What Page Are You On? Cross-Modal Coordination and the Sensory Dimensions of Social Reading

Abstract

Texts are defined by their decontextualizability, including decontextualization from the sensory experience of their transmission. Nevertheless, text, like all of language, is always encountered in some material form. This paper explores how readers make use of distinct text modalities to coordinate individual reading activities into a collective experience of textual unity. I present a semiotic analysis of meetings of a Taipei-based reading group alongside explicit metapragmatic talk from readers on the affordances of different text formats, such as audiobooks, e-books, and print. I show how readers leverage differences and similarities between the same text in different formats to achieve degrees of alignment, coherence, and coordination, even in the absence of agreement on truth-conditional propositional content. I argue that the ability of text to serve as an anchor for social life depends upon interactional practices that alternately foreground and background the sensory dimensions of acts of reading.