(1)
In our twenty-first century we can find several ways that convey information far better and faster than the Text. Poor Text, how can it possibly compete with television programmes in full HD, with video games or with interactive web pages, which are a supermedium, for they can hold text, image, video, sound, indeed even video games themselves? If we are to be objective, it is clear that text in itself is a rather archaic affair. Yet the all too quick and uncritical adoption of new technologies (media) has paradoxically meant that working with text, that is reading, is needed not less, but perhaps more than ever before.
To justify such a claim, however, we need to know what reading actually is. The first thing we will surely imagine is the strenuous mechanical movement of the eyes, the sense organ — rightly understood and admired as a miracle of evolution — with which we follow the lines of a text, then recognise the jumble of signs, store their sound in short-term memory and finally form a mental image of what we have read, which helps us remember it in the long term.
But reading can be understood more generally; it need not have (seemingly) anything to do with language. We often appreciate it when someone close to us can recognise how we are feeling at the moment without our having to mention our feelings explicitly. In such a case that person reads emotions, or is likewise able to read our thoughts. Not only do they notice the subtle grimaces on our face, above all they can decode their meaning. And that is, if we think about it, an almost magical ability, since our faces reveal nothing tangible apart from changes in the facial muscles or the tone of voice. When decoding these non-verbal signs, however, we no longer speak of reading in the passive sense of the word, but of the active work of interpretation.
Similarly, when reading a text, merely following the lines of words is not enough. From these linguistic signs we must first piece together larger units in our mind, examine how they relate to one another and how they connect. For that we inevitably need to know what these larger units mean. To create a coherent mental image of a text, its meaning has to be “dissected out”, that is, the text has to be interpreted. That too is why reading is a strenuous activity requiring a degree of skill, training, knowledge, a good memory and, last but not least, the ability to concentrate.
On the other hand, watching television or a video on YouTube asks rather less of us; consuming their content is friendlier, it forgives our inattention more readily. Why is that? Vilém Flusser argues that we receive images and then analyse them, whereas a text must first be received for it to be analysed at all. Reading letters requires:
more effort than reading [images]; it is less comfortable. That is why it makes the uncritical reception of information impossible. Following lines is a critical gymnastics of thinking (Flusser, 79).
Images, still and moving, enter our consciousness as a whole, whereas reading a text is like gradually winding thread onto a ball. Or we can imagine reading as the work of a potter who, while the potter’s wheel keeps turning, gradually shapes the final piece with her fingers. In the same way, a reader rarely finishes with a book after the first round of reading. An average book of average length calls for the reader to return to it after a while, to explore the corners that escaped them at their first touch with the text, to fill in the pieces of the mental image that remained unfilled, unformed, unfinished after the first reading. Reading naturally contains both analysis and synthesis, whereby the reader embodies both the scientific and the artistic perception of the world.
It would be very foolish to think that we could uncover all the corners of the text the author has prepared for us at the very first attempt. The author of a text is likely to be more educated and more sophisticated than the reader, and reading their thoughts will require concentration and attention to minute details. Even if we fulfil these conditions of the unwritten contract of the dialogue between author and reader, we may not be rewarded with a positive result, and we will have no choice but to read the text again and again until the imaginary ceramic vessel is clear, solid and whole. One of the greatest aesthetes of twentieth-century prose, Vladimir Nabokov, in his well-known essay Good Readers and Good Writers defines that a good reader should have, among other things, a good memory, imagination and an artistic sense, and he also agrees with Flusser when he writes:
“We have no physical organ (as we have in regard to the eye when a painting is concerned) that can take in the whole picture [of a text] and then enjoy its details. But at a second, a third, a fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.”
For Nabokov the reader is not a passive consumer of the book but a colleague with whom he shares a talent for imagination and an artistic sense. After all, the reader must, step by step, raise again the pillars of an imaginary world whose origin lies in the author’s mind. It is up to the reader to bring to life the buildings, the vast meadows, the murmur of the forests and the colours of sounds; they must be able to imagine the main characters’ clothes, their faces, eyes, perfume and charm. Through the silent, dead signs on the page of a book we resuscitate a whole world by mere thought — a competence originally belonging only to the gods of most of the world’s religions (if, according to the Old Testament book of Genesis, we were created by God in his image, then writing and reading the text of a fictional world is a divine activity; or else, can God not be understood as the first and last great artist, man of letters, poet, whose creative power has not yet been surpassed?).
Of course, the grandeur of the world differs from book to book and also depends on the chosen genre of the text. Fiction depicts a concrete world, whereas an essay rather awakens abstract images in us, aimed at our intellectual self, where the haziness of abstractions has to be recoded, made concrete, visualised. Understanding the text of an essay reminds me in many respects of a process not unlike the perception of avant-garde poetry: the surrealist or symbolist school of poetry presents us with a series of images, and it is up to the reader to assemble a coherent structure from these disparate brushstrokes; the essayist, in turn, puts together a logically ordered line of arguments and ideas, so the structure is already present, yet it is rarely presented as easily depictable content.
This division is, of course, not universally valid. Fiction may “from antiquity to the nineteenth-century novel faithfully follow the rhetorical precepts aimed at the evident vividness (enargeia) and clarity (safeneia) of the image that the mind unfolds from the description offered” (Císař and Koťátko, 71), but (great) fiction would in no way differ from the genre of descriptive journalism if it could not move beyond the mundane, the everyday, and did not represent what cannot be described, what escapes rational conceptual vocabulary, what philosophy and literary criticism call the Sublime. Moreover, authors such as Samuel Beckett had as their creative programme the making of works in which the imagery of the text would be deadened, the shapes and solidity of objects dissolved in a world without ugliness or beauty or fever; they “will be lifeless (almost lifeless)”. Beckett reduces the visual elements to a minimum, and what remains is a scenery as if from a world after the end of the world. (Císař, 76) Beckett’s prose is therefore very hard to read and hence also to interpret. The text does not serve here as a mediating medium, for the reader can only with great difficulty see beyond the grammar and the shape of the individual sentences, which they read with sweat on their temples, waiting for the images to arrive; but the images do not come. His texts therefore become autonomous objects: text for text’s sake, grammar for grammar’s sake, sounds for sounds’ sake, art for art’s sake.
And on the other hand, the genre of the essay can, and often does, make use of traditional literary figures and of making mental images concrete. This is also the content of the book The Sense of Style by the American cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker, who in his modern-day style manual draws on the current findings of the cognitive sciences and argues that one of the preconditions of a good style of (non-fiction) prose is to limit abstract expression to the necessary minimum and instead to use concrete nouns, because the reader is then better able to visualise and remember what the text is about.
Let us not forget that in a text we have access not only to inanimate objects and facts, but also to the historical consciousness of the world. It was the text that first freed humans from an endless present and allowed knowledge and experience to be passed on to further generations, who did not have to go through life entirely from the beginning but could build on what their ancestors had lived through. Text, and more specifically literature in the hands of masters such as Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Austen, Eliot (both George and T. S.), Dickens, Proust, Joyce and Kafka, can carry the mind along the line of space-time into regions that are in reality forbidden to us: every great literature is a thought experiment, a virtual reality in which, through the lens of a voyeuristic omnipotent eye (in online gaming jargon, the “spectator”) or through the avatar of one of the characters, we put ourselves in the roles of other characters, and thereby train our capacity for empathy (KIDD, D. C. and E. Castano).
Let us recall, for instance, the main character of one of Dickens’s books, Pip, who under very tangled circumstances became the owner of a considerable fortune and a young gentleman with great expectations. Dickens has prepared a moral dilemma for us: on the one hand we wish Pip his new life, yet we must condemn his behaviour when he is plainly ashamed of his old friend, the good-hearted blacksmith Joe, his stepfather. Dickens asks: how would you react? Although it is fiction, a virtual world, it puts before us a real question whose answer (for the more perceptive) can have a fundamental influence on real life.
The literary critic Harold Bloom writes that we read for many reasons; among the most frequent lies the maxim of “the limits of a single human life”: whatever we read, with every stroke of the clock the weight of time falls on us, and the knowledge that in one short life we cannot “know enough people well enough; that we need to know ourselves better, which requires knowledge not only of oneself and of others, but also of the way things are” (Bloom). For Bloom, reading literature is first and foremost a “difficult pleasure”, an activity in which we immerse ourselves in a work in order to let ourselves be intoxicated by the genius of the author, whose construction of a fictional world and evocation of strong and authentic emotions can tear us out of the normality that surrounds us.
The trouble is that each of us has emotions and intellect set up a little differently, and if a work is too remote from our everyday life, there is a danger that enchantment turns into frustration, sometimes even into aggression against excessive intellectualism. The height of the bar symbolising the setting of these parameters is, however, influenced not only by genetic predispositions but also by culture. Culture offers two options: either it will take the path of difficult pleasure, perhaps seeming paternalistic, for it will educate us and ask us to overcome our own limits; or it will be entertainment that is easy to digest, pre-chewed, made to give us a quick and cheap dose of doping, a blue pill passed off as the red one, meant to disconnect us at least for a while from the Matrix version 9-17.24.365, though its only function is to make us forget that we are in the Matrix at all.
(2)
I am afraid that new media are in fact a fraud. At first sight it seems that they merely make use of old media (text, photography) and, thanks to existing technologies, add previously unimagined possibilities to them.
For example, the good old Text already contained an embryonic form of hypertext: the apostles of the New Testament frequently refer to passages of the Old (in the early days of Christianity the Old Testament would always have been among the top results of a Google search), for the two bodies of text are linked by a similarity of content and of logic, which the new prophets made use of: they linked their preaching to the Old Testament context, and thereby proved that this (self-fulfilling) prophecy was the grandiose fulfilment of a divine plan. But only in the twenty-first century can personal prophecies exist, directed and preached not in sermons but in the contextual advertisements of Google AdWords and the like. And so we have the feeling that the whole digital world is subordinate to us.
Yet this is not the greatest deception of new media; that we should look for in their appropriation of the Text, which is not an act of extending its existing possibilities but the destruction of its basic qualities: mental imagery and the necessity of interpretation. As examples of where this annihilation has taken place, I will name web pages and popular YouTube videos, but since this is a global phenomenon of addiction to Speed, the proverbial breadcrumbs would essentially lead us into every corner of today’s society.
I said that reading can also be understood more generally; in that case I also understand watching a video and browsing the Web as reading a video and reading interactive web pages, for the theoretical model of how communication takes place between a human being and the content mediated by a given medium (which need not necessarily contain text) consists of several steps: establishing communication, transmitting the content, receiving the content, decoding the content and its subsequent interpretation.
New media, unfortunately, have it encoded in their DNA to avoid as far as possible being read, in the sense of being interpreted. This does not stem from any inherent technological limitation of theirs, but from a socio-cultural choice we have made. Why socio-cultural, of all things? Theorists working in the philosophy or sociology of technology point out that technology does not exist outside society but is an integral part of it. In other words, the development of technology is not some inevitable, determined process; on the contrary, it is shaped by who creates it and for what purpose. The creators are individual people. They are, of course, in turn part of a wider socio-cultural context. And finally, people are in turn influenced by technology.
When Tim Berners-Lee launched the first web page from his office at a Swiss research centre, it contained only text, coloured mostly black, but some words and phrases were highlighted in blue. Those were the first links of the hypertext project that the WorldWideWeb was and, despite all its disadvantages compared with competing solutions (e.g. Xanadu), still is.
Over time, a small project for sharing information among scientists became a platform containing not only hypertext but also multimedia elements (photographs, video, sound), which is also where the word hypermedia, rarely used among laypeople, comes from: hypertext + multimedia.
The web page turned from a container for text into a digital artistic canvas, since wherever multimedia and text appear, there arises a demand for these elements to be suitably arranged. With the arrival of photographs, videos and sound, the Web became a space that needed to be designed. And by that I do not mean choosing suitable colours; design is thinking that synthesises, brings together, diverse elements so that they create a unified, good form. Graphic design applies this thinking to visual communication. It is not possible to say unambiguously and exhaustively what exactly graphic design is; as an operative definition, though, I believe that at its basis it is visual communication (hence “graphic”), that is, graphic design has to be “seen” for communication to take place. What certainly cannot be said is what this communication should concretely look like; I only believe that the communication should be successful. How the graphic designer brings about successful communication, however, depends on his decision. There are many paths to successful communication: the path can be rough and winding, or on the contrary smooth and therefore easy to digest. On the surface, perhaps paradoxically, even unsuccessful communication has to be regarded as successful. How is that possible? If the designer’s aim is to evoke a feeling of fear, confusion, aggression, rejection, and the reader-viewer really does react to his work in the intended way, the communication has, from the designer’s point of view, been successful.
This successful-unsuccessful communication, however, is not something we usually encounter. Only in exceptional cases, such as an artistic act or a would-be avant-garde marketing campaign, does a web page quite deliberately aim at confusion, misunderstanding or the rejection of communication. The designer has an unspoken agreement with the reader-viewer that his work must only be such that successful-successful communication prevails. Why is that so?
We live in a long-standing and unconscious dependence on an ever-increasing Speed. If we want to stay relevant, we are forced (with our consent) to follow the productivity curve demanded by society. The more relevant and visible our position, the more we feel the exponential bend of the curve. It is true that nobody is literally holding us by the throat to make us take part in this ride; and yet theoretical freedom is a banal statement on paper if the means to realise it do not exist. Many times I have heard quite extreme sentences from the guardians of freedom, such as: “anyone can live outside the city, even outside civilisation, where the demands to submit to Speed do not exist”. These notions are a form of extremism; those who utter them, however, simultaneously believe fully in freedom, a considerably reduced meaning of freedom.
We go with the times, we go with society. So as not to lose our standing, or merely as a gesture of resignation, we are constantly connected: we get up and look at a screen; when moving around, we watch a screen; when we work, it is with a screen; when we go to bed, we fall asleep with a screen. Once it was the privilege of geeks and the well-off; today it is a necessity for everyone. Do you want to do something about it? Move to the forest! That is what we would hear from the extremists promoting so-called freedom.
We do not want to, but we must. That is the definition of addiction when push comes to shove. At the moment, however, we are still in the phase when we want to, for there is no time to realise that we do not.
Our great-great-ancestors lived in a perpetual present because they lacked historical consciousness. That was changed by the then new technology of the Text. Now we live in a perpetual present because we lack the Text.
It is interesting that the technique of meditation, appropriated from Zen Buddhism, is promoted in the West as an aid to start living here and now. But what we lack is not the skill of focusing on the present; on the contrary, our ability to concentrate on anything outside the present has died off entirely. Data flow into us through our senses from all sides; before we manage to process one batch, the next is already waiting: First In First Out, First In, First Out, life will wait.
Our brain, however, is not designed for this amount of data; unfortunately, it was not designed at all. And few of us are Johnny von Neumann. Unfortunately, for the second time. It had to show somewhere.
Could the current epidemic of attention disorder, the so-called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and of various kinds of dyslexia be the brain’s answer that it can no longer keep up, that, if its owner so wishes, it will change its mode so as to manage processing a large amount of input data at the expense of the quality of processing?
(3)
If a person cannot concentrate for a longer time, they begin to reshape the world around them so that it contains only those things their mind can still cope with — just as a skilled craftsman will not actively pursue theoretical physics, a person with a five-second attention span will have trouble writing a longer novel.
A working hypothesis might be that cultural (creative) artefacts, that is, the things over whose creation people have direct control, will be less and less demanding to process cognitively; they will be adapted to a flighty and short attention span, and will not be built from content that requires concentration and time. In other words, the function of the Text and of interpretation will be reduced, and we will see a proliferation of media for transmitting information that allow uncritical reception and processing: photographs and videos.
(4)
Many makers of web pages have heard that visitors do not read content but scan it; they wait for something to appear on the screen that catches their attention, and if nothing like that happens within a given time, they leave the page. The current limit of that time is around five seconds. Makers of web pages, aware of the need to catch attention at once, will certainly not reach for textual information. That is why today we see full-page photographs and videos on every page. It is true that they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but the reason for this way of making web pages is not necessarily the need to say something, often there is not even anything to say, but simply to squeeze into those gallows five seconds.
It reminds me of the situation when a journalist in one interview asked Noam Chomsky why he thought he was not invited to the well-known mainstream broadcast programmes. His answer was that these programmes have a cleverly chosen requirement of concision from their guests, which is an ideal method for many voices to be ignored, excluded from the programme, or for them to discredit themselves in front of the viewers.
For it is difficult to present arguments drawing on information that viewers or listeners have never heard. Hardly anyone stops to think when someone declares that the United States is the cradle of democracy. But if someone says on live broadcast that the United States is a terrorist state and a threat to the world, people will not know what is being talked about and will quite naturally demand an explanation. And here the genius of the requirement of concision shows itself: the guest cannot utter a controversial sentence without sounding as if he had just fallen from Neptune. It is a form of censorship, often self-censorship. Whoever wants to speak, to explain, to bring something new, is condemned to the sidelines, to the underground. That is why Chomsky, one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century, has appeared on mainstream American television only a few times in his whole career.
How many ideas are silenced only because there is no time for them? How many unrealised ideas have we lost because their complexity would have found only a minimum of supporters?
Current practices of making web pages put the emphasis on user experiences. These are not a new buzzword only in the digital environment; they permeate the methodology of making things in many other fields as well.
I am personally right at the core of this User Experience field, and more and more I realise that an originally honourable idea can very quickly turn into a dangerous practice. It is a plain fact that today, with many technologies, we no longer think about how a given thing works but are rather interested in how it can enrich our life and what meaning it has for us, and last but not least we notice their aesthetic qualities. From the beginning, User Experience aimed to respond suitably to these questions.
Enriching and satisfying the meaningful and aesthetic part of our lives has since time immemorial rested on the shoulders of storytellers, poets, artists and, we must not forget, religious figures. Although in human history we find periods favourable to these callings, most of the time they staggered along in voluntary or forced poverty. Few artists managed to make their way in such a manner that their work captivated most of society. From a statistical point of view these were rare exceptions open to only a few individuals. In short, “making art” is a demanding and uncertain activity. A wholly rational person does not choose this calling if their aim is a secure livelihood and a steady source of income.
How, then, do we explain that the world’s largest multinational corporations invest considerable money in that artistic element, albeit one bent in the corporate sphere, with which they want to enrich their products? Or, put differently, what recipe do they have that lets them make art en masse on a conveyor belt?
Modern marketing and User Experience methods know the solution: accumulated real data about potential customers are run through the prism of statistical algorithms as well as qualitative evaluations in order to create several averaged archetypes, on whose basis a new product is made. I ask: is it more frightening that the lives and desires of hundreds of thousands can be expressed by four archetypes, or that someone has accepted that this way will enrich the lives of individuals, and thereby of society as a whole?
Not long ago we believed that the individual is a unique human being. In reality this fact is the ultimate enemy of every industry: making personalised products for a billion people is too expensive, so it seems much cheaper to invest in a clever marketing campaign that will convince this billion that they want one and the same thing. Once this happens, the commodification of culture begins to lower the entropy of the whole society, until in the end all differences cross the horizon of a black hole, from which there is no return, and where disorder, time and being freeze.
This decay is accelerated by the fact that greater conformity is accompanied by greater simplification. Who is willing to get past the economic dictate of the status quo and introduce something truly new? History shows that the most influential projects have always depended on subsidies from a generous mother — the State. And even if the capital were found, would anyone listen? We understand original things badly; they require interpretation, reflection, internalisation, translation into Text and placement within the structure of earlier knowledge. Five seconds are not enough for that.
(5)
For the reasons given above, the image dominates our culture. YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr and Vine are the main suppliers of visual content. The problem is not only that they bury us wholesale in objects of trivial content; it seems to me that the main danger lies in the very imagery of images.
What is needed for us to form a mental image of an image? It is enough to have a functioning eye and the relevant parts of the brain responsible for processing the electrical signals from the retina. But these are processes entirely independent of consciousness, and so they do not pass through the filters of the intellect. In other words, there is no need to do anything.
The image appears by itself, its whole content is immediately accessible, and unless it is supplemented with a literary touch (metaphor, irony, etc.), the only interpretation consists of a simple enumeration of what is in the image. The directness of the imagery of images invites us to call it the pornographic quality of the imagery of images.
If we reduce the amount of Text in society, we cheat ourselves of the ability to imagine on the basis of the linear code of the Text.
Yes, the mental images constructed from a Text are imperfect, in many respects rather metaphorical or abstract. But that very imperfection contributes to expanding the intellect, for we create our own new images, visual connections, subjective unfinished objects, which we apply to new knowledge, which we in turn wrap in those unfinished objects, connections and images of our own making, and so we can come up with original ideas.
If, however, we remove this image-making from the intellectual process and replace it with prepared, pre-rendered objects on the cinema or computer screen, we create nothing new; we merely receive objects as they are. One could say that we depend on the creativity and skill of the graphic artists who design these objects (animated characters, scenes). In other words, we outsource our image-making into the hands (the head) of someone else. That is dangerous for several reasons: it degrades our mind, and it also forces on our consciousness content that we cannot receive critically: when reading texts, we ourselves dictate how we will picture the author’s thoughts. And so we are left with only one way to defend ourselves against contagious foreign images — to close our eyes.
HAROLD BLOOM. How to read and why. 1. paperback ed. London: Fourth Estate, 2001. ISBN 9781841150390.
CÍSAŘ, Karel and Petr KOŤÁTKO. Beckett: filosofie a literatura. 1st ed. Praha: Filosofia, 2010, 252 p. ISBN 978-80-7007-336-0.
FLUSSER, Vilém. 2013. Alfanumerická společnost. In: BABÁK, Petr. Proto: grafický design a současné umění. Praha: tranzit.cz, p. 73-81. ISBN 978-80-87259-22-1.
KIDD, D. C. and E. CASTANO. Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind. In: Science. 2013, 342(6156), p. 377-380. DOI: 10.1126/science.1239918. ISSN 0036-8075. Also available at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.1239918
PINKER, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. 2015. Penguin. ISBN 9781846145506.