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New Age Reading

Perhaps different reading formats each have a particular osmotic capacity to absorb composite media. This is evident in print where a native capacity to diagram scientific concepts was seamlessly integrated into the printed book. From the 16th century to modern publications such as Steven Wolfram's A New Kind of Science or Edward Tufte's Graphic Display of Quantitative Information the assimilation of diagrammatic content into print has been natural.

Adrian Johns describes this assimilation beautifully in his introduction to Walter Ong's Ramus. He suggests that the process not only converges with the potential of a technical medium, but also with a way of thinking. "The idea that thinking could be reduced to an act of spatial arrangement and display proved immensely important to practicing teachers. In the century between 1550 and 1650 Ramism gained adherents beyond number. When it then vanished as an explicit intellectual cause, it did so not so much because its limitations had become apparent - they had always been that - as because the attitude it embodied had become prerequisite for the act of thinking itself."

Motion and audio were naturally assimilated by the screen format during the advent of cinema. The rich assimilation of media by the networked computer screen appears equally inevitable. Likewise a momentum toward perceptual habits in accord with such presentation is also apparent, probably especially in the field of education.

What else? Certain assimilations did not occur. The publishers' device of including a CD in a printed book or URLs in a print bibliography have been bodily rejected by the print medium. What enrichments have been problematic to screen presentation? Here we can see the problems that proliferation of channels brought to television, inducing a viewer behavior that disrupted sustained programming. Likewise the presentation of YouTube has induced a reading skill for deselection, while compromising and distracting from the very reading environment that it wishes to cultivate. The computer screen in essence has naturally induced a deconstructive reading behavior exemplified by dispersive linking and cultivating counter skills of deselection and inattention. Somehow the efficiency (or legibility and immediacy of meaning) of screen reading seems to be continually displaced by elaborations. Well we know where that propensity went with print!

Experiments exemplified by StorySpace and Sophie do not have the luxury of centuries of perspective that the diagramatic presentation of print provides. But I am always told that current progressions are much quicker and that they actually occur within the life spans of software developers themselves. Anyway, persistence is not a native virtue in screen reading....just the opposite.