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Reading at a Million Crossroads: Massively Pluralized Practices and Conceptions of Reading
Douglas K. Hartman and Paul M. Morsink, Michigan State University
Manuscript prepared for inclusion in:
Spiro, R., DeSchrvyer, M., Schira-Hagerman, M., Morsink, P., & Thompson, P. (Editors).
Reading at a Crossroads? Disjunctures and Continuities in Current Conceptions and Practices.
Routledge Press.

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We have been asked to answer the question whether reading today is “at a crossroads.”
Our answer, in short, is yes—yes many, many times over. As we indicate in our title, and as we
illustrate in the following pages, our view is that recent years have seen a massive pluralization
of practices and conceptions of reading catalyzed by the rapid spread and deep penetration of
Internet-based Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), especially the Web.
Of course, these ICTs have not, by themselves, magically brought about new practices
and conceptions of reading. Practices and conceptions arise and then persist within a particular
socio-cultural-historical-material matrix (Gee, 2001; Gutierrez & Stone, 2000; Halliday, 1978;
Smagorinsky, 2001; Vygotsky, 1978). Consequently, when a new technology is introduced, its
impact is mediated by a long list of factors. Only gradually—and by dint of recursive processes
marked by selective adoption and use, gradual discovery and negotiation of the new technology’s
affordances and constraints, the emergence of new communities of practice, and some amount of
creative re-purposing by users—does the impact of a new technology eventually come into
focus.
Still, bearing in mind that new technologies never transform conceptions and practices in
a straightforwardly linear or predictable manner, there is no question that ICTs in recent years
have put reading tools of unprecedented power and versatility at the fingertips of millions and
now billions of “ordinary” readers (Internet World Stats, 2011). With these tools, readers with all
sorts of reading backgrounds and ability levels have discovered, in aggregate, millions of new
ways to locate, select, navigate, sequence, filter, internally search, translate, (re)format, decode,
summarize, excerpt, transmediate, remix, store, and share a rapidly expanding universe of old
and new types of texts, on screens big and small, for a growing variety of reading purposes,
public and private, formal and informal.

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Consequently, we do not believe it makes sense any longer—if it ever did—to speak of
reading as a unitary construct (see Duke, 2005) that could ever find “itself” all of a sudden at a
(singular) crossroads. Instead, and as a result of the massive pluralization of ways people read,
types of texts available to be read, and purposes for reading, we see a parallel massive
pluralization of crossroads. When we look around, we see a 21st century reading landscape
where (to continue with the metaphor of travel, roads, and crossroads) readers constantly find
themselves at crossroads, facing a bewildering—or exhilarating—array of choices about what to
read, how to read, what reading-assistive technologies to use, how to document or archive their
reading, with whom to share their reading (synchronously or asynchronously), and how to
(re)conceive the very idea of reading.
Of course, insofar as reading is construed as an activity whereby readers mentally,
socially, and materially construct meaning with texts (as opposed to simply receiving or
registering meaning in the manner of a supermarket bar-code scanner “reading” a bar code),
reading everywhere, at every time, has always been at many crossroads. That is to say, every
human act of reading (every act of making meaning with texts) has always involved some
amount of crossroads-like choice or decision (e.g., “Must I read these printed words out loud to
grasp their full meaning, or is it okay to read them silently inside my head?” “Does this word I
think I’m mispronouncing have a correct pronunciation, and how can I be sure?” “Should I
connect what I’m reading right now to other texts I’ve read before on the same topic?” “Can I
trust the sincerity and accuracy of the statements I’m reading?” “Does my understanding of the
sentences I just read need to agree with what other readers say these sentences mean?” and so
on). In this sense, reading everywhere, at all times, for all readers, has always happened at one or
more crossroads, and what is new or different today may simply be the frequency with which

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more readers than before consciously see themselves at a crossroads, aware of having to make a
choice or decision of some kind, or perhaps simply aware for the first time of the great variety of
different kinds of choices or decisions that readers are able to make, the number of different
paths and means of transportation they can take on their various meaning-making journeys.
Crossroads past
The idea that reading has always taken many plural forms and has always, in every era,
been perceived, experienced and navigated differently by different readers is given empirical
support by historians and sociologists of reading (e.g., Darnton, 1998; Griswold, McDonnell, &
Wright, 2005; Rose, 2001). Given our limited space, we provide just two brief illustrations.
Our first takes us to Great Britain in the late 1700s and early 1800s. This period in Britain
saw the emergence and rapid spread of a range of new genres and formats of texts (in particular,
an explosion of new forms of “functional literature”) that quickly became ubiquitous: train
schedules, trade catalogs, route maps, invoices, product advertising, and distance charts
(Vincent, 1989). Historians and sociologists have investigated how these new forms of text, and
their sudden importance in everyday life, created the necessity of a more highly literate public
and gave rise to new experiences of reading and new strategies for reading. For example,
Esbester (2009) documents the reading culture that grew up around the Bradshaw train
timetable--a timetable and travel planner that allowed readers to find the arrival and departure
times of trains from all stations in Great Britain. While useful--indeed, indispensable--to many,
“the Bradshaw” was also known for its “fiendish complexity” (156). It challenged millions to
read in new ways, to acquire new knowledge of novel text features and structures, to hone new
page-level reading strategies, to navigate across texts with new inter-textual reading skills, and to
develop new attitudes and dispositions toward reading. Readers of course coped with these

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challenges in different ways, with varying success. The big picture, though, was one of
significant change in the reading activities of millions of people.1
Our second brief illustration focuses on the emergence and rapid spread of an assistive
technology for reading: writing tables. Dating back to at least the early fifteenth century, writing
tables (or simply “tables,” for short) were pocket-sized notebooks containing blank, wax-coated
pages that could be written on and then wiped clean (Powers, 2011). Besides reducing their
owner’s consumption of expensive paper, tables contributed to what we are calling the
“pluralization of reading” on at least a couple of fronts. In the first place, they changed what
many readers did during reading. With an erasable notebook ready at hand, readers could quickly
record important information and exact quotations. This was a change in material practice, and it
also altered the quality of a reader’s mental engagement with what s/he was reading. For
example, less mental energy had to be devoted to committing new information to memory; more
mental energy could be devoted to the kind of mental processing involved in discerning
important ideas and concisely summarizing them.2
Later, when a tables user opened his notebook
and read his earlier notes and scribbles, a different kind of reading unfolded. Now the reader
engaged in a reconstructive activity, using his notes and maybe some exactly copied excerpts
from the original text to solidify his understanding, synthesize new and old information, or
maybe apply what he had read to a new context. No doubt, readers used writing tables in a great
1
We do not have the means to compare this period of pluralization with our own with any degree
of quantitative precision. Our broad claim is that the pluralization we are witnessing today far
outstrips anything seen before in terms of both speed and scale. We acknowledge, however, that
in some particular communities of urban readers, the early 19th century may have been
perceived very much as we perceive ours--as a period of “massive pluralization.”
2
See, for example, Britton’s (1980) study of readers’ varying levels of cognitive activity and
cognitive load during reading depending on whether they expect to be tested on their recall of
information immediately after reading or, on the other hand, after a delay. (The study’s results
suggested that readers expecting the delayed test engaged in additional cognitive processing
operations.) Or see studies designed to assess the benefits to memory and learning of note taking
during reading (e.g., Makany, Kemp, & Dror, 2008).

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variety of ways, many of which are lost to us forever. The basic point, though, is that a new
reading-related, comprehension-assistive tool had far-reaching impacts on how people conceived
of reading, the particular procedures and strategies they applied during reading, and so forth.
There are many other historical examples that suggest the same fundamental point:
reading activity has always taken many plural forms (see Blair, 2003; Eisenstein, 2005; Febvre &
Martin, 1976; Rose, 2001). In this regard, there is nothing exceptional about the present
historical moment. What is exceptional is simply that, today, the rapid pluralization is on a scale
that eclipses any seen before. With hundreds of millions of people around the globe now using
the Web daily (de Argaez, 2011), and a fast-growing array of digital tools to annotate,
summarize, transmediate, and more, we see a dramatic acceleration in the diversification of
choices, practices, and conceptions. What’s more, the phenomenon involves both a massive
pluralization across readers (i.e., increasing variability in how different people, or different
groups of people, read) and a massive pluralization within readers (i.e., increasing range within
individual readers’ repertoires of reading practices and conceptions, too). These changes
dramatically underscore the fact that the term reading is a moving target, forever shifting ground
in relation to changing tasks, purposes, text formats, reading-assistive tools, and other
dynamically interacting factors. As Leu (1997) presciently argued some years ago, reading is
“deictic” (p. 62); what it indicates here, today, is not the same as what it will indicate there (or
here), tomorrow.
We are aware that, to some readers, this talk of “massive pluralization” and of the
“deictic” nature of reading may seem hyperbolic. To put some flesh on the bones of our
argument, we therefore offer four composite vignettes of contemporary readers reading—readers
of different ages reading for a variety of purposes with a range of text types in different contexts.

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Four readers reading
(1) Sarah sits cross-legged with a touch-screen iPad in her lap, swiping through the pages
of a digitally enhanced picture ebook. The ebook is programmed to speak out loud the alphabetic
text on each page, but Sarah changes this default setting with a quick tap of her finger on the
loudspeaker icon at the top of the screen. With this change, tapping once on individual words
now allows Sarah to hear them pronounced one at a time; double-tapping lets her hear them
spelled out, letter by letter. Doing either of these things makes words and letters change color to
visually reinforce the correspondence between letters or words and their sounds. Additionally, if
she is so inclined, Sarah can tap a large microphone icon on the screen to record her own voice
as she decodes words and narrates the story herself. Then she can tap the sideways-triangle play
button to listen to her own recorded voice and the ebook’s pre-recorded voice one after the
other—to compare them and check her pronunciation, or simply to goof around and have fun.
Finally, on a subset of the ebook’s pages, Sarah quickly locates a video camera icon. By tapping
on these camera icons, she can play short video clips that provide additional information to
enhance her understanding and enjoyment of the story. For example, in a fanciful illustrated
story about the adventures of two migrating barn swallows, Sarah can watch a 30-second clip
showing how real swallows build their nests from mud and plant fibers. Sarah is four years old.
(2) Amado sits at a public library desktop computer doing online research for his group-
authored social studies paper on the fall of the Roman Empire--though you perhaps wouldn’t
guess it by looking over his shoulder. Right now he is playing a free download of a real-time
strategy game called “Nemesis of the Roman Empire.” There are “live,” constantly updating,
annotated maps for him to monitor showing the embattled northern border regions of the Roman
Empire, and in the game’s main window there are a myriad of decisions for him to make about

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where to send his remaining legions and how to keep them supplied. Periodically, Amado
toggles to a different window on his screen to read and reply to short text messages from his
classmates Greg and Sasha who are playing other games. Greg texts that he is enjoying the game
“Glory of the Roman Empire,” in which he plays the role of a Roman city planner. Sasha writes
that she has just finished exploring the free trial version of “Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome”
and is now re-reading the webpage where their teacher posted the assignment guidelines for their
research paper alongside two traditional, encyclopedia-style articles describing the main causes
of the fall of the Roman Empire. Now that they have read the two articles and played the games,
the next step in the assignment is for Amado, Greg, and Sasha to make two lists: a list of details
in the strategy games that seemed inaccurate or misleading in light of what they learned from the
scholarly articles, and a list of game features that deepened or enriched their understanding of the
articles. Amado and his classmates are seventeen years old.
(3) Elena sits on her couch with her paper copy of Time magazine. Her neighbor Gladis
recently came over with her new touchscreen tablet and showed Elena what a digitally enhanced
issue of Time looks like, with embedded video clips, links to additional content, and instant
access to word definitions, a text-to-voice feature, discussion boards, and more. On balance,
Elena prefers her print copy. Among other things, she likes the fact that, with her print copy, she
can tear out the ad pages and give them to her three-year-old son to draw on. She also likes the
fact that, with her print copy, her reading time isn’t interrupted by incoming emails, texts, tweets,
Skype calls, or any other form of electronic communication. At work, she sits at a computer
screen for upwards of six hours per day. Reading her print copy of Time feels like a welcome
break from that. Elena also believes that, when she reads print, she has more reading stamina and
sustained attention than she does at her computer, and she likes the way that feels; she will finish

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an entire article in her print copy of Time without once taking her eyes off the page. At the same
time, she concedes that, when an article really sparks her interest, she sometimes wishes she
could immediately click to another article on a related topic, as she would online. By the time
she is back at her computer at work the next day, she rarely has time to follow up. Elena is thirty-
five years old.
(4) Seth sits at his desk studying an online, annotated edition of the Christian New
Testament. In separate tabs of his web browser, he actually has four different annotated editions
open side by side, and he occasionally clicks back and forth to compare the wording of particular
sentences. As he reads and compares synoptically, Seth also adds annotations using a free web
tool called Diigo. Using Diigo, he types his observations, questions, and reflections, and digitally
attaches them on his screen to the particular sentence or word that triggered them. Every time he
adds a Diigo annotation, he can choose to make the note visible to all other Diigo users or to
limit its visibility. Seth belongs to a Bible study group, so he chooses the option that makes his
annotations visible to only his group-mates. As he continues reading, he sees a notification pop
up that another member of his group has just now posted a note on the very same page he is
currently reading. He scans the note—it’s a question about whether vineyards in the Book of
Matthew have a particular symbolic significance—and it piques his interest. He decides to do a
search for all the uses of the word vineyard in the Book of Matthew. Working from the search
results page, he spends a few minutes reading across all the verses containing the word vineyard.
As a next step, he searches all the public annotations of the Book of Matthew for items
containing both vineyard and symbol. He is pleasantly surprised to find that several other readers
have posted comments and reflections on the very question that now interests him. Triangulating
his group-mate’s question, a particularly resonant verse in the Book of Matthew, and two of the

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public annotations he has just read, Seth starts to type a new comment of his own. And this time
he opts to make his annotation “public to all” so anyone using Diigo can read it. Seth is seventy
years old.
Dimensions of change
The foregoing vignettes highlight practices and experiences of reading that vary along
several dimensions. They vary (among other things) with respect to (a) the types of texts
involved, in terms of genre and format, each with its own particular affordances and constraints
(e.g., Frow, 2005); (b) the types of cognitive processes that are activated and supported (or, on
the other hand, challenged or inhibited) in the reader’s mind, mostly below the threshold of
consciousness (e.g., LaBerge & Samuels, 1974); (c) the types of social and affective processes
that are engaged and supported (or challenged or inhibited) (e.g., Au, 1998); (d) the types of
learned skills and conscious strategies that are activated or perhaps required for successful
comprehension (e.g., Afflerbach & Cho, 2009); and (e) the types of material and logistical
resources that are involved or required (e.g., Darnton, 1990, 1998).
Furthermore, these dimensions are complexly interconnected, such that a change in one
dimension may have ripple effects in others, which may in turn cause further ripple effects.
Consider, for example, the addition to a text of a few simple within-text hyperlinks (providing
readers with new ways to navigate the text and also highlighting connections between ideas and
information beyond those directly stated, in words, in the text’s prose). The addition of these
hyperlinks may have multiple repercussions. Some readers (those new to hyperlinks, for
instance) may experience distraction and cognitive overload as they click on the links and criss-
cross the text along multiple non-linear paths, losing track of where they started and where they
were going. Other readers may quickly develop new strategies--or adapt old ones--to take

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advantage of the new text’s affordances. They may spend additional time clarifying their
purpose(s) for reading before they start reading, or they may become more disciplined about
taking notes while reading. Still other readers may find themselves experiencing more frustration
than before because their hardware and software configuration is such that the text freezes up
whenever they click on a hyperlink.
In vignettes such as those sketched above, we thus see a variety of aspects of reading that
are evolving—dynamically evolving—and that are likely to continue evolving for the
foreseeable future. In some cases, for some readers, the shifts are rapid and dramatic and across-
the-board; in other cases, reading activity may be changing in just one or two particular areas,
and at a modest rate.3
For all readers, though, a starter list of areas of possible change include the
following:
● how much time is allotted for reading;
● when and where reading happens;
● how much it costs to read something (in terms of money, time, effort, etc.);
● how much choice and freedom readers have regarding what to read and how to read it;
3
We have noticed that a discourse of requirement and necessity--of certain things being
“required” of readers or “necessary” for reading—is frequently used these days by those trying to
describe and theorize the complex ways in which new literacies are emerging and taking root.
For example, Leu, Zawilinski, Castek, Banerjee, Housand, Liu, et al. (2007) write about the
“skills required to read and comprehend information online” (our emphasis, p. 58) as well as the
new reading skills that “the Internet requires” (our emphasis, p. 56). We are uncomfortable with
the word “required” and its variants (though we ourselves are guilty of using it now and then)
because it seems to imply a deterministic view of the impact of technology on reading. When
one speaks of skills or strategies that are “required” for comprehension of a webpage, for
example, one loses sight of the point we have tried to make--that reading happens in many
different ways, that readers face choices, and that readers are continually at a crossroads.
Rhetorically, use of the word “required” also often goes hand in hand with formulations that give
agency to abstractions or to inanimate things--as when Leu et al. (2007) write about what “the
Internet requires.” This way of talking--and thinking--downplays the role and agency of
individuals and communities of readers and risks obscuring the reality of reading being deictic
and always happening “at a crossroads.”

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● the extent to which reading is interspersed or intertwined with writing activity;
● the extent to which reading is experienced and conceived as a kind of composing or
authoring activity, with every reader assembling a unique text-of-the-moment by virtue of
choosing a particular path across hyperlinked page and text elements;
● the extent to which reading activity is in principle recordable and retrievable, or is in fact
routinely recorded and later retrieved (e.g., through a web browser “history” log of
webpages visited, etc.);
● the extent to which a variety of reading supports are available and used (e.g., text-to-
voice tools, word pronunciation audio clips, within-text search tools, etc.);
● the extent to which reading is orchestrated and experienced as a social activity that
unfolds in the literal or virtual presence of others, with input from other readers, or under
their more indirect influence;
● the extent to which the reader has choices—and is aware of having choices—regarding
the material form or formatting of the primary text being read (e.g., font, page layout,
marginalia hidden or visible)—regardless of whether any of these options are in fact
exercised by the reader;
● the extent to which reading is experienced as being potentially or in fact a “broadcast”
activity (i.e., an activity that can be made visible and shared with an audience, whether
formally or informally, through screencast recordings, shared annotations and comments,
etc.);
● the extent to which a given text or a given reading “event” involves more than one
semiotic system;

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● the extent to which reading is anticipated and experienced as being potentially or in fact
multimodal and multisensory;
● the extent to which, and frequency with which, reading entails encountering unfamiliar or
entirely unprecedented genres and formats of text.
Overlapping waves of change
Looking out across today’s landscape of massively pluralized and still rapidly pluralizing
forms of reading, our view is that a new lens—maybe a new framework—may be needed to help
us understand and theorize what is happening.
The framework we currently find most helpful is one we derive from the work of Robert
Siegler (1998; 2007), specifically his “overlapping-waves” theory of strategic variability. Siegler
observed children’s problem-solving attempts in a number of different domains and noticed that
children were quite prolific in generating and then trying out new strategies. The amount of
strategic variability he observed far exceeded what a Piagetian model of child development and
learning theory would predict. Thus, when faced with a problem of some kind (e.g., adding two
numbers, deciding how to spell challenging words, calculating whether one quantity is larger or
smaller than another), children routinely generated and applied a number of different and
sometimes incompatible strategies, some of which were demonstrably more effective than others
(in a given context, for a given purpose). Further, children continued to apply multiple strategies,
including less effective ones, over a substantial period of time. Only gradually, over the course of
repeated trials, did the use of some strategies eventually decline, while the use of others
increased. More recent studies with adults have found the same patterns of strategic variability
for a variety of tasks in different domains (e.g., Dowker, Flood, Griffiths, Harriss, & Hook,
1996; LeFevre, Sadesky, & Bisanz, 1996).

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To explain these “overlapping waves” of declining and increasing use of particular
strategies, Siegler draws on key concepts from Darwinian evolutionary theory. Within this
framework, cognitive strategies are analogous to life forms coexisting for a time in an ecosystem.
In this analogy, the learner is the ecosystem; her strategies for adding two numbers (or
accomplishing any task) are akin to the genetic mutations embodied in rival life forms possessing
different survival-promoting characteristics. Depending on the learner’s circumstances
(especially the degree to which her social environment sanctions the use of particular strategies),
these rival life-forms may happily coexist over long periods of time, or more rapidly and
intensely compete with each other for preeminence until a subset of strategies prevails (at least
for the time being) or until a new, superior strategy is generated.4
Our view, extending Siegler’s framework to the domain of reading, is that the increasing
and decreasing prevalence of particular reading practices may similarly be understood through
the lens of evolutionary theory. Like other cognitive strategies, reading strategies may be said to
parallel genetic mutations in important ways. In an ecosystem, mutations yield bio-diversity.
Complex processes of natural selection then gradually winnow out winners and losers. In the
case of reading practices, multiple practices can and do co-exist and thrive together, side by side
in an ecosystem of many practices, many epistemic beliefs, many conceptions of literacy, and
many purposes for reading. Coexistence is often peaceful or even symbiotic; however, some
practices may also be in “competition” with others. In the latter situation, some practices will
4
An important finding in this regard is that learners who initially try a larger number of
strategies, or who use more different strategies on a single type of problem, tend to have superior
overall learning outcomes in the long run (Siegler, 1998). This may be because learners with
knowledge of a greater variety of strategies (good and bad) are better positioned to combine
promising strategy elements into new, superior approaches; it could also be because those who
initially try more strategies get more practice with evaluating and winnowing strategies, and that
greater efficiency and cognitive flexibility with regard to this winnowing process gives them a
comparative advantage over other learners who are more rigid in their attachment to particular
“proven” strategies.

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become more widely adopted and used, while others may die out. Which does not mean that the
“winning” practices are necessarily better than “losing” ones in any absolute sense. The reading
practices that prevail are simply better adapted for success in a particular environment, under
particular conditions, when used for particular historically situated purposes.
We submit that this overlapping-waves, evolutionary framework provides a basis for a
new perspective on such things as the fate today of deep, absorbed reading of literary texts (Carr,
2010) or the emergence of new forms of reading such as technology-assisted rapid scanning and
skimming strategies (which some may attack or dismiss as “shallow” and “not real reading”).
This perspective underscores the inevitability of diversity. It also encourages us, as reading
researchers, to consider at every turn the various factors and forces that will, in aggregate, and
over time, confer advantage on some reading practices and disadvantage on others.
With regard to diversity, Darwin would tell us that, in general, the more of it there is
within an ecosystem, the more productive the system as a whole becomes (e.g., where there is
more plant biodiversity, there is a higher overall yield of plant biomass [Tilman, Lehman, &
Thomson, 1997]). We predict, optimistically, that the same will be true with regard to reading.
More choices, more options, more kinds of texts, more ways to read, more ways to witness and
learn from the reading activities of others—all these things may over time yield a greater
“biomass” of meaning production and meaning exchange that benefits everyone. We tend to
agree with Clay Shirky’s broad point that “every past technology … that has increased the
number of producers and consumers of written material, from the alphabet and papyrus to the
telegraph and the paperback, has been good for humanity” (Juskalian, 2008). Extending this
point to reading yields the following: “every technology that has increased the number of

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different ways people can access and construct meaning from text is good for humanity.” And no
technology has catalyzed a more rapid increase in this regard than today’s Internet-based ICTs.5
Implications
What are some implications of the ideas we have sketched here—for schools, for reading
researchers, and for the general reading public? What are some possible repercussions of the
“massive pluralization” we have described in reading practices and conceptions of reading?
In terms of school-based instruction in reading comprehension, we see a huge challenge
for teachers. Reading instruction will need to be more explicitly tailored to genre, medium,
discipline, context, purpose, student, language, and more. In new digital reading environments,
with new types of texts, students will need new knowledge, new skills, new strategies, even new
dispositions to thrive. Already now, there is growing pressure on K-12 teachers to incorporate
more different kinds of literacy activities, adding new media literacies to traditional print
literacies (e.g., CCSS, 2010). In coming years we will likely see even more pressure on educators
(a) to use new methods and tools in order to accelerate and enhance their students’ “learning to
read” and (b) to explicitly target reading instruction for specific “high value” ways of “reading to
learn” (especially as the wider public gradually becomes better informed about different ways of
reading, available online tools to enhance reading, etc.).
In the preceding paragraph we specified “school-based” instruction because it seems
likely that, with the massive pluralization of reading practices we have described, K-12 students’
reading lives will be powerfully shaped by informal literacy and reading experiences outside
school as never before. To be sure, outside-school reading experiences have always played an
5
On a more sober note: we acknowledge the reality that, as Shirky put it, we are “powerless with
regard to the adoption curve” (Juskalian, 2008). As well, we recognize that the emergence of
new reading practices dependent on new technologies also instantly creates new lines of
exclusion and new dynamics of intellectual and socio-economic advantage and disadvantage.

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important role in children’s and adolescents’ lives (e.g., Kirkland & Hull, 2011). Now, however,
outside-school literacy experiences are arguably more varied, engaging, immersive, and social
than ever. Gee (2003) explores this terrain in his research on the reading practices that teens
develop in “affinity groups” around activities such as video gaming. Ito and colleagues (2010) do
the same.
For reading researchers we see the need for increasingly complex views of reading
capable of keeping track of dynamic interactions among multiple factors (Hartman, Morsink, &
Zheng, 2010). As our object of study—reading, in all its forms and manifestations—continues to
diversify, reading researchers may also face pressure to specialize and develop expertise about
particular sub-species of reading. As well, researchers in coming years will likely see a huge
increase in the amount of data that’s routinely gathered and, in principle, available for research
regarding the reading activities of millions of “users” of particular websites, particular e-reader
devices such as the Kindle, particular smart phone and tablet “apps,” and more. At the same
time, there will likely be mounting pressure to quicken the pace of research to meet the surging
demand from app developers, curriculum developers, and others related to the design and
delivery of effective educational materials, interfaces, and so on.
For the general reading public we see growing diversity in the reading “ecosystem,” more
and more niches of specialized reading activity, more communities of practice rapidly forming
(and maybe just as rapidly dissolving) around topics of interest, hobbies, news events, political
causes, or particular literacy tools. Of course, such “niches” and communities have always
existed. Now, however, anyone with a browser and an Internet connection has a vast array of
reading-related resources at their fingertips—search engines, social media sites, book club sites,
free online tools for creating and editing multimedia content, free instructional materials, vast

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libraries of free books, free discussion forums, and much more. As more and more members of
the general public become everyday users of specialized literacy tools, it seems increasingly
likely that this shift will sooner or later translate into changed expectations for school-based
education.
Finally, with K-16 students reading in more and more different ways, assessment of
reading will need to become more dynamic and flexible. Building on developments in “dynamic
assessment,” students’ comprehension may need to be evaluated using a range of text and task
types, with varying levels of assistance. For example, schools may be charged with assessing
how deeply a 10th
grade student understands an assigned novella read in school for the purpose
of writing a five-paragraph essay, but also how well the same 10th
grader is able to synthesize
information gleaned from five different websites that combine alphabetic prose with a variety of
multimedia elements. Thus, we will have a multifaceted picture of what readers can understand
and do as they steer through many crossroads in their reading life.
Looking ahead
Against the backdrop of the trends we have sketched and the perspective that reading has
always been at many crossroads, we conclude by asking: What new forms will reading take in
the next ten years? Will artificially intelligent reading coaches soon be ubiquitous, with
sophisticated voice-recognition capabilities far beyond those of the current Siri iPhone “personal
assistant” app? In the future, will such assistant or coaching apps always be standing by to
respond to our questions, provide relevant background knowledge, suggest related texts to read,
gently correct our oral reading miscues, provide specific reading strategy advice (“Remember to
ask questions while you read”), and encourage comprehension monitoring (“Does the
information about the debt crisis on this page agree with the information on the previous

19. 19
webpage you visited?”)? Will the texts we read become even more interactive, even easier to
customize, even easier to remix? Will reading events be so richly tagged and annotated in
multiple ways (with time and GPS data indicating where and when each reading event occurred,
with searchable social networking data allowing us to recapture the conversations that occurred
around a particular reading event, etc.) that readers will be able to search, retrieve, and revisit not
just the texts they read but their own past experiences of reading alone and with others--how it
felt, yesterday or last year, to read a particular text? When new technologies (such as eye-
tracking hardware and software) eventually come “standard” on every laptop and tablet, will we
see a further explosion in the amount and kinds of data gathered as a matter of course about even
the most routine reading events? Will our reading devices eventually collect not just eye-
movement data (data about where exactly our eyes fixate on a given page) but also data about
our facial expressions while reading, our heart rate (measured through our fingertips), and other
biometric data? Will our reading devices eventually come programmed with the ability to
respond intelligently to these inputs--reading our moods, for example, and factoring this mood
information into the timing of the coaching advice they provide to us (“If the information on this
page is making you upset, you might want to search for another page on this topic, to see if it
contains different information or the same information”)? Will Internet—and GPS—enabled
“smart” eyeglasses—eyeglasses capable of projecting text annotations and other data into the
wearer’s field of vision—soon allow us to access all these reading supports and resources (and
more) at the blink of an eye?
The possibility that even just a few of these questions will be answered in the affirmative
ups the ante for the view we have sketched in this chapter regarding a massive pluralization of
reading practices and conceptions of reading. In ten years we may need to find an even more

20. 20
dramatic word to replace the word massive … or a more encompassing word for what we now
call reading. With new reading devices, new genres of multimodal texts, increasingly intelligent
and responsive reading environments, new ways of recording and sharing reading “events”—our
prediction is that, in ten years, readers will find themselves at an even greater number and type of
crossroads than they do today. Our hope is that, even as the crossroads continue to multiply, we
will see a growing collective commitment to making sure that more readers than ever before
have the knowledge and resources to see these crossroads for what they are, to join with others in
discussing and understanding them, and to choose reading paths that are personally and
collectively rewarding.

21. 21
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