Reading, New Media Technology and what they tell us about Social Cognition

The relationship of the New Digital Media to the human mind has become a fraught question. In this paper we examine some of the frequently made contentions about the possible ‘impact’ of media technologies on our reading abilities and our wider cognitive processes more generally. We look at a particular case study of how HTML reading has come to be treated with suspicion and cast some doubt on the conclusions that have been drawn from these studies. We cast this fear and loathing against a background understanding of the interaction of culture, technology and brain with special reference to Dehaene’s neuronal recycling hypothesis and Michael Anderson’s Massive Redeployment hypothesis. Finally we attempt to put these findings into the context of an emerging ecology of reading involving both paper and a variety of elec-