In Jonah Lehrer’s article, "The Future of Reading," there seems to be a large concern with the technological advancement of e-readers. While analyzing the rhetorical situation of this article, it is clear that Jonah perceives a flaw with how easy it is to read a text that is perfectly printed on a screen; causing reading to become an unconscious, effortless act. “Meanwhile, unusual sentences with complex clauses and smudged ink tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra work – the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words – wakes us up” (Lehrer). The fact that e-readers allow reading to become an unconscious activity is precisely Lehrer’s exigence for writing this article. As the rhetor, however, Lehrer is not the one who originated this discourse. As Keith Grant-Davie explains in his article, "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents:" “We can distinguish those who originated the discourse… from those who are hired to shape and deliver the message…” (Grant-Davie 269). This topic has already been largely discussed in the writing community ever since the first Kindle was released; Lehrer is clearly responding to a topic that is already present in his discourse community.
That being said, Lehrer is not a “creative genius,” he is merely stating his opinion on an already present subject and offering a potential solution to the problem. The fact that Lehrer pieces together fragments of pre-existing texts to build on his own discourse is what makes this article intertextual. As James E. Porter puts it in his article, "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community," “Examining texts ‘intertextually’ means looking for ‘traces,’ the bits and pieces of Text which writers or speakers borrow and sew together to create new discourse” (Porter 34). Although Lehrer’s article is intertextual in Porter’s terms, he still fails to have a consistently strong ethos within his discourse community. The fact that Lehrer has failed to successfully make use of his sources has caused his credibility to drop significantly. This decrease in credibility can be seen as a constraint on his writing since “what we have already written must constrain what we write next” (Grant-Davie 273). However, within the bounds of his article, e-readers may be seen as the constraint to his exigence. Lehrer does recognize “the astonishing potential of digital texts and e-readers. For [him], the most salient fact is this: It’s never been easier to buy books, read books, or read about books you might want to buy” (Lehrer). On the other hand, it is the e-reader that is making the content that we read easy to perceive; Lehrer worries that “before long, we’ll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink – to these screens that keep on getting better – that the technology will feedback onto the content, making us less willing to endure harder texts. We’ll forget what it’s like to flex those dorsal muscles, to consciously decipher a literate clause” (Lehrer) So, since his main concern is losing the ability to read consciously, not just skimming screens, Lehrer’s constraint thus becomes the e-reader itself. It is the e-reader that is enabling people to read quickly and easily; and therefore, unconsciously.
Although Lehrer uses small amounts of sources to back up his main point, his article seems to be mostly opinion based. By doing so, Lehrer seems to be reaching out to an audience that isn’t necessarily a part of the sci-tech community. He goes off on tangents and inserts little personal tidbits; for example, when discussing the technological advancement of the clarity of screens he says “(I still can’t believe that people watched golf before there were HD screens. Was the ball even visible? For me, the pleasure of televised golf is all about the lush clarity of grass” (Lehrer). This sentence is irrelevant to his article, except that it allows him to connect to his audience on a personal level by reflecting on his personal views of the advancement of screen clarity.
Even though Lehrer fails to offer a solution to his exigence, he does, however, state his main concerns with the e-reader and uses other sources to try and communicate his concerns with his discourse community. This article allows the audience to weigh the pros and cons of the e-reader as Lehrer discusses the positives and negatives of his situation. Grant-Davie states that “Rhetors may invite audiences to accept new identities for themselves, offering readers a vision not of who they are but of who they could be” (Grant-Davie 271). In this case, Lehrer invites his audience to either share his views or to opinionate against them. Perhaps, while beginning the article, the reader might have been pro e-reader; however, after reading Lehrer’s views and the source from a neuroscientist that he provides, perhaps the reader might have second guessed their decision on the e-reader stance. This is the most important part of a rhetorical situation, the outcome of how the audience perceives it, specifically after being given the information needed to make a decision.
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