Randoe is director of Randoe Verandermanagement and founder of the Institute of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool Amsterdam.
52. Arrangements – Bernhard Rieder
Having been part of collections, libraries, and catalogues for centuries, the book is increasingly embedded into digital databases of various kinds. As a data object it is not only an expression of cultural ingenuity, but also an arrangement of words, sentences, and paragraphs that can be counted and processed in innumerable ways. By comparing word frequency distributions, degrees of similarity between books can be calculated in a heartbeat; 'modeled' knowledge allows for the extraction of names, places, dates, and more abstract concepts from millions of pages per second; with the help of shopping profiles, customer reviews, and statistical representations of actual reading patterns, extracted from data collected by eBook readers, database companies like Amazon and Google rank, filter, connect, and suggest in real time. These techniques have become part of our routine: they structure the way we find books, decide whether and how to read them, explore their contents. Access to the universe of books now leads more often through an algorithm than through a library door – and the new mediators are mostly private companies that seek to transform the 'computational potential' (Jean-Claude Guédon) of vast book collections into sale and click streams rather than explore the immense opportunities for new ways of knowing. Is it time to put 'data politics' on the agenda?
Bernhard Rieder is an assistant professor for New Media at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam .
53. Desecration of Reading – Paul Rutten
Information consumption, and that includes reading, can in principle take place everywhere. Electronic networks offer information to the farthest corners of the world. Efforts by research institutes and companies are aimed at making information omnipresent; a cloud of permanently available and accessible intelligence. With this, we arrive in the era of unbound information. The marriage between specific information and dedicated media has been finally dissolved through digitization. With digitization, the relationship between printed media and reading has definitely come to an end, we read from walls and coins, and from screens and streets. The current technology development is on the point of final desecration, by digitizing the icon of enlightened culture, the printed book. In this process, reading is stripped of both its status and its form. Some cultural critics see this as a degeneration of culture, while others celebrate it as the final unlocking of information and culture for everybody. The greatest challenge is to provide everybody with access, regardless of the institutional, commercial, and social barriers.
Information consumption, and that includes reading, can in principle take place everywhere. Electronic networks offer information to the farthest corners of the world. Efforts by research institutes and companies are aimed at making information omnipresen
54. Epi-phany Plea for a Counter-culture of Un-reading and Un-writing – Johan Sanctorum
The advance of Internet and the new ‘social networks’ regularly leads to culture-pessimistic deliberations: we shall no longer be capable of understanding texts and making links. But the comprehension of a text is acquired and preconditioned by power relationships. The links are always conventional, and determined by tradition, fashion, or the hype culture. The radical break with the cultural conventions would then consist of un-associating and not making links. That leads to a double counter culture: that of the ‘un-writing’ and the ‘un-reading’.
Today, we find ourselves in an infinite network of images, texts, stories. We are terrorized, partly via the mandatory social intercourse, by the intertext, the communication hysteria, the obsessive neurosis to have to link everything together. The counter movement is that of striking things out.
The new writer escapes from all stories and also decomposes his own stories. He is the absolute amateur or ‘man-without-qualities’. Everything remains one-off, unrecognizable for the outside world, awkward and jagged, in the stage of experimentation. The ultimate boundary is the writer of the unwritten book, that only exists as an intention. The best book is the unwritten book.
The existing scientific, cultural, artistic, or political domains, always working with selection norms and communicative criteria, completely ignore the epiphany – the own interpretation. The Internet is an enormous biotope for this trans-communicative amateurism, that on the other hand possibly contains the germ of a new, non-levelling mass culture. The blog in that sense is not an individual Internet newspaper (that is a typical media-sociological confusion), but rather a diary left laying around which accidentally comes across a reader, who is aware of his indiscretion and the impossibility of decoding. In this way, a new reader also emerges: the ‘surfer’ who appreciates the text as a mystery and thus respects it, as an ‘absent-minded’ passerby.
I like people who read books they don’t understand. I prefer to read books in a language I do not master: sentences, words, symbols that reveal nothing, preferably in a different alphabet, Chinese, Arabic, or Sanskrit. The new reader is an un-reader, an accidental finder of inscriptions that cannot be decoded, which he may momentarily touch but further leaves intact. Everything that presents itself as public, communicable, able to be integrated is then mercilessly exposed. I un-read only a certain type of book, which I suspect were not written in order to be understood. Epiphanies, texts that have never been published, but have appeared, or perhaps not. I respect them as a labyrinth of words that only have a meaning inside the mind of their inventor.
In a technopolis dominated by speed and immediacy, we may wish to create delay, search for mystery, and send messages to an intermediate space that offers comfort to both message and the messenger. Completely on the outskirts of cyberspace, a meeting can take place between the un-writer and the un-reader. Accidental, perhaps. Do we call this a moment of fortune?
Johan Sanctorum is a Flemish columnist, essayist, and philosopher.
55. Savouring Thoughts – Louise Sandhau
I admit it. I’ve stopped reading. Well, not really perhaps. I consume words. That’s not the issue. They come in through my ears, my eyes, and occasionally I have to eat them. Is it age? The age of many media? A bit of both I suspect. And what I do consume – are they morsels to sustain or just to entertain… or soothe?
Sleepless nights and long drives, I listen. Mysteries are for the road, while light-hearted banter is best on the pillow. (I blush at my disclosure.) But in one ear and out the other.
Sustenance it seems still needs to come through the eyes. Something about the shape and space of words. Yes, on a page; materialized into ink-like-ness on flat white rectangles of permanence or it remains reconfigurable bits in my brain – flotsam and jetsam of thoughts that don’t add up.
Give me complex thought elaborated on a folio and I’ll get out my knife and fork, savouring every bit and relish it as I ingest the experience!
And, by the way, did I mention my fear of phones.
Louise Sandhaus is owner of LSD (Louise Sandhaus Design), full-time faculty at CalArts and board member of AIGA.
56. The Stutter in Reading (Call for a New Quality of Reading ) – Niels Schrader
Reading is the process of consuming information. It cannot exist without the action of producing information and the two can simply not be addressed separately. Therefore, to understand how reading will change, we should consider the act of communication in general.
Based on the concept of history, reading and writing unfold into an ever-evolving linear code. As communication habits keep adapting to new lifestyles and technological developments, communicating through and with computers stimulates a new, numerical, structure of information. Here, concepts are displayed as a mosaic of numbers (Latin calculi) rather than a sequence.
The ease of use and the pace of technological developments stimulate the fragmentation of texts. The linearity is being broken up as browsing effectively means navigation through short fragments distributed over multiple accessible sources. Chunks of different style, form, language, or format.
Consequently the future of reading lies in learning how to lay a thread of reasoning between these disconnected fragments. We will have to learn hyperlinking in communication and, eventually, speaking HTML. Otherwise communication will undoubtedly evolve into stuttering. Only those who develop a new quality of reading, will continue to understand the world.
Niels Schrader is founder of Mind Design in Amsterdam and lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague .
57. I Read in the Mind – Ray Siemens
I read in the mind. For all the physical locations of reading one might choose (at home, at the office, in the garden), for all the bodily points of interaction (eye, fingers, hands, sometimes the tongue to wet a finger to turn a page), for all the material manifestations of reading devices (scroll, book, letter, napkin even, iPad), and for all the affordance-oriented technological apparatus associated with reading (eyeglasses, candle or light, manuscript marginalia, indexes, wordless, tweets, search screens, and distribution lists, database back-end with pertinent corpora)… For all this, the place of reading ultimately is, for me, in my mind, with reading as a technologically-facilitated, intellectually-centred emotional and physical act, one in which acts of community are established and shared across time and space. The most prominent advances made in reading technologies over time have been pragmatic interventions that ultimately facilitate, serve, and support the ability of the mind to act as a place of reading; we would do best to look in this direction for our next advances in reading- related resources.
Ray Siemens holds the Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing at the University of Victoria and leads the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL).
