The Cultural Construction of Reading

It was interesting for me to read Howe's essay on "The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England" in conjunction with your reading scene descriptions.  Many of you recall reading scenes that reverberated with the luxurious sense of privacy evoked in Stevens's poem "The House was quiet and the world was calm," where the reader is so absorbed in the book that the world inside the book merges with the world outside.  As a result the immediate scene of reading becomes, as Stevens says, "like the conscious being of the book."
It was neat to see how many of you engage in definite rituals of reading: the right place, the right time, a drink (less so food). So in many of your accounts I found evidence for what might be called contemporary western constructions of reading as primarily a private, individual activity.  A reader is by her or himself, immersed in a text (is that nowadays still a book?  for some of you it clearly is...).
Lili, who learned to read in China, associates reading with listening and repeating what a teacher says--and doing so as a group, sitting in a very specific, disciplined way, holding the book at a 45 degree angle from the body.
By contrast, In the US, reading instruction focuses on individual reading: it seems children don't know how to read unless they can read on their own.  Makes sense, doesn't it?  But still--Howe's essay makes me understand that what counts as "literate" is very much bound by the culture and the community in which such literacy functions.  Being able to read a text on your own was not a literacy requirement in Anglo-Saxon England.
I found it equally interesting however that in some cases you, as readers, are still very aware of your surroundings: Pete's novel reading was "interrupted" or "enriched" (I imagine both) by voices of friends and neighbors; Kyle enjoys reading while listening to the voices of his wife and her friend,etc.
This makes me wonder if the communal roots of "reading" as speaking or giving councel or listening and reciting--or solving a puzzle--don't still somewhat inform even contemporary constructions of reading.  Both Kent and Kylista described reading scenes through conversations; Lawrence recalls doing spiritual reading together with his mother; and isn't it true that while we might read on our own, we often do like to discuss what we read with others?  And some of us might even enjoy discussing what we read while we read it?  And doesn't poetry invite us to read it aloud to someone else?

And what about tv?  Could we say watching tv is a form of "reading"?  Often communal reading?
Or online surfing, chat rooms, blogs (like this one)--could we say that new technologies have reintroduced new forms of more collective forms of reading?  (Is there something like begin tv literate?  And is that a valuable literacy?