Digital Reading: A Constructivist Model for Knowledge

Together with writing, reading is a fundamental way of learning and gaining an understanding of the world around us. Reading therefore constitutes our essential nature, so much so that, as we will show, mutations in reading practices necessarily involve anthropological mutations. We are currently witnessing the passage from a reading model based on the linear sequential transfer of information, intense reading by a reader who decodes, reflects and memorizes, to a new hybrid model of reading in which meaning is sought through a simultaneous anticipatory predictive process. Interstitial and modular, this new model is practiced according to multiple mixed methods on several planes or levels. It coincides with the advent of a society with creative access to knowledge and, at the same time, a kind of human being that in some ways is a bit more netsmart and social. This paper aims to identify the connections between the global model of construction of meaning in reading, a transactional socio-psycholinguistic model, and the strategies of digital reading.