simulations of other media offer a huge set of affordances for both the creation and reception of meaning. The sheer density of information and materiality of the contemporary moment is unrivaled in history.
Peter Lunenfeld, Professor in the Design Media Arts Department at UCLA. He is the creator and editorial director of the MIT Press Mediawork project.
This text is adapted from The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine, MIT Press, 2011.
38. From Noun to Verb – Ellen Lupton
Over forty years ago, the author was brutally slain in the streets of Paris . It was 1968. The times were dark; the turtlenecks were darker. Young people stormed the gates of the academy and upended the author’s role as originator and legislator of meaning. Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida pissed proudly into burning heaps of doctoral dissertations that had once claimed to ground the true meaning of written texts in the inner lives of writers. The author was dead; the reader was born. The new generation exposed the text as an open web of connections whose meaning lay at the mercy of history and context, reception, and appropriation.
What status does 'the author' and 'the reader' hold today? The vocabulary of SMS has upgraded 'text' from noun (inert object) to verb (electrified action). The telephone, invented to deliver the living human voice, is now used for writing more than talking. Along the way, text lapsed into the informality of speech, entering an age of stunning laxity.
Algorithms have become authors, too. Welcome to the world of 'black hat' search engine optimization, which uses automatically generated content to trick Google into sending extra clicks to dubious websites. Phrases like 'cloaking', 'auto blogging', and 'content farming' are part of a new wild west of un-authored content. One piece of software translates texts from English into German and then back into English, scrambling the vocabulary and grammar of the input to ensure a seemingly original output, immune to accusations of plagiarism. Behold the rebirth of the author.
And what has become of 'the reader'? Digital display technologies have transformed readers into hardware/software constructs designed to display, filter, push, feed, and aggregate content. Screen readers turn text into speech. Tablet devices host apps and files hewn from an astonishing array of file formats, competing for survival in a jungle teeming with combative standards.
Today’s 'author' and 'reader' encompass countless digital products and interfaces as well as human producers and consumers of the word. Designers are grasping the opportunity to aggregate content in critical and creative ways or to offer people better ways to navigate, annotate, and filter the digital word. New tools for writers help people compose text in more focused environments or to arrange ideas with both freedom and oversight. Web templates and print-on-demand services have broadened access to the tools of design and publishing. The author may have died, but his ashes were strewn upon the oceans of digital connectivity, equipping vast populations to broadcast ideas through the indelible scrim of the alphabet.
Ellen Lupton is curator at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in NYC and director of the Graphic Design MFA at MICA, Baltimore .
39. The Role of the Hardware – Anne Mangen
These are challenging times for reading research. For a long time, we have felt comfortable with developing theories of reading and models of reading comprehension mainly based on the verbal, linear, printed text. With digital technologies, however, reading has diffused to a virtually limitless variety of processes and practices with an equally endless variety of texts. How and to what extent are existing theories and models of reading able to explain what’s going on when we read the kinds of dynamic, interactive, ephemeral texts that appear and disappear in an instant, as in instant messaging and Twitter? The simple answer is that they cannot, at least not without a considerable amount of modification and limitation. Another challenge, hitherto unforeseen and hence largely neglected, is the role of the reading device itself – e.g. the bound book, the computer screen, or the reading tablet. We handle and manipulate the devices differently, for instance in navigating through a document. Hence, in order to accommodate adequately contemporary and future reading practices, reading should perhaps be reconceptualized as a multisensory engagement with a display of static and dynamic configurations, implemented in a device with particular sensorimotor, ergonomic, affordances which in different ways interact with perceptual and cognitive processes at play. As simple as that.
Anne Mangen is a reading specialist at the National Centre for Reading Research and Education at Stavanger University in Norway .
40. From Reading to Pattern Recognition – Lev Manovich
The emergence of social media creates a radically new opportunity to study cultural processes and dynamics. For the first time, we can follow the imagination of hundreds of millions of people – the images and videos they create and comment on, the conversations they are engaged in, the opinions, ideas, and feelings they express.
Until now, the study of the social and the cultural (individual beings, individual artefacts, and larger groups of people/artefacts) relied on two types of data: 'shallow data' about many (statistics, sociology) and 'deep data' about a few (psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, art history; methods such as 'thick description' and 'close reading'). However, the rise of social media along with the computational tools that can process massive amounts of data makes a fundamentally new approach for the study of human beings and society possible. We no longer have to choose between data size and data depth. Rather than having to generalize from small samples or rely on our intuition, we can study exact cultural patterns formed by millions of cultural texts. In other words, the detailed knowledge and insights, which before could only be reached about a few texts, can now be obtained about massive collections of these texts.
In 2007, Bruno Latour summarized these developments as follows: 'The precise forces that mould our subjectivities and the precise characters that furnish our imaginations are all open to inquiries by the social sciences. It is as if the inner workings of private worlds have been pried open because their inputs and outputs have become thoroughly traceable.' (Bruno Latour, 'Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces', Times Higher Education Supplement, April 6, 2007.)
But how do you 'read' through billions of Twitter posts, blogs, Flickr photos, or YouTube videos in practice? That is, how do you read for patterns?
Today people use a variety of software tools to select the content of interest to them from this massive and constantly expanding universe of cultural texts and conversations. These tools include search engines, RSS feeds, and recommendation systems. But while these tools can help you to find what to read, they do not show the larger patterns across this universe.
Computer scientists and media companies use a different set of tools and techniques that allow for the detailed study of such patterns. They employ statistical data analysis, data mining, information visualization, and visual analytics. They also have access to substantial computational resources needed to analyse massive data sets. For example, many companies use 'sentiment analysis' to study the feelings which people express about their products in blog posts. Recent publications in computer science investigated how information spreads on Twitter (data: 100 million tweets), what qualities are shared by most favoured photos on Flickr (data: 2.2 million photos), and what geotagged Flickr photos tell us about people’s attention (data: 35 million photos).
What if everybody had access to such techniques? At present, this requires knowledge of advanced topics in computer science and statistics. However, with the right tools, anybody should be able to at least explore large image collections and notice interesting patterns. At Software Studies Initiative (softwarestudies.com), we have been developing such software tools, and testing them on sets of different types of cultural images ranging from all 4535 covers of Time magazine (1923-2009) to one million manga pages. Currently we are using these tools to study video remixes on YouTube, images from deviantart.com, and spatial patterns in Second Life. We plan to release all tools as open source shortly.
Lev Manovich is an author of new media books and director of the Software Studies Initiative at CALIT2.
41. Reading ‘For the Sake of It’ – Luna Maurer
The longer I think about what reading actually means to me, the more insoluble situations I encounter. Everything I do daily – communicating via email, research, or production for work – means that I absorb a lot of text and information, but I do not connect that to the concept of ‘reading’. And so I read a lot during the day, just like everybody else, everything that arrives via our countless digital networks: browsing, scanning, searches on Google or Wikipedia. These are pieces of information, texts, or images that are consumed. Not only in the digital field, but also on the city roads. I consider all this as ‘knowledge gathering’ or ‘absorbing information’ – and it doesn’t really matter whether it is text or image.
The concept of reading ‘for the sake of it’ is different. It’s about surrendering yourself in the world of words. That means that language becomes very important. Part of the story is already contained in the way in which something is formulated. Formulating is designing with words. And just as we wish to evoke a message with a visual design, a writer can create an extra dimension with language. Designing with words contains a character, ambiance, or touch of magic that is lost in the ‘fast’ streams of information. If you surrender yourself to reading, you find peace inside, time is absent, a new world is created.
To explain yourself in words and sentences costs time. It is without aim and seems more like a journey. It’s not about absorbing information as quickly as possible, but about expanding your mind with thoughts and words. This form of reading is also an emotional enrichment. Peter Bieri, the language philosopher, writes: ‘An educated person knows
