Toward a Phenomenology of Contemporary Reading

With seismic changes in forms of communication and more pervasive use of mobile devices to understand content, reading requires reimagining. Though traditional notions of reading and years of reading research continue to be relevant, there are clearly differences between not only the texts that we read and understand but also differences in how we read them. In this article, I adopt a phenomenological approach to reading practices in order to illustrate how sensory and embodied reading is and, in turn, how methods for interpreting and analysing reading need to turn more to phenomenology and identifying what Merleau-Ponty (1964) describes as ‘the essence of the experience’. Built on more of a game-based, ludic approach to reading, I argue that content (i.e., different texts and narrative styles) are processed in different ways and not in a traditional linear, narrative manner. The article draws from a multi-sited two-year project of iPad reading to illustrate how reading has shifted and how our methods for examining it need revisiting.