Hacking the Text: From Social Reading to Social Text

“Social reading” is a concept that has some currency today, but it is too seldom considered within its historical context, a context that is informed as much by the available technologies of reading –volumen, codex and screen, manuscript, print, and code – as it is by social and cultural practices. Such reading and writing practices challenge our own assumptions about the experience of the text and the nature and function of “authorship.” Bringing these same dynamics to our own reading of texts would represent a radical disruption of these assumptions, and a necessary reconfiguration of our understanding of our own subjectivity, and our relationship to textuality and text. This paper proposes that we harness the capabilities of digital technology, and the dynamics and functionality of social media, to bring this kind of disruption to bear upon our teaching texts. In so doing, we will challenge our own students’ assumption about their relationship to the literature they read, and their own role in the production of meaning. We will expose them multiple perspectives, and more dramatically, will show how those perspectives can become literally transformative as they are applied to apparently “static” texts.