Summary
Digital technologies are used as a medium in widely varied fields of human reality: communication, entertainment and science. The digital revolution turns the world into a huge database: a world of computerized, codified objects accessible only via interfaces. This paper examines the influence of new technologies and media on the dual nature of the narrative text, which exists both as printed text and screen structure. The print culture started its centuries long dominance in Europe as a promising way out of the difficulties that accompanied the scribal culture, which ended in the 15th century with the advent of the Age of Gutenberg. The dominance of the print culture has been questioned ever since the computer mediated communication began its expansion, creating a false alarm about the death of the book, but also offering a false encouragement about the indispensability of the print media. Digital culture ultimately changes the semiology of the sign, bridging the gap between the verbal and the visual, and deepening it at the same time. The blurred boundary between the screen and the print clarifies the fact that page reading and screen reading demand diverse reading strategies: requiring a particular kind of focus, the printed texts provides the reader with monovalent information, while the screen makes the reader’s attention difused, offering a dazzling array of sources but not the much desired reliability of information. One of the most obvious and interesting forms of convergence between the studies of literature and computer science has come in the area of computer-generated narratives: computer scientists working in artificial intelligence perform the same operations as folklorists, narratologists, critics and theoreticians of storytelling – they all break down stories into component parts or structures and attempt to show how meaningful narratives can be generated from these parts. The cultures of print and screen are further divided owing to different attitudes towards new information techologies, defined by Susan Greenfield as webophoria, webophilia and webophobia. While webophobia springs from eternal human fear that illusion might at one moment irretrievably erase the truth, webophoria fails to see that the media structure of the Internet changes irrevocably as well: it has moved from a democratic institution of polilogue towards a commodified dimension of monologue.

Keywords:
screen, reading, cultures of print and screen, narrative strategies, library, digital, analogous, media literacy

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