Page 158 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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Re-considering the relationship with users...
Today we use the term prosumer to define this new type of user who is both a recipient and
a producing agent, seeks greater participation and does not settle for the more passive role traditionally granted to them. And there has also been talk of “Generation C”, over and above digital natives or non-natives of particular ages, to refer to people, both children and adults, who live in a state of permanent connectedness. This is largely the profile of the student, user or client we are dealing with.
Today’s readers are accustomed to books and networks; they transcend media and walls, switching from reading in print to online reading with increasing versatility. They interpret dif- ferent codes for creating multimodal discourses in which the text establishes a dialogue with
the image and sound. Today’s society navigates through old and new forms of reading: on paper, audiovisual, multimedia and hypermedia.
The traditional split in our society between cul- ture and education is giving way to the creation of spaces for education and ongoing and contin- uous training and resource centres that are open to citizens and oriented towards putting an end to a passive concept of reception and cultural consumption so that readers, schoolchildren, spectators, and visitors to exhibitions and museums cease to be mere contemplators and adopt an active and critical attitude. This means that educational centres, libraries, museums, exhibition venues and other institutions must adopt a new role, take on a new meaning and a new dimension.
The new situation thus grants users a new, more participatory and active role in building and maintaining institutions’ services and this needs to be taken very much into account when devising strategies and designing programmes and activities based around reading and writing:
• They have thus gone from being the recip- ients of activities for encouraging reading to active agents who are present from the design stage and are an essential factor for disseminating and expanding these actions.
• The new approach calls for greater adap- tation to people and groups. This requires knowing how to listen, speak and analyse the behaviour of face-to-face readers and digital readers to boost the participation and decision-making levels of citizens in the various reading contexts.
• Technology advocates a horizontal inter- connected network built by everyone, piece by piece, in which conversation is a core element around which all proposals for boosting reading and writing revolve and constitutes the best mortar for building
a solid and coherent cultural animation project involving reading services and their physical and virtual spaces.
Expression and communication
The wish to offer spaces for expression related
to books and to open up channels of commu- nication underpins many actions designed to promote reading and campaigns and activities carried out in different fields. It is also key to the development and promotion of digital reading. Creating communication situations is also per- ceived in the digital sphere as the centrepiece
of all action designed to introduce all citizens, especially youngsters, to the pleasures of reading.
The idea upheld and proclaimed by Marc Soriano back in the 1990s that the shortest route to reading is expression and communication is newly important today, and it is enriched with new connotations and new possibilities in order to achieve a wider impact:
If we want our children to read, and for them to read properly and good books, we need to start
STRATEGIES/APPROACHES FOR GIVING IMPETUS TO READING
Readers in the digital age