mobile screen from, say, the Gutenberg project, the classics of literature completely free-of-charge. And when you have a spare half hour in the train, in the bath, or wherever, you can allow Kafka, Austin , Mann, Shakespeare, and the other greats to visit you. By allowing the classic canon to have its way with you in these transitory times, you get ever more insight into and understanding for the greats of literature because your frame of reference becomes ever deeper and broader. Never would have thought that reading things that are really worthwhile could become so simple in the Internet age.
Rick van der Ploeg is an economist and politician. From 1998 to 2002 he was Dutch Secretary of State for Culture and Media.
70. Content Economies – Daniel van der Velden
In recent years the economies of offline print and online content have merged as networks invade the book’s former sovereignty. Google Books transforms the currencies of page and chapter, and devices like the Amazon Kindle are increasingly viable alternatives to reading on paper. Interactions between book and Internet were eventually to boost book sales, but are of course supplanting the finite, limited nature of the printed object.
To secure the physical economy of book making, publishers resort to techniques of nostalgia that are at odds with the ideas of high efficiency that made the printing press a groundbreaking invention. Coffee table books now assume gargantuan proportions, rather like furniture or architecture – Sexitecture as one is aptly titled. If the end of print is in sight, these are the dinosaurs: a grotesque species that travels the earth, dramatically illuminating the critical condition of contemporary reading. It is a losing game if you consider a book to be the horse and carriage of the information economy, to be preserved because it is slow, heavy, and expensive.
It is conceivable that books will become dispersed entities, ‘content economies’, of which the physical object constitutes just one aspect. Live events, comments snippets, PDFs, blog postings and discussions, and printed artifacts may operate together in a new coherence. Consumers may purchase the printed book as a centerpiece in the midst of a largely virtual buzz. To design a book may become like the process of coordination required to fine-tune all these online and offline efforts, rather than typesetting pages and creating cover imagery for a paper object.
In 2009, we did an inquiry into the networked space of the book.* We targeted the seminal Manuel Castells volume, The Rise of the Network Society, and looked at ways to rebuild it without actually owning it or getting it from a library. Based on online sources (blogs, Amazon, Google Books, professors posting parts of it as classroom PDFs) and pictures taken with a cell phone in a bookstore, we retrieved about seventy percent of the pages, and collected these in between a cover printed from an enlarged Amazon.com jpeg image. The remaining thirty percent of pages were printed black, ‘informational black holes’. Visualizing the ‘content economy’ of Castell’s classic was a helpful exercise in realizing the extent to which the book, in a network society, gets disembodied from its physical presence.
Daniel van der Velden is a designer, writer, and co-founder of the design studio Metahaven.
‘The Netbook and its Library’ was carried out by Daniel van der Velden (Metahaven), Nina Støttrup Larsen, Femke Herregraven, Henrik van Leeuwen, Rozemarijn Koopmans, and Kees de Klein as part of the project 'The Architecture of Knowledge', initiated by the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Dutch Library Association, in Rotterdam, 2009.
71. Do Images Also Argue? – Adriaan van der Weel
The screens that dominate our lives demand literacy. How else would we utilize our digital tools, or the social media that have become so important to us? In fact we read and write more than ever before. Yet the primacy of text has passed.
Not only are the texts we produce becoming ever shorter, more importantly our communication is becoming multimodal. The populist expansion of audiovisual media we now witness finds parallels in the 1970s, when offset lithography democratized print production. Cutting and pasting text for offset reproduction, which could even be typewritten, eliminated the expensive investment in cumbersome presses, metal type, and highly skilled typesetters. Offset lithography generated an avalanche of printed matter on culturally and politically ‘marginal’ subjects.
Similarly, anyone can now produce photos and videos, often in preference to textual messages. Just as offset lithography supported-if not fomented-grass-roots movements for social change, the democratization of audio-visual media will prove transformative.
Images can be extremely eloquent, but they do speak differently than texts. If images and sound increasingly merge into the communication stream, what might happen, for example, to sustained discursive prose? Will multimodal communications replace textual argumentation? And if so, how will images argue?
Adriaan van der Weel is Professor of Modern Dutch Book History at Leiden University , and lecturer in Book and Digital Media Studies.
72. Read Me First – Erwin van der Zande
I read more today than ever before. This contradicts the general idea that we are currently reading less and less. And yet it’s true. I watch less TV in the evenings, and mainly read on the Internet. When I watch something on Internet, generally on YouTube, it never lasts long. What’s more, with the arrival of smart phones and tablets, any moment that previously would have been wasted can now be filled with checking the news, feeds, and received messages. We read more and more often, but with less concentration. Ecstasy has made way for distraction, slow media for hypermedia. Thanks to digital technology, we have taken two steps forward and one back. That is, on balance, still progress. But why doesn’t it feel like it?
Naturally that has to do with the quality of our reading behaviour. Modern reading consists mainly of glancing over, checking, and scanning headlines. According to publicist Nicolas Carr, this transitory reading behaviour even influences in a worrying way our cognitive abilities. If we don’t watch out, he warns us, we will forget the attentive reading that offers room for reflection and insight. We need quality time when it comes to reading. As if you are talking about a couple who, with the arrival of their first child, come to the conclusion that they hardly have any attention for each other.
It is a pattern that we frequently see arise since the digitization of media: there is more, but it is of a lesser quality. Take music. Digitization has brought us into contact with a virtually infinite collection of music. Initially, we exchanged them illegally using Napster; now there is Spotify where you can get millions of numbers free of charge. The audio quality of the music is worse than it was on vinyl or CD, but that doesn’t bother us. The same applies to videos on YouTube. The picture quality of the average video is awful, certainly when compared to the high definition pictures of some digital TV channels or Blu-ray discs, but we put up with it.
An e-reader doesn’t surpass the interface of a printed book, but with an e-reader you can take more easily more books on holiday with you. For writers, it has become easier to publish a book; they do not necessarily need a publisher and can publish the book themselves. The online communities are also very appealing to fervent readers; they cross borders and are stimulating. But we ourselves remain the biggest stimulus. If you believe that you read with too little attention, then you will have to free up some time. It’s as simple as that. If that doesn’t work – and there’s every chance of that – then you will have to be more rigorous: get rid of the TV, leave your laptop in the office, and get a dumb phone.
Erwin van der Zande is the founder and current editor-in-chief of Bright magazine.
73. Designing a New Stratification of Information – René van Engelenburg
There may very well be drivers who are an exception, but I think that for most, observing traffic signs along the road is an automatism. You pick up the relevant data: ‘here the maximum speed limit is 130 kph’. But actually the reverse is true: you ‘unconsciously’ filter out what is not interesting. ‘Prohibited for vehicles weighing more than 5,000 kg’; whoever saw that sign? And so you ‘scan’ yourself a route through the traffic.
An explosion of screens has engulfed us in recent years; from smartphones, iPads, laptops, touch panels on ticket machines, personal navigation systems, and public signposting, to electronic advertising panels and gigantic urban screens. The physical world at all levels is slowly but surely being devoured and covered by the virtual. Behind all those screens there is a world of ‘new media’ people who invisibly provide content 24/7: make apps, fill websites, do dtp, program RSS-Feeds, transmit broad and narrow casting streams, provide Twitter feeds, and very occasionally make a digital work of art. An incomprehensible stream of text, image, and symbols, which have all been thought up and designed by somebody. All those screens have an enormous impact on the way in which we experience our environment and influence our actions.
In this new world, artists and designers have more chance than ever to think about and to build that approaching ‘New Babylon’; the modernistic ideal world of CoBrA artist Constant Nieuwenhuis, where the architecture will adapt itself to the changing circumstances so that you, as a completely free and nomad individual, will never return to exactly the same place. Where you, just like the driver, automatically filter what is relevant information for you on your way to your next location.
The reality, however, has not yet arrived in ‘New Babylon’; the integration of this new media layer and the ‘old architecture’ will demand years of development. Museums, broadcasting companies, cinemas, and theatres, the classic providers of culture content, have the chance, and perhaps the obligation, to play a leading role in that developing world. They could begin by reinventing themselves by integrating all the various media layers into a search for new possibilities for the public that then not only absorbs information, but also shapes it themselves.
René van Engelenburg, designer and initiator of DROPSTUFF.nl; Urban Screen Network for the Digital and Interactive Arts.
