The concept appears to have originated in the study of philosophy and literature as a technique to more fully comprehend and appreciate a complex text.
We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book.
[4] A similar view was stated by Postman, who noted the character of the ordinary citizen of the 19th century, a mind that could listen for hours on end to political orations clearly shaped by a culture favouring text.
[5] Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at Harvard University Press, declared a worldwide reading crisis resulting from our global push toward productivity.
[8] Laura Casey points out that the increasing availability of instant communication technologies, such as texting and social media like Facebook and Twitter, may be contributing to the decline of slow reading.