Asociación Galega de Editores

Reading

One of the characters of H. P. Lovecraft, writer of fantastic fiction, begins the search of a city whose domes gilded in the evening sun he had dreamed of so many times. Lost in the tangle of street maps, he can eventually reach it, thanks to the help of a magic silver key. When he succeeds, he finds out that the city is none other than his home town -revealed under a new light.

Yes. The oneiric city was within his real city (we can extrapolate now) as knowledge is within information: concealed, dusty, waiting for the magic key.

And it's time to reveal our secret: the magic key to knowledge is reading. It will be necessary to repeat it, since we are subjugated by the dimension and virtues of the new technological wonders and, at the same time, we should learn again the potential and marvels of something we consider trivial, only because we already have it and it has kept us company for a very long time.

Reading is the ability that literate humans have to extract textual information. (Apart from this ability, we'll later talk about "image reading"....) And it's time to announce the central thesis of these pages: reading is the key to knowledge in the Information Society.

J. L. Millán