Abstract
The home is a text rich environment and people’s everyday home life normally and quite unproblematically embraces many different kinds of reading associated with such things as scribbled messages, post-it notes left on fridge doors, labels, articles in newspapers, magazines, and, of course, books. Increasingly reading incorporates various electronic devices, whether it is reading text messages, reading instant message chat or reading friends’ Facebook statuses on mobile phones, laptops and desktop computers. In considering reading in the 21st century home and how the process and activity of reading might change, we need to appreciate the different processes and kinds of reading (reading for pleasure, reading as work, reading as a distraction or time-filler etc.), the different circumstances in which reading is accomplished as well as the ‘technologies’ of reading and the interactions between them.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed, this has its own subtleties. An opened out book left face down in one place, say on the seat of a chair, may be imputable as ready for return in ways that a book left opened out on, say the arm of a chair or a table doesn’t. To someone competent in the ordering of the setting one may say that the reader will return imminently, whilst the other may say they intend to carry on reading sometime soon, but not straight away.
- 2.
Alan is a friend of her son.
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Rouncefield, M., Tolmie, P. (2011). Digital Words: Reading and the 21st Century Home. In: Harper, R. (eds) The Connected Home: The Future of Domestic Life. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-476-0_8
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