The book as we know it, the codex, gradually replaced the scroll between AD100 and AD400. There are a number of reasons it became the preferred medium: It was sturdier, it was probably cheaper and its numbered pages made it easier to use.
Imagine looking for a particular passage in Plato's Republic among a pile of scrolls. Now where is that passage where Plato condemns poets Research must have resembled looking for a needle in a haystack.
Though it seems inevitable to us now, the triumph of the codex was by no means a foregone conclusion. It was a rarity in classical pagan literature. It caught on in large part because it was popular among the Roman Empire's persecuted proletariat - Christians. And when Christianity became Rome's official religion, the codex became the standard protocol, as it were, of the written word.
But why the codex? It may be that the early Christians wished to distinguish themselves from the pagans by preferring it over the scroll. It may be that the codex was chea-per. But the likely reason was probably more profound:
'With its format - numbered pages and a contents list,' writes Peter Watson in his magnificent
Ideas: A History Of Thought And Invention, 'it was much harder to interpolate forgeries in a codex. In a young religion, when the accuracy and authoritativeness of the scriptures was a major concern, the advantages of the codex format would have been considerable.'
Would the written word possess the same authority if the codex were to disappear? Has our reading mind already changed with the Internet? Would our children - the so-called digital natives - lose intellectual skills that humanity has honed over thousands of years?
The research is tentative, but the evidence does suggest that there are reasons for us to be concerned.
Studies have shown that people 'don't so much read online as scan,' reported Rebecca J. Rosen in The Wilson Quarterly. One study found that only 16 per cent of people read an online text in the order in which it appeared. Most skipped around, scanning the text rapidly and taking in its argument in a jumbled sequence.
Former Nature Neuroscience editor-in-chief Sandra Aamodt wrote in The New York Times that 'people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 per cent' - and this does not include delays caused by checking e-mail or Facebook or whatever.
One study found that people switched to a new task online about once every three minutes - and took an average of 23 minutes to return to abandoned tasks. The supposition that digital natives are better multitaskers than their elders is simply not true.
A Stanford University experiment found that people who habitually multitasked were worse at focusing, remembering things and moving from one task to another than those who habitually completed one task at a time.
Professor Maryanne Wolf, the director of Tufts University's Centre for Reading and Language Research, explained why the Web may detract from the formation of 'good readers' among the young.
Humans, she wrote, 'were never born to read'. Unlike our capacity for vision and speech - 'both of which have genetic programs that unfold in fairly orderly fashion (in a) nurturant environment' - reading does not have 'one neat circuit (in the brain) just waiting to unfold'.
This means that a young reader has to fashion a 'reading circuit' when he or she learns to read. This 'tabula rasa circuit is shaped by the particular requirements of the wri-ting system'. People learning to read Chinese, for example, require more visual memory than those learning to read an alphabet-based language. A young reader's developing reading circuit is susceptible to whatever the medium - phonetic script or ideograms, printed book or online - emphasises.
Our minds learn to process within 300 milliseconds a complex of visual, aural and semantic signals to decode a word. Once this process becomes automatic, our reading circuit can then 'allocate an additional 100 to 200 milliseconds to an even more sophisticated set of comprehension processes that allow us to connect the decoded words to inference, analogical reasoning, critical analysis, contextual knowledge, and finally, the apex of reading - our own thoughts'.
What happens to the brain on the Web? The concern of cognitive neurologists like Prof Wolf is as follows: 'That the young brain will never have the time... to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding.' Instead, the young brain may be 'pulled by the (online) medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now perhaps videos in the new vooks (which incorporate videos in digi-tal texts)'.
Prof Wolf added: 'The child's
imagination... is no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information.' The short attention span of children may be one reason they find on-screen reading so engaging. But that may also be one reason 'digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the... reflective nature of the expert reading brain' - as we have known it for 2,000 years or more.
Perhaps, if e-readers catch on, digital reading may resemble more print reading, though it is not as easy to flip through an e-book as it is a paperback. Also, one might recall that 2,500 years ago, Socrates thought that writing itself would damage memory and logic. The world survived the transition from orality to literacy - and there is no reason to believe it will not survive the less radical transition from print to digital.
Still, it is worth pausing to ask if we are not losing something immeasurably precious by allowing our children to immerse themselves too early and too indiscriminately in the digital world. Educators and parents need to ponder how we can preserve the best of the old reading brain in the new digital bottle.
