Reading chapter one of Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, I paused at her description of the papyrus scroll and found myself drifting into thought. She describes papyrus as light and flexible, yet not easy to carry around. A scroll required both hands to handle, or a table to place it on, and reading moved in one long, continuous line. There was no flipping back or comparing passages. The form itself made reading linear and tied to time.

What stood out to me here is how much the material itself shaped reading. On the one hand, a scroll was very simple to use. You unrolled it and followed the line forward. That simplicity made reading easy. But at the same time, it was clumsy to transport and hard to navigate. You could not easily go back to a section or hold two places at once. In that sense. While reading was straightforward, it was also limited.

This suddenly reminded me of how we read today on phones. In many ways, social media feeds are modern scrolls. They run in one continuous stream, moving from top to bottom, easy to follow but difficult to step outside of. The big difference is that technology has solved the old problem of portability. What was once heavy and awkward to use is now light, instant, and always in our pocket. So in a way, we carry the scroll everywhere.

But this comes with new effects. The papyrus scroll at least had an end. After some time, you would eventually reach the bottom. The digital scroll, however, never ends. Feeds refresh again and again, keeping us moving and holding just enough of our attention. This shapes how we read. We skim, swipe, and move on quickly, very rarely stopping and taking some time to reflect. Where the codex brought depth and comparison, the feed pulls us out and throws us into an endless scroll.

Borsuk’s description of papyrus made me realize that reading has always been about more than words. It is also about the form that carries them. The scroll once kept reading on a linear path. The codex later opened new ways of moving through text. And today, our screens have brought the scroll back, this time in a portable, digital form. The question is whether this return to scrolling opens up new freedom or if it traps us in a flow we can’t really step out of.