Chapter Three: A History of Reading
You are reading this right now. Your light in coming from the sun to let your eyes see and your eyes are pointed at this because your brain found it interesting. Your eyes, nerves and brain are working together to take an upside down image and transform it into computational information. It does this by first, flipping the image right side up (this is what you see) then recognizing familiar shapes and correlating them into sounds that your kindergarten teacher taught you. Then you take these sounds and slur them together to make words that, according to you and other people who speak the same language as you call words. This is a word: hello, but this isn’t: khsdpfi;aehf.l. Unless it is and you speak a language that I don’t know. The words that you read can make you cry make you hope or make you walk away. I hope these words don’t make you walk away. But even if they do, it’s science at work. Long ago, it was necessary to pay attention to the biggest, loudest thing around you, because it will hopefully become your dinner. Now, advertisers exercise this instinct to get you to buy their products. I’m not one of them, I just want to tell my stories, you can put down this book, or close this web page, or shut down this hologram, I won’t be offended. Honestly, I probably won’t even know. But if you do bother sticking around I’ll tell you stories you’ve never heard before. So go on, I’m giving you a choice, choose and go where your choices take you.
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