The morality of reading in a digitizing world

Everyone is surrounded by language, whether it comes from a voice, a printed page, a computer screen, or a host of other technologies and practices that all help create, store, disseminate, and present texts to people. Taken as a whole, this world of text, of language embedded in things, is a pervasive and profound part of human life. We use text to live, we live with text, and the quality of our lives, if not our very existence, depends on what texts exist, how they exist, and how everyone relates to them.; Text allows people to do things, but are those things worth doing? We might be changed by text, but are those changes for the better? Questions like these lead the debate away from empirical concerns for effectiveness or choice to moral concerns for why one kind of life is better than another, and thus for why one organization of the textual world is preferable to others.; While morality can focus on the value of a specific character trait or action, the fundamental moral question is the nature of freedom, meaning our ability to participate in the world in a conscious and effective way. Propaganda might create proper beliefs and good behaviour, but well-behaved slaves are still slaves, and they are little different from well-trained pets or well-oiled machines.; The importance of freedom connects back to the challenges and opportunities created by the textual world. But the textual world is connected to everything else: to government, to the economy, to social expectations, and to the technologies that are available and effective at any given time. The morality of reading is not simply about reading well, it is about understanding and evaluating the conditions in which reading well and reading at all are possible, and therefore about the conditions in which we are able to improve our lives and ourselves.