The printed page is static. Like an empty house, the book does not change while you are away. It waits, making meaning only in the strangely private relationship called reading. Digitized text lives and changes constantly, vibrant in its hive mind. Ong, writing thirty years ago, predicted that electronic techonology would hasten a 'secondary orality'. Though he had in mind books-on-tape, rather than digitization, his analysis remarkably predicts the condition we find ourselves in: 'This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment.'
Paradoxically, the new orality recovers the book as an enduring and meaningful technology by freeing it from a host of awkwardly performed duties. During the age of mechanical reproduction books became home to image culture; their flat pages hosted the illusion of three-dimensional space and were sometimes manipulated to convey action or motion, as in flip-books or the sequential illustrations of comic strips. Their covers became movie stills and their interiors art galleries in which were hung that ultimate expression of the contemporary artist, his photo documentation.
No longer. Now the unfolding capacities of digital transmission will free the printed page from these awkwardly performed duties. As image culture – whatever that is – moves into its spacious new home (digital transmission), it will bed down with its true lover, orality. And literacy will be left to reside comfortably in the flat static pages of the book – home alone, at last. The book lies closed, recumbent and still, waiting for its reader. Who wouldn’t want that?
Matthew Stadler is a writer and editor living in Portland , Oregon . Together with Patricia No he founded Publication Studio.
61. Letter and Spirit – F. Starik
There are two types of people: readers and lookers. And all
just push against doors on which scribbles are scrawled,
everyone does it. The reader will only go into the toilet
after carefully studying which scribble is the man
Which the woman: pictograms are meant for illiterates
and not intended for you, who just wants to know where
to piss. The reader can’t know what the train door is saying
if the picture explains that the door is half open
And the arrows point downwards or do they point upwards,
it’s all over the place. The reader just loves giving
meaning, but never attaches an action, a consequence to what
he has just finished reading. When the reader leaves his flat
he reads all the names on the doors of the other tenants
and also the words on the doormat with the bleeding heart
of the girl on the first floor: ‘You look nice today’.
The looker rings that bell.
F. Starik is a writer, poet, singer, and artist. He is the current city poet laureate of Amsterdam .
62. Social Reading – Bob Stein
Beginning in 2005 The Institute for the Future of the Book began a series of experiments under the rubric of 'networked books.' This was the moment of the blog and we were exploring what would happen if we applied the concept of 'reader comments' to essays and books. Our first attempt, McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory turned out to be a remarkably lucky choice. The book's structure -numbered paragraphs rather than numbered pages – required my colleagues to come up with an innovative design allowing readers to make comments at the level of the paragraph rather than the page. Their solution to what at the time seemed like a simple graphical UI problem, was to put the comments to the right of each of Wark's paragraphs rather than follow the standard practice of placing them underneath the author's text.
Within a few hours of putting Gamer Theory online, a vibrant discussion emerged in the margins. We realized that moving comments from the bottom to the side, a change that at the time seemed minor, in fact had profound implications. Largely because Wark took a very active role in the unfolding discussion, our understanding at first focused on the ways in which this new format upends the traditional hierarchies of print which place the author on a pedestal and the reader at her adoring feet. With the side-by-side layout of Gamer Theory's text and comments, author and reader were suddenly occupying the same visual space; which in turn shifted their relationship to one of much greater equality. As the days went by it became clear that author and reader were engaged in a collaborative effort to increase their collective understanding.
Later experiments in classrooms and reading groups were just as successful even though no author was involved, leading us to realize we were witnessing much more than a shift in the relationship between author and reader.
The reification of ideas into printed, persistent objects obscures the social aspect of both reading and writing, so much so, that our culture portrays them as among the most solitary of behaviours. This is because the social aspect traditionally takes place outside the pages – around the water cooler, at the dinner table, and on the pages of other publications in the form of reviews or references and bibliographies. In that light, moving texts from page to screen doesn't make them social so much as it allows the social components to come forward and to multiply in value.
And once you've engaged in a social reading experience the value is obvious. Contemporary problems are sufficiently complex that individuals can rarely understand them on their own. More eyes, more minds collaborating on the task of understanding will perhaps yield better, more comprehensive answers.
The difficult thing however about predicting the future of reading is that everything I've said so far presumes that what is being read is an 'n-page' article or essay or an 'n-page', 'n-chapter' book, when realistically, the forms of expression will change dramatically as we learn to exploit the unique affordances of new electronic media. Ideally, the boundaries between reading and writing will become ever more porous as readers take a more active role in the production of knowledge and ideas.
And lest, you think this shift applies only to non-fiction, please consider huge multi-player games such as World of Warcraft as a strand of future-fiction where the author describes a world and the players/readers write the narrative as they play the game.
Our grandchildren will assume that reading with others, i.e. social reading, is the 'natural' way to read. They will be amazed to realize that in our day reading was something one did alone. Reading by one's self will seem as antiquated as silent movies are to us.
Bob Stein is founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book.
63. Is the Role of Libraries in Reading Innovation Fading? – Michael Stephens, Jan Klerk
Michael Stephens and Jan Klerk share some thoughts about the future of reading and libraries.
Michael, I would like you to consider the following lines: I think reading is the mother of time consuming activities. To understand a book fully you’ll need to read it in private for many hours from start to finish. Of course you can try to understand a text by ‘diagonal’ reading. Compare it to trying to know a Bach cello suite by just listening to part 1, 3, and 6. But you can only fully comprehend a Bach piece in a slow way. Time-consuming activities are under increasing pressure. There are more and more things that come up for distraction: we are living in times where you are constantly challenged to do things you actually don’t want to do. In my personal life this has led to a totally fragmented but dynamic information and media experience spending many small bits of time on different sorts of writing, reading, watching, and listening.