The ease of use and the pace of technological developments stimulate the fragmentation of texts. The linearity is being broken up as browsing effectively means navigation through short fragments distributed over multiple accessible sources. Chunks of different style, form, language, or format.
Consequently the future of reading lies in learning how to lay a thread of reasoning between these disconnected fragments. We will have to learn hyperlinking in communication and, eventually, speaking HTML. Otherwise communication will undoubtedly evolve into stuttering. Only those who develop a new quality of reading, will continue to understand the world.
Niels Schrader is founder of Mind Design in Amsterdam and lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague .
57. I Read in the Mind – Ray Siemens
I read in the mind. For all the physical locations of reading one might choose (at home, at the office, in the garden), for all the bodily points of interaction (eye, fingers, hands, sometimes the tongue to wet a finger to turn a page), for all the material manifestations of reading devices (scroll, book, letter, napkin even, iPad), and for all the affordance-oriented technological apparatus associated with reading (eyeglasses, candle or light, manuscript marginalia, indexes, wordless, tweets, search screens, and distribution lists, database back-end with pertinent corpora)… For all this, the place of reading ultimately is, for me, in my mind, with reading as a technologically-facilitated, intellectually-centred emotional and physical act, one in which acts of community are established and shared across time and space. The most prominent advances made in reading technologies over time have been pragmatic interventions that ultimately facilitate, serve, and support the ability of the mind to act as a place of reading; we would do best to look in this direction for our next advances in reading-related resources.
Ray Siemens holds the Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing at the University of Victoria and leads the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL).
58. Full Circle – Karin Spaink
I used to read whenever and wherever I could. You were only allowed to borrow four books a week from the library – for me, a measly ration. Once I had finished the children’s section, I cheated a bit with the age groups; the lady behind the desk sometimes turned a blind eye to that.
When my parents were out for the evening, I would sit for hours on end on the wc with a book. At least that light wouldn’t betray me when they came home. As soon as they started fiddling with the front door, I hid my book under my pyjamas, sanctimoniously flushed the wc, and pretended to be intoxicated by sleep. In the weekend, when they had a lie-in, I would take book after book from the shelves in the living room. At breakfast, I read the labels on the jam jars.
Later, I would read at least two or three books a week and the greatest attraction about holidays was that you could read even more. When around my thirtieth birthday I was suddenly struck half blind – fortunately only temporarily – my first concern was how I could carry on reading. I considered Braille. When my sight cleared up, I triumphantly read the screaming advertisements and billboards that disfigured public roads.
All around me, in my five by five living room, there are now more than fifty metres of books: almost three walls full. It looks impressive, but I hardly ever read them. Nowadays, I read at most a couple of pages before going to sleep, in order to ease the transition from waking to snoozing. I also seem more and more unable to keep up with the newspapers and magazines to which I subscribe. (I do obsessively read the T-shirts of people I meet.)
It’s the computer. I sit at it day and night, I read myself silly on mails, news groups, forums, blogs, websites, newspapers, wikis, Facebook updates, summaries, and tweets, and naturally all the reactions to that. Internet has turned me into a short-track reader. I would conscientiously keep the longer pieces that I came across on my way for that same later in which I would read all those unread books that had, in the meantime, piled themselves up everywhere.
That continued for years.
Until I saw a Kindle and immediately fell in love. Four days later, Amazon delivered mine, which I immediately stuffed full of books. Longer pieces that I encounter on the Internet are sent, with just a few clicks, to my Kindle, and would you believe it, now I do get round to them. Hours on end on the sofa, in bed, or in the train; during stolen minutes in the smoking breaks, or waiting in the café at the cinema for the film to start – I’m again reading books wherever and whenever I can.
And again – plus ça change – I often read illegally. I exchange as I have always done books with my friends, but that isn’t allowed now that they are digital. I have to break the copy protection on the books I purchased in the Netherlands in order to read them. (Dutch books shops only serve the market for Sony e-readers.)
My Kindle is in a red leather case; as soon as I open it, I have two hundred books at my disposal. There is a reading lamp built into that same case. In bed, in the dark, I read books – and my cats suspect nothing when they come home at night.
Karin Spaink is a writer, columnist, and feminist. She is a free speech advocate and social critic.
59. Books Erik – Spiekermann
Lots of important people have pronounced the book dead. And lots of less important people – the average consumer – believe them because they want to be seen as progressive and on top of the latest trends. Tablets, smartphones, and other gadgets are sexy; printed books are tired.
I disagree. Nothing is sexier for the promotion of knowledge than printed books. The decisive factor is the typographic arrangement in all its depth and detail and adequate production. Books are objects, not surfaces. Badly designed and produced books will quickly be superceded by letters on screen.
A book, however, that has been properly designed in all its parameters, from the format, the paper, the binding, and the other materials to all its complex typographic parameters, offers a physical experience far beyond the mere transfer of facts. 500 years of typographic experience cannot be emulated by a reader’s swipe of a finger. There are only so many ways to set a beautiful, legible and readable page in a given size and format and most readers wouldn’t be able to improve on it.
As long as our brains and eyes have to compensate for technical and typographic defects instead of dedicating all our brainpower to the comprehension of content, we’ll need books. If their design and production have been carefully considered, they can be perfect objects.
Erik Spiekermann is typographer and graphic designer. He is co-founder of MetaDesign design consultancy.
60. The New Orality and the Empty House – Matthew Stadler
There is anxiety about the book, but little about writing. Text flourishes. We read and write everywhere. Recall sitting in a room with a half-dozen friends on laptops, passing messages in chat boxes; or texting a loved one in another room of the house. No more phone calls; in Japan and South Korea per-capita minutes talking on the phone are down almost 300 percent. Never has literacy been so ascendant over orality. Or so it would seem.
Contrarily, bookstores close and sales numbers drop, throwing shadows of doom over the evolving enterprise of the book. People worry and assemble conferences.
In fact, the book is robust and ascendant while literacy threatens to collapse under the weight of a new orality. The New Orality. Digitized and freed from the inertia of the printed page, the written word has become fluid. Just as solid ground liquifies in an earthquake, the written word turns oral within the rhythmic convulsions of digital transmission. Text corrects itself. It is withdrawn, resent, and then doubled. Links burst open; feedback loops chatter; spelling dissolves and is reassembled. Digital transmission is, thus, performative, contextual, social, additive (rather than subordinative), aggregative (rather than analytic), copious, and homeostatic – in Walter Ong’s analysis, oral.