Books are changing, and the nature of reading, what we take away from it, is changing too. Books used to be physically malleable things that we marked, physically, with our experiences: dog-earing them, underlining them, highlighting, and copying out. But the books will not be physical for very much longer.
The great misunderstanding of digitization is to believe that it is only the content and the appearance that matters. That, to reproduce the experience of the book, we needed to make a screen that looked like a page, that turned like a page, that contained words. And the reason that we've had difficulty for so long with the notion of eBooks is that that is not all that books are.
Books are journeys, and encoded experiences. The writer has spent months, perhaps years, producing this work out of themselves. That devastating last line of James Joyce's Ulysses: ' Trieste – Zurich – Paris 1914 – 1921.' And the book is the medium of transmission of that experience, so that the reader, too, can experience it, and go on their own journey.
The books are subliming, they are going up into the air, and what will remain of them is our experiences. That experience is encoded in marginalia, in memory, and in data, and it will be shared because we are all connected now, and because sharing is a form of communal prosthetic memory.
When Walter Benjamin wrote that 'what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced by technological means is its aura', he was assuming that the aura diffused, that it was lost to the other reproductions. But digital technologies do not just disseminate, they recombine, and in this reunification of our reading experiences is the future of the book.
James Bridle is publisher, writer and editor.
6. Watching, Formerly Reading – Max Bruinsma
I don’t read, someone I know well told me. She meant that she doesn’t read the way ‘readers’ read. People who can spend hours on end with a book in a chair or on the sofa, occasionally turning over a paper page and appearing to have completely forgotten that there exists a world outside the sentences they are reading. No, she’s not one of those readers. But, I say, you actually read the whole day through! You scan articles and books, browse through websites and online fora, open and answer emails, gloss over newspaper headlines. Yes, but that’s not reading, she says. What it is, then, I don’t know, but I do know that on an average day she processes more text than many a ‘reader.’ I am from a somewhat older generation; I know how it feels to be immersed in a book. But I have to admit that it’s been a while. My reading also seems to be less than what it originally meant to be. Yet I would be too quick in saying I don’t read – at most that I read too little, but even that is not entirely true. I read differently.
What we used to call ‘watching’ seems increasingly like what we once called ‘reading’. Then they were different things, with a clear hierarchy. Reading was ‘absorbing content’, watching was ‘receiving an impression of something.’ The first was a conceptual activity that was valued higher than the second, a more passive, sensory affair. The fact that you do both with your eyes was less important than the thought that reading conjures up a non-existent picture and watching processes existing pictures. Only for trained viewers – art historians and design critics such as myself – the two were alike. Our looking is also reading; for us, a picture is also a visual text. What I’ve noticed is that since the irresistible increase of the ‘visual media,’ non-professional viewers have also become more and more readers. Concurrently, the idea that the only thing you can read is text is losing ground.
We, the homini visuali, do not only read and write words but also images. The form in which things appear to us has thus become just as much text as text has become image. Perhaps that is why she says that she doesn’t read – because reading is no longer what it used to be. Reading has also become a form of ‘getting an impression of something’. A scanning of visual stimuli, that are linked together in our head into something of significance. These stimuli can be letters or pictures, the difference between the two – once so fundamental – is fading. That doesn’t just mean that we have become more aware of the sensory side of reading; it also means that watching has become a more conceptual, more reflective activity. And that terms that used to stand for superficiality, for absorbing transitory visual impressions at a glance, such as ‘scanning’, ‘leafing’, ‘browsing’, ‘watching’, have developed into the most significant concepts of our culture.
Here, oversight is becoming more important than insight. You can lament this and say that the depth that was so connected to the old reading – penetrating deeply into a text is fathoming the world behind reality – dissolves in a view without dimensions. But that comes down to rendering a new phenomenon in old concepts. Something like designing the recently invented automobile as a horseless carriage. You see what is missing from the device, but not what you have gained in its place. The new oversight is not, as it used to be thought of, a perspective on an expanse of plain, but penetrates deeply into the transparent and limitless space of data that the world has become. Oversight is: seeing what links or can link the data. Anyone observing the current profusion of data visualizations that help us understand a reality caught in figures – a reality that used to be called virtual but is now becoming more real than the real – knows what I mean: the image has become a text, the real significance of which is in its property of having us understand what it means at a glance. Once we start reading longer, we are in danger of losing our way in incoherent details.
Like text and image, insight and oversight are growing closer together, merging into each other. Perhaps even the old hierarchy will be reversed: reading, then, will be understood as the scanning activity that gains us oversight and enables us from there to gather significance, to choose (gathering and choosing are, after all, two ancient meanings of ‘lecture,’ the Latin root of which means both), and watching will become the word for what we realize when we pause at something for longer than a transitory moment. If you really want to fathom something, you will have to watch. Long and intensively, just like former times with a book in your lap on the sofa.
Max Bruinsma is an independent design critic and editor-in-chief of Items, the Dutch review of design.
7. If Words, Then Reading – Anne Burdick
If interface, then navigation. If disguise, then disclosure. If map, then itinerary. If resource, then use. If environment, then wayfinding. If plan, then practice. If erasure, then reconstruction. If sketch, then animation. If architecture, then dwelling. If capture, then release. If trace, then archeology. If program, then process.
Anne Burdick is a designer, writer, and curator as well as the Chair of the graduate Media Design Program (MDP).
8. Flowing Together – Vito Campanelli
Maybe it’s trite but when I reflect on the evolution of reading modalities I cannot do without thinking that, in the present historic moment, we are witnessing an epochal 'change of status': from the invention of the alphabet to mechanical movable type printing and even to deconstructionism (Derrida, above all), the text was organized into rigid structures that, despite the heterogeneity of their evolutionary trajectories, have come to constitute as many cages. We know that a cage means a condition in which every possibility is ordered to remain confined within it, so that – to take some practical examples – the interpretation of a written text or its reworking, not being able to take place outside that precise form/cage in which the text was shaped, inevitably end in adapting themselves to the rules of the game and to the set of finite possibilities of that very context. The various dominant forms, characteristic of specific ages, have determined the 'thought form' of their time, so that alphabetic writing is a prerequisite for the emergence of historical consciousness; the printed book is crucial for the spread of a generalized confidence in the linear progress of science, without which there would be no industrial revolution; and so on.