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proposals for expression and creation based on reading and writing in all contexts and formats.
This dimension extends to the two realms in which organisations today project their action, both actual and virtual. This consideration is particularly relevant to the first, as it lends special significance to the physical spaces of organisations, which gain a new importance as complementary areas of action together with the Internet and the cloud, strengthening their func- tion as hosts and meeting places. The traditional principal function of these spaces as containers of collections of objects and reading materials is giving way to a new conception of them as open, welcoming, flexible and multidisciplinary.
The virtual realm offers a host of opportunities for interacting with the community of readers associated with organisations, as a complement to face-to-face action. This is also due to technological development, as a result of which larger groups of people can take part in the activities, clubs, workshops, courses or any other initiative through an Internet presence without physical limitations by means of social media profiles, communities of readers and other digital alternatives that constitute a varied, attractive and accessible offering of participation, dialogue and creation.
In this context, conversation is a primary method for developing formative functions, promoting reading and stimulating and strengthening citizens’ reading habits in the context of multiple literacy and digital reading. The following state- ment made by Jorge Wagensberg is relevant to the foregoing:
Understanding and learning are perhaps, ulti- mately, strictly individual activities. But they always occur at the extreme of some form of conversa- tion. A research project, a school, an exhibition, a museum, a lecture, a text, an artwork or any piece of knowledge is only something if it stimulates conversation. Conversing is perhaps the best training a human can have in being human.162
The educator and reading specialist Juan Mata also speaks in depth about the virtues of conver- sation and establishes direct links between con- versation and promoting fondness for reading and the development of skills and competence in relation to digital reading. In one of the reports on the conclusions of Territorio Ebook, the research project on readers and digital reading run by Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, Mata states that “understanding the world, of which reading books is part, can thus be seen
to be linked to some sort of conversation. This conversational experience is not unrelated to literary learning”.163
Professor Mata also argues that readers’ training and background account for differences between them and the degree of enjoyment they derive from reading. This idea embodies the evident fact that collective learning activities are benefi- cial to the appreciation and practice of reading, in whatever format:
It seems beyond doubt that speaking about a text (say, literary) or using it as a basis facilitates comprehension, boosts knowledge and language, and reduces fear of the new or unknown. Con- versation, accompaniment, dialogue, mobilisation and encouragement could ultimately be regarded as different words for the same task: educating readers, devising spaces and activities where it is possible to educate readers, arouse their curiosity and sustain their wish to learn under any circum- stance and in any medium.164
It is therefore not surprising that one of the classic activities designed to promote reading, reading clubs, is currently thriving. Today these traditional spaces par excellence for socialising reading come in an interesting variety of for- mats, from purely face-to-face to those that also use their Internet presence as a support, and
the new clubs that are fully in cloud, born in the virtual realm and absent from the physical spaces of the library. All these reading clubs can cur- rently make use of websites, blogs, social media profiles and the formation of groups in the latter
STRATEGIES/APPROACHES FOR GIVING IMPETUS TO READING
Readers in the digital age