now I was training several hours a day and I could read faster and faster. I was immersed in trying to make sense of more blur and more blur, puzzled by how my brain was adapting in this exponential manner. After 4 weeks I even read complex French and German texts that I could hardly read before. My focus and training on ‘looking through shapes’ had a deep impact on my understanding.
Opening up
The experience of letters ‘opening up’ is strange. One has to be able to recognize the shape to be able to read the words. But once reading, you don’t see the shape anymore, only words and meaning surface. Learning to read seemed to be learning to look through shapes and not at shapes. Peripheral attention registers the shapes, but words, sounds, and meaning emerge from behind and through the shapes. Letters are like the mise-en-scène of language, setting the stage for the theatre of mediated communication. Only when you grab the mise-en- scène do words acquire meaning and communication flows.
Centre Stage
Letters opening up requires me to move my attention into the place where letters are located. On the many devices connecting to the Internet, however, letters pass by in instantaneous configurations of a never ending mise-en-scène. I am put centre stage, where mobile letter carriers embrace my body with their bliebs and sounds and colour my personal environment. No looking through is required here; opening up one’s self is the only way in or out. All is here. What is it that we do not look at now?
Caroline Nevejan is a researcher and designer focusing on the implications of technology on society.
45. Achievement Unlocked! – David B. Nieborg
It is a question that keeps recurring among game critics. What if games had the same social status as literature? A gamer can search through the supplements of the Dutch quality newspapers and although there is well-wrought literary criticism, there is remarkably little intellectual reflection about games. And that is a pity for fervent readers and hardcore gamers have a lot to tell each other.
There is a world to be gained in the way in which stories are told in the average blockbuster game, such as the popular first-person shooter games Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, or Halo. The stories in these games can be summarized in one sentence and act as an excuse to paste a series of explosions and game locations one after another. There is seldom any narrative depth. Yet these games are played a lot. In fact, it is probable that many young gamers gain greater insight into modern warfare through digital games, than through books about the war in Fallujah, Baghdad , or the Korengal Valley .
The how (they fight) question is answered rather precisely by game designers. The why question is seldom addressed. Even though the interactive character of games can present the player with moral dilemmas in a different and more direct way than in books. In a war game, the question ‘What would you have done?’ is translated into ‘What do you do?’ Actually, authors in particular can help create believable characters, ambiguous choices, and applying many shades of grey.
Conversely, game makers can help tempt gamers to dive into war books. For games are not played for no reason. Before, during, and after the game, you constantly receive feedback from the game about how good you have been. Achievement unlocked then appears in the television picture. Such virtual medals can then be seen by all gaming friends.
Structurally speaking, there is nothing to prevent publishers and writers of books from adding such game elements to the book. Perhaps not in its paper form, but the average e-reader, tablet, or digital bookshelf is powerful and networked enough to add so-called ‘paratextual’ elements to the book. What if you could become better in reading books and could share that with the whole world?
David B. Nieborg is researcher and teacher at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht with a focus on online participation and gaming culture.
46. U-turn – Kali Nikitas
Alternative paths towards reading to achieve maximum knowledge, in the shortest period of time, with approval from peers on content consumed and delivery method, tackling any insecurity about missed information or simply not being smart enough, not knowing how to manage time, racing to consume material that will make you more civic, a better conversationalist, a humanitarian, a braggart, fighting the fear of memory loss, and sneaking away into the corners of texts on lady gaga, fashion updates when the nagging continues pulling you back to world news even though you can’t stand the misfortunes of others and your only concern is 'do I really' or rather 'can I really take the time to enjoy the comics?'
Kali Nikitas is the Chair of MFA Graphic Design + Communication Arts of the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles .
47. The Epitaph or Writing Beyond the Grave – Henk Oosterling
We browse a lot. What used to be written in thick books hidden away in shadowy libraries and which could only be consulted after negotiating a lot of red tape is now available virtually, fully illuminated, for everybody, at any moment. With a single click of the mouse or a gentle stroke of the touch screen, thousands of hits are compiled in a fraction of a second. At the end of the twentieth century, reading was given back, unnoticed and unintentionally, its original significance: collecting by hand. This urge for collecting still echoes in the old Dutch expression ‘aren lezen’ – reading the are. After harvesting, the farmers allowed the crowd of poor creatures who were looking on in hunger to collect the broken, discarded corn stalks.
We are collectors when we read. Not collectors of ideas, but of material symbols. The blind are the most sensitive readers. More even than the are readers, they read with the tips of their fingers. From within their dark universe, they inspect dexterously every pleat, groove, dent, or bump in the material. They stroke graphemes: symbols that are engraved in the world, such as the spoils on the hunter’s stake, to reverse the volatility of transitory existence. The grapheme offers resistance to oblivion. That is why the world’s graphic design is, in a literal sense, the material basis for a script culture. The grapheme is a grave in which the past is buried. But paradoxically, this epitaph gives eternal life to all that is past.
The reader is a laser. The seer touches the material with his eyes. First his eye flash back and forth across the medium on which the symbols string together meaninglessly. But unlike the illiterate person who, searching in panic for meaning like a Dutch tourist lost in China or Libya , only gathers senseless symbols, the reader sees meaning at the same time that he scans. The reader reads the world. Collecting is one of the meanings of the Ancient Greek legein that also means ‘reading’. Logos is derived from this. In logic, collecting becomes calculating. In science, calculating becomes, via registering, chronicling. Counting becomes recounting. Sciences arise from the urge to manage in rulers thirsting for power, the coquetry of megalomaniac priests, and the urge to collect of inquisitive world travellers. Through this combination, every form of systematic collecting eventually changes into an authoritarian -logy: astrology, archaeology, psychology, neurology. Knowledge is power. World is truth.
With the World Wide Web, we are back to the beginning and yet far past it. The circle closes. Data is meaningless and information contains no truth. Information is friction-less. WWW is like a sixteenth-century collection of knick-knacks. But through cunning communication technology, an ICTheological message is given: somewhere there is a resistance-less, eternal world. A world in which each fact is itself in a virtual current event where everything is possible. The world of pure potentiality is not made up of atoms packed together into matter. They punctually unite in a brightly lit, shimmering 1-dimensionality that is created by double passes between infotomes. We are beyond the depth and with it the epitaph. On the touch screen we stroke, without meeting resistance, as if reaching for Michelangelo’s The Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the foundation of our existence.
Henk Oosterling is a philosopher, and associate professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
48 Jumping Frames – David Ottina
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My experience of reading is dominated by the experience of browsing the web. I meander, dipping into conversations then jumping out to essays, sometimes settling into books. Yet ultimately it is a linear way of reading and although it may branch, the path I follow is only visible to me from ground level. I think this is changing though.
Every word that travels through the Internet is parsed and stored. Every touch sensed and recorded. Every connection routed and logged. We are identified and located. Our meanings and moods are derived and noted. Profiles are built. Our relationships are graphed and analyzed. Histories are compiled. As we read, so we are read.
The question is what sorts of texts are being written with these traces? Who are their authors? Who are their readers? And how are they being read?
We can think of the authors of these computed texts as the people who write the algorithms that set the conditions of narrative possibility. Rather than writing the stories themselves, they simply create the frames in which stories can occur. The readers are the ones who extract the narratives from this multidimensional space to create a coherent story. The creative role of the reader has of course been theorized, but for these sorts of texts, it's an imperative. The reader comes to the foreground while authorship recedes into the shadows, a purely technical function.
These texts are read in the hopes of monetizing our every communication, of securing a perpetual rent on culture. As long as the texts are created for exploitation and control, it seems unlikely they will lead to new understandings of ourselves. In this context, the social can only be cast in the image of the individual, like the aggregate figure in the frontispiece of Leviathan.
However, algorithmic authorship and creative readership can be put to other uses. What interests me is the potential of multidimensional texts. The ability to
