What does it mean to be a reader? reflections on the conception of the subject reader conditioned to the book and not reading the world

Abstract

We spend our entire lives as readers, and this statement does not just refer to decoding symbols to pronounce, memorize, or understand the written word and recorded in texts, a practice generally learned and repeated at school as fundamental for social development. The idea that we are readers our whole lives comes from the constant interaction we have with others and how we receive, interpret, feel and experience the information that is mediated to us by our parents, family, friends, colleagues and other members of society and communities of which we are part. The purpose of this work is to reflect the act of reading beyond the academic and work world, bringing an everyday sense of existence and the meanings that are given to our own place of speech, to memory and identity traces. The motivation for this writing is influenced by the thought of the influential Venezuelan Simón Rodríguez (1999), when he presented the importance of feeling to understand, a principle linked to the postulates of Paulo Freire (1999) with his liberating pedagogy. Thus, we seek to deepen the utopian possibility of freeing ourselves from academic and institutional constraints, committed to hierarchizing and elitizing the act of reading. What would the world be like if everyone had an open mindset to know and understand how others read the world? What would the world be like freeing itself from the readings of peers or other social subjects associated with power or leadership? What would the world be like if the act of reading went beyond the book form? Are the current times not leading us to the need to rethink the establishment of indicators that are more flexible and linked to today's reality, when human beings are investing many hours of their time interacting with content, information and people through social networks? that work over the Internet. In fact, after the Covid-19 pandemic, work and academic structures and ways of relating to other people changed drastically, due to the mandatory confinement that had to be observed around the world. This troubled and uncertain scenario generated an increase in the use of applications, programs and digital channels such as WhatsApp, Google Meet, Zoom, Instagram, TikTok and others that served as a platform to continue daily activities that, to a large extent, required reading text messages, reading videos, reading music, reading audios, podcasts, including reading corporality to identify symptoms in people with whom they interacted. Thus, a strong position on the part of Information Science professionals seems urgent, recognizing the potential of liberating education as an inclusive and necessary practice for social change, regarding the perception of what it means to be a reader and the reading practice in its approaches to mediation of information by leading the problematization of informational processes. Interference is evident as a point of common action, with intentionality in opposing conformist thinking and the domination of elitist and segregating attitudes towards the popular, everyday life and the true feeling and living of the citizen.