What will certainly happen is that text and image will more frequently be consumed jointly. I used to be able to listen to the radio and do my homework at the same time (something my mother wouldn’t or couldn’t believe); today, young people can also have their television on and watch CNN on their computer, with two split images and above them one and sometimes even two newsbars. Before I forget: making a phone call or sending an SMS via your mobile telephone can also be put on the list.
What is required is something or someone offering coherence and consistency, a sort of funnel. That function was for a long time the exclusive field of newspapers and magazines, but an end is coming to that. No need to panic: new filters are coming. You increasingly consume news via fast websites and Twitter, discover what your friends and acquaintances are doing via the social media. In short, there’s not much news coming, just more of the same. And moving along with greater speed.
And what about that book? The unparalleled brainchild of the individual? The jacket may and will change: the e-Reader, the audio book, the iPad, in Japan 180,000 titles exclusively for the mobile phone etcetera. Distribution is changing (recently, Borders, the bookstore chain in America went bankrupt), but content remains. And I remain posimistic, as my son in America calls it.
Peter van Lindonk is a publisher and writer. He annually organizes a congress called PINC (People, Ideas, Nature, Creativity).
76. Reading Surroundings – Koert van Mensvoort
Anybody wishing to know the future of reading must consult the past. I will skip grandma’s era; the age of printed paper was nothing more than an intermediary period. Let’s go back even further. How did we read 40,000 ago? We didn’t! Or so you would think. And yet that isn’t true, There were, of course, no media such as we have now. And yet we read. What? We read our surroundings. We read the landscape, the skies, the tracks in the sand of the prey we were hunting. This way of ‘reading our surroundings’ is something we’ve forgotten – except for a handful of Aboriginals. That’s a pity, because reading your surroundings, in which symbols coincide with events and things, has a future. An expensive description for this is Augmented Reality. And it is precisely what it says: increased, magnified reality. We drape a symbolic layer over our physical surroundings which must help us denote them. Buildings and events become text. Our surroundings become our interface. Context is content. And we human beings are evolutionarily perfectly equipped for that.
Koert van Mensvoort is founder of Next Nature and assistant professor at the University of Technology , Eindhoven .
77. Reading with Electronic Blinkers – Tjebbe van Tijen
This morning, an academic e-reader (MyiLibrary) again annoyed me by putting me in blinkers and only allowing me to read a few pages. I was so annoyed that I sent the following question to a Flemish scientist in the field of reading perception: ‘Various so-called e-readers with online book files have, in order to protect commercially the paper book, restricted reading to just a few pages at a time. The familiar, traditional way of reading, with pages open next to each other, has been made impossible, as has leafing through the book or jumping from page to page. A single, slowly loading page at a time – that is what is set before you.’
This causes me, but also many others – see all sorts of protesting users and people who have programmed work-arounds – enormous irritation when reading… That irritation is initially subconscious, but it soon becomes so irksome that reading such presentations is virtually impossible.
I am trying to discover what causes that irritation, also out of interest for what reading actually is. (I have been active for thirty years as a part-time librarian/archivist and I am interested in the history of reading and writing.)
Now my experience with a book is of a somewhat undulating landscape of pages laying next to each other, which appear two-by-two in picture (in which hand/eye synchronization… the tactile and the visual, and also the motoric, all blend into one action). This experience is damaged by the visual exclusion of the expected image of neighbouring pages, the constantly missing other page, which gives the physical, but perhaps also the metaphorical balance to the reading object known as book. Printed text is naturally first and foremost image and only becomes writing when it is read. When reading, my eye wanders, as in a landscape, across words, across graphic indications such as indents, quotation marks, differences in the typography, lists – you name it. Linear reading is but one of the actions that are undertaken. This information landscape seems to have a natural border because it is (often) held by ourselves and the eye moves like a ship on the waves and still knows how to keep its course.
Looking back and forward from one half to the other of the open book. Then the distinguishing localizations of our perception system come into play. The peripheral field of vision perhaps creates the space in which reading becomes a creative act. The current scientific research into what reading really is for you also has more refined terms about how observations at the edges of the shifting field of our focus can play a headstrong role. Parafoveal vision is a term that is used in this context. Could the impossibility of reading at one glance the field of writing on the pages of an opened book perhaps cause our eye to scout constantly the edges of our immediate observation as a form of verification of the meandering progress along the words and through the sentences?
Reading academic orations stimulates – I think – this rapid back and forth movement of our alert eye more than a more linear narrative, when we really don’t want to know in advance what is coming… It is certain that the single page of the small eBook and the miserly publishers who offer their electronic book versions in the 1-page format are systematically stealing what is and remains one of the miracles of technique: the book controlled by hand and eye.
Tjebbe van Tijen runs Imaginary Museum Projects and is visiting fellow at the School of Creative Media / City University of Hong Kong.
78. Better Tools – Dirk van Weelden
In the past, when most people were only moderately lettered and read slowly and out loud (obeying the rules according to the holy printed word), it was an enormous gift if you could also read differently. Scholars, writers, setters: professional readers mastered techniques that resembled sorcery: diagonal reading, fast reading, pattern recognition reader, and reading between the lines. And what’s more, it seems as if they were inexhaustible and so could read all the time and everything at once, without getting at all confused.
That speed reading now seems something that the average fourteen-year-old can easily master. Now we all do it. But the quantity, the speed, and the diversity of the texts passing by would make somebody from the seventeenth century faint. We can write something down while we are phoning, and occasionally follow over our shoulder a screen with news items and in another window scroll through search results.
Reading swiftly and switching, at random and recognizing patterns, gave a lead in a world of slow, straightforward text reading. A lead in terms of freedom, speed, skill. What type of reading gives freedom, speed, and skill if the norm for reading is fast, diagonal, springing, and fragmentary?
In the past, it was the magic of the written word that inspired authority and made them obedient. Now it is the magic of the media circus, with its overwhelming, multicoloured variety, its speed, its humour, and its recognition that make people credulous and docile. It is not Authority but Distraction that keeps us stupid. Resistance to it is a good way to start. Or in other words the ability to be able to choose where to direct your attention and to keep it there as well. Don’t bat an eyelid when an e-mail comes in, don’t multitask, don’t do anything other than read.