For most people in the Western world, the mere idea of getting through daily life without reliance on some form of digital technology is unimaginable. We check our email regularly rather than writing letters; we text instead of calling; we read our news on-line rather than having a paper delivered. Increasingly, the way we gain information from our loved ones and from the world around us is print based in a digital format. “Each change in the technology has transformed the information landscape,” observes Robert Darnton, as we are able to access information at an increasingly rapid rate and with greater ease “and the speed has continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible.”[1] However, Anouk Lang emphasizes, in From Codex to Hypertext, “the movement toward digitization should be seen as the most recent in a long series of efforts in human history to store and retrieve information.”[2] Information has been inscribed on tablets, painted on walls, scripted on scrolls, printed in codexes and now stored in cyberspace.
Each of these changes in technology, in how information was stored in the past, caused a shift in both the recording and receiving of information; texts have become smaller, more uniform and easily transportable. In the 21st century, we are at the beginning of a change in how information is stored and retrieved, and any change in technology prompts some form of panic because “a new technology,” as Neil Postman argues “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.”[3] As Lang observes, the idea of a new technology shifting and disrupting society has been a recurrent theme throughout the twentieth century because of “the anxieties around the unknown impact of new technologies” such as the arrival of radio, television, video games and the internet.[4] These new technologies altered the entertainment industry as listening and viewing became increasingly private in one’s own home rather than enjoyed in a public theatre. The shift to e-readers from books in the twenty-first century follows earlier changes in entertainment, since how we acquire books has become increasingly private and home based with a quick download.
The book has been virtually unchanged, in both the format and in how it is read, since the invention of the Gutenberg press in the 1450s, as a result the shift to a new medium for reading becomes difficult for people to imagine. “The electronic revolution has inspired some extreme responses” observes Martyn Lyons, in A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World, “—an anxious nostalgia for the old, mingled with a dose of panic on one hand and a naive enthusiasm about the promise of the future on the other.”[5] The reaction to books becoming increasingly digitized has inspired both alarm and acceptance. Some, like Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies decries the loss of the book as an important object. He passionately argues, “we are in some danger of believing that the speed and wizardry of our gadgets have freed us from the sometimes arduous work of turning pages in silence.”[6] He laments that with the rise of popular culture, with all its movies and merchandise attached to stories, that books, as a single entity without the media gloss and glamour, will be pale in comparison. While others, like Alberto Manguel, in A Reader on Reading, recognizes that the digital age will not retreat and that “each technology has its particular merits.”[7] Encyclopedias, for example, are more suited to an electronic form because of the ability to cross-reference easily. However, he does recognize that how one reads in a digital environment will change.
Manguel’s ideas about the changes in reading habits as a result of changes in technology parallel those of Neil Postman’s in Technopoly. Adoption of a new form of technology requires a change in understanding. Postman asserts, “our understanding of what is real is different which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.”[8] It is the strengthening of one sense, the visual, over the other four senses, taste, touch, smell and sound, with the movement towards e-readers that as a result creates a new form of understanding text in a digital world. With an e-reader the sound of a page flipping can be turned off. There is no smell of musty paper or old binding. The texture of the page is smooth and does not vary from text to text. There is no taste lingering on the tongue from the licked fingertip turning the page. Postman encourages his readers to evaluate what is lost in adopting a new form of technology because many advertisements and sales pitches focus solely on the gains. While an e-reader promotes the dismantling of bookshelves in favour of a slim device, which allows for more space, less clutter, and greater accessibility to a variety of reading materials, the amplification of the visual as the predominate sense should be questioned.
The book becomes the perfect ground for discussing the intersection of technological and sensory shifts in a digital age. The change captures the rising importance of the visual as the dominant sense through which to gain knowledge, and the value of written knowledge as the dominant way of gaining an understanding of the world. In a firmly established print culture, the transformation to a digital one should be questioned the way Socrates questioned the shift towards written culture from an oral one in Plato’s Phaedrus.[9] Moving from an oral culture to a written one changes ways of understanding and knowing as well as alters the sensory connection to text. Socrates tells Phaedrus the story of Theuth, who in discussion with the Egyptian King Thamus, explains the virtues of the written text. King Thamus argues that if people rely on written texts, they will become forgetful. Socrates further explains that people need to hear and discuss a text in order to remember it. He argues that the written text without the oral-aural component loses its value as a form of knowledge. True understanding, argues Socrates, is a result of discussion. However, the shift towards print culture valued the visual, attached to written language, over the oral-aural form of storytelling and debate. As Marshall McLuhan observes, “Socrates stood on the border between that oral world and the visual and literate culture.”[10] McLuhan contends the shift from a print culture to a digital one is just as significant as the one Socrates was observing. Bernard Hibbits, a legal scholar, contemporizes Socrate's point by stating that technology further separates “the sender of a message from its recipient… writing thus discourages simultaneous reliance on speech, gesture, touch and savor.”[11] The other senses play a role in storing the text in one’s memory. A friend’s perfume does not linger in an email the way it would in a letter. The person’s voice is no longer in our ear when we text back and forth. Reading the news online does not leave inky smudges on our fingertips as we swipe from screen to screen. The digital world is changing our sensory landscape in subtle ways. However, one of the key differences between shift from the oral to written culture and the shift between the written to digital culture is the speed in which it is occurring.
With the rapid switch to the digital environment as a way to gain understanding and knowledge, the transformation of the sensory environment is equally significant. In Sensory History, Mark M. Smith, a historian, raises a profound and often unquestioned point that our senses, while unique and specific to every individual, are still filtered through a very particular way of understanding the world. He argues that “we need to expose the senses for what they are: historically and culturally generated ways of knowing and understanding.”[12] Western culture has placed high value on a visual understanding of the world because it can be easily quantified.[13] Constance Classen, a sensory anthropologist, elaborates on Smith’s assertion of the historical and cultural ways of understanding the world. She supports Smith by stating, “society directs how we perceive.”[14] Perception is the physical actions of all five senses gathering data in order to understand the world more fully. Classen illustrates that a sensory understanding of the world is not universal and it varies according to place and culture, as well as time.[15] Classen explains that some cultures believe we have more senses, or ways of perceiving the world and some believe we have less.[16] Aristotle developed the Western belief in the five senses because Plato “did not distinguish clearly between senses and feelings.”[17] Within the five senses there is a hierarchy of importance with sight at the top because it is considered the most rational and easily quantifiable. The other senses of hearing, smell, taste and touch have shifted in importance as a reliable way to gain information from the world.
The book as an object has not remained static in how it is perceived by the senses. The early print culture still retained a close sensory attachment to text as scribes painstakingly transcribed work. The texture of the paper or vellum was unique as it was prepared by hand, and the size of the book was not standardized. The inks also varied in color as well as in opacity according to the process in which it was made. The smoke from the candle and the texture of the writing surface all left a mark on the page. The individual transcribing the work as well as the text in a wider social and political context was evident in the font choice and illustrations. Each book was unique to a particular scribe, and would provide different sensory stimulation to the reader and would stress different aspects of the text depending on the surrounding embellishments. Books were also rare, and few people knew how to read; despite Socrates’ fears that the oral-aural culture would be lost by moving to a print culture, people were still read to as a way of gaining understanding of a text.
The printing press changed the sensory nature of writing by making it more mechanized, which in turn changed the sensory landscape of books themselves. Scribes were no longer inhaling the ink fumes as pen traveled across the page. Text became uniform in both size and style and lacked the personal embellishments and idiosyncrasies from individual monks and scribes. Language itself became more standardized and began to adhere to strict rules of grammar, punctuation and spelling. The printing press also brought with it a change in how books were read. As books became more readily accessible, the act of reading became increasingly private. This changed the sensory nature of reading itself from an auditory experience in the company of others to a quiet and solitary activity. Rather than the reader gaining an understanding of text from being read to and inferring importance based on the reader’s stress and intonation on words and phases, the reader could infer meaning individually, but was relying on sight as the dominant mode to do so. The visual activity of reading became increasingly the most important sense in order to gain knowledge from the text. Books became smaller as they no longer needed to allow for multiple people to gain glimpses at the text, but instead could be held comfortably in the hand.
How we perceive the world relates to the values and practices of the society we are living in. Howes argues, “sensation is not just a matter of physiological response and personal experience,” it also falls under the domain of cultural expression.[18] Rather than viewing and recording each sense in isolation, anthropology of the senses seeks to recognize and record “the multisensory nature of embodied experience” and also questions “the supremacy of sight as the historical articulator of modernity.”[19] C. Nadia Seremetakis argues in The Senses Still that “any discussion of the senses cannot be partitioned from a consideration of modernity; the two subjects are interwoven.”[20] Modernity, however, has prescribed a very specific view of the senses with sight and hearing becoming of primary importance. These two senses were considered the most rational, the “least subjective” and “therefore most suitable for scientific research.”[21] But it was not just scientists who favored vision over the other senses. Freud, “influenced by contemporary theories of biological and social evolution,” argued in favour of sight by postulating that psychologically well-developed individuals have no need for the other senses as those senses were considered closer to animals.[22] Foucault also stressed the importance of vision as the dominant sense in Western culture with his ideas of surveillance and of the “the classifatory eye” in gaining a rational understanding of the world.[23]
The importance of sight, as the predominant way to gain a rational understanding of the world, was reinforced in works of literature, psychology, philosophy and economics. As Smith observes, “the print revolution was also responsible for braiding sight and logic, seeing and reason, vision and objectivity.”[24] Gaining an understanding of the world became a solitary and individual pursuit supported by the ever-widening access to texts through mass reproduction. David Howes argues the “association of sight with both scientific rationalism and capitalist display and the expansion of the visual field by means of technologies of observation and reproduction” continued to reinforce vision as the dominant sense through which to gain an understanding of the world.[25] Books became the primary object reflecting both the importance of sight as a way of gaining knowledge and of the importance of the written word as a rational and stable archive of that knowledge.
As printing costs dropped, books became more accessible and the rising middle class became increasingly literate. The cultural expression of the importance of sight and the written word was reflected both in the object of the book as well as in the content of the written material. The movement from books to e-readers further heightens sight as the dominant mode of perception as the other senses are rarely stimulated from reading off a screen. Western culture “excluded all other sensory phenomena”[26] and has developed technology that tends to focus on senses in isolation rather than an integrated fashion. “By focusing all our attention on visual symbolism,” argues Classen, “we remain ignorant of the symbolic function of the other senses.”[27] The role of the other senses, taste, touch, smell and sound, in perception and understanding has slowly been diminished in modern society as they became culturally devalued because they were more difficult to quantify. And with every new technology introduced into society, the sensory understanding of the world shifts and creates what McLuhan calls a “new sense ratio,” in which all the other senses are reshuffled in order of importance.[28] However, with increasing digitization, the other senses are now rarely even stimulated.
McLuhan argues that, “any sense when stepped up to a high intensity can act as an anesthetic for the other senses.”[29] It is important to question the shifting of sensory importance because as Seremetakis argues “the numbing and erasure of sensory realities are crucial moments in socio-cultural transformation.”[30] The shift from a print culture to a digital one marks a distinct shift in our sensory reality as we adopt objects increasingly devoid of sensory stimulation and have increasing reliance on sight as the dominant way of gaining information. Howes postulates that we are further homogenizing the world by becoming increasingly dependent on electronics.[31] This homogenization towards a world reliant on sight as the foremost mode of perception has unexplored consequences.
While modernity has emphasized sight as the dominant way of gaining information from a book, the gustatory and tactile sensations are reflected in the way we talk about books. We talk of devouring, savoring, regurgitating, spewing, rolling on the tongue, feasting, living on a diet of books, of particular authors, of particular themes.[32] The use of gustatory language to describe reading habits is significant because it indicates that reading is connected in subtle ways to the entire body rather than just to the eyes. C. S. Lewis remarks on the tactile nature of books. “From their inception, [books] held a profoundly tactile quality. Books were, and are, held, carried, opened, thumbed, fingered and stroked.”[33] The e-reader alters the tactile quality of books, and evidence of the opening, thumbing, fingering and stroking is not left as a tangible mark on the text. The copy remains clean regardless of how many times it has been read. The move towards digitization separates the body from the object.
Our sensory attachment to texts is also related to how we choose them. As Manguel states, “of all the shapes that books have acquired through the ages, the most popular have been those that allowed the book to be held comfortably in the reader’s hand.”[34] The ease in which we can hold a book is important. The weight of the book is pleasing in our hands and texture of the pages stimulates rather than distracts us. We often pick books based on the image on the cover, or the font type appeals to us. The odor wafting, from the pages, draws us closer in. We also discard books because the object of the book itself does not delight our senses; the decision having nothing to do with the knowledge contained within the pages. The cover of one edition is not as appealing as another; the texture of the paper is rough. The smell emanating from a used book is offensive or the spine of a new one is too stiff to comfortably hold the text open. We remember what we have read by how many pages were held between thumb and forefinger. Manguel expresses our sensory attachment to books best when he describes how all the senses are involved in the act of reading. He states:
The act of reading establishes an intimate, physical relationship in which all the senses have a part, the eyes drawing the words from the page, the ears echoing the sounds being read, the nose inhaling the familiar scent of paper, glue, ink, cardboard or leather, the touch caressing the rough or soft page, the smooth or hard binding; even the taste, at times, when the reader’s fingers are lifted to the tongue.[35]
Reading a paper copy of a book allows for a full integration of all our senses in subtle and not easily identifiable ways. An e-reader creates a more homogeneous reading experience because, regardless of the text, the sensory experience remains the same. Manguel furthers his argument by stressing the importance of specific books for readers as “one reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover.”[36] It is through our senses that we know that a book is ours. An e-reader is designed to make reading more accessible, but relies mostly on our visual acuity to remember the text. In the process of gaining access to a greater number of texts, we lose the opportunity to make those books ours.
The making of the books our own is a sensory process. Seremetakis argues that “the awakening of the senses is awakening the capacity for memory, of tangible memory; to be awake is to remember and one remembers through the senses via substances.”[37] With the shifting of reading to a more sensory devoid environment, we are also shifting how we encode memory of the text as the other senses recede into the background as there is no scent wafting from the pages as we slide our finger across the screen, our fingertips no longer experience the differences in page quality. Regardless of the numbers of pages, the weight remains the same in our hands and we no longer have reason to lift our fingers to our tongue in order to turn a page more effectively. An e-reader allows the reader to completely homogenize the reading experience by changing the style and size of the font according to personal preference and it subtly intensifies the reader’s visual reliance as the dominant way to gain and retain information from the text. The continued emphasis on sight as the primary sense through which to gain information further strengthens the cultural construction that vision is the most rational of all the senses.
Books are not only containers of knowledge, before they are also a way of holding onto our lives. In addition to activating memories by holding them in our hands, books give weight and meaning to our lives by telling the history of who we once were and where we are now. Books hold a sacred place in our understanding of self because they are the “silent witnesses” of our intellectual meanderings and shifting of character.[38] Nicholas Basbanes quotes a small section of Proust’s essay “On Reading” in opening of his monograph, Every Book Its Reader. Proust states, “that if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of the days that have vanished.”[39] Stacked beside the bed, spilling off bookshelves and tucked into corners, books are tangible markers of how we have spent our time. Manguel delights “in knowing that [he is] surround[ed] by a sort of inventory of [his] life, with intimations of [his] future.”[40] Within the books stacked around his home he is able to discover “in almost forgotten volumes, traces of the reader [he] once was—scribbles, bus tickets, scraps of paper with mysterious names and numbers, the occasional date and place on the book’s flyleaf which take [him] back to a certain cafe, a distant hotel room, a far-away summer so long ago.”[41] Books become a scrapbook or a calendar of the reader, which we have not recognized as having value or importance.
There are very few objects that can meaningfully reflect our interior lives. Our own marginalia in the books becomes a layering of self; small snapshots of intellectual growth are left on the pages revealing “a great deal about [the book’s] place in the intellectual life of its reader.”[42] This interior life contained within the pages of the book is reactivated through the stimulation of our senses in multiple ways by holding the book in our hands and flipping through the pages. As Howes suggests, “what gives objects their sensory meaning—and what may give them new meanings—is not just the memories we associate with them but how we are experiencing them right now.”[43] The sight of the front cover, the weight of the book in our hands, the texture of the paper and the smell wafting from the pages subtly remind us of who we were when we first read the book and maybe force us to contemplate who we are now. Books hold an important place in our lives. A different edition evokes something new. There is something important about a text being our copy with our own personal marks on the pages.
With an e-reader, an active reader can mark them up and comment on the text, but the unconscious or accidental marking of the text is lost. The bus tickets, old movie stubs and coffee stains create a memory of the place and time of the reading. While these marks across the page may come off as trivial or unnecessary to the understanding of the text itself, they do offer reminders of whom the reader once was. Serematakis asserts, “the cosmos of economically discarded cultural artifacts constitutes a vast social unconscious of sensory-emotive experience that potentially offers up hidden and now inadmissible counter-narratives of once valued life worlds.”[44] The self expressed through marginalia and tucked between covers may be different than the self presented to the world in more public ways. Books are becoming “discarded cultural artifacts” which reveal important details about the reader.[45] However, Western society values sight over the other senses, so the importance of tactile and olfactory details of a book are discarded in an effort to improve accessibility without questioning the possible losses in heightening a use of a single sense. We are not acknowledging that, “the senses represent inner states not shown on the surface.”[46] These inner states are difficult to identify, because of their personal and individual nature, and therefore discredited as unimportant because they cannot be observed and evaluated in a rational way.
We have focused on books as knowledge containers rather than their role in our lives as personal and cultural artifacts, thereby diminishing the role that our senses have in our understanding and remembering text. The speed of which Western culture can readily access written knowledge has become a marker of its modernity. Postman states in Technopoly that, “we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to ‘access’ information.”[47] It is our high need to access information that has led to changes in the way books are manufactured and distributed. This is not a new change. Postman remarks “innovations in the format of the machine-made book were an attempt to control the flow of information, to organize it by establishing priorities and by giving it a sequence.”[48] Thus, the mass production of books available for purchase led to a rising literate middle class. Digitizing books would thereby increase the number of books available to a reading public. “Millions of electronic books are now available to an infinite number of readers,” Lyons points out, “but there is no guarantee that the technology of digitization will survive.”[49] Darnton argues, “nothing preserves texts better than ink imbedded in paper.”[50] Postman further argues that “time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost.”[51] Darnton cites numerous examples where the movement of text to microfiche, fax and email have failed to preserve a record for more than several decades all in the name of opening accessibility and saving time in accessing sources. E-readers eliminate the need to spend time searching in multiple bookstores for a particular text, and allows for an almost instantaneous download; however, it requires constant software updates to continue reading it and eventually the technology itself will become too outdated to continue to do so.
Manguel emphasizes that “it is interesting to note how often a technological development… promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede, making us more aware of old-fashioned virtues we might otherwise have either overlooked or dismissed as negligible importance.”[52] The sensory mode of perception is just as important as the object of perception. Seremetakis, in her exploration of the importance of objects in gaining a sensory understanding of the world, asserts that, “the sensory landscape and its meaning-endowed objects bear within the emotional and historical sedimentation that can provoke and ignite gestures, discourses and acts.”[53] Books are important artifacts in Western culture because different editions and publishers reveal subtle aspects of class and accessibility in the quality of the cover, paper, and binding. On a personal level, books reveal our own history and emotional sedimentation in our marginalia and what is left behind in between the pages. The e-reader is reliant on an ability to access outdated technology to look for the sedimentation fifty from now, whereas we can still read scrolls, painted caves and tablets because of the tangible physical object.
Lang suggests that new technologies are gradually integrated into society and society’s use of new technology is “transformed organically rather than abruptly,”[54] Reading in a digital environment is the reality for most people. However, the difficulty with “the digital revolution,” observes Lyons, is it “gives all texts a homogeneous form.”[55] The difference between books is often what makes them memorable. The e-reader does not have the same distinct tactile quality, smell and weight that individual books have. The other senses become impoverished through the act of reading off of it. Darnton believes “no matter how advanced the technology, [he] cannot imagine that a digitized image of an old book will provide anything comparable to the excitement of contact with the original.”[56] Books bring to the reader an understanding the socio-economic heritage of when the book was printed and, through the marginalia, the value of it to the reader.
The context in which we keep our books is part of the social or mechanical systems that surround it.[57] These systems cannot always be reduced to a purely scientific form resting on the rational construction of information acquisition and retention. Books are important, not only for the knowledge and pleasure contained between the covers, but also for the sensory stimulation they provide by allowing memories of the text and also the reader we are at that moment to be encoded. The often idiosyncratic placement of books on shelves is a tangible marker of the reader we once were and in turn reveals that aspect self to anyone who cares to draw a finger across the spines. Rather than being displayed on bookshelves inviting a guest to browse the shelves and pull one off, books are stored out of sight on a slim electronic device. The shift to e-readers further changes the social nature of reading as books are becoming increasingly private. The act of sharing a book between friends or colleagues becomes lost because it is difficult to share purchased books between devices. Books are and should remain important cultural markers to inform future generations of readers, yet as texts are stored on platforms requiring electricity and apps that need frequent updating the possibility that they will be lost is opening up. But most importantly, the push towards the digitization of texts should be questioned because of how it impoverishes our senses. We don’t yet know the significance of sniffing books and sliding our fingers down pages in encoding memories and in reactivating those lost hours in which we fell into the text and emerged as a different reader.
Notes
1. Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 23.
2. Anouk Lang, From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 5.
3. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1992), 18.
4. Lang, From Codex to Hypertext, 4.
5. Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 195.
6. Sven Berkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 32.
7. Alberto Manguel, A Reader on Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 283.
8. Postman, Technopoly, 13.
9. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
10. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1962), 27.
11. Mark M. Smith, Sensory History (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 22.
12. Smith, Sensory History, 12.
13. Historians Patrick Joyce and Chris Otter both discuss the socio-cultural changes in British society after the industrial revolution and how they favored sight as the dominant and most rational of all the senses.
14. Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993), 46.
15. According to Classen, the importance of odor has been declining in Western society. She cites the rose as an example where its scent was the primary importance 1500s and by the 20th Century a rose has very little smell, but is noted for its appearance. She also illustrates how the importance of hearing has shifted historically. For Thomas Aquinas, hearing was an important sense because it led to an understanding of the Word of God, whereas today we are more concerned with the clarity of sound in our home stereo systems. Both the declining importance of odor and the lessening importance of hearing have been as a result of the rising importance of vision.
16. Classen argues for example, the Ongee of the Andaman Islands use smell as the dominant sense and the Tzotzil of Mexico have a strong sense of touch. The other senses have little cultural importance.
17. Classen, Worlds of Sense, 2.
18. Howes, Sensual Relations, xi.
19. Thomas Porcello, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and David Samuels, “The Reorganization of the Sensory World,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 61
20. C. Nadia Seremetakis, ed. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 125.
21. Howes, 6.
22. ibid., xv.
23. Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007)
24. Sensing the Past, 10.
25. David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), xii.
26. Howes, 7.
27. Classen, 17.
28. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 27.
29. McLuhan, 27.
30. Serematakis, 23.
31. Howes, 6.
32. Alberto Manguel, (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998), 170.
33. Mark M. Smith, 93.
34. Manguel, 128.
35. Manguel, 244.
36. ibid., 15.
37. Serematakis, 28.
38. Nicholas Basbanes, Every Book Its Reader (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 69.
39. Basbanes, xiv.
40. Manguel, 237.
41. Manguel, 237,
42. Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 39.
43. Howes, 44.
44. Serematakis, 10.
45. ibid., 10.
46. ibid., 5.
47. Postman, 61.
48. ibid., 62.
49. Lyons, 207.
50. Darton, 37.
51. Postman, 45.
52. Manguel, 138.
53. ibid., 7.
54. Lang, 4.
55. Lyons, 195.
56. Darnton, 55.
57. Alan Galey, “Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web Browsers and the Materiality of Digital Texts,” in The History of Reading: Methods, Strategies and Tactics Vol. 3, eds. Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 205.
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--A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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--A History of Reading. Toronto: Vintage Canada 1998.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Christopher Rowe. London: Penguin Books, 2005.
Porcello, Thomas, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and David Samuels, “The Reorganization
of the Sensory World” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 51-66.
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia. ed. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994.
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-- Sensory History. Oxford: Berg, 2007.
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