adoring feet. With the side-by-side layout of Gamer Theory's text and comments, author and reader were suddenly occupying the same visual space; which in turn shifted their relationship to one of much greater equality. As the days went by it became clear that author and reader were engaged in a collaborative effort to increase their collective understanding.
Later experiments in classrooms and reading groups were just as successful even though no author was involved, leading us to realize we were witnessing much more than a shift in the relationship between author and reader.
The reification of ideas into printed, persistent objects obscures the social aspect of both reading and writing, so much so, that our culture portrays them as among the most solitary of behaviours. This is because the social aspect traditionally takes place outside the pages – around the water cooler, at the dinner table, and on the pages of other publications in the form of reviews or references and bibliographies. In that light, moving texts from page to screen doesn't make them social so much as it allows the social components to come forward and to multiply in value.
And once you've engaged in a social reading experience the value is obvious. Contemporary problems are sufficiently complex that individuals can rarely understand them on their own. More eyes, more minds collaborating on the task of understanding will perhaps yield better, more comprehensive answers.
The difficult thing however about predicting the future of reading is that everything I've said so far presumes that what is being read is an 'n-page' article or essay or an 'n-page', 'n- chapter' book, when realistically, the forms of expression will change dramatically as we learn to exploit the unique affordances of new electronic media. Ideally, the boundaries between reading and writing will become ever more porous as readers take a more active role in the production of knowledge and ideas.
And lest, you think this shift applies only to non-fiction, please consider huge multi-player games such as World of Warcraft as a strand of future-fiction where the author describes a world and the players/readers write the narrative as they play the game.
Our grandchildren will assume that reading with others, i.e. social reading, is the 'natural' way to read. They will be amazed to realize that in our day reading was something one did alone. Reading by one's self will seem as antiquated as silent movies are to us.
Bob Stein is founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book.
63. Is the Role of Libraries in Reading Innovation Fading? – Michael Stephens, Jan Klerk
Michael Stephens and Jan Klerk share some thoughts about the future of reading and libraries.
Michael, I would like you to consider the following lines: I think reading is the mother of time consuming activities. To understand a book fully you’ll need to read it in private for many hours from start to finish. Of course you can try to understand a text by ‘diagonal’ reading. Compare it to trying to know a Bach cello suite by just listening to part 1, 3, and 6. But you can only fully comprehend a Bach piece in a slow way. Time-consuming activities are under increasing pressure. There are more and more things that come up for distraction: we are living in times where you are constantly challenged to do things you actually don’t want to do. In my personal life this has led to a totally fragmented but dynamic information and media experience spending many small bits of time on different sorts of writing, reading, watching, and listening.
I’ve always loved libraries for the ‘slow’ experience. In a library you can easily forget about time. But times have changed. Last year most of the books, DVDs, and CDs I borrowed from my library remained unread, unseen, unlistened to. Instead I’ve spent an increasing number of hours reading and commenting on various texts on various online screens. Libraries have always been the guardians and perhaps even the personification of time-consuming activities. You could say that libraries therefore may not fit all to well into the Zeitgeist. What would you say Michael about the perspectives of libraries? How will libraries survive when reading, watching, and listening is becoming more and more a digital and social experience by using personal mobile devices?
Jan – I spent much of the morning reading Bilton’s I Live in the Future on my Kindle for a class this weekend – highlighting and sharing interesting passages to my followers on Twitter and Facebook. The potential for reading to become a social act of sharing/commenting and remixing is great. Then, I jumped into YouTube and reviewed a few videos for the class, using the favourite command to save them and share them. Imagine a future where an eBook, a video, audio, et cetera might seamlessly be shared and utilized to educate and entertain. As you note, the solitary concept of reading wanes whilst a media rich experience blooms across multiple channels and networks. These changes will not contribute to the dumbing down of our culture. The opposite is true: media savvy consumers and creators of content will be the renaissance stars of this future scenario.
Sadly, the library playing a strong role in this equation might be fading. I’m writing this the day the news broke in the US about publisher Harper Collins enacting borrowers limits on eBooks through the OverDrive service as well as requesting access to borrower data. This only muddles the waters further for librarians and readers with Kindles, Nooks, mobiles, et cetera. It may mean that the content available via the library may rely more on creators and less on publishers stuck in old models of distribution and economics.
Jan Klerk and Michael Stephens wrote columns together about the future of libraries for the Dutch journal Digitale Bibliotheek.
64. Slow Reading – Carolyn Strauss
By definition, ‘reading’ goes well beyond the grasping of written characters and the realm of ideas they express. Applied to environments, systems, and relationships, ‘reading’ is an act of interpreting, intuiting, even foretelling what may be.
Not surprisingly, today’s fast world has taken its toll on all manner of reading. More ‘connected’ than we’ve ever been, we’re increasingly disengaged from territories of thought, personal experience, and creativity that I believe are essential to ‘reading’ the world accurately and authentically. As the ubiquitous web, messaging, chat, friending, and tweeting force us into a constant state of reacting, we are left little or no time for turning inward, reflecting, losing, and then finding ourselves again to arrive at what we truly think and believe in.
Psychologist/author Guy Claxton warns that while today we have become very good at solving analytical and technological problems, we’ve lost touch with the ‘Slow mind’- the one more suited to addressing ecologies and systems. Two centuries prior, Goethe promoted ‘intuitive imagining’ as a tool of scientific research to reveal relationships and underlying patterns; he believed we should read the world around us not at face value, but in terms of ‘flowing processes.’
Both point to what I call ‘slower ways of knowing’ that can enable an expanded (maybe unexpected) set of ‘readings/interpretations’ of a given situation, place, or relationship. We need both ‘slow reading’ (verb› active process) and ‘slow readings’ (noun› understanding emerging from process) to arrive at information and tools for moving forward in an increasingly complex world.
Carolyn Strauss is founder and director of slowLab (US/NL), a laboratory for Slow design research and creative activism.
65. Cyclops iPad – Dick Tuinder
When we open the classic book, it has the proportions of a landscape. The way that landscape-like format works is not only determined by what we see, but also what we miss as we concentrate on a section of the show. What is outside our immediate field of vision determines our idea of landscapeness more than what we do see. Because it implies that there is something larger than can be immediately observed by our senses.
It is seductive, and perhaps not even nonsense, to imagine that the landscape size of the paper book has influenced the form which literature has assumed over the centuries. That it has given that literature a perspective and stratification which had to be achieved at the time of the clay tablet in totally different ways.
There are more matters connected with the classic book that must have supported subconsciously not only the reader but also the writer in his imagination.
Subtle sensations that make reading a physical experience. Naturally there is the smell of paper and ink. The bonus that is becoming increasingly rare of text set in lead. The fact that a book is not only a carrier of words, but also a unique object. But also the slowly shifting balance from right to left (or from left to right depending on where you live) the more one progresses in the story. A shift in weight that, with increments of a half a gram of paper for each page turned, also propels the reader faster in the direction of the end of the story.
It is also of the utmost importance that the opened book should fall into two halves. The left and right page. Naturally that is a logical consequence of the form of the book, and it would only be that if it were not coincidentally a conceptually flawless visualization of the core of just about all the dramas written down in books. Jekyll amp; Hyde, plus and minus, conscious and subconscious, will and imagination, war and peace.
You ask yourself why a medium that is so well equipped for its task should have to be replaced by something new.
Naturally there are all sorts of practical reasons for the school slate like format of the iPad and its cousins, but the symbolism is too coincidental to ignore. If the paper book should ever disappear then that will not be because the e-reader is a better idea, but because the landscape has lost its significance for the modern reader and his interest is primarily directed at the single upright format of the portrait photograph.
Dick Tuinder is a visual artist, illustrator, writer, and producer of (short) movies.
66. Context Is King; Content Is Queen – Lian van de Wiel
Tablet, eReader, laptop, smartphone. Add to that the information overload from Google, Twitter, and Facebook, combined with the overruling image culture and the trend towards a decline in reading. The changes in the information society take place at a rapid rate. But nevertheless, a
