"Rewritten: from Print Minds to Digital Cognition"

As digital technologies displace the printed book as the primary medium of knowledge transmission, some of the most pressing questions for contemporary society have concerned the cognitive and epistemological shifts taking place in the human mind.

Much recent cultural criticism has focused on the decline of long-form book reading and the rise of new cognitive modes shaped by screen-based media. Recurrent questions include: What patterns of consciousness characterize digitally mediated cognition? What are the cognitive side effects of the digital and AI revolutions?

To understand what is new about digitally mediated cognition, however, we must first examine the cognitive scaffolding it is displacing—namely, the ‘print mind.’ Because the invention of the printing press not only revolutionized how people share information but also gave rise to the Enlightenment worldview that underpins modern liberal democracy. Print culture also formed the modern Western subject, typically imagined as rational, autonomous, individualistic, and politically egalitarian. Within this framework, linear reasoning, sustained attention, interiority, and a strong sense of individual agency have been valorized as normative cognitive ideals to which every educated person is expected to aspire.

As we move deeper into the digital age, it becomes increasingly possible to ask: to what extent is this model of the self in reality a downstream effect of print culture, the end of which is upon us? The cognitive shift produced by screen scrolling destabilizes some of the foundational presuppositions of modern subjectivity, including the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous individual. This model of the modern individual was shaped by the print revolution. People could read in solitude, form their own opinions, and take part in public life as rational citizens. This mind is private, reflective, literate, and capable of independent judgment.

By contrast, the digital world is producing a very different kind of mind - one that is constantly fragmented and momentarily connected, shaped by algorithmic logic and rage-baited. The digital mind makes the notion of the modern individual as private, reflective, literate, and capable of independent judgment harder to maintain. The more pessimistic cultural commentators have characterized the current moment as “postprint,” “post- literate,” “post-liberal,” even “post-democratic”—a full-blown “counter-Enlightenment.”

Yet it is possible to take the long view that the models of selfhood and cognition that we take as normative are historically and technologically contingent - that the “print mind” is not necessarily something essentially human, so much as a particular constructed version of what it is to be human. This conception of the human is under threat.

Literature and Mind proposes to host a series of seminars/lectures under the title Rewritten to explore the epistemic and cognitive tensions between two kinds of minds: the 'print mind' and 'digital cognition' approaching both as historically contingent products.

Convenor: Dr Sowon Park (sowonpark@ucsb.edu)