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Newspapers, advertisements, and labels surround us everywhere, turning our environment into a mass of texts to be read or ignored. As the quantity of information we receive continually increases and as information spreading is shifting from page to screen, it may be time to ask how changes in our way of reading may affect our mental life. For how we receive information bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret reality.

What is most obvious in the evolution of reading is the gradual displacement of the vertical (垂直的) by the horizontal-a shift from intensive to extensive reading. In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation (激增) is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed by the availability of texts, the reader tends to move across surfaces without allowing the words to resonate (共鸣) inwardly.

Interestingly, this shift from vertical to horizontal parallels the overall societal shift from bounded lifetimes spent in single locales to lives lived in wider geographical areas amid streams of data. This larger access was once regarded as worldliness-one traveled, knew the life of cities, the ways of diverse people…. It has now become the birthright of anyone who owns a television set.

How do we square the advantages and disadvantages of horizontal and vertical awareness? The villagers, who know everything about their surroundings, are blessedly unaware of events in distant lands. The media-obsessed urbanites, by contrast, never lose their awareness of what happens in different parts of the world.

We may ask, which people are happier? The villagers may have found more sense in things owing both to the limited range of their concern and the depth on their information. But restricted conditions and habit also suggest boredom and limitation. The lack of a larger perspective (视角) leads to suspiciousness and cautious conservatism, but for the same reason, the constant availability of data and macro-perspectives has its own decreasing returns. When everything is happening everywhere, it gets harder to care about anything.

How do we assign value? Where do we find the fixed context that allows us to create a narrative of sense about our lives? Ideally, I suppose, one would have the best of both worlds-the purposeful fixity of the local, as well as the availability of enhancing views: a natural ecology of information and context.