Fate of Reading in a Digital Age

For anyone in the Ann Arbor arear on May 15, here's the info for aSymposiumon "Bookishness:  The New Fate of Reading in a Digital Age." The way this is framed and the cast of characters suggest this mighteven get beyond the really, really tiresome "it used to be wonderful,now it is dreadful" nostalgic binarism of pre- and post-digital readinghabits.  (Just ask Hawthorne or, for that matter, Thomas Jeffersonabout how terrible reading habits are because of "new technologies" . .. or women, or the non-elite, or . . . )

 Here's the announcement and I hope someone there will live blog or tweet it for those of us who can't be there!

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Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age

Symposium on May 15th, 2009 in 3222 Angell Hall

Please visit our website for a full program: http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/bookishnessmqr/home

9:30-10:00: Coffee and Refreshments
10-12:00: Panel on New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age

2:00-4:00: Forum on New Insitutions for the Digital Age

At the current moment of ever-accelerating technological change, it's particularly important to pause and think about the challenges generated by new media and how they might or might not change the ways we read in the decades to come.  What new literacies are generated in the digital era?  What happens to the cultural practices and norms associated with and generated by the traditional book? And most importantly, how are institutions--libraries, bookstores, newspapers and magazines, presses, universities, the general reading public--responding to this new situation?  How ought they respond?

The Michigan Quarterly Review and Rackham are co-sponsoring this first in what we hope will be a series of open discussions devoted to thinking through these questions.  A morning session will be devoted to theory and history; an afternoon session, to questions of institutional response.  Symposium speakers will include University Librarian Paul Courant, Alan Liu (English Department, UC Santa Barbara, Director of Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Cultural and Social Practices of Online Reading ), Phil Pochoda (Director, U of Michigan Press), Jessica Pressman (English Department, Yale),  Leah Price (English Department, Harvard University), Sam Tanenhaus (editor, New York Times Book Review).

Admission is free and open to the public.  Please mark your calendars!