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READING MODES

Introduction

Reading modes are fully different methods of engaging and deciphering readable transmissions. This discussion assumes that reading modes exist but it does little to define them or map their relations with reading media.

Instead, this discussion attempts to describe where reading modes come from; the modes emerge from inherent capabilities of readers and from technologies, such as the book, that support reading acts. Special consideration is given to the situation of the book in relation to reading modes. Another special feature of this discussion is the projection of a new reading mode.

The sections of this discussion are (1) Reading by Hand - the haptics of the book, (2) Reading by Mode - the interfaces for reading, (3) Reading the Future - prospects for the book, (4) Real Reading - confirming the fourth mode,(5) Reading Results - consequences of the fourth mode, and (6) Reading Persistence - preservation of the reading modes.

(1) Reading by Hand - haptics of the book

How the Hands Prompt the Mind

The Hand by Frank R. Wilson, is a book about the influence of the human hand on the evolution of our species. The book discusses how the evolution and use of the hands have shaped "the brain, language and human culture", and how the development of the brain follows dexterity. The fact is; the hands prompted the mind.

Wilson describes how the development of the hand preceded the advance of human intelligence and how exceptional primate dexterity is older than the entire human fossil series. The important transition of our own speciation was the descent from an arboreal life to foraging on the ground. Hominids adopted upright posture, but unlike, say...the kangaroo, we did not abandon development of our upper limbs. Some complex upper limb usefulness emerged at this earliest transition.

Then, for millions of years primate dexterity preceded increasing brain size in the hominid genealogy. This circumstance engendered a learning pathway based on discovery by manipulation and tactile observation. This perceptive channel of primate dexterity then prompted the mind toward conceptual thought.

The African savanna of the Pliocene was a dangerous and unpredictable place. To survive, small ground foraging primates had to be dangerous and unpredictable as well. The complex feat of rock throwing was achieved and practiced. It was practiced for hundreds of thousands of years. Gestures, the first simulations, emerged, again using the hands and upper limbs. Grooming gave way to gossip. Most importantly, as neurologist Wilson points out, practiced manipulation actually embedded concepts in the mind and these began to compile into a useful database. The practiced manipulations of tools and fire added to the manipulations of food and projectiles. The hand signs engendered layers of social interaction. Slowly, the slow brain began to develop, just to keep up with the disciplined hands.

That is pretty much the end of the story...except for one factor; the hands still prompt the mind. We have not escaped this deep learning pathway. In accord with this circumstance, cultures have directed young learners to hand skills for thousands of years, including the expressive skills of crafts, visual arts and instrumental music. We may be the first generation to demote this educational approach as we seek to strip education of manual activities and supplant them with purely visual learning. What has become of wooden blocks, real sea shell collections or battleships made from Popsicle sticks? What is achieved in such displacements is the amputation of the hand to mind discovery pathway. Even more risky is the influence of such displacement at an early age.

The Manual Act of Reading

I also read the Wilson book wondering about the manual act of reading. My question here is whether it possible that the practiced manipulation of codex reading also conveys conceptual patterns to the mind. The Wilson book is a matrix for this question, but is this even a useful question? Does the physical paper book somehow enable a manual understanding of print concepts? Stranger still, does the action and physicality of a book impose a particular receptivity to its content? Is there a haptics of comprehension?

Watch yourself reading. You may find that you begin to turn the page at the start of the page reading and that your fingers will glide under the leaf to coincide the page turning with the completed page reading. You will also find, pages later, that you can recall the physical location of an encountered idea. As Wilson says, our understanding of the world is too "cephalocentric" because it overlooks the role of dexterity. Specifically, and with regard to the relevance of the reading manipulations:

"There is growing evidence that H. sapiens acquired in its new hand not simply the mechanical capacity for refined manipulation and tool using skills but, as time passed and events unfolded, an impetus to the redesign, or reallocation, of the brains circuitry. The new way of mapping the world was an extension of ancient neural representations that satisfy the brain's need for gravitational and inertial control of locomotion. ...a new physics would eventually have to come into this brain, a new way of registering and representing the behavior of objects moving and changing under the control of the hand. It is precisely such a representational system - a syntax of cause and effect, of stories and of experiments, each having a beginning, a middle, and an end - that one finds at the deepest levels of the organization of human language." p.59-60

So are laboring bookbinders history's progenitors of the mechanisms of the appreciation of literature? Are books, in their actions alone, methods of literary criticism, inviting or offending the reader? Perhaps the practiced deftness of page turning is a clock that moves us through content; a punctuation of the page. Isn't it then possible that conceptual transactions are embodied to paper because this act itself mimics the deep efficiency of discovering concepts by physical manipulation?

At first this hand-to-concept path seems difficult to define and historians remark on the lack of documentation of the hand skills. The needed realization is that dexterity itself is a medium of information. Hand skills have been conveyed for hundreds of thousands of years by direct exchange from hands to hands. It can be noted that some people are gifted with efficiency and insight in reading and, of course, we can only wonder what portion of that scholarly gift is dependent on a dexterity at reading.

This is a stretch perhaps...but connect the dots here. "...brachiation allowed a new skill: the overhand throw. ....this made early hominids into dangerous predators." Throwing and catching and the immense bodily kinesthetic intelligence and grace of dexterity needed is not that distinct from conveying concepts in physical objects...especially objects conceptually accessed via graceful dexterity. Just tossing out an idea.

Further who can say what portion of our double hand and arm waving induced our propensities toward duplicities, contrasts, polarities and polemics. Perhaps the utilization of the two hands together not just the vise and tool but a dichotomy of sinister and dexter, good and evil.

So reading may be, in part at least, a hand craft. At least we see...from this perspective...that eBooks, in the context of the print reading mode, are obsolete. The new on-line reading technologies take a backward step to try to mimic the hand induced reading mode. The obstacles, involving haptic simulation connected with simulation of book action, are daunting and futile. How did we somehow know that all along...contrary to all the hype and hyperbole? Do the hands prompt the mind?

(2) Reading by Mode - the interfaces for reading

Definition of Reading Mode

But wait, what is a reading mode? As we observed with the haptic components of book reading, it is best to begin with a wide approach to reading modes that encompass all reception means not even excluding aspects of touch and smell. The parent modes (1) the verbal/visual reading mode encompasses auditory and visual transmission, (2) the reading mode of writing encompasses direct written exchange between an author and reader and the (3) print reading mode encompasses fixed conceptual works interrelated in libraries. These are the classical modes from Walter Ong.

In addition to these three parent modes, this discussion includes a fourth, composite reading mode. This mode requires layers of technological support and a thresholding and integration of the multiple transmissions into a single, screen based interface.

Such a scope for discussion of the reading act is at the far extreme of the study of the reception of print literatures alone. The discussion is also beyond a wider limit including reading of all genres of alphabetic transmission extending, for example, to commercial signage. Finally the scope is widened to include reading acts involving non alphabetic transmission that are present in the verbal/visual mode. This mode includes the reading skills applied, for example, to lectures or musical recital or television viewing.

Emergence of a New Reading mode

Much of the paradigm shift attributed to current information delivery occurred in the nineteenth century. Instantaneous communication, digital encodement, photographic and audio recording and mass marketing, all had their advent two centuries ago in a context in which these innovations constituted real shifts of paradigm.

But what has this to do with reading? The paradigm shift that the technologies of the nineteenth century were unable to provide was an integration of communication technologies into a single interface or a single reading mode. The individual and, specifically, the individual reader was left to compile various transmissions and interrelate them to accomplish useful work and useful meaning. Further investigation of the circumstance of nineteenth century reading, as for example the partitioned reading skills required for railroad operations, begins to provide context for the advent of a fourth, composite mode for readable transmissions.

The New Matrix

This new matrix of reading modes illustrates the partitioning of the three classical reading modes and the classical thresholding transitions and hybrid readable transmissions between them. But the new matrix also illustrates an important paradigm shift of the later twentieth century as all of the distinct parent reading modes were integrated, with immense technical accomplishment and support, into a composite, fourth reading mode. A diagram, Matrix for Readable Transmission, illustrates (1) the relations of the four reading modes, (2) the concept and examples of thresholding between reading modes, (3) examples of hybrid, inter mode reading, and (4) differing degrees of technological dependence of the various reading modes. The matrix also offers additional suggestions of (1) a transition from a classical, direct reader interface to an intermediating software between reader and content, (2) an implication of growth of meaning as single works are conveyed to multiple reading modes and (3) a suggestion that any single reading mode can now, technically be delivered to any other.

We will return, at the end of this paper, to consider further implications of the fourth reading mode. But, for now, we can pause to consider the consequence of a new reading mode by looking at the previous advent of a reading mode; the advent of the writing mode of reading.

The Missile Missal

Roger Bagnall, Professor of Classics & Professor of History at Columbia University, spent a week with us in Iowa City. He took time to participate in our class and took time to instruct all the non-papyrologists out in this province of the book studies Imperium. Among his lectures was one on the scroll to codex transition. In a very orderly and rich presentation he discussed the inadequacies of all the various technological and literary explanations for the transition.

While there is no argument that the codex supplanted the roll across a period of five centuries the explanations neither avoid contradictions nor add together into a convincing composite. The codex format was more economical, but the economy of duplex writing was somewhat off set by loss to gutter margins. Random access is somewhat facilitated by the codex format, but skilled reading manipulations were well developed in both roll and codex reading. Judaic injunctions for and against the use of the scroll or codex suggests an explanation for the codex preference for pre-Christian works, but does nothing to explain an equal transition of a subsequent preference for the codex in classical literature. Finally, new literary genres such as Gospels or Letters do not particularly favor either format or do layouts for accommodation of commentary and these factors really emerged at a later period anyway.

Let’s use another approach to explain the transition. The reading environment of late Antiquity was one still teetering between a majority tuned to orality and a minority even aware of the option of written transmission. The scroll exemplifies this environment and perhaps exemplifies the reading format of non-readers. The scroll was read by recitation and spoken delivery. The codex, however, may exemplify a new reading mode for writers rather than listeners and most importantly may exemplify a transmission format for exchange between writers. A clue here may be the papyrus letter of late Antiquity both in its folded format and in its emergence as an extended exposition and literary genre.

Roger Bagnall suggested that another important clue is in the evidence that while sectarians adopted the codex exclusively, the classical world did equally as much by adopting the codex in place of the scroll. In other words a more universal explanation of a greater magnitude is at work. He suggested a change of reading mode. Now this brings up a curious question. In a narrow sense, do books predate reading and is the advent of the codex a symptom of the transition to a world of text exchange?

Evidentially the reading modes emerge, persist and influence each other in a continuing, timeless dynamic of the storage and transmission of knowledge. Meanwhile another pattern of technological and literary production is at work. Here various media express the state of the interaction of reading modes at particular periods. The scroll to codex transition would be one of the earliest, while any television to WorldWideWeb transition would be a later example. The issue of relation of reading modes to reading media opens another investigation.

please continue to part two

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