Digital dystopianism as affirmation: Notes on the perpetual loose ends of scholarly reading

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss debates related to the nature of scholarly practices such as reading in the digital age, and how these are underpinned by a range of utopian and dystopian visions of the future of the university. Rather than summarily dismissing these visions as positing ‘unattainable elsewheres’ or as paradoxical forms of nostalgic alarmism that deny the reality of the present, I instead take seriously some of the values that both sides of the debate seek to preserve. In line with certain strands of contemporary utopian scholarship, utopianism here does not relate to a static future state, but rather a form of thinking that is fruitful in helping us make sense of what we value as scholarly practices in the university. Here, however, I focus on the idea of dystopianism as a mode of thought which performs a similar affirmative function. In the case of digital dystopianism in particular, I argue that what is affirmed is a sense of scholarly reading as positing perpetual loose ends, something that is nevertheless still possible in the digital age provided we subscribe to a more pluralistic understanding of what it means to read.

Introduction

In this paper, I discuss the debates related to the nature of scholarly reading in the context of digitization in the university, and how these are underpinned by utopian/dystopian discourses around what it means to study in the digital age. On one hand, there is a great sense of faith in the digital as a potential solution to challenges related to university participation. Conversely, there are also several reservations against digitization - in particular, the concern that it disincentivises scholarly reading as we conventionally understand it. In simple terms, the former points to a particular utopian vision of digitization in the university - for instance, in enabling more democratic modes of study in the future. The latter, however, is more decidedly dystopic, and as demonstrated in this paper, is not only future-oriented but is simultaneously steeped within a deep nostalgia for the pre-digital past.

These debates showcase the wider interdependence of the concepts of utopia and dystopia – as the science fiction writer Le Guin (2017: 86) puts it, both utopia and dystopia are “always in process of becoming the other”. What Le Guin is pointing to here is the idea of utopia not as a relatively stable future state that we aim to realise over time, but instead as a mode of thinking that is always in process, and that necessitates an “acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift” (Le Guin, 2017: 87). Thinking of utopia in this sense posits it not as a ‘blueprint’ but as what Cooper (2014: 3) describes as a “form of attunement, a way of engaging with spaces, objects, and practices that is oriented to the hope, desire, and belief in the possibility of other, better worlds.” This conception conceives of the temporality of utopia as something which is always situated between the latency of the present and the tendencies of both past- and future-oriented thinking, as can be seen in conversations around technology in the university today.

Whilst Cooper’s invitation to ‘hope’ here seems to suggest a positive sense of utopianism, I argue that this form of attunement is also true of dystopic thinking. Indeed, it is in both orientations that we seek to not only critique aspects of the present but that we also identify what is worth preserving or affirming therein. In utilizing this approach as a method of inquiry, this paper thereby considers new ways of thinking about the influence of digitization in education, concluding from both utopian and dystopian visions a common value around what ought to be preserved in the university – namely, the necessary inefficiency of scholarly practices such as reading.

Before turning to this, let us first familiarise ourselves with the concerns around scholarly reading in the digital age.

Digital dystopia

The debates concerning digitization in the context of education are long-standing, although perhaps heightened somewhat in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the increased prevalence of GenAI tools in contemporary educational study practices. A common focus of these debates relates to the role digitization plays in ‘troubling’ the very concept of the university itself. In one camp, there is (and always has been) much worthy celebration of the promises of digitization, from students, educators and institutions alike, not only as a useful addition to study but as also paving the way for more democratic forms of education (in the future). On the other hand, there are those who are reasonably concerned with the danger digitization poses for the integrity of what we deem to be important scholarly practices. In this section, I will present aspects of both sides of the debate in terms of how I understand them to be positing particular utopian and dystopian visions of the university, acknowledging that these are perhaps somewhat caricatured (for the sake of provocation) and are by no means exhaustive.

In terms of the utopian visions of the digital, we can consider the various ways that it has been touted as a potential solution to many of the challenges facing universities today. For instance, digitization is seen as key to efforts in increasing the density of activity in the university, particularly in the context of fragmented, unused space across campuses in part due to the expansion of hybrid ways of working (e.g. Haubrich and Hafermalz, 2022; Nickolopolou, 2022). Digital tools promise to enhance academic practices in various ways, including, for instance, through the knowledge-extending possibilities of GenAI (e.g. Naeem, 2024; Nguyen et al., 2023) understood as “awe-inspiring tools [that] extend [our] repertoire of action” (Cope et al., 2021: 1230). The value of such tools might be seen not merely as instruments that make scholarly reading and writing more efficient, however, but in tackling the inequities that stem from a mismatch between student and university habitus, since they enable students to emulate academic practices that are otherwise contrary to their apparently inappropriate forms of cultural capital. In a way, then, such tools are also useful for specific emancipatory purposes that are not incongruous with many uncontroversial aims of social justice in education.

Although mainly conceived of as an addition to learning in the former sense, the idea that technologies work towards wider democratising aims is not solely a post-pandemic phenomenon, when their role in the university had become especially prominent. It was also one of the early promises of MOOCs. Indeed, MOOCs were in part premised on offering new forms of connectivity and peer-to-peer exchange that, by virtue of economies of scale, could (theoretically) allow for an increase in the level of university participation alongside a reduction in costs, therefore increasing the potential for education to reach larger and more diverse groups of students (e.g. Citton, 2017). And whilst there are many criticisms of the failures of MOOCs to achieve this purpose wholeheartedly, we can nevertheless begin to see a particular utopianism at play in reference to the digital future of the university, beyond the idea that technology serves as a tool for aiding existing learning processes, but as central to education’s inherent democratic purpose.

But of course, the utopian promises of MOOCs as well as digital tools such as GenAI are also accompanied by concerns that point to a very different future reality of university life. Resistance to technological change has had a long history, even though it can feel like we are in the midst of a radical turning point within university education specifically. For one, the proliferation of digital tools has been accompanied by various practical anxieties related to their perceived potential to replace or reduce the importance of teachers. The forms of pedagogy they seem to encourage are intimately connected to the ‘learnification’ that Biesta (2015, 2019) warns us about, where “learning is an educational logic predicated on measuring outputs and accessing success and failure… [lending] its support to economic imperatives” (Lewis and Hyland, 2022: 3). In this view, the digital not only impoverishes the role of the teacher as paramount to the educational process but also the necessary co-presence of teachers, students and learning materials in the classroom. Moreover, there are reasonable concerns that the existence of digital tools actively de-motivates desirable scholarly behaviours – including, of course, the practices of scholarly reading. ¹

Thus, it is undoubtedly the case that today, the utopianism of the emancipatory possibilities of digitization exists concurrently with a dystopic vision of digital futures. Interestingly, many of these dystopic visions are underpinned by both a vision of a possible future as well as an orientation towards the past – namely, towards an ideal state that once existed and is now lost. For Agamben (2020), the turn to online education during the pandemic was concerning not only in terms of the disappearance of physical co-presence but also the “cancellation from life of any experience of the senses as well as the loss of gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen”. In response to the threat to this important social dimension of studenthood, Agamben put forth an impassioned plea for a refusal of online instruction, and by doing so to “constitute a new university” that rebirths culture so that “the world of the past might remain alive” in the face of this “dictatorship of telematics” and its “technological barbarism”. His grievance here likely relates to the increasing instances of “states of exceptions” that have come to circumscribe modern politics, the crisis management of the COVID-19 pandemic being one such instance, and yet his views also reflect many wider sentiments concerning the increased digitization of education in common discourse.

In a similar vein, Birkerts (2013: 25) laments the “intangible transformation” that technology has had on the younger generation. He speaks of his bemusement when confronted with the pervasiveness of technological devices amongst university students in the classroom, and the influence this has on the pacing of the lesson, given the extraordinary speed by which they can answer searchable questions “before [he has] even finished [his] sentence”. Like many, Birkerts (2013: 27) is concerned in particular with the information-bombardment that we seem to experience every day because of this new environment, which he describes as follows:

If anything “important” happens anywhere, we will be informed. The effect of this is to pull the world in close. Nothing penetrates, or punctures. The real, which used to be defined by sensory immediacy, is redefined.

Alongside an uneasiness about the future of the university, there is also a deep disquiet here with what is happening in the immediate present. Indeed, although Birkerts (2013: 28-29) initially sees his worries “[from] the vantage point of hindsight, [which]… looks quaint”, his reflections reveal themselves to be “no exercise in futurism… [since] library users already have a sepia colouration.” These anxieties are also reflected in the idea that digitization has affected students’ capacity for sustained attention – the belief that young people are no longer capable of sitting still in contemplation because of a proliferation of digital tools that rely on constant stimulation and hyperactivity (e.g. Birkerts, 2006; Carr, 2011; Citton, 2017; Hayles, 2007). In this sense, the university and the scholarly practices it relies on are already and irrevocably compromised in the digital age.

Such arguments relate, therefore, not only to what students read, but how, a fear that has also manifested in the growing panic related to GenAI use (Butson and Spronken-Smith, 2023; Crompton and Burke, 2023) and, more broadly, the so-called “grand mediological displacement” that affect reading practices specifically (e.g. Birkerts, 2006; Brady, 2025; Carr, 2011). Whilst the use of technology makes it possible, on the one hand, to mitigate the habitus mismatch between students and scholarly expectations in the university, it has also aggravated a different kind of mismatch between students and their teachers - those who prefer rapid stimulation through digital platforms, and those who cherish traditional teaching and learning practices underpinned by the value of slowness. This sense of slowness is now forced to compete with the speed of modern technology, leading many to think of technology as a “weapon of mass distraction” (Citton, 2017: 33) - a form of sorcery, even, that not only disincentivises but actively impedes the sustained attention that the practices of scholarly reading rely on.

For Birkerts (2013), the model of the mind as a neural network has been extended through the digitization of every sphere of human life, and yet, this model is insufficient in illustrating how the mind actually works. It does not account for the particular uniqueness of human meaning-making practices, which rely not on algorithmic but imaginative forms of thinking. In fact, the digital poses for Birkerts a direct threat to the imagination in this sense, insofar as it promotes ‘analytic’ rather than ‘contemplative’ modes of thought. Where analytic forms of thought are “transitive” and goal-oriented, one may sensibly use digital tools such as artificial “thought machines” to gather, sort and isolate factual information for a specific purpose. The contemplative mind, on the other hand, is “intransitive”, positing reflection as an end-in-itself, a “means of testing and refining [our] relation to the world”.

The anxieties around digital tools, it seems, are in the extent to which these may encroach on imaginative forms of thinking, insofar as they are not just tools but have become the means by which we think. Such an idea is certainly not new. In 1954, Heidegger (1977) famously wrote in A Question Concerning Technology that technology is not merely an instrument that serves to meet pre-specified ends, but that it also demarcates a particular way of thinking about and engaging with the world. The risk, for both Heidegger and Birkerts, it seems, is that technological modes of thought reduce the world to its instrumental function, encouraging ‘calculative’ thinking that involves manipulating what we encounter to our own particular ends. ² Rather than seeing the open-ended potentiality available in the material riches surrounding us, we thereby become myopic in what the world has to offer (us). An analogy here could be how modern manufacturing manipulates materials (such as plastic) to make pre-designed objects into something effective, manageable and useful for our purposes, as opposed to original craftsmanship that involved working with rather than against the grain of wood. In short, artificial tools allow us to master the world for our own purposes, and in doing so, ‘enframes’ our orientation such that we become unable to behold what the world has to offer beyond our own needs and interests.

For Heidegger, technological tools like the typewriter make “everyone look the same” since it functions as an apparatus that mediates and thus interferes with a more direct expression of our thoughts and ideas. We could make a similar claim about GenAI and the extent to which it produces standardised interpretations of texts at the expense of slower, more strenuous and embodied forms of reading. In light of this, we might take the provocative question that Vlieghe (2014) raises – namely, that if education is the means by which we become the sorts of beings that we are, then to what extent might the use of educational technologies result in very different forms of human subjectivity?

Importantly, for both Heidegger and Birkerts, our relationship with the world need not be this way – indeed, we can encounter the world without this manipulative motive in mind, but with an openness that characterises ‘poetic’ modes of thinking. This is described by Bonnett (1994: 1938) as follows:

The value of poetic thinking lies not in specific tangible results or conclusions that follow logically from it, but rather from a place of attunement, place, and fittingness that it engenders.

For Birkerts (2013: 34), the arts (and the novel in particular) is a space in which intransitive, poetic thought is possible, thereby serving as a “vital antidote” to the technologization of the world where contemplation is “rapidly eroding”. As I discuss below, the nature of scholarly reading is, in one sense, commensurate with Birkerts’ descriptions here, even though his focus is mainly on reading in a more everyday sense. Moreover, it could be argued that the classroom itself, premised on the co-presence of the teacher, student and the ‘things’ of education, too, provides such an opportunity (e.g. Masschelein and Simons, 2013; Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019). Contemplative thought requires a different attitude towards the world and to study practices such as reading – not as information to be efficiently digested, regurgitated and algorithmically ‘predicted’ (as is encouraged through the use of digital tools), not relying on a “switching [of] focus rapidly among different tasks” as Hayes (2007: 7) describes as being an intimate aspect of navigating information online. Rather, it is sustained by an “inward plunge” into the world of the text, which must “survive interruption and deflection” as well as the ‘fractured’ forms of attention encouraged by digital technologies (Birkerts, 2013: 34).

As I have discussed elsewhere (Brady, 2025), however, these hard and fast binaries here between hyper- and sustained-attention, and indeed, reading in the sense of our engagement with physical rather than digital interfaces, are misguided. Rather, scholarly practices such as reading are best understood ecologically “as that which has always involved (a) dynamic forms of attention, including what we might call “hyper” as well as “sustained” and (b) a deep and inescapable entanglement with the socio-material world”. The latter in particular points to what Vlieghe (2014: 528) describes as a “technocentric” rather than “anthropocentric” view of technology as more than simply tools that aid or impede educational practices but as evoking a fundamental shift in how we think and in who we are. Admittedly, it is perhaps more so this latter view that I entertain in this paper, though I also point to the close relationship between both. But most importantly, my interest here is not in determining whether these utopian or dystopian visions are ‘correct’ or ‘exaggerated’, as needlessly or insufficiently concerned with the influx of the digital on university life. Instead, what role might these two imaginaries play here in terms of helping us make sense of what we value in scholarly practices? Before considering this, let us look more closely at the general function of utopian and dystopian thinking for such an endeavour.

Utopia and dystopia as modes of thinking

Thus, when considering the prominence of digitization in education, amid utopian visions around its wider democratic potentials, there are many distinctly dystopian ones – its present impoverishment of contemplative modes of thought encouraged by and necessary for scholarly practices such as reading, its future threats to the co-presence of teachers and students in the classroom. Such arguments are inflected with various temporal dimensions at once – in terms of what a university ought to be based on selective preferences for what a university was in the past, which in turn is tied to a future projection of what it could become, or indeed, what it has already become and is likely to continue to become even further. In the arguments considered thus far, digital dystopianism is imbued with a sense of nostalgia that also points to the latent potentiality of things to be otherwise and is both backward- and forward-looking in that respect. Criticisms of digital dystopianism tend to focus on their reluctance to accept the inevitability of the current state of things in the present: GenAI is here to stay, and there is no point in trying to convince ourselves otherwise – we must learn to adapt. But more than that, to what extent do such forms of denial fail to properly consider how the digital might be positive rather than destructive in attaining worthy educational aims?

There is, of course, a third possibility, which, as above, I entertain elsewhere (Brady, 2025) – namely, the idea that we have never been fully disentangled from technology, and that we are in fact not really experiencing anything radically ‘new’ here, despite the arguments posed by those who celebrate or fear the arrival of digital tools such as GenAI. Rather, technology in education is simply more visible and more ubiquitous now because, although it has always persisted in the backdrop to study, it has become increasingly highlighted in our collective attention in more recent years – ironically, perhaps, due to the very digital platforms many of us use. I will leave this third possibility aside to think about the two extremes in these positions, however – namely, the utopianism and dystopianism of digital futures not as ‘true’ or ‘false’ reflections on the reality of the situation, but rather as particular modes of thought that allow us to make sense of what we deem to be important in education.

Typically, utopianism is connected to ideals that never arrive, as “hopeless whimsy and daydreaming” that posits an “unattainable elsewhere” (Le Guin, 2017: 85), or indeed as “the foundations of dangerous totalitarianism” (Firth, 2019: 332). In this sense, utopias seem to concern a future-oriented state that not only denies or dismisses the present but calls for authoritarian control to ensure their eventual realisation. Certainly, there are examples of utopianism that posit a continually deferred state of being, much as any other form of idealism might. This is a criticism aimed at perhaps less controversial educational causes, such as critical pedagogy. The authors of the Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy, for instance, take issue with the critical pedagogue’s singular vision of an ‘emancipation’ that never arrives, since this leads to not only a reinstatement of a regime of inequality (between those who are the ‘enlightened’ and those who are not) but also a denial of what is already worth caring for or affirming in our current practices. The argument, in turn, is that this results in the perpetual postponement of action rather than attending to things in the here and now (Hodgson et al., 2017).

In the sense that the emancipatory aims of critical pedagogy are dismissed as pure utopianism, a similar criticism might be levied at the democratising aims of technology. And yet, in the course of positing such aims, utopianism can be thought of not merely as a future state to be realised, but as useful in forcing us to (re)consider aspects of the present. In an effort to avoid the totalising ‘blueprint’ tendencies of conventional understandings of utopia, those working in the field of critical utopianism present it as a mode of thinking that is dynamic rather than fixed, and that enables us to imagine – and to (concretely) prefigure - what it might be like to inhabit an alternative future. This alternative future does not break with the social and historical circumstances of our present moment – indeed, it arises primarily in response to these. Thus, whilst it is forward-looking in one respect, it is also concerned with what can be materialised directly in the present. As Levitas (2017: 7) discusses:

There is a sense, then, in which all utopian speculation is about the present rather than the future. It addresses those issues that are of concern in the present, by projecting a different future in which they are resolved…. [enabling] a kind of double vision in which we can look not only from present to future, but from (potential) future to the present.

For Levitas, this process entails seeing utopianism as a method – an act of speculative, experimental thinking that involves forging hypotheses, whether or not these are realistic or attainable in actuality. Levitas argues that it is particularly crucial for such visions to be negotiated collectively, and that above all, they remain fragmentary rather than totalising, reflecting an awareness of the issues that we (collectively) wish to address in the present moment in light of how we imagine these to transpire in the future. In this sense, exercises in utopian thought contain within it a “transformative impulse that has the potential to raise consciousness” (Firth, 2019: 333), and by imagining a different future society our attention is drawn to “the need for change, [offering] a direction towards that change and a stimulus to action in the present” (Levitas, 2017: 6).

Despite the criticisms of MOOCs and other forms of digitization in the future ³ , we might also consider these as utopian examples that serve as a means by which we articulate our imperfect desires. In doing so, we are encouraged to test out concrete action in the present whilst being mindful of the extent to which they might fail. Indeed, for Le Guin (2017), such visions should never be seen as a permanent solution – they are and must always be, in Levitas’ terms, provisional. They rely on improvisation (Bell, 2017), understood here in the etymological sense as the ‘unforeseen’, or rather, as existing within the process of ‘foreseeing’ that which remains elusive and yet imaginable in the present.

As a method or an orientation, utopianism in this sense encapsulates an alternative rendering of temporality distinct from the establishment of a pre-determined endpoint we progress towards and eventually hope to attain. Instead, this form of utopian temporality is concerned not with a static vision of the future but with “mobilising hope or desire” here and now (Firth and Robsinson, 2014: 381), in a way that is not dislocated from the present but which, in fact, “alters the relationship between past, present and future.” As a way of thinking, it is thus propulsive and immanent, “‘grounded in materiality rather than vapidly floating free as a vague disposition” (Bell, 2017: 11). Whereas eternal utopia negates temporality, what is envisioned here is an “ever-born movement toward something indeterminate” (Abensour, 2008: 407), a perpetual ‘not-yet’ that marks a beginning and that sets in motion a drive or a need for something else, a threshold in which utopian intention and its realization persists (Bloch et al., 2000). ⁴

But what about dystopianism as a mode of thinking? Through the debates discussed so far, one can perhaps begin to see how utopian visions understood as ‘unattainable elsewheres’ can turn into dystopic ones, especially considering the element of control necessary to realise these visions in practice. A utopian vision of the future of the university emancipated from the digital might, for Agamben (2020), involve an act of determined self-control in order to refuse online instruction, even at the risk of endangering our own employment and safety, perhaps. Recent policies from my own university now demand that we make the majority of our assessments ‘AI resilient’, ensuring our students are adequately prepared for their digital futures whilst simultaneously speaking to anxieties around the continued relevance of university study. ⁵ How is it that both utopian and dystopian visions are used to describe the same phenomena? And what is the significance of these conflicting dimensions of the university, where both utopia and dystopia appear to exist in tandem?

For Le Guin (2017: 87), utopia cannot exist without dystopia – they are, indeed, two sides of the same coin, in “complete interdependence and continual intermutability… each half [containing] the seed of transformation [into the other]”. Comparing this with the Chinese symbol of yin-yang – yang being the “bright, dry, hard, active, penetrating, control”, and yin being the “dark, wet, easy, receptive, containing, acceptance” – neither utopia nor dystopia is static (Le Guin, 2017). This again supports the idea of utopianism as a process, which, as mentioned in the introduction but worth reiterating here, requires an “acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift” (Le Guin, 2017: 87).

In that sense, might we think of dystopianism in the context of digitization in the university as also containing within it a sense of utopianism? Indeed, Agamben’s entreaty to refuse online instruction is underpinned not merely by a nostalgia for the pre-digital university but also a hope in its digitally-emancipated future, the realisation of which rests on explicit and disruptive actions in the present. Birkerts’ call to protect literary art as an antidote to the pervasive digitization of modern life is not merely a form of melancholic wistfulness for the ‘old days’ but also a radical vision for the future, actionable in the present, that seeks to prevent the calculative tendencies in our thinking from being exacerbated even further. For Levitas, although dystopianism shares features of utopianism, insofar as it too posits a vision of an alternative society, their warnings constitute a projection of anxieties dislocated from the present rather than a vision of (and the means to move towards) a desired future. Moreover, dystopianism seems “more likely to rouse fear… rather than hope or desire” (Firth, 2019: 337). And yet, just as utopias are useful as modes of thinking that posit a ‘hope’ for the future to come, might the ‘fear’ of such a future be similarly instrumental? For both utopianism and dystopianism contain within them not only a critique of the present. They are also underpinned by a particular set of values about what is important, what is worth concerning ourselves over, and ultimately, what is worth preserving or caring for both now and for the future.

Whilst we can (and should) certainly call into question the content of these visions – whether they deny reality, whether they are misguided or elitist, whether they really do endanger our long-held beliefs about what a university education should look like – what happens when we think of them as modes of thought that have a specific and unique affirmative function? It may be easier to immediately dismiss Agamben’s or Birkerts’ critique as underpinned by a naïve hope for pre-digital futures, or indeed, to point to the taken-for-granted problems of GenAI and MOOCs as overly trusting of the benefits of digitization. And yet, it might also be worth orienting our discussion towards articulating what we feel is precisely “lost” or “gained” in the processes of digitization, and what this says about what we believe is worth protecting in education more broadly. To make this ‘exercise in thought’ more specific, I will examine the case of scholarly reading in the digital age.

The perpetual loose ends of scholarly reading

So far, the debates on digitization as it pertains to the university certainly lend themselves to the critical impulse, and with that, perhaps, an insurmountable divide in terms of what there is (left) to value in our educational institutions. As Felski (2015: 15) remarks, academics are adept at all things critical - ‘documenting insufficiencies of meanings, values, and norms’. And yet, by focusing purely on their unlikelihood or impossibility, or indeed, the aspects that they fail to account for in their visions, we are likely to result in a self-perpetuating critique that overlooks their affirmative impulses.

The focus in this section will be on ‘pre-digital utopianism’ (which simultaneously might be understood as ‘digital dystopianism’) and their provocative claims or critiques that concurrently make visible a set of values that we may wish to protect. What might one be concerned about in terms of this incursion of the digital, exactly? What is in danger of being lost, and what is it then that we wish to preserve? In thinking carefully about the stakes in these arguments, what unfurls is a value hitherto not considered – namely, the idea of reading as wandering, and with that, a rendering of the temporality of reading as a disentanglement of means from ends. What is affirmed in the dystopic depictions of reading in the digital age is not simply the threats to sustained attention in and of itself, but rather, the possibility of scholarly reading as necessarily inefficient.

Before continuing, it might be worth pausing for a moment to reflect on what I mean by “scholarly reading”, since I accept that, in the discussion thus far, there has been some slippage between this and reading in the more everyday sense. On one level, scholarly reading is distinct to the extent that it is accompanied by specific gestures that are not necessarily associated with reading in an everyday sense – for instance, the gestures of individually writing notes in the margin, underlying key quotes or arguments to aid in understanding, as well as a plethora of collective and public activities that demarcate it within the boundaries of specific institutional contexts. ⁶ Unlike everyday reading, scholarly reading is almost always circumscribed by a critical orientation towards the text (e.g. Brady, 2024a, 2024b) ⁷ , in part because reading for scholarship tends to be ends-oriented as opposed to the more autotelic practices of reading purely for pleasure. Perhaps as a consequence, then, scholarly reading seems to be more affected by a variety of distracting tendencies (e.g. repeated pauses for note-taking or for checking the meaning of specific terms). It is therefore slower, the ends being repeatedly frustrated by our need to dwell and reflect. Undoubtedly, the pressures of articulating one’s understanding and penetration into the meaning of a text mean that scholarly reading is also more likely to be bypassed through the use of digital tools. And whilst aspects of reading for pleasure can also involve similar demands as well as moments of interruption, the freedom from such direct external pressures (e.g. to perform ‘well’ in the classroom discussion or an assessment) primes us towards the text is distinct ways, which in turn alters our experiences as readers. ⁸

For this reason, the argument for necessary inefficiency is perhaps not as controversial in the context of autotelic, everyday reading practices. But it certainly seems less congruous in relation to the purposes of scholarly reading. ⁹ And yet, whilst there are important distinctions between the two, the dualism is also less rigid than we might initially think. If we consider the existential and perceptual enrichment that comes from having been affected by a text – is this confined to everyday reading alone (e.g. Brady, 2024a)? When Birkerts (2013: 14), for instance, captures the “aesthetic bliss” associated with full immersion into a text, which he describes as not simply a “swooning over pretty words and phrases” but a “delight that comes when the materials… are working at their highest pitch” - are these not also communicable with certain facets of scholarly reading? Indeed, as Felski (2008: 33) reminds us, “theoretical reflection is powered by, and indebted to, many of the same motives and structures that shape everyday thinking”. In accounting for the experience of scholarly reading, then, there are certainly elements that are not so dissimilar to reading in the everyday sense – including, as I argue here, the experience of being confronted with its perpetual loose ends.

As I have discussed elsewhere (Brady, 2024b, 2025), from the perspective of dystopic visions thus far outlined, one danger of the digital relates to its effects on our capacities to engage in the contemplative forms of study. These are seen to be essential for practices such as scholarly reading, insofar as within it we must avoid the distractions facilitated by digital technology. In his early essay on the Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre (2011) distinguishes between what he refers to as an original pre-reflective immersion in the world (where the separation between myself and my object of interest is suspended) and a reflected state (which is characterised by a hyper-attentiveness that disables me from such immersion) ¹⁰ . When I am enthralled in reading a book in the library, Sartre might say that I am fully at one with the activity and indeed the ‘thing’ that I am engaged in. There is, in this sense, no separation between me and my act of reading. If I am distracted by something, however – my awareness that another person is watching me, or the arrival of an email in my inbox – this pre-reflective immersive state is disrupted. For Sartre, it is at this moment that I ‘arrive’ at the scene. Suddenly, I am reflecting on the email I have just read, and even when I try to return to the book, I become hypervigilant of the lines and dots on the page, and I am no longer able to continue reading. In remaining on the ‘reflected’ plane of being, I am instead more aware of myself and the absurd situation I find myself in, rather than fully attending to the materiality in front of me, which, for Sartre, is a more fundamental form of consciousness.

It seems that it is this pre-reflective state that Birkerts also wishes to preserve, even though he doesn’t explicitly refer to Sartre - namely, this fact of concerted attention that “tunes up [and] accentuates… my own inner life”. Oftentimes, this is not obvious in the course of reading itself – indeed, if we were to be vigilant of these transformations as they are taking place, then they would likely fail to find any footing. Instead, these transformations might be thought of as residual and parenthetical. They are not solely inward, however, but also relate to our wider engagement with the world. When Foucault (1991: 27) similarly discusses the difference between an ‘experience book’ and an ‘information book’ (the former of which “transforms [you], changes what [you] think” – often in implicit and immeasurable ways) he is, in fact, discussing his own, even though many of these seem to be purely esoteric historical analyses that are not immediately engaging or affective - and certainly not likely to result in aesthetic bliss! And yet, by attending to the discourses he draws our attention to, such experience books very subtly and shrewdly begin to fabricate our ways of seeing ourselves and the world anew (Rayner, 2003). They arouse our attention towards the world, thereby bringing aspects of it to light in surprising and unfamiliar ways, albeit not always in a way that is easy to definitively pinpoint and measure.

If we consider technology to be a “weapon of mass distraction” (Citton, 2017: 33), then in what sense might it render us incapable of reading as a slow process that involves this deep sense of immersion with a text, whereby these forms of perceptual and existential enrichments are made available (Brady, 2024a)? Although writing prior to the burgeoning use of GenAI tools amongst university students, the defence of contemplative forms of reading here speaks directly to the concerns around how technology has not only radically altered the ways we read, but has in fact disincentivised or disabled us from really reading in the first place. Indeed, what is being described here is distinct from how we consume ‘information’ in the sense Birkerts and others believe is encouraged in digital regimes. In the context of information rather than experience books, it is perfectly fine for sustained attention to be replaced by hyper-attention, for surely this is now a necessary disposition for surviving in a world that requires us to rapidly flit between different streams of information? And yet, in the case of the often imperceptible changes to our perception of ourselves and the world around us, moving beyond these purely analytic modes of thought seems important and necessary.

But without denying the significant ontological differences between reading a physical book as opposed to navigating large streams of information online, sustained attention has never been just a matter of sitting still in deep immersion. Instead, contemplative modes of attention exude a kind of energy not dissimilar to what we characterise as hyper-attention – the excitement when the material resonates with us, when we incidentally reflect on our relationship with certain passages without disturbing our state of immersion, the ‘quickness’ we experience when the text suddenly emerges before us in a flash of understanding. ¹¹ Reading has always involved the constant negotiation of different (often paradoxical) temporalities and orientations, including what we might characterise as sustained- and hyper-attention, contemplative and analytic modes of thought, critical and post-critical orientations (Brady, 2024a). Despite mourning the rapid erosion of our sustained attention due to the prevalence of artificial tools, Birkerts (2013) himself speaks of swerves in our reading, the flickering awareness that circumscribes this experience rather than a full punctuation into the density of the text – unwittingly, perhaps, describing something that is not dissimilar to our engagement with the digital world?

In a similar vein, Manguel (2013: 134-135), in his essay on The Ends of Reading, thinks of the relationship between the physical library with its limited supply of books and the seemingly infinite number of texts available online. ¹² Notwithstanding the significance of these boundaries (or lack thereof), one could tentatively suggest that it is misguided to suggest that the physical library is limited in the first place:

We know that every book holds within it all its possible readings, past, present and future, but its Pythagorean reincarnations, those wonderful forms which depend on readers to come, will not be found on our shelves… In the library of the mind… books that have no material existence constantly cram the shelves: books that are the amalgamation of other books once read and now only imperfectly remembered, books that annotate, gloss, and comment on others too rich to stand on their own, books written in dreams and nightmares that now preserve the tone of those nebulous realms, books that we know should exist but which have never been written… books of utterable desires, books of once obvious and now forgotten truths, books of magnificent and inexpressible invention.

My point is not to say that there are no valid concerns in the dystopic visions of the impact of digital tools on reading practices or, indeed, on the very material existence of books. Rather, it is to point out that what is perhaps less so at stake here is what we might call ‘sustained attention’ but something else. It is this idea of being “lost in the ritual of study”, where we experience dual temporalities of slowing and acceleration, where reading is not a linear process but a “rhythmic drifting back and forth” (Lewis and Hyland, 2022: 24). It is what Agamben and Sullivan (1995: 64) calls the “labyrinthine” nature of study with no entrance and exit preordained, involving “long hours spent roaming among books when every citation, every codex, every initial encountered seems to open a new path, immediately left aside at the next encounter.” It is this wandering around the library – in person, but also online – and the possibility of new connections and serendipitous encounters that appear. It is the idea of scholarly reading as persistently and frustratingly incomplete. In Lewis’ (2018: 5) terms, this is akin to a temporary rendering inoperative of the “intentionality to actualize a goal in relation to some kind of standard of practice that can be measured through developmental pathways (earlier or later)’ which circumscribes many of our assumptions around learning, a rendering which thereby releases education from the economic logic of ‘efficiency’. Efficiency is precisely the opposite of so many of our experiences of scholarly reading (and, indeed, study practices ¹³ more broadly) – and it is this inefficiency that we need to preserve.

The concern with technological tools might not be in their potential to disrupt sustained attention, then, but the fact that they might facilitate our attention becoming too focused on particular goals or outcomes that we must arrive at in the most efficient way possible. Indeed, perhaps it is not the capacity for digital tools to interrupt, but where they are used in service to an educational logic that seeks to pathologize interruptions in the first place, a logic that is equally concerning to those presenting dystopic visions of the digital who emphasise the importance of contemplative thought. In short, the issue, then, is not digital tools per se, but the fact that we consider them as tools, as the means by which we utilise them for specific ends of education.

Borrowing from Lewis’ (2018) discussion on weak philosophy in education, what would happen if we were to consider the digital not as ‘tools’ but as ‘toys’? Whereas a tool aims to ‘fix something’ in order to meet a pre-determined end (such as using GenAI to summarise and/or ‘fix’ our understanding of Hegel so it can be accurately inserted into an essay that is then used to measure student learning), a toy instead provokes a sense of playfulness, open experimentation, and a “displacement of specified conditions of use” (Lewis, 2018: p. 7). A toy does not have particular success conditions. It is not ‘operative’ in relation to this but instead open to latent potentialities beyond prespecified use or purpose. Like utopian modes of thought, it sits within temporal moments suspended from any linear progress towards particular ends, but instead dwells within “the paradoxical, in-between time of “no longer, not yet.””” (Lewis, 2018: 10). As Vlieghe (2014) remarks, even though Agamben is often interpreted as a technophobe (and this certainly appears to be confirmed in light of his vitriolic remarks about online education during the pandemic), he also (somewhat ironically) presents us with the idea that there is ‘no right way’ of using technology, much as there is no right way of using a toy. In the process, we find ourselves in a situation freed from normative constraints – freed, perhaps, from particular ‘ends’ and the means by which we measure these.

By thinking of digital spaces as toys rather than tools, then, they can be engaged with in a way that preserves this necessary inefficiency of scholarly reading. There are many examples that we might draw inspiration from in order to be more playful in our use of technology – I’m thinking of the experimental Oulipo group of writers ¹⁴ , Lewis and Hyland’s (2022) protocols for digital education, Drucker’s (2009) SpecLab and its technological-aesthetic experiments. Lewis and Alirezabeigi (2018), for instance, speak of the potentiality of digital spaces in terms of the oversaturation of text, voices, icons, images, light, and so on, which might initially seem to suggest the exact opposite to, for instance, the pure potentiality we are confronted with when facing a blank slate of some sort, like an empty page. And yet, it is precisely in this oversaturation that the digital screen too becomes ‘blank’, where it can produce a “profound apathy in the user that she can go in all directions” – invoking, therefore, precisely this sense of wandering we might imagine in inefficient study practices.

Although this comparison between the ‘blank slate’ and the internet might speak to scholarly writing specifically, what this also suggests is a more pluralistic account of what reading looks like in the digital age, where similar forms of over-saturation (and thereby hyper-attention) occur. If we were to instead posit a sense of reading as imaginatively linked with the infinite array of textual sources and interpretations that you find in both the ‘library of the mind’ and the library online, then, indeed, the perpetual loose ends of reading might therefore be preserved.

Conclusion

To conclude, then, this paper seeks to engage with both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of scholarly practices such as reading in the digital age. But rather than summarily dismissing these visions as unattainable ideals or as a form of alarmism that denies the reality of the present, I tried to illustrate (some) affirmative understandings of educational practices that surreptitiously underpin them. In doing so, I treat such visions not as static states that we must attain or avoid in the future, and that can be (easily) dismantled as insufficient or inaccurate in that sense, but as particular modes of thinking that are fruitful in getting us to think through what it is we wish to preserve in scholarly practices. In doing so, I argued that what the digital dystopian modes of thinking in particular are concerned with is perhaps less so the digital per se (or the sustained attention that it seems to interrupt), but a sense of scholarly practices such as reading as being necessarily inefficient. So, whilst digital tools such as GenAI seem to disincentivise learning (as a means of progressing, through much strenuous effort, towards particular ends), thinking of such tools as ‘toys’ preserves a sense of study that is in fact helpfully suspended from such ends. Notwithstanding the ontological differences between navigating online versus physical texts, the seemingly infinite array of sources that digital libraries make available to us can, indeed, encourage a sense of ‘wandering’ that is an intimate part of intellectual work. In turn, this paper calls for a more pluralistic understanding of reading practices in the digital age in light of this, where this particular orientation towards study as involving ‘perpetual loose ends’ can be revalued anew.