shape catch a person’s notice? It’s always an enigma in the end: time and again, we realize that the deeper logics of perception are non-observable. They escape us, although they fundamentally determine what we find interesting, attractive, seductive – in a word: informative. This awareness that our perception in general and attention patterns in particular are ultimately opaque to our consciousness, marks us as decentred subjects, no French philosophy needed.
Whatever the underlying motive, the contemporary information user actively considers, selects, retains, and perhaps also reads, in the genuinely hermeneutic sense of interpreting or deciphering the overall, or 'deeper', meaning of a series of words, images, or sounds. This level of reading differs from immediate sense making, or minimal reading, that simply recognizes what one already knows. On the other hand, the maximal reading that most reception theories suppose involves a short interruption, a moment concerned with the difference between something’s directly understood meaning ('I’m looking at a picture of a man') and one or more other possible meanings, or even absence of meaning ('why does the man wear these clothes?'). The search for an 'exact' meaning is commonly coupled with deciphering the intention of the information producer. Whereas minimal reading is user-oriented, maximal reading is author-centred.
In an environment saturated with information possibilities, we read both more and less. As the minimal mode of reading increases, its maximal counterpart becomes rather exceptional (and thus also more 'elitist', even among those holding a university degree). Many commentators decry this growing superficiality. Yet we also process more information in greater variety. It’s therefore wiser to say that we’re moving beyond 'the Age of Hermeneutics': deep interpretation of some texts is gradually superseded by flat comparison of more information. Readers turn into comparers, with resulting gains and losses. While we have more points of reference, we are less adept at savouring the richness of a singular bit of information. In an information-rich society, authentic astonishment also becomes a scarce good.
Rudi Laermans is professor of theoretical sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Leuven.
34. Reading Apart Together – Warren Lee
Books have in many ways become an integral part of my life; I have been in the book business now for forty years. I have done just about everything in the trade except operate a printing press and I have learned that books have souls; I know this because I know how difficult it is to throw one away, if it has reached that point of no return at the end of the value scale. There is a voice which keeps saying: 'Find a way to let me live on'.
I read for pleasure and I would rather read a hardbound book than a paperback, and, I love well designed books; books which become something more than just a receptical for words and pictures. Books which become objects of desire, for which collectors will do almost anything to own. A weakness that is well known to bookdealers and often used to profitable results.
It is the tactility of books which I feel will be their salvation in the onslaught of electronic paper, eBooks, and still unheard of new inventions. I was reminded of this only recently while sitting in the Eurostar coming from London . I had settled into my seat and taken out the book I was reading at that time; an English gentleman sat down next to me, opened his briefcase and took out his Kindle and also started reading. We were both seriously into our reading for some time but I found myself reflecting on our parallel situation. There came a point when I interrupted him to ask how he found the experience of reading electronically as compared to a printed book. He laughed and said: 'But I love books and I have a house full of them at home. I read and I travel a lot therefore I just cannot carry around the extra weight of real books, and my Kindle offers me a wide selection to choose from.'
We talked shortly about the pros and cons and then both retired again into our reading. I was happily reassured that the book will not be replaced, but will find its place in the onslaught of the electronic era.
Warren Lee is the owner and co-founder of the internationally renowned bookstore Nijhof and Lee in Amsterdam .
35. Unexpected Ways – Jannah Loontjens
How and where we encounter literature determines how we approach the text. Not only do our physical surroundings influence our reading experience, but also the framework in which a text is presented or discussed. If a novel is discussed by Oprah Winfrey, it is easily associated with therapeutic literature and a women’s audience; if the same novel is reviewed in the New Yorker it is taken to be more serious. Exposés of the author’s life are often associated with lowbrow forms, whereas highbrow outlets are assumed to focus on the work itself. This prejudice no longer reflects reality. Highbrow media also increasingly write about authors’ lives. Yet as long as such exposés are printed in, say, the New Yorker, they are not considered a disreputable way of approaching literature. In fact, all media increasingly scrutinize the lives of authors to the same extent as they scrutinize the lives of ordinary people in reality soaps and talk shows.
People seem curious to read about private lives in order to reflect upon their own lives; it seems that readers do not want to know this information about the author in order to understand his work better, but rather to understand themselves better. While the increasing attention for the author scares critics, who believe that the approach of the 'autonomous work' is the only possible way to value literature on its own merits, I am convinced that literature does not need to be protected from bad influences. In fact, literature that seemed almost forgotten, or studied only by academics, is finding a new readership through new media. Tolstoy and Faulkner, for example, were suddenly popular, because their novels were selected for Oprah’s Book Club, which took care to portray the background of the authors on its website. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) also recently gained an unexpected new readership, because of the release of the film The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), which is partly about Woolf’s life. This is the way literature survives through, in, and via new media, and finds new readers in truly unexpected ways.
Jannah Loontjens is a writer and poet.
36. Consume Without a Screen – Alessandro Ludovico
Since the arrival of electronic media, visionaries have speculated on ways to expand our physiological reading limits beyond the constraints of print, in order to absorb, through a sort of cultural osmosis, huge quantities of information in a fraction of time. They foresaw what we now call digital technology, though originally imagined as much more powerful than today’s fare and often involving the body as primary interface. In line with their predictions, since the early 1990s we've expanded reading space almost ad infinitum through global networks of hypertexts. Now we're back again, considering the book the perfectly sized medium with a universal 'interface'. In fact, after twenty years of re- inventing the wheel, through multiple and unnatural combinations of icons, graphic and animations, contemporary e-reading interfaces resemble the most effective one yet: print.
Our desire for rich digital content on the go has yielded varieties of fast, precise tools that digitize print at will. We have more software options to make online text (often lost in graphical enhancements and ads) that look and feel like paper. Attempts to incorporate 'digital' elements in print have also generated various hybrids, such as POD (print-on-demand) files that can be updated every second. Digital and print, while two different worlds, are in no way mutually exclusive; they attract, repulse, and sometimes complement each other. Nevertheless our senses are still not trained for hypertexts and hybrids. Lost in too much information, we are distracted by the ability to search ad infinitum, floating in a limbo of minimal concentration. The finite space of a book becomes reassuring with its limits, its focus on un-linkable topics.
If the digital expands our possibilities and access to content, print is still the preferred medium for preservation. The 'convergence' of different media into a paradise ruled by some omnipotent digital god resounds once more like empty propaganda. The ruling classic interfaces operate alongside digitally specific platforms in a desperate attempt to establish a digital standard for print, as was accomplished for music and video. Once established, this standard will likely escalate our taste for and consumption of editorial products, with unpredictable social consequences. But print will not disappear. On the contrary, whether cheap last-minute up-to-date printouts or more expensive, limited editions, the printed medium is simply mutating as a physically enjoyable form and a future luxury: consume without a screen.
Alessandro Ludovico is a media critic, editor-in- chief of Neural magazine, and founder of Mag.net (Electronic Cultural Publishers organization).
37. The Networked Culture Machine – Peter Lunenfeld
The growth of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook considered in tandem with Tumblr and other social softwares that enable posting and tagging accounts, creates an environment of 'continuous partial production.' As ninety-nine percent of everything ever made is either purely for personal consumption, largely forgettable, or just plain junk, continuous partial production is not a huge problem. What does become problematic is when the new affordances make the old content untenable in the emerging environments.
Acknowledging that there are losses that follow every gain in technological capacity is not the same as blindly following the reporting cycle. The key issue is that our twenty-first-century cultural machines lead to a previously unimaginable level of object differentiation and information richness. The networked culture machine’s combination of embedded technology and just-in-time production make possible a novel hybrid intellectuality. Text can be linked to graphics, photos, and moving images in fluid ways impossible a generation ago. The combinatory possibilities of alphanumeric texts, still and moving images, aural components from music to spoken word, and even contextual environmental embedding, all of these
