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Writing Machines

the book in its own future

Katherine Hayles new book Writing Machines with design by Anne Burdick, MIT Press, 2002, will be out in November. FotB had a preview and, like the Stephan Wolfram book, this publication looks like it will exemplify one of the futures of the print book.

As with her previous book, How We Became Posthuman, Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999, this new book will sway both academic and popular views on the influence of a new, composite, screen based reading mode.

As Kate Hayles explained, this book is a literary analysis and narrative....the running story of her review of a novel, an artist’s book and an electronic text. But, Writing Machines is also an ethnography of the technologies of composite reading mode presented in print. Writing Machines, from my glances, is layered with multiple meaning as conveyed by its visual design. The motifs of screen reading are really rather muted and the linearity of the text and its legibility was a prerequisite of the author. The few devices of video cornered cartouche and “screen” prints of insets and arrays of text blocks don’t really make this a print rendering of a web site reading experience.

Instead, this wonderfully designed book, is built on an inventive and fascinating iconography of a pure print book as viewed and read by the skilled reader of a new, composite reading mode. That is, visual conventions of a composite reading mode are applied to the print book without disturbing the parent print reading experience. This is one of those inevitable, possible reverses from the features of a composite mode back into the format of a parent mode.

For example, both the gutter shadow and foredge staircase of the opened book-spread frame the form of the set type on each page. These affectations are not. Instead the shadow is a diagrammatic gray scale and the foredge page splay is a register of lines similar to a bar code. Add to this a medieval, extended thumb index at the foredge which locates the opened page within the book thickness, but which is really a series of skewed, computer generated, tabs.

Layered beyond this is the print readers sense of interpretation of such thresholdings. The form of the set type bites into the gutter shadow rendering a copier like effect as when the worn transport blanket of the page feeder is printed out as a gray surround of the copied sheet. At least, that's one way for the print reader to interpret this reframing of the page. The print reader will also need to travel across design features of persona proprietary fonts, which again exercise pure, print mode reading skills, but are instances of voice activation as a back circling convention from a more composite reading mode.

Probably the new Hayles and new Wolfram print publications do represent a future of the print book. Maybe what Katherine Hayes says about the immenseness of the influence that electronic text and technologies of composite reading will have on the parent print reading mode, will occur. After all, as she says, we are only in an early stage of the influence.

But the future cannot be linear. It will more feasibly be layers of webs of interaction. For example, it is just as reasonable to assume that the transmission technologies that enable a synthesis of the parent verbal/visual reading mode, the writing reading mode and the print mode into a new screen based composite of these, can also enable parent modes to deliver themselves discretely, in new ways to each other. These technologies can decouple reading modes perhaps even accentuating the haptics and transmission features of pure print.

The only FotB regret with Writing Machines is that it was not titled Reading Machines. Authors write their own books to read their own books and certainly readers are not necessarily focused on the act of writing. Ted Nelson probably still has it right when discussing the implications of electronic literature. He used the title Literary Machines

Yesterday I was at the Iowa Student Union. I saw a student with headset on listening to a CD as she glanced back and forth between a TV and her opened book. She was intermingling reading modes for sure, but perhaps intermingling more than merging. The same technologies of transmission that have enabled composite modes of reading have also loaded our environments for reading with competing, discrete opportunities for reading.