The Self in the History of Distributed Cognition: A View from the History of Reading
This chapter looks at relationships between reading and writing, decorous speech and self-formation in the eighteenth century. The process of self-formation is understood by psychologists today to be a fluid and dynamic one, with the potential to vary across environments. The chapter considers how increasingly novelised forms of diary writing produced a swift oscillation for eighteenth-century diarists between addressing the reader and being the reader. New conceptions of the relationship between writing and print, meanwhile, produced a split between the face to face encounters of lower class readers, and their self-conception as silent readers of political and other topics. These developments meant that self-formation could be distributed between human subjects and the books and documents which they read and wrote.