Pay Attention! (Short Assignment #1)

In "The Future of Reading," Johan Lehrer explains his love for books and his fear of their disappearance and our loss, as readers, of fully grasping the concept of whatever we are reading.  Having previously read "Rhetorical Situation" and "Intertextuality," I can see where both apply and come together.

Bitzer's rhetorical situation can be broken down into three main components: exigence, audience, and constraints.  Lehrer's exigence is that reading is going to become too easy as books move into the digital age.  His audience is more complex.  While this article is addressed to fellow WiredScience readers who obviously appreciate the same interests as Lehrer and probably struggle with their love of books and technology and whether those two should intertwine as well, I do believe this article can be addressed to a "universal audience," because it is simple enough that people who may not be as into reading or human sciences as Lehrer can follow the article; perhaps this is a subtle cry for help from Lehrer trying to persuade the "universal audience" to not let their "dorsal stream" become lazy.  And as I stated above, I believe an obvious constraint would be Lehrer's appreciation for both books and technology; he admits to using an e-reader although criticizing it.

When Lehrer addresses Stanislas Dehaene's neural anatomy of reading, he does this on two levels of intertextuality: levels one and three.  Level one is "drawing on a prior text as a source of meaning to be used at face value (Bazerman 86).  Lehrer explains Dehaene's two pathways of reading and then continues to use key words from that in order to further explain his case.  Level three of intertextuality is "explicitly using statements as background, support, and contrast" (Bazerman 87).  So Lehrer aslso uses this concept as support for his claims made throughout the entire articel; I also think this helps establish his ethos and logos.

I think Lehrer is being a bit dramatic in this article.  I don't think avid readers, such as he, are going to become lazy and not try to grasp the full concepts of reading if they don't want to.  But what I find interesting is when he asserts that features should be included within e-readers to "undo [the] ease" of reading, such as altering fonts, color schemes, etc.  If he is so sure that this would help the reader to pay closer attention to whatever he or she is reading then why didn't he do this within his own article?