statistics. Apparently, there is a difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ words, just as there is between high and low culture. That perhaps explains why we complain about the decline in reading and at the same time worry about information overload.
Is it really so bad if we read fewer ‘high’ words, less ‘crime and punishment’ and more twitter feeds? If we lose our ability for ‘deep reading’? Or will that be replaced by associative digital network reading, via tags and ‘likes’ and links, supported by video, or an instant translation from the Arabic, which is a mess but good enough?
I hesitate. Journalists must live with the inflation of the word. And the word, just like the masses, is falling apart. The inflation of the word is the inflation of the power – and of journalism.
What saves journalists is the story. Not necessarily their story. Or that of their antagonists, the politicians. Stories originate in networks, and are not told by the masses, but by small clans. Perhaps society will eventually have enough with these new stories, but I wouldn’t want to bet democracy on it.
But journalists will have to tell better stories and tell those stories better than ever. There’s more than enough shallow news. Even stories with a head and tail, heroes and scoundrels, sweat and tears are no longer scarce. But the need for stories that tell what we share and do wrong, how we suffer and love, is as old as mankind.
Henk Blanken is a journalist and writer of books on digital culture and new media.
3. From Books to Texts – Andrew Blauvelt
It took about 300 years for the codex (the book as a set of bound pages) to rival the popularity of scrolls and another 300 years to replace it completely. This easy to read, efficient, durable, compact, portable, and randomly-accessible format multiplied with the invention of the printing press and endured for the next 1400 years. In 2010, Google estimated that there are about 130 million unique books in the world. In 2011, Google had scanned more than 15 million books and planned to have all known books scanned by the end of the decade. In 1971, Project Gutenberg was launched as the first collection of digitally formatted texts (what we now refer to as eBooks). In 2011, many booksellers reported that eBook sales surpassed their hardback equivalents for the first time. It has taken only 40 years for digital texts to rival printed books.
In a reversal of the publishing process, digitization converts an image of a book page back into language – searchable, retrievable, scalable, and translatable text. This linguistic alchemy transforms atoms into bits, the fixed materiality of a book into fungible texts. In the future, most designers will be creating reading experiences not book designs. However, the codex survives for much longer than we think. To paraphrase Kenya Hara, the physical book becomes an information sculpture – a unique, haptic, three- dimensional reading experience. Counterculture guru Stewart Brand once remarked that information wants to be free, but he also noted that it wants to be expensive because it can be valuable. In the future books will be more expensive while eBooks will be ubiquitous – their texts having already been liberated from the codex will want to be free.
Andrew Blauvelt is Curator of Architecture and Design at the Walker Art Center , Minneapolis .
4. I Read More Than Ever – Erwin Blom
I like reading. I’m crazy about print. Everyday, two newspapers fall onto the doormat, every week I buy a pile of magazines during my weekly trip along the shops. But I read each of the publications less and less. In the early morning, I can better look at Internet for current information rather than in the newspaper that went to the printers half a day ago. And for depth, I can better visit specialist sites than read magazines that wrestle every month with a scarcity of pages. No matter how much I love the printed media, I increasingly experience that they offer me insufficient added value. I am slowly saying farewell to something which has always been so dear to me.
For digital media can be text and image and sound. With digital media I can chat online with other people about the subjects that interest me. With digital media I can get customized content and therefore more of what fascinates me and less of what doesn’t interest me. And digital media are dynamic and can be current at any moment.
As far as newspapers and magazines are concerned, publishers see new distribution channels such as iPads as possibilities to repeat their old trick one more time in a new packaging. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work anywhere. Of course people buy Wired or de Volkskrant out of curiosity, but after an initial optimism, the numbers sold have drastically dropped.
It is as logical as can be, but not, apparently, for the publishers of paper. In an environment with new possibilities, I do not want to be confronted with old limitations. I want my media to be diverse (also audio and video), I want my media to be up-to-date (latest information always available), I want my media to be social (be able to share content with people), and I want my media customized (matching my interests).
Is it dreadful that people are reading less, but are getting informed in other ways? No, of course not. Is it dreadful that the reading behaviour of people is changing? No, of course not. The people that think that only a doorstop of a book can provide depth and that a summary of short messages and interactions on Twitter has no substance, have done nothing more than take a cursory view of things. Adding everything together – blogs, Twitter, mail, Facebook etcetera – I read more than ever, but increasingly less with those parties that used to have exclusive rights to reading matter.
Erwin Blom is founder of The Crowds, a company specialized in social media.
5. Encoded Experiences – James Bridle
Books are changing, and the nature of reading, what we take away from it, is changing too. Books used to be physically malleable things that we marked, physically, with our experiences: dog-earing them, underlining them, highlighting, and copying out. But the books will not be physical for very much longer.
The great misunderstanding of digitization is to believe that it is only the content and the appearance that matters. That, to reproduce the experience of the book, we needed to make a screen that looked like a page, that turned like a page, that contained words. And the reason that we've had difficulty for so long with the notion of eBooks is that that is not all that books are.
Books are journeys, and encoded experiences. The writer has spent months, perhaps years, producing this work out of themselves. That devastating last line of James Joyce's Ulysses: ' Trieste – Zurich – Paris 1914 – 1921.' And the book is the medium of transmission of that experience, so that the reader, too, can experience it, and go on their own journey.
The books are subliming, they are going up into the air, and what will remain of them is our experiences. That experience is encoded in marginalia, in memory, and in data, and it will be shared because we are all connected now, and because sharing is a form of communal prosthetic memory.
When Walter Benjamin wrote that 'what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced by technological means is its aura', he was assuming that the aura diffused, that it was lost to the other reproductions. But digital technologies do not just disseminate, they recombine, and in this reunification of our reading experiences is the future of the book.
James Bridle is publisher, writer and editor.
6. Watching, Formerly Reading – Max Bruinsma
I don’t read, someone I know well told me. She meant that she doesn’t read the way ‘readers’ read. People who can spend hours on end with a book in a chair or on the sofa, occasionally turning over a paper page and appearing to have completely forgotten that there exists a world outside the sentences they are reading. No, she’s not one of those readers. But, I say, you actually read the whole day through! You scan articles and books, browse through websites and online fora, open and answer emails, gloss over newspaper headlines. Yes, but that’s not reading, she says. What it is, then, I don’t know, but I do know that on an average day she processes more text than many a ‘reader.’ I am from a somewhat older generation; I know how it feels to be immersed in a book. But I have to admit that it’s been a while. My reading also seems to be less than what it originally meant to be. Yet I would be too quick in saying I don’t read – at most that I read too little, but even that is not entirely true. I read differently.
What we used to call ‘watching’ seems increasingly like what we once called ‘reading’. Then they were different things, with a clear hierarchy. Reading was ‘absorbing content’, watching was ‘receiving an impression of something.’ The first was a conceptual activity that was valued higher than the second, a more passive, sensory affair. The fact that you do both with your eyes was less important than the thought that reading conjures up a non-existent picture and watching processes existing pictures. Only for trained viewers – art historians and design critics such as myself – the two were alike. Our looking is also reading; for us, a picture is also a visual text. What I’ve noticed is that since the irresistible increase of the ‘visual media,’ non-professional viewers have also become more and more readers. Concurrently, the idea that the only thing you can read is text is losing ground.
We, the homini visuali, do not only read and write words but also images. The form in which things appear to us has thus become just as much text as text has become image. Perhaps that is why she says that she doesn’t read – because reading is no longer what it used to be. Reading has also become a form of ‘getting an impression of something’. A scanning of visual stimuli, that are linked together in our head into something of significance. These stimuli can be letters or pictures, the difference between the two – once so fundamental – is fading. That doesn’t just mean that we have become more aware of the sensory side of reading; it also means that watching has become a more conceptual, more reflective activity. And that terms that used to stand for superficiality, for absorbing transitory visual impressions at a glance, such as ‘scanning’, ‘leafing’, ‘browsing’, ‘watching’, have developed into the most significant concepts of our culture.
Here, oversight is becoming more important than insight. You can
