seems as if they were inexhaustible and so could read all the time and everything at once, without getting at all confused.
That speed reading now seems something that the average fourteen-year-old can easily master. Now we all do it. But the quantity, the speed, and the diversity of the texts passing by would make somebody from the seventeenth century faint. We can write something down while we are phoning, and occasionally follow over our shoulder a screen with news items and in another window scroll through search results.
Reading swiftly and switching, at random and recognizing patterns, gave a lead in a world of slow, straightforward text reading. A lead in terms of freedom, speed, skill. What type of reading gives freedom, speed, and skill if the norm for reading is fast, diagonal, springing, and fragmentary?
In the past, it was the magic of the written word that inspired authority and made them obedient. Now it is the magic of the media circus, with its overwhelming, multicoloured variety, its speed, its humour, and its recognition that make people credulous and docile. It is not Authority but Distraction that keeps us stupid. Resistance to it is a good way to start. Or in other words the ability to be able to choose where to direct your attention and to keep it there as well. Don’t bat an eyelid when an e-mail comes in, don’t multitask, don’t do anything other than read.
The second characteristic of reading that is freer and faster, and makes you stronger is this: take the text literally, read the same sentence again, out loud if necessary. Remember what you have written in this way. Think: how could this be said in a different way? Why do they say it like that? You develop a nose for incompetent, thoughtless bullshit. And an eye for the ingenuity of a surprising phrasing. If you read literally and slowly, you know like lightning whether somebody knows what he’s writing about or not. You see the secret vanity of how somebody lays the blame in a subtle way with somebody else. You hear emotions between the facts. The repulsive vagueness, the hideous narrow-mindedness. You don’t see all that if you speed read. Somebody who can read slowly learns to think faster. You reach an opinion faster – one that is based on something. Handy!
The sort of reading that can make somebody in today’s information society freer, faster, and more skilled works like this: continue to concentrate; look at the language and how it works; wait until the implicit and unintended in a text can organize itself and tell you something that does not coincide with the information in the text. Anybody who can do this has built up a strong immune system against the toxin in the stream of information. But also has a formidable tool in their hand. Your fellow speed readers are jealous of it and sometimes afraid.
Dirk van Weelden is a philosopher and author.
79. E-Stone – Jack van Wijk
Text is a fantastic invention. The idea is simple: in its minimal form, text is nothing more than a short or long sequence of around one hundred different symbols. This enables us to save, spread, and absorb information, whereby information can be everything, varying from a sequence of facts to an exciting story, from a business letter to a declaration of love.
Text and technology have a close relationship. Text can be cut in stone: a durable, but not very portable solution. We can still read on the Rosetta Stone how the priests of Memphis thanked ruler Ptolemy V Epiphanes more than 2000 years ago, but if we want to read the original we have to go to London . Paper is a much handier medium and allows us to take texts with us; with electronic and digital technology, we can distribute texts around the world like lightning. The telegraph is an early example of this, followed by inventions such as telex, teletext, e-mail, the web, SMS, and Twitter.
In all these new electronic environments, text is the pioneer that first demands space, followed later by graphics, image, and video. Initially, graphic quality is minimal. Instead of carefully designed texts, carefully set in accurately designed fonts, letters are constructed with a limited number of lines or with a coarse grid of dots. The reader, eager for rapid information, accepts this and reads texts from an illuminated ticker-tape and from grey green mobile phone screens. Perhaps we must accept that new technology restricts graphic possibilities. Wim Crouwel saw this as a challenge and in 1967 designed the New Alphabet: a font with exclusively horizontal and vertical lines, suitable for cathode ray tubes. But in practice it transpires that new technology is developed to offer a higher image fidelity, and a modern smartphone has a colour screen with 300 dots per inch.
With modern technology, text can be quickly produced and distributed by everybody. That gives a deluge of text, in which we could drown. But modern technique also provides solutions for this. Finding a word in a text, finding a text in a collection: that is no problem at all with a search function and a search engine. Visualization makes it possible to get a quick overview of large quantities of text. Examples of this are the tag cloud, or the word cloud, with which key words can be indicated; Vox Civitas, a tool which can analyze, for example, 160,000 tweets during a speech by Obama; and ThemeScapes, coloured mountainscapes in which collections of similar documents appear as mountain tops.
Electronic text is transitory. Often that is no problem, not every SMS is equally important, but sometimes you receive a message that effects you and you want to keep it. I see here a gap in the market. Send your SMS to a service that is newly established with the working name SMS4ever. Your message is sent to a computer-driven milling machine and a day later you receive your message engraved in either granite or marbel as specified, immortalized for eternity!
Jack van Wijk is Professor Visualization at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).
80. Mushrooms and Truffles – Astrid Vorstermans
How do illiterates and young children read? They don’t read text, but can often point out pictures with the best of them. I spoke to a woman who had been illiterate until she reached the age of forty and had developed a range of clever tricks to distil information from images and context. Until she started reading lessons and learned the difference between the targeted pointing out of information, and savouring text and image for their own qualities.
Gradually I learn to read information on new carriers: Where do you find what? How do you use various media to give stratification and significance to certain questions and content? How do data branch out and how do tracks merge? I find a way in the sea of possibilities. Internet is an ideal source for the latest news, for the weather forecast, and for train cancellations and delays, and while doing that I learn where I can find more and more exciting things. I notice that I still use Internet only as a targeted way to solutions and answers, and, funnily enough, I often use it in the same way as ‘old’ media: if the information is more profound, then I make a print and read it with much more attention than the information on the screen.
But what to do with smell, taste, rhythm, texture, and so on? The information that I acquire via the path of the screen is, for me, a mushroom: nutritious, light, easily and cheaply produced and consumed, no after-taste. Books offer a different experience: the tension curve and concentration is different, and the paper, the rustling, the texture, and the smell, the suppleness of the cover, the typography invite you not just to absorb information, but can, in the proper case, evoke seduction, delay, greed, introversion, excitement, and eroticism.
Astrid Vorstermans is an art historian, and founder, editor and publisher of Valiz.
81. Book It – McKenzie Wark
I define book as any fairly long, more or less continuous act of reading with some more or less consistent thread.
It is probably always the case that a book in this sense is not the same as the bound-together pages of the thing usually called book.
When did we start thinking that the book designated some kind of unity? How many bound books actually ever manage to be consistent and coherent enough to warrant its status as being properly booked?
In English, to make a booking is to add something to a collectively authored book, usually a work of appointments. Why not think of booking more broadly?
A booking could be both the writing and reading that produces a more or less consistent, coherent experience where a book appears.
These days booking is a do-it-yourself business. Read across all sorts of surfaces and eventually you find the coherence and consistency of a situation that really seems worth booking.
Perhaps this is what you are looking for, on your screens. Perhaps you are looking for the threads, links, conjectures that can book sentences together into larger realms of sense.
After the death of ‘the death of the author’ comes the birth of booking.
McKenzie Wark teaches at the New School for Social Research and is the author of Gamer Theory and A Hacker Manifesto.
82. Danger: Contains Books – Simon Worthington
The recent proliferation of digital reading devices has led to extreme format paranoia, as if the book is an endangered species, under threat of extinction. This overlooks the fact that there is already a lot of ‘book’ in the digital – the vector of incursion moving as much from print to digital as it does from the digital into our notionally stable, ‘enshrined’ cultural form of the book. As the number of tablets and eReaders in use doubles, and mobiles lose their buttons behind the glass of the screen, the interface behaviour of ‘the swipe’ is in ascendance. Is this not, in the end, also a page turn? And in a similar way, is the tweet not something like a margin note; the cloud ‘bookmark’ just that – a bookmark. If we regarded these categories more openly than we do – as ripe for mutation and adaptation, rather than set in stone, a legacy of history – then we would realize this moment constitutes one of ascendance not death.
More interesting questions, I think, focus on the composition of the publishing market – irrespective of whether that is for digital or print. When it comes to the production of books, the booster mantras – of ‘long tails’ and ‘here comes everybody’ – turn out to be misguided fantasies, distractions from the fact that the top twelve publishers make 65 percent
