Our country was founded on the written word, says Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants, a book that will be out in October.

“By 1910, three-quarters of the towns in America with populations of more than 2,500 residents had a public library,” Kelly said in a story in this month’s edition of Smithsonian magazine. “We became a people of the book.”

That’s thanks both to Mr. Gutenberg and his printing press, and the stress we in this country put on education.

Now, though, we are becoming less a people of the book, than a people of the screen. The simple truth is, says Kelly, “words have migrated from ink on paper to pixels on computers, phones, laptops, game consoles, televisions, billboards and tablets. . . . Screens fill our pockets, briefcases, dashboards, living room walls and the sides of buildings.”

In becoming a people of the screen, the time we spend reading – get ready for the surprise – has almost tripled since 1980. Says Kelly, “By 2008 more than a trillion pages were added to the World Wide Web, and that total grows by several billion a day. . . . Right now ordinary citizens compose 1.5 billion blog posts per day. . . . More screens continue to swell the volume of reading and writing.”

Traditionally, we writers have measured our success by the number of books we sell and the number of reviews we garner. Not so in the future, says Kelly. Our success will be measured by the degree that what we write “is linked to the rest of the world. A person, artifact or fact does not ‘exist’ until it is linked.”

Screens engage us, oh, do they ever. We read an idea that’s new to us or we come across a fact we didn’t know before, and most of feel we ought to do something – maybe we should research the term, or query our Facebook or our Twitter friends for their opinions, or search out an alternate view, perhaps create a bookmark.

Says Kelly, “Book reading strengthens our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. . . . Screens provoke action.”

Tomorrow: The future of the book – Part 2