I’ve always loved libraries for the ‘slow’ experience. In a library you can easily forget about time. But times have changed. Last year most of the books, DVDs, and CDs I borrowed from my library remained unread, unseen, unlistened to. Instead I’ve spent an increasing number of hours reading and commenting on various texts on various online screens. Libraries have always been the guardians and perhaps even the personification of time-consuming activities. You could say that libraries therefore may not fit all to well into the Zeitgeist. What would you say Michael about the perspectives of libraries? How will libraries survive when reading, watching, and listening is becoming more and more a digital and social experience by using personal mobile devices?
Jan – I spent much of the morning reading Bilton’s I Live in the Future on my Kindle for a class this weekend – highlighting and sharing interesting passages to my followers on Twitter and Facebook. The potential for reading to become a social act of sharing/commenting and remixing is great. Then, I jumped into YouTube and reviewed a few videos for the class, using the favourite command to save them and share them. Imagine a future where an eBook, a video, audio, et cetera might seamlessly be shared and utilized to educate and entertain. As you note, the solitary concept of reading wanes whilst a media rich experience blooms across multiple channels and networks. These changes will not contribute to the dumbing down of our culture. The opposite is true: media savvy consumers and creators of content will be the renaissance stars of this future scenario.
Sadly, the library playing a strong role in this equation might be fading. I’m writing this the day the news broke in the US about publisher Harper Collins enacting borrowers limits on eBooks through the OverDrive service as well as requesting access to borrower data. This only muddles the waters further for librarians and readers with Kindles, Nooks, mobiles, et cetera. It may mean that the content available via the library may rely more on creators and less on publishers stuck in old models of distribution and economics.
Jan Klerk and Michael Stephens wrote columns together about the future of libraries for the Dutch journal Digitale Bibliotheek.
64. Slow Reading – Carolyn Strauss
By definition, ‘reading’ goes well beyond the grasping of written characters and the realm of ideas they express. Applied to environments, systems, and relationships, ‘reading’ is an act of interpreting, intuiting, even foretelling what may be.
Not surprisingly, today’s fast world has taken its toll on all manner of reading. More ‘connected’ than we’ve ever been, we’re increasingly disengaged from territories of thought, personal experience, and creativity that I believe are essential to ‘reading’ the world accurately and authentically. As the ubiquitous web, messaging, chat, friending, and tweeting force us into a constant state of reacting, we are left little or no time for turning inward, reflecting, losing, and then finding ourselves again to arrive at what we truly think and believe in.
Psychologist/author Guy Claxton warns that while today we have become very good at solving analytical and technological problems, we’ve lost touch with the ‘Slow mind’- the one more suited to addressing ecologies and systems. Two centuries prior, Goethe promoted ‘intuitive imagining’ as a tool of scientific research to reveal relationships and underlying patterns; he believed we should read the world around us not at face value, but in terms of ‘flowing processes.’
Both point to what I call ‘slower ways of knowing’ that can enable an expanded (maybe unexpected) set of ‘readings/interpretations’ of a given situation, place, or relationship. We need both ‘slow reading’ (verb› active process) and ‘slow readings’ (noun› understanding emerging from process) to arrive at information and tools for moving forward in an increasingly complex world.
Carolyn Strauss is founder and director of slowLab (US/NL), a laboratory for Slow design research and creative activism.
65. Cyclops iPad – Dick Tuinder
When we open the classic book, it has the proportions of a landscape. The way that landscape-like format works is not only determined by what we see, but also what we miss as we concentrate on a section of the show. What is outside our immediate field of vision determines our idea of landscapeness more than what we do see. Because it implies that there is something larger than can be immediately observed by our senses.
It is seductive, and perhaps not even nonsense, to imagine that the landscape size of the paper book has influenced the form which literature has assumed over the centuries. That it has given that literature a perspective and stratification which had to be achieved at the time of the clay tablet in totally different ways.
There are more matters connected with the classic book that must have supported subconsciously not only the reader but also the writer in his imagination.
Subtle sensations that make reading a physical experience. Naturally there is the smell of paper and ink. The bonus that is becoming increasingly rare of text set in lead. The fact that a book is not only a carrier of words, but also a unique object. But also the slowly shifting balance from right to left (or from left to right depending on where you live) the more one progresses in the story. A shift in weight that, with increments of a half a gram of paper for each page turned, also propels the reader faster in the direction of the end of the story.
It is also of the utmost importance that the opened book should fall into two halves. The left and right page. Naturally that is a logical consequence of the form of the book, and it would only be that if it were not coincidentally a conceptually flawless visualization of the core of just about all the dramas written down in books. Jekyll amp; Hyde, plus and minus, conscious and subconscious, will and imagination, war and peace.
You ask yourself why a medium that is so well equipped for its task should have to be replaced by something new.
Naturally there are all sorts of practical reasons for the school slate like format of the iPad and its cousins, but the symbolism is too coincidental to ignore. If the paper book should ever disappear then that will not be because the e-reader is a better idea, but because the landscape has lost its significance for the modern reader and his interest is primarily directed at the single upright format of the portrait photograph.
Dick Tuinder is a visual artist, illustrator, writer, and producer of (short) movies.
66. Context Is King; Content Is Queen – Lian van de Wiel
Tablet, eReader, laptop, smartphone. Add to that the information overload from Google, Twitter, and Facebook, combined with the overruling image culture and the trend towards a decline in reading. The changes in the information society take place at a rapid rate. But nevertheless, a number of fixed values and needs are still around. And that is the importance we attach to fine stories, useful information, and valuable knowledge.
The question many publishers pose today is how those stories are going to reach us, how we shall gather information, and how we can best learn. Reading in the old meaning of the world – namely, with a ‘paper book in a quiet place’ – is still one of the methods for doing that. But it is not always the most effective, up-to-date, or appealing way.
Text, image, and sound now exist in all sorts of combinations. From hardcover print books via printing app with sound effects to on-demand animation films. The choice depends on what you want to achieve: stimulating the fantasy, discovering things yourself, or escaping for a moment from reality.