"I Read Where I Am. Exploring New Information Cultures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Various)

1. Gathering Up Characters – Arie Altena

Reading behaviour changes, also because of the influence of technology. Empirical research has shown that a screen-based reading behaviour has arisen because we are online so much and read from the screen. A characteristic of this reading behaviour is that more time is spent on browsing, scanning, and identifying key words. Reading is selective, things are not read more than once, and it is generally non-linear. It is said to be at the expense of concentrated and in-depth reading.

That’s probably right. Readers in the richer countries read more and more from the screen. The developments of the past twenty-five years have been just as radical as those following the invention of book printing. With the transition from printed material to digital text, there was, to a certain degree, a shift from ‘owning text’ to ‘accessing text’; from a book or magazine that you hold in your hand, to access to text in the ‘cloud’ – the internet – via an appliance. (I write ‘to a certain degree’ because in the past the ‘access’ to text was primarily for professional readers: you had to be in the library.)

How, then, will we read in the future? No different than in the past – at least as long as it’s about converting word images into something with linguistic meaning. That people are reading more from the screen doesn’t, of course, mean that concentrated reading is a thing of the past, or that nobody ever reads out loud. When reading selectively, scanning, the word image is converted into meaning. After seventeen to eighteen years of screen reading, the question of how you ensure a concentrated reading experience in the current – and future – media ecology still fascinates me.

I am still not really impressed by the e-readers (the format misery is still a long way from being solved) and the tablets (you can’t read from a reflective screen in the sun). The e-readers have a problem with access, the tablets one with ergonomics. It is getting better – but slowly.

I hope that in fifty years we are using reading appliances and accounts in the ‘cloud’ that individuals are completely in charge of, and that there are no organizations that check and log what bytes you download, analyze it in real time, sell on the data, and save it. Or at least, should that happen – and it will happen; that it will benefit to the customer – and that alternatives will also exist. I hope that use will be made of simple data formats and of simple software. I hope that a free circulation of knowledge takes place.

Printed material is text and reading appliance in one. In the future it will be expensive. But once it has been produced, it doesn’t get broken very easily. It has one advantage: you only need light if you want to concentrate and read it in private. Light from the sun.

Arie Altena writes about art and new media; he works for V2_ in Rotterdam and co-curates the Sonic Acts Festival.