writing, interactivity, sociability, image, orality, ritual, sentimental education, everyday settings, mobility, the proliferation of devices, the fragmentation of time and the multiplication of occasions and reasons for reading.54
A final observation on the scope that promoting reading can attain in the digital age
It is a fact that this global base of readers and this variety and disparity in the available supply of reading material are giving rise to many kinds of readers, but at the same time they also offer a broad range of possibilities for promoting reading in the digital age (to encourage the transition from one medium or format to an- other, or an additional effort in connection with an interesting subject, etc.) and constitute a major asset that can contribute to the formation of twenty-first-century readers.
“I have always argued that people should read what they please; the palace of literature has many gates and you can enter through which- ever one you like, as long as you want to. And
if it is through the Harry Potter entrance that’s fine – the requirement is to enter for pleasure”, states Fernando Savater.55 Though once readers are inside, the mediator will attempt to guide them further on an enriching and fruitful reading journey.
Gustavo Martín Garzo also alludes to a similar idea when he refers to the reader as “someone who [...] does not seek greater knowledge of himself or of the world but [is] driven by fasci- nation”.56 And it is precisely this fascination that mediators need to seek, find or prompt in order to attract readers to the different forms of read- ing that are not so present in their day-to-day lives and with which they will need to familiarise themselves in order to become educated and grow as readers.
What technology can do for readers with special needs
Technology, with the hugely varied offering of reading materials it makes available to us, can be, as pointed out in the previous section, a major ally in promoting reading (in both paper
READERS
Readers in the digital age