A question in the "Collaboration" lecture in the Reith lectures, 2005, asked Lord Broers if he had an idea what the significant developments would be in the first few decades of the 21st century, to which he replied that he was of the opinion that flexible screens and electronic paper would be of importance. The difference in portability and the various ramifications of the changed phenomenology of a computer that behaved in many ways like a book would, one can see, be enormous. My first response was to agree, and to liken the comparison between a bulky laptop computer and a paper thin screen that had some sort of computing power to the difference between a scroll or tablet and a codex.
Codices made the transportation of knowledge possible, in ways
scrolls and tablets never really could: certainly they allowed access
to information more readily, and the storage and cataloguing became
easier. [There is more to say on this subject about the changed
phenomenology of the object (the book, the computer)being studied, and
its reciprocal effect on the reader, as well as the alterations in what
I would call the 'interiority' of the text, by which I mean its powers
of becoming a discrete space, accessible in characteristic ways, and
'thinkable-about' in ways characteristic of books]. Codices, along with
moveable type are the tools needed to produce the gigantic shifts made
possible by the introduction of books to human culture.
While I am unaltered in my agreement that the changes wrought by a
true 'electronic book' would be massive, I now wonder what the effect
of a networked, open and literally rather than seemingly limitless book
would be. One would lose the sense of enclosure, the satisfaction of
closure in the works one read. While it's true that it would still be
possible to read uninterrupted works, the mere possibility of explicit
ruptures, links and shifts in the text at the level of the medium one
was reading in, would tend, I think, to militate against the
introspection, the meditation, of reading. Books have a sense of
privacy, of inviolability. One that is transgressed, of course, in
various fictional forms, and one which is certainly an illusion, the
meaning of the work and the language it is expressed in being a mere
suspension in the larger culture- in this way the borders of the book
are actually illusory. But it is a strong illusion, and it is, I think,
one of the prime enjoyments of reading that it is, for a while, a
private estate of discourse. We know this from the web- reading here is
not the same as reading from a book in one's room, on one's own, and in
one's own time. Could electronic paper approach this? Or would its very
elasticity, its very capacity, bring us into new ways of reading? And
what might these new ways of reading be? It is easy to criticise
web-surfing for its impatience, its superficiality, its lack of seemly
gravitas. It is more difficult to pin down how reading actually takes
place, what 'serious' electronic reading (for want of a better phrase)
might be about. It is similar to our more familiar notions of reading
and the reader, but different, and it takes into account the vertigo of
openness that digital reading offers (the reader's exposure, if
you will, to borrow a mountaineering term). It has a more widely-spread
awareness, to be sure, but it can focus keenly on individual pieces,
all the while critically disarming the work in question of any claims
to being the last word, always wondering, in fact, if there isn't more
to it.
I find myself trying to think about this notion of digital reading
in terms of temporary atttention-sets, temporary holdouts against an
all-collapsing relativism. It's a struggle to make a meaningful
comparison between the iconic figure of the traditional reader, and
whatever the image of this new activity might be. To do this I would
need a language of what the reader absorbs from the book, and how the
reader is in turn absorbed in the book, and I would need to expose
these imageries of inside and outside to the effects of the continually
shifting boundaries of digital media.
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