The future of text

Does the written word have a future? Some contemporary trends seem to suggest otherwise: the replacement of the novel first by movies and then video games as leading cultural form; the shift from text to audio and video in messenger apps and on social media platforms; a (related?) loss of concentration and focus; and sinking rates of functional literacy in many developed countries. And just a year after large language models such as ChatGPT arrived on the scene, artificial intelligence is already doing a lot of writing and reading for us.

In this seminar we will take these trends not necessarily at face value, but as a starting point to explore the relationship between reading/writing, media and society from interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives. I invited colleagues in literature and psychology, book history and the history of computing to co-teach this seminar together with me. Together we will look at long-term trends related to various textual media, the evolution of technologies from the printing press to social media platforms, and the social contexts of reading and literacy in order to think about past, present, and future trajectories of textuality.

<<Learning Goals>>
After successfully completing this seminar, participants will be able to
- identify and compare different conceptions of text, reading, writing and literacy
- understand textuality as a complex social and cultural practice
- analyze how textual practices are influenced by social and technological contexts
- consider a range of interdisciplinary perspectives from social media studies, anthropology, history and science and technology studies on textuality
- apply critical approaches on the relationship between text, media, and society to their own research as well as to reflections on future scenarios