74. Dancing Words – Francisco van Jole
In the second half of the twentieth century, the arrival of vinyl and the transistor made music permanently available to everybody. And the first thing that perished was the dance. Before this, dancing was subject to rules, encapsulated in formats. Waltz or foxtrot, Charleston or tango. Each had its own demands that the dancer had to satisfy. That drawing up of rules is part of restricted availability: making as efficient and intense use as possible of what is available. Scarcity exacts discipline. ‘I cannot dance’ means: I haven’t mastered the rules.
Subsequently, dancing became self-invented rhythmic movements of the body There is practically complete freedom, with no or very few rules. Everybody does whatever they like.
A similar liberation arose with the digitization of language. The computer, thanks to the word processor and email, was the first to ensure that written language, with all its specific format rules, was ousted by spoken language. Then the SMS message appeared and put pay to the most elementary spelling rules, like a sort of house music of written language. It is all about the ability to express instead of mastering skills. For the language purist, it is destruction; for the user it is liberation. More people than ever express themselves in writing.
At the same time, the image is in the ascendency. When I am searching for the meaning of a word in a foreign language, I make at least as much use of Google Images to be able to see what it is at a glance as Google Translations. YouTube is used more than you think as a search machine or encyclopaedia. Ask yourself the question: ‘how does the heart work?’ and you know why pictures are preferable.
Images also win because language is too complicated, too abstract. The example that stands out the most is the smiley. If you want to replace this with words, you will need considerably more time and thought to do it.
For the lovers of language, that is a horror scenario: the image that suppresses the language. But regardless of the question of whether that suppression really is so complete, it actually leads, in practice, to the opposite development. Image language is not yet levelled out, the proper mastery of it is as yet a scarce skill, the rules are stricter. Image is the new field of the expert. As language once was. And before that the dance. Dancing words, that is automatically an image in your mind.
Francisco van Jole is an Internet journalist and writer.
75. Books Are Bullets in the Battle for the Minds of Men – Peter van Lindonk
What inspires more? A picture or a text? Stupid question, of course – sometimes a picture and sometimes a text. But almost everybody thinks that a picture always wins. Who hasn’t heard the sentence: ‘A picture says more than a thousand words’? It was first written by Frederick R. Barnard, the marketing boss of Street Railways Advertising, in the trade magazine Printers Ink of 8 December 1921. Frederick is honest enough to say that this piece of wisdom was not his, but came from a Japanese philosopher. He wasn’t, incidentally, completely honest: a few years later, he had changed ‘a thousand words’ into ‘ten thousand words’, and the Japanese philosopher suddenly became Chinese.
The answer to the question is: the picture has the potential of winning in all its simplicity from a torrent of words, but that does not mean that it is always the case. The problem is that looking at a picture is, in principle, easier than reading words. I say ‘in principle’, because just as a child must learn to read and write, a child must also learn to ‘read’ a picture, to analyse it, or even to reject it. In a world full of visual violence, ‘learning to see’ (not learning to look) should be a mandatory subject.
What will certainly happen is that text and image will more frequently be consumed jointly. I used to be able to listen to the radio and do my homework at the same time (something my mother wouldn’t or couldn’t believe); today, young people can also have their television on and watch CNN on their computer, with two split images and above them one and sometimes even two newsbars. Before I forget: making a phone call or sending an SMS via your mobile telephone can also be put on the list.
What is required is something or someone offering coherence and consistency, a sort of funnel. That function was for a long time the exclusive field of newspapers and magazines, but an end is coming to that. No need to panic: new filters are coming. You increasingly consume news via fast websites and Twitter, discover what your friends and acquaintances are doing via the social media. In short, there’s not much news coming, just more of the same. And moving along with greater speed.
And what about that book? The unparalleled brainchild of the individual? The jacket may and will change: the e-Reader, the audio book, the iPad, in Japan 180,000 titles exclusively for the mobile phone etcetera. Distribution is changing (recently, Borders, the bookstore chain in America went bankrupt), but content remains. And I remain posimistic, as my son in America calls it.
Peter van Lindonk is a publisher and writer. He annually organizes a congress called PINC (People, Ideas, Nature, Creativity).
76. Reading Surroundings – Koert van Mensvoort
Anybody wishing to know the future of reading must consult the past. I will skip grandma’s era; the age of printed paper was nothing more than an intermediary period. Let’s go back even further. How did we read 40,000 ago? We didn’t! Or so you would think. And yet that isn’t true, There were, of course, no media such as we have now. And yet we read. What? We read our surroundings. We read the landscape, the skies, the tracks in the sand of the prey we were hunting. This way of ‘reading our surroundings’ is something we’ve forgotten – except for a handful of Aboriginals. That’s a pity, because reading your surroundings, in which symbols coincide with events and things, has a future. An expensive description for this is Augmented Reality. And it is precisely what it says: increased, magnified reality. We drape a symbolic layer over our physical surroundings which must help us denote them. Buildings and events become text. Our surroundings become our interface. Context is content. And we human beings are evolutionarily perfectly equipped for that.
Koert van Mensvoort is founder of Next Nature and assistant professor at the University of Technology , Eindhoven .
77. Reading with Electronic Blinkers – Tjebbe van Tijen
This morning, an academic e-reader (MyiLibrary) again annoyed me by putting me in blinkers and only allowing me to read a few pages. I was so annoyed that I sent the following question to a Flemish scientist in the field of reading perception: ‘Various so-called e-readers with online book files have, in order to protect commercially the paper book, restricted reading to just a few pages at a time. The familiar, traditional way of reading, with pages open next to each other, has been made impossible, as has leafing through the book or jumping from page to page. A single, slowly loading page at a time – that is what is set before you.’
This causes me, but also many others – see all sorts of protesting users and people who have programmed work- arounds – enormous irritation when reading… That irritation is initially subconscious, but it soon becomes so irksome that reading such presentations is virtually impossible.
I am trying to discover what causes that irritation, also out of interest for what reading actually is. (I have been active for thirty years as a part-time librarian/archivist and I am interested in the history of reading and writing.)
Now my experience with a book is of a somewhat undulating landscape of pages laying next to each other, which appear two-by-two in picture (in which hand/eye synchronization… the tactile and the visual, and also the motoric, all blend into one action). This experience is damaged by the visual exclusion of the expected image of neighbouring pages, the constantly missing other page, which gives the physical, but perhaps also the metaphorical balance to the reading object known as book. Printed text is naturally first and foremost image and only becomes writing when it is read. When reading, my eye wanders, as in a landscape, across words, across graphic indications such as indents, quotation marks, differences in the typography, lists – you name it. Linear reading is but one of the actions that are undertaken. This information landscape seems to have a natural border because it is (often) held by ourselves and the eye moves like a ship on the waves and still knows how to keep its course.
Looking back and forward from one half to the other of the open book. Then the distinguishing localizations of our perception system come into play. The peripheral field of vision perhaps creates the space in which reading becomes a creative act. The current scientific research into what reading really is for you also has more refined terms about how observations at the edges of the shifting field of our focus can play a headstrong role. Parafoveal vision is a term that is used in this context. Could the impossibility of reading at one glance the field of writing on the pages of an opened book perhaps cause our eye to scout constantly the edges of our immediate observation as a form of verification of the meandering progress along the words and through the sentences?
Reading academic orations stimulates – I think – this rapid back and forth movement of our alert eye more than a more linear narrative, when we really don’t want to know in advance what is coming… It is certain that the single page of the small eBook and the miserly publishers who offer their electronic book versions in the 1-page format are systematically stealing what is and remains one of the miracles of technique: the book controlled by hand and eye.
Tjebbe van Tijen runs Imaginary Museum Projects and is visiting fellow at the School of Creative Media / City University of Hong Kong.
78. Better Tools – Dirk van Weelden
In the past, when most people were only moderately lettered and read slowly and out loud (obeying the rules according to the holy printed word), it was an enormous gift if you could also read differently. Scholars, writers, setters: professional readers mastered techniques that resembled sorcery: diagonal reading, fast reading, pattern recognition reader, and reading between the lines. And what’s more, it
