read/see a text through multiple contexts at once. The chance to try out different frames. The opportunity to see discourses from a perspective other than ground level. Such a thing is difficult to envision, but it can be analogized to the current media implosion/genre explosion.
Digitization undoes the materiality separating media, collapsing them into one, multifaceted medium. This, in turn, erodes the barriers under which genres have developed. All of a sudden we are free to mix genres, causing an explosion of possibilities.
Through the same kind of move, barriers between texts/readers can also be eroded. Of course we can and do mix contexts and jump frames with texts already, but the process is laborious and difficult. This is compounded by the fact that our discursive traditions make transcending disciplines near impossible. Computational media have the potential to make such frame jumping easier, to become a normal part of reading.
What would such networked texts look like if not framed by the conditions of capital, but by free and open cultural production? One certain outcome would be the massive proliferation of frames that flow from the diversity that openness invites. Might we see another image of ourselves in this process, not as an aggregation of individuals but as a social entity?
David Ottina is an interaction designer, free culture advocate, and a co-founder of Open Humanities Press.
49. Pictures and Words – Peter Pontiac
Asked to share his or her views on reading, no serious comic strip artist can ignore the bad reputation comic art (or 'sequential art' as Will 'The Spirit' Eisner preferred to call it) appeared to have and still does: it spoils young readers and makes them unqualified for reading true literature.
In the fifties Dr. Fredric Wertham proposed a total ban on comics in his book Seduction of the innocent. A Dr. Schückler claimed that comics were 'the Esperanto of the illiterate'. And to this day the comic book is generally deemed the defective cousin of the pictureless novel. Pictures, however successful in telling a story, are simply considered inferior to words.
Neither the 'Classics Illustrated' comic series that started in 1957 with its boasting motto 'Lees feestelijk, groei geestelijk' ('When reading pleases, knowledge increases'), featuring stories by Shakespeare, Verne, Homer, et al (not always drawn by the most inspired artist, I'm afraid), nor the fashionable new label 'graphic novel' (also coined by Eisner) have yet changed this arrogant view.
Presumably 'word art' is seen as superior to 'picture art' because a writer, simply by using well-put phrases, provokes the reader's imagination to breathe life into a story and its characters, whereas the drawing storyteller shortchanges the reader, leaving less elements to the imagination. According to this way of thinking, film should have even less value than comic art, as film is one of many art forms that use more than just words to touch the beholder – art's core business after all.
(By the way, the fact can't be denied that those who cherish the Word and disdain the Picture find themselves in the company of bad-ass bearded bigots…)
But as long as the reader is moved, how this is achieved shouldn't be of consequence. Pictures and words are simply equal in their storytelling skills. A picture paints a thousand words, so they say, but – frankly – one word might just as well paint a thousand pictures. One thing though is certain: only a pitiful blind man wouldn't agree with the conclusion that a novel is a comic without pictures!
Peter Pontiac is a comic strip artist.
50. The Grammar of Images – Ine Poppe
When I was asked to write something about ‘the future of reading’, I googled to see what has already been published about this subject and what claims have been made. You could think up most of what I found in an afternoon.
A number of articles claimed that we were rushing headlong into an image culture and that the reading culture was disappearing or at least subject to intense change. The latter is certainly true. But language is still the spindle of our thinking. Our image culture is based on language, but now that language directs ones and zeros (just look at the code, commands, and software that serve as the basis of the web).
But image is also a culture-linked language that you have to master, and this is shown by Werner Herzog in his 1969 documentary about the Flying Doctors. The doctors who Herzog follows in East Africa use pictures to teach the isolated population about vaccination and malaria. Large boards show a greatly magnified mosquito, and also a man, a woman, and a child. Herzog hangs up a number of these prints, and he hangs up one of them upside down. Next, Herzog asks the Africans one by one which print is upside down. Nobody is able to point out the correct print: nobody is capable, in fact, of ‘reading’ the picture. When Herzog asks them to point out a picture of a man, they do not understand that the black line on the paper is a representation (and a condensed one at that) of a human. After all, a human is much taller than on the picture and doesn’t fit on a board that’s just a couple of feet high, and we aren’t made up of a line. The same applies to the magnified mosquito. Is that a small creature? In villages with some schooling, things are better; people there have learned to interpret pictures.
Reading image language is linked to culture: you need schooling, practice, and explanation. Reading written language requires more effort and a longer learning process; writing is abstract and complex. Through globalization, we have access to several image languages, and some are more dominant than others. Our current image language develops extremely rapidly, is becoming in a certain sense more complex, and requires knowledge about the ‘way of reading’: think of parallel editing and fast transitions in feature films. Virtually always, there are written sources at the foundation of the image: a story, a scenario, a plan for the structure of a web project, or design. That is why it is important that image makers learn to enjoy reading and writing; become fully aware of the cultural links and development of image languages. How pictures are read.
William Burroughs wrote an essay in which he claimed that written language existed before language was spoken. An amusing thought experiment that arises from the idea that it is not possible to think without a language. Much has been written and philosophized about this. I would, as an extension of this, suggest that without intensive reading and writing, image language has no future.
Ine Poppe is an artist and journalist with a special interest in digital culture, technology, and art.
51 .The Many Readers in My Body – Emilie Randoe
My father was a passionate typographer who, during his time at the academy, managed to pick up an antique English printing press and, during his life, collected a complete print shop. He taught us the basic principles of the art of printing. All three of us, because then we would at least be able to print a newspaper should there be on-going problems in the future with power cuts. After his death, I kept the mini-printing shop together. A newspaper isn’t really possible, but a daily pamphlet should be all right. And I’ve got enough ink to last me at least 150 years – all of superior German überkwalität.
My mother grew up in a period when children were strictly discouraged from reading comic books. As pedagogue herself, she felt that it really didn’t matter how we absorbed information or knowledge, as long as we learned something and did something with it. Thanks to her, when I was a young grammar school pupil, I collected all the Asterix and Obelix albums – in Latin. Nowadays, I can’t read them any more, but they still stand in a row in my bookcase.
People in my circle know me as somebody who is pretty smart about applications of new media and their carriers. But since the appearance of the iPad, I doubt whether I can still justify this. You see, I don’t own one and every time I go into the shop to buy one, I’m struck with doubt. If I were a designer, photographer, or model, I’d get one at once. But as change manager, I don’t see the added value, except that it’s a bit of a conversation piece when you get one. For the time being, that is, because at every congress I attend, the consultants wander round with their iPads under their arm. But every time I am just about to buy one, I simply can’t come up with the answer to what the iPad adds to my MacBook and iPhone.
So this is the context in which I ponder the future of reading. A confrontational question. I have kept track of my reading behaviour during the past few weeks and what do you know: for real reading, simply give me a book made of real paper. I can scribble in the margin, stick mini post-its at the important passages, and, very important, I can see how far I am and whether I have to hurry up – for a book I really want to finish – or actually slow down – because some books you never want to end. So for a week in Barcelona , I stuffed my bag with books which, naturally, I took home practically unread. The pile on my bedside table gave me a comforting feeling when I turned out the reading lamp at night. And how enjoyable it was – when I got back home – to sit at the table after dinner with my beloved reading the newspaper, tearing out articles, and passing sections to each other. The first thing I read is that my favourite newspaper is losing two hundred readers per week.
So I am one of the last of the Mohicans. Because in that very same Barcelona , my sixteen-year-old daughter explained to me how she saw the future of reading. She’s wrestling at the moment with the mandatory book list. She reads quite a bit, but few titles on the book list interest her. But fortunately that’s not a problem, she explains cheerfully, for you simply watch the film and download the summary from somewhere.
In Barcelona , the iPad once again pursued us. There we were, fiddling with our paper guidebook and the fold out metro map, and we see those clever boys – no clever girls, strangely enough – who really do have everything about the metro within hand’s reach on the iPad: the metro map, the information from the tourist guides, the newspaper from home, the latest news on Facebook. In the cafés you see that the iPad really does make sure that reading – consuming – goes hand in hand with writing – producing. And all that takes place in much shorter texts than the ones I grew up with and used in my training.
Emilie
