Page 101 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

riences which we would characterize as social.51 Private reading, presumably in silence, was, of course, also done, but seems not to have been necessarily perceived as an experience so often worthy of depiction.
Book clubs, in which readers get together in person to discuss books have existed for a very long time. Book-oriented newsgroups in which people exchange views concerning books by emails posted to subscriber lists, have probably existed for at least twenty years. What is new is how social reading is being organized for profit on the web. In June 2010 Amazon added a social networking feature to eBooks for the Kindle called “popular highlights”; this feature may be turned off. At thecopia.com you could browse and buy eBooks and find an online reading group: “All your books. All your friends. All in one.” The social reading websites, are, of course, subsets of social me- dia, which, along with web search, has become the most widely used aspect of the Internet. What is probably most notable about social media is the speed at which this phenomenon developed. Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg as a Harvard undergraduate on February 4, 2004, reached over 500 million users from around the world as of July 2010, and by December 29, 2010, only six years after its foundation, was the most searched for and most visited website in America. From the astonishingly rapid growth of social media sites we may observe the desires of very large groups of people around the world to communicate instantly and easily, and to share and compare their tastes or opinions on everything. Because this was never pos- sible on this scale until just a few years ago, its impact is mostly unexplored, and is of the greatest interest to merchandisers, advertisers and politicians, as well as social scientists. Certain factors have, of course, combined to make this connectivity possible. At most basic it is the literacy of hundreds of millions of people, as basic literacy is required for computer connectivity. Beyond that, ease of communication, resulting from very well-written pro- grams, make it easy for everyone to be their own publisher. Ease of use is a
51 Coleman, “Reading the Evidence in Text and Image: How History Was Read in Late Me- dieval France,” in Morrison & Coleman (eds.), Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting 1250-1500 (2010), p. 54; see also pp. 55-66 which reproduce numerous images showing groups of people listening to reading.
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