I would like to begin with a story, and like all captivating accounts it will be about struggle. I am plagued with poor penmanship. That used to be something that was graded in elementary school, and I was appraised accordingly. I cannot keep a steady rhythm in writing. I use the physical act of pen to paper to punctuate my thoughts more than I rely on appropriate marks. I feel deeply connected to the implement in getting my thoughts down, otherwise I feel it would distort some thing along the way. Thoughts are precious, writing is hard. I use it as a way to reinforce my memory on a train-of-thought.
I struggle with devices that I thrust my thoughts on. Because I trust the pen or pencil I find myself affected by its traits. Ink color or pencil hardness, casing construction and material, point size, all affect how I write. Blue ink makes for loose and sloppy notes, so too my thoughts. I prefer black ink. To be so affected by design is to become obsessed with particulars, the perfect pen that feels right. I favor the Parker Jotter.
I don’t see reading as very different in the ways that matter to writing. Both aren’t without effort, they require that we pay attention. How closely we do so is shaped by the medium. If writing is impacted by the pen I use, I assume stories are similarly determined by their delivery. I don’t think that I am a special case and my experience with reading is similar to most.
So, how do we read? Letters still become words and paragraphs, pages are packaged into books. Does it make a difference that they are made up of pixels or pigments? I think so.
Before writing people spoke and learned by motif, regimented and repeated. Stories where constructed with phraseology and formula, designed as if with a kit of parts. Proto-literate peoples could interact directly with their story-tellers and give instant feedback (Social networks). Like my niece and nephew who insist my stories contain car chases. The shift to writing established the creative individual, unchained by influence of her audience. She is free to experiment with language and poetry, because record of the process is kept and navigable.
The transition was not swift or without objection. Socrates most famously opposed it thinking it would ruin our ability to remember anything. Smart guy. Are we exploring similar territory now? There are those today who bemoan the advent of digital publishing, much the same way Socrates warned against the new technology of written records.
Our consciousness is transformed by writing, we can hardly imagine a world without it. We are in symbioses with technology. So, the typographic man is a cyborg. “The use of uniform, repeatable characters to manufacture uniform, repeatable texts transformed the way people think, write and talk” Also how we read. What emerges from typography is a reading public. A culture that is diverse and innumerable, much more so than pre-print, manuscript culture allowed or cared for.
So we read more than ever, constantly even. Some view discontinuous reading, the kind online with distractions and hyperlinks, as something less worthy than real reading with a capital R. Robert Bringhurst worries for the future of reading, because it looks different. He pleads that “reading could have a rich and interesting future because it has a rich and interesting past.” To be so entrenched is to confuse rich tradition with technological limitations.
Content is not restrained by fixed analogs anymore. Instead ideas are relocated to variable and communal spaces. The linear navigation of a book is blurred by the swell of the internet. We must rely again on redundancy as an essential mode of communication. This is made apparent in the vibrancy of meme culture. The more I prod the more striking a resemblance our internet age has with pre-literate oral cultures. It all boils down to a need for an exceptional memory achieved by considered repetition of content. A text moves from primary source to secondary outlet, then forwarded, re-blogged and tweeted to more and more people. The Odyssey might have had a similar distribution network until put down in writing.
I still struggle with tools, my hand writing is still awful and my reading is similarly shaky. *This will be a good place to begin another narrative, dealing with how we interact with content and stories today. At the same time introduce the modern readers.The tempest-tossed traveler can instead be a commuter. Her safe harbor is no longer stationery, maybe its google or a phone, instead of the library. Kinds of readers: