My oldest friend, J, fellow writer and most observant critic emails:My first take on (your blog) is hampered by my dis-inclination to read (with attention) off a computer screen. This is a real obstacle as evidenced by the efforts to produce a "reader" like Kindle. However, this may not be an obstacle for our kids but I worry about the loss of the habit of attentive, non distracted reading on our consciousness of the real, tactile world. Such may have been the medieval transition in human thought from oral tradition, bardic incantation of epic tales, wandering theatrical troupes to the emergence of print and the explosion of human knowledge.
My response:J, I'm probably in the minority of early adopter types, but I still think Kindles suck and won’t get one until they get much better. Christ, they don’t even backlight, which means I can’t tote it to bed and read in the darkness while my wife sleeps. That's a deal-killer for me. I might as well sit in my comfy chair with a book or my desktop screen which has better resolution. But what's zero sum gain for one reader is a direct hit for another. I maintain each student in this country should be issued a loaded Kindle and juvenile backstrain would disappear overnight. Poor #2 Son has had to carry as many as 18 lbs. of treekill. I know, I always carry them for him on our walks from school and several times have weighed the bloody things.
From feeding to locomotion, there are some human needs so old and basic that the forms of the devices that service them are elegantly fixed by function, if not physics. Simple machines like the spoon and the wheel represent design perfection in their spooniness and wheelishness. With reading, the issue (as J points out) is also form factor, but as acquiring knowledge is a relatively new human endeavor, it is vulnerable to being pushed, bent, perhaps out of shape by the delivery mechanism. Books tire the eye less than e-screens. Portability, visibility, tactility are all easy virtues of books. Length becomes a design issue when it tires the eye and undermines rather than engages concentration.
So my essays are long and I'm faced with two choices:
Write shorter ones
/
or
\
acknowledge they are long because they have to be
to convey concepts that aren't easily condensed
and help the reader suffer through them as much as I can.
From a book aesthetic it seems artificial to mediate a solid argument with jumps, links, graphics, pictures, headlines and other publishers eye-candy to titillate tired or bored eyes. Yet, the British tabloids know exactly what they're doing with their
(PG-13 rated) page three girls. This is how we train people to write for the web. Content design born of the limitations and the audience's declining attention span. Fifteen years ago, I wrote an essay on a concept I coined as "deep interactivity" which I defined as using content driven branching and non-linear information architecture used to create the kinds of deep, meaningful resonances and complexities a reading a long passage in a story or essay provides. To quote U2, I still haven't found what I'm looking for. Perhaps the quest is quixotic.
The printed page is a linear storage device. However experimental a writer's style, it will always be linear and thereby limited. Why is linear limited? Because linear compels each user to use the author's argument architecture largely to the exclusion of his own. The disk-based nonlinear storage of content frees us from linearity, offers us search, linking, bookmarking, compact storage, but it sacrifices the best of what even the paperback has to offer, the intact human voice telling its own story from start to finish. Reading itself seems to be evolving into something we won’t understand a hundred years from now.
The bardic tales were passed by oral tradition, so Homer, Gilgamesh, the Upanishads and a handful of the great oral works fortunately survived long enough to be fixed in the amber of written language. But what we certainly lost are lesser known tales and even the finest extemporaneous interpretations of the tale, because a scribe wasn't around at a particular campfire to write it down. It would be like a 21st Century saxophonist reinterpreting John Coltrane, without any original recordings to reference from. Each oralist brought both enhancement and degradation in his ownership of the stories he committed to memory.
Modern disciples of the oral tradition, like my professional storytelling brother argue that the paradigmic shift from oral to written tradition lost something precious, i.e., storytelling as a socially binding, community-reinforced experience. In workshops, conferences and festivals all over the country, a new generation of bards are subversively deconstructing the modern media to reconstruct and reclaim the ancient oral arts.
Tactility has also suffered. I keep coming back to it as it might be at the root of what J is saying. You can touch a storyteller, hear him, smell her, hold hands with an audience member during a scary part. Emotions and social engagement are subcarrier waves for long, involved stories. Tactility is another content subcarrier.
Books have a more reserved but still profound tactility. Papers, bindings, edges, covers, fonts, illustrations, the shapes of paragraphs so fixed and legible that you can see patterns in the way the letters line up. The smell of a new book. The smell of an old one. The soft flick of a turning page, the satisfying thunk of the cover closing to assure that everything you've read and yet to read will be in exactly the same neat rectilinear package tomorrow.
The web; keyboards, speakers mice and screen. We're still clicking away. Each generation abstracts the kinesthetics of knowledge acquistion a bit further.
Yet those who only look back without looking ahead (and J is certainly not one of them) demonize the web as an anti-socializing, anti-intellectualizing force, neglect to grasp something fundamental. The web has taken giant strides toward synthesizing the instantaneous emotional resonances of the communally shared story and the archival compactness of text, adding search, networking and infinite storage, a synthesis paper can never accomplish on the same scale. Synthesis is meaning and context. Community is meaning and context. Community adds complexity. The tactility issue is addressable by bandwidth and innovation.
Today, the Kindle, tomorrow i-glasses, which will let you read the entirety of the world’s web of knowledge, while walking, but only line at a time. Or you'd rather have a v-hat that plunges you full and deep into 4-d holospace. You could experience the classics of world literature in full Sensurround without ever needing to learn how to read. Will you want to? What will change next? Will the language itself become more pictographic to balance the inverse proportionality of textual and visual literacy. Will density and complexity of information continue to degrade or can a newer, meatier sensory-augmented alphabet convey more with less.
As our generation ages and dies off, many believe the trend of information decay will accelerate until like pond scum it blankets the surface and blots the sun from the deep spaces, satisfied to be skipping along the bright and superficial, the odd and confrontational while avoiding the deep elaborate organic tide pools where complexity flourishes and well-reasoned resolutions to multivariate arguments are forged.
Are we really the last champions of "complexity" that we so smugly assume ourselves to be?
Or are we witnessing the watershed of language evolution, the indrawn breath before the explosion of the new language, new concepts and new achievement in thought and word propel us to new heights.
Or did Gutenberg, like the Beatles, get it absolutely right the first time, only to have successors dilute and degrade the medium and the message beyond all future recognition or hope.
