Ruxandra Bularca

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România

ruxandra.bularca@gmail.com

How the Internet taught me to read

Abstract: This study discusses the material component of a book as paramount to an aesthetic delimitation between the book in its classic, traditional meaning, or the book per se, and its electronic counterpart, generically dubbed e-text. Concurrently, it also attempts to establish itself as a rather symptomatic treaty on contemporary reading. It does not embark on a review of the new editorial means and methods; nor does it assume any subversive stance, in taking sides with regard to the two incarnations of the book. The Internet offers a paradigm which can no longer be ignored or marginalised by mainstream editorial studies, whereas digital native individuals are inevitably led to assume personal perspectives on the act of reading (as a performance, not as an achievement!), and such perspectives may sometimes appear at odds with tradition. Thus, the Digital Age lends the factual book a decadent aesthetic role to play on the new cultural scene, a role that leads to the emergence of book art or using books as mediums or canvases instead of abstract content.

Keywords: E-text; E-book; Book art; Digital native; Digital immigrant; Digital reading,; Internet; Pierre Bayard.

“Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.”

Gaston Bachelard

Argument

It is a unanimously accepted fact that the digital environment entails a process of rethinking the relationship between readers and their books. The emergence of a new paradigm, that of the e-book and e-reading, has caused a relapse of the book (as an object), stripping it down to the purely functional, that is, to the simple display of content in a more accessible, cost-effective environment, where individual copies can be replicated endlessly. The book’s materiality has thus become an independent variable, not an ancillary (and always intrinsic) trait, as entertained up until the advent of the ‘90s.

This study is attempting to discuss the material component of the book as a paramount to an aesthetic delimitation between the book in its classic, traditional meaning, or the book per se, and its electronic counterpart, generically dubbed e-text.

Concurrently, it also attempts to establish itself as a rather symptomatic treaty on contemporary reading. It does not embark on a review of the new editorial means and methods; nor does it assume any subversive stance, in taking sides with regard to the two incarnations of the book. Beyond simply drawing an impressionist profile, or being liable to appear as such, it is consequential to a rather more profound aspect. The Internet offers a paradigm which can no longer be ignored or marginalised by mainstream editorial studies, whereas digital native individuals are inevitably lead to assume personal perspectives on the act of reading (as a performance, not as an achievement!), and such perspectives may sometimes appear at odds with tradition.

What is a digital native?

Digital natives are individuals who have been born, intellectually speaking, into the Digital Age of the world, since the World Wide Web and its inherent informational flows have effectively become common place. They start to interact with the new technologies from an early age, and benefit from an upbringing within the Internet environment which is plausibly akin to that received in their own father’s house: indeed, they acquire a dynamic knowledge and familiarity with the meanders of the digital stage, as they would with the rooms of their real-life homes.

Mark Prensky, the scholar who authored one of the meanings of the term^[1], places it in direct opposition to that of the digital immigrant: the individual born (or should we say, brought up) before the ‘70s, that is, before the wide-scale implement of digital technologies, and who therefore has to adopt, at some rather late age in life, the mannerism and the mechanisms of the Digital Age.

These terms draw meaning from the analogy with the perspective on the native citizens of any given country, who acquire a natural grasp on native customs, language and religion, as compared to immigrants to the country, who are expected to adapt to the new realities. Prensky pushes forward to discuss matters of digital immigrants’ “accent “and “dialect” (such as a propensity for printing documents and taking notes on paper, rather than submitting on-screen comments, or printing emails in order to save and file them as hard-copies). Digital immigrants are distinguishable by their thick, heavy accent when they turn vocal in the network, as they adopt distinctly pre-digital manners – for instance, calling someone to their room so as to share with them the webpage displayed on the computer screen, rather than simply sending the URL; or, including the apparently redundant attribute “digital” when referring to their camera, rather than simply calling it a “camera” as a digital native would.

How am I reading, or The Internet, the Book and their constraints

We will state as a starting point that both the literary eye and the sound literary reasoning can be educated just as efficiently in both environments. The outcome is approximately the same. Most often, an excessive reading of traditional books can warrant a reading experience just as shallow as that which transpires from accessing a plethora of Internet articles via their URLs, and both represent the same function: purely informative.

In its linearity, reading presupposes certain calmness and an uninterrupted flux, which builds in intensity, in a gradual crescendo. This transgresses into the disruptive, and becomes a disconnecting and disconnected experience when it operates in environments where text is no more than a mere reference within the weave developed and supported by adjacent texts, all of which seem to circle it both playfully and incessantly.

Also, digital reading extends to the fact that the availability of all references, footnotes, and generally the satisfaction of all conceivable requirements for further insight or clarification impose a relativistic appearance to the main text and to its significance cloud, ranking it down to an indeterminate position within the larger network.

Digital reading implies, by its very non-linearity, its transgressions, its narrative beat swings and moodish shifts in style, that the text should no longer be conceived as unique and particular. It dismantles the text and it removes it from the center of the stage, it robs it of its place as the nexus of the reader’s interest, and in doing so it creates outrageous ripples in the flow: the text is delayed until it slips out of phase, and only gains momentum as the reader is focused onto what will eventually settle down as the next (pre)text, and even then only as (con)text.

Owing to its specific instances, hypertext, technotext, cybertext, link clouds and to their transmediation capabilities, the act of Internet reading causes a mutation. The elegant armchair reader seated comfortably with his book by the fireplace (as held by the respectable literary tradition) shifts into a deranged, schizoid and compulsive persona. Digital reading seduces with its call for distributed attention. The long-awaited informed reader of the New Criticism becomes a false, wireframe reality within the network. The readers entertain such plausibilities as the notion that by clicking an ever increasing number of links, they might actually map the entire context and eventually gain access to all possible interpretations of the text.

The Internet boasts a literally infinite ability to attend to intelligent informational gobeur-ism, as a feeding frenzy. A significant number of scholars object, asserting that one can not obtain intellectual satiety by living on informational fast-food, just like one would not have the same dish everyday, and thus pointing out that there must be a difference between an informed brain and a literary brain.

Should we choose a different perspective, however, it would become apparent that an isolated (disconnected) book imposes a certain rhythm, capable of guiding the reader through the folds in time it postulates itself. Due to the discontinuous nature of digital reading, the internaut can easily take whatever time she pleases and dwell at length on portions of the text cloud which touch on the main corpus, thereby achieving control on the dosage of the reading pleasure.

Traditional reading, on the other hand, relies on certain wisdom, acquired through the repeated act of reflection, instilled through careful consideration for each paragraph. The proper way to read a book equates to the tacit immersion into the history of the niche cultural debate epitomized by that particular book; of course, with the caveat that such a debate more closely resembles a conference where time is saved for a round of questions at the end, and the audience graciously abstains from interrupting the speaker with any impolite remarks throughout the duration of the discourse.

Yet, the Internet accommodates partaking in conversations quite similar to those in real life, where the interlocutor engages the author polemically, assisting him in the construction of the discourse and possibly extending its boundaries, molding it into an ever more open, ever swirling, ever expanding narrative. Burst after burst, the digital environment discharges micro-narratives, but it never conflates them into the frame of Grand Narrative with all-encompassing wings and a taste for judicious measure.

We can carry around with us any type of gadget designed for e-reading, such as an iPhone, but the instrument itself cannot create the time for reading. Authentic reading feeds on history / chronology, and it enables memory. Far from showing disparaging contempt to such concepts, Internet reading offers a framework for the readers to design their own personal historicities and an evaluative micro-canon, while also establishing itself as the repository of paths already followed.

The memory per se is not necessarily involved in these workings. What good is there, indeed, in attempting to retain any data ourselves, since we can so easily find it in real-time, within the network and its omniscient, omni-historic archives? The underlying logic of the network itself rejoices in bookmarking and marginalia, much more than in simply gulping information at all costs. Therefore, in the absence of any information mnemotechnical requirements, reflection emerges as the winner. Since we are only one click away from the information we desire, the ideational path can attain self-indulgence and thus achieves a qualitative boost.

Remembrance and memory are consequent to the very act of reading a book. It leads the reader into the narrative universe designed by an author, and into a story erected upon certain cultural constructs defined and nuanced through previous readings. The Internet, on the other hand, grants access to all existing interpretations of such constructs, and thus triumphs in the overlay of a nearly complete spectrum of nuances. It opens the door to new interpretations and, sometimes, gives hints of such possible formats as to which the author, bound to his day and age, would have not given any thought. Not equating such an approach to a downright intrusive attempt on the initial auctorial intentions, it can still be sustained that the digital environment purposes a panoramic perspective (and also a snapshot) on a given society of culture at a given time, and can explain and contextualize with surgical prowess the synchronized evolutionary paths of literary methods, concepts and tactics, or those of stylistic form.

Internet reading represents a form of establishing connections, illustrating a function which aforetimes had remained throughout centuries the privilege and the prerequisite of those great reflexive minds empowered to assemble comparative paradigms (Goethe, for instance) avant la lettre, or to sublimate subtle cultural shifts into concise encyclopedic essays in foreboding homage to a before its time genealogical approach (as with Flaubert or Valéry).

Extensive studies were published and great coverage was granted to the so called Death of the Book (with a capital D) in the Digital Age, however such statements should give proper consideration to the level of subsistence within the narrative of the mechanics of desire (as defined by Brooks or Hillis-Miller), which can become creatively attuned to both author and reader. As far as the narrative is concerned, change has only affected its medium, its dynamics and the rules regarding access, and the potential ability of story-users to equip themselves in order to immerse into the epic.

Tricksters in Academia – powered by the Book

For me, the reader, the text of the book represents the percentage of the book’s universe shared/updated by the author within its covers. Thus, the book becomes the entirety of the “world” which explodes into existence when contact is made between reader and text.

This world is as much powered by the reader through an imaginative process (centered on an accumulation of data pertaining to my real, present environment and adjoining on the subjective sum of all experiences derived from my previous readings), as much – of course – as it belongs to the author, just like the book, or (to) the text of the book itself.

Thus, we can witness a role reversal, in what Gadamer defines “the hermeneutic circle”. It entails a gradual surrender of redundant or ultimately incompatible interpretations (with regard to the continuous stream of fresh “data” consequent to permanent updates to the expectations horizon, in line with the advances in reading).

The digital environment causes the streams of meaning projected (from the hermeneutic circle) that end up labeled as “faulty” (and seen, in Gadamer’s key, as possible instances of the book) to avoid being discarded simply on virtue of the fact that they never materialized. They do belong, in fact, to the book – but to that compendium forsaken by the author yet embraced and updated by the reader, and atuned to the reader’s parameters.

A library becomes thus a “world” which subjectively draws psychological sense, generated by networks that materialize from the interconnection and superimposition of past potentialities. The reader thus weaves the fabric of existence for the context himself, manipulating the sum of the book’s virtual incarnations.

The practice of digital reading determines by necessity a reconfiguration of the book’s medium.

Along with the development of digital reading strategies, the French Academia has witnessed a similar effervescence even within the traditional, analogue medium. One of its most radical voices, that of Pierre Bayard[2] (echoed by Umberto Eco) postulates (bluntly) that books should not even be thoroughly read, as a matter of fact. In complete defiance of the – horrified – buttoned-up academic mainstream, the author goes on to conclude that it should suffice to know simply the coordinates of any book within the literary network (not to be confused with the Canon, which it simply encloses), to be able to issue a sound cultural judgment.

Far from being a guide to non-reading, and what at a glance might seem a manifesto of academic pharisaism, Bayard’s thesis places itself rather as an honest and profoundly human(ist) testimony, and as a soothing touch for those readers who feel rather overwhelmed by the sheer mass of available information and with humbleness try to hide their editorial gobeurism.

Despite the sacralization of reading by the society, Bayard implies that a vast majority of those who perform it are patented tricksters, even within the ranks of the literary elite. Postulating that no one can (claim to have) read Everything (nor is it feasible to do so), but rather that the driving force remains the intimate pleasure of reading, he investigates the deeper meaning of the Canon as a bibliographic patrimony.

Non-reading is, for the author, an act just as authentic as its counterpart. It implies an involvement in the literary flux and is quite distinct from what we might call the absence of reading. An authentic reader is thus more interested in his/her ability to indulge in reflection on the book, be it upon its actual reading, or without having consumed the experience. With only limited time at disposal but in charge of an apparently infinite bibliographic estate, the most respectable approach in Bayard’s opinion, would be to bookmark the grid coordinates of a reference (that is, a book) within the wider and evidently more contextualized network of Literature, so as to better grasp its relative clout and hue within the canvas of literary history.

Being aware of the grid coordinates becomes equivalent thus to being intimate with the book itself. It is instrumental to the act of reading books – and reasoning of that which is read – and does not interfere with the reader’s ability to delve deeper into some of them. The fabric of the network is in fact the body of knowledge and the collection of meanings that can be acquired without having actually read the book.

Bayard’s coordinates outline the “ideal reader” for a book. They can predict what sort of tag can stick to the book and implicitly how you would perform as a reader, because the ideal reader is powered by the book.

What can be(come) a book? – A digression

In the wake of the emergence of digital content, the book’s expression and its manners acquire a self-conscient material undertone.

Estheticizing the ontological is a form of decadence, and this seduction through aestheticism is the trait of those strong concepts or objects (in Vattimo’s terms) which lose strength by focusing on one function of theirs – in this case, that which bestows upon them an atemporal status, a passport to eternity and thus an obvious realignment of their semantic identity, prone to rejuvenate their objectual self.

Consider the monocle. The antiquarian Philip von Stosch used to wear one in Rome in the 1720s, for better results in his close examinations of engraved gems, but it did not become an ubiquitous fashion accessory until the 19th century, only to become – shortly after the advances in the field of modern optometry – a mark of dandyism. In the 18^thcentury this object acquires with a relatively fast pace its function as an eye care device, its role being to mitigate the natural inconveniences of poor eyesight. In the passing of time, the design and the production of this artefact which have been both an art and a revolution unto itself lost ground in practical and functional terms, due to the emergence of a new object – eyeglasses. Nullified in practicality, the monocle retained its aesthetic function.

It was eventually salvaged as an epitome, notably in the esthetic (but not the practical) version of steampunk[3], an esthetics which in its own right represents the resurgence of a past period – the Victorian era – at the noontide of post-modernism. As a common article in pre-Victorian times (steampunk hailing from Victorian Britain), the monocle remains today only evocative and referential to its poshdimensions.

It does not seem to be the case for the book as an artefact. Its plurality of functions remains undiminished, but when transplanted in the digital world, these functions are reduced to the status of “medium”.

The material book becomes a medium that not only facilitates the spread of knowledge, but it can stand actually stand for it, and may embody (as materiality) a self-referential meditation on its (newly acquired) ontological status.

Tradition holds the canon on how to observe a painting. From Leonardo’s “pittura e una cosa mentale” or the Louis Marin’s theories on proto-renaissance paintings, to the recommended distance from eye to canvas and to cubist tridimensionality, all trends and movements educate the eye on how to observe the “thought” on the canvas, not the canvas itself. Yes, the matter which is instrumental in breathing life to the painting remains important, of course, but in the overarching logic it is of diminished rank. Of more immediate effect is the reflection “thought” with the paintbrush and thus its outcome. In post-modernism, the painting embarks onto the act of self-consideration, whereas the majority of arts and their apparel are starting to develop their own meta-discourse.

History is repeating in approaching the book as an esthetic artifact. Owing to the long established art of bookbinding or to the elaborate minutiae of editorial elitism, or even to older ancestry, such as the art of medieval illuminators and unique hand-adorned breviaries, seeing the book as an esthetic artifact had usually the limited meaning of observing its content, or at most, the pictorial representations within the covers. Those copies which had a clear, precise function (usually religious) were bound in precious metals or subject to various methods of conservation treatment.

Tradition teaches us to perceive and rank books (only) on virtue of their content. But what may occur when the book’s “medium” is challenged by another environment and the issue lies in establishing the specificity of these two media?

Even as the process of digitization has been pushed to full throttle, the book – and the printed page – still remain cause for fascination.

As traditional texts undergo the mutation from informative to performative, they most often retain not their function, but rather their medium. To illustrate the multimedia dimensions of this alternative classification, I’m attaching examples of artists who transmutated traditional texts in authentic pieces of sculpture. The book is not reduced to its mere material medium, quite unlike Truffaut’s rendering in which all pages in all the books in all the libraries in the world are inexplicably stripped of their letters by a sign-eating-virus, thus leaving humanity denuded of its cultural meaning.

The sculptures below retain a firm grasp on the significance of the book. Their texts support the sculptural intent and complement it seamlessly, to bring into being a form of art which transgresses the reductionist, purely informative function imposed upon the book by the digital medium.

Robert The book collects books abandoned by former owners or gathered in storage bins and creates works that comment on their meaning as self-referential and their newly acquired cultural irrelevance. The explains the poetics of his art as heartfully vandalizing these discarded and betrayed books, so as to retaliate against a culture that has turned them into waste.

Robert The, The Art Crisis[4], 2003

Thomas Allen combines pulp-fiction cover-art and pop-up books to create scenes from that certain book by cutting and combining images represented on the covers and by using the remaining pages and tabs to create the stage or pedestal for the depicted event in the book.

Thomas Allen, Untitled, 2009

Cara Barer’s photographs are trying to reinvent the book as an aesthetic object and its substantiality as an abstract form with an infinite and variable range. Depicting a book this way can draw on almost as many interpretations as the content itself. The poetics^[5] of this artist is to capture, through skewing and rippling, the vulnerability and intimacy of the printed page.

CaraBarer, Untitled, 2010

The poetics of Nina Katchadourian seems to have a clear literary antecedent in the cut-up technique engineered by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. The selection and organization of material is a curatorial kind of endeavor, in which the artist works within the limitations of a given collection to impose some semblance of logic and order. The physical configuration of the books, however, is sculptural, allowing the formal properties of the covers such as color, font, as well as the overall arrangement, to gird the sequencing of titles in formal subtext. And while these layers imply a knotty, multi-disciplinary practice, Katchadourian views this project as a form of portraiture, in which books freed from alphabetical order or the more basic goal of storage tell the stories of their owners through incidental verse.

A day at the beach

Primitive art The bathers

Just imagine Shark 1

Picasso Shark 2

Raised by wolves Shark 3

Sudden violence

Silence

What is Art Another way of telling

Close observation The history of Philosophy Illuminations

Negations

Brian Dettmer is using book-based scrap whose original function was cast into oblivion. His usual materials fall into the category of books, but not only. Maps, tapes and various other media “prosthetics” are geared to re-contextualize new meanings or meanings taken for granted and culturally omitted regarding the object itself. Using surgical tools, Dettmer engraves and sculpts each copy of the book into an exhibit piece that stuns the eye and persuades the mind of its inherent accuracy of detail and technique.

Brian Dettmer, Encyclopedia, 2010

In the absence of the standard white canvas, Mike Stilkey uses stacks of books in order to paint his paintings. Making use of the form and cover each book and each recycled book “spine”, his sculptures and his large installations are defined both by the picturesque imagery and by the particularity of his canvas.

Mike Stilkey, Untitled, 2009

Laramée Guy’s sculptures depict the reversed relation between the oversized accumulation of knowledge and the corrosion of the environment. Stacks of books are sculpted in such a way as to show landscape formations, edges of canyons, mountain-tops or famous landmarks reflecting the terrestrial both in physical and spiritual terms, trying to capture the living nature of inanimate objects^[6].

Guy Laramée, Untitled, 2009

Jeremy May chooses to craft unique jewelry out of old abandoned book sand. The artist dissects stack of hundreds of printed pages and laminates them to model into the desired shape through a painstaking process of production. The delicately artistic results may be worn as symbols of condensed written history and may be matched with any apparel as exclusive designed jewelry.

Jeremy May, Vanity Fair, 2010

Su Blackwell chooses to manufacture tangential scenes of ideational content from the books she uses, by gently folding and precisely cutting their pages. Artist converts the strips of text removed from the books in order to create a new narrative style in storytelling.

This hyper-detailed style varies between figures and silhouettes “tattooed “on text page, butterflies that fly towards the open book’s cover and specific narrative scenes that reflect events in the original content of the book.

Su Blackwell, Red Ridinghood și Sleeping Beauty, 2009.

Jacqueline Rush Lee’s sculptures resemble, in large degree, wilted plants or exotic marine vegetation than the remains of civilization. Deliberately destroying ancient books by exposing them to moisture, dismantling or remodeling, the artist illustrates the fragility of the object represented by the book reducing it to the status of a fossil skeleton.

Jacqueline Rush, Lorem Ipsum I, II, 2010.

Bibliography:

Bayard, Pierre, Cum să vorbim despre cărțile pe care nu le-am citit, ed. Polirom, Iași, Romania, 2008.

Webliography:

Prensky, Mark: www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants

Webography:

Allen, Thomas: http://www.foleygallery.com/artists/artist_ins.php3?artist=8

Bară, Carer: http://www.carabarer.com/

Blackwell, Su: http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/

Dettmer, Brian : http://briandettmer.com/

Katchadourian, Nina: http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/index.php

Laramée, Guy: http://popstart.ca/en/members/guy-laram%C3%A9e

May, Jeremy: http://littlefly.co.uk/

Rush Lee, Jacqueline: http:// www.jacquelinerushlee.com/

Stilkey, Mike: http://www.mikestilkey.com/#

The, Robert: http://www.bookdust.com/main.htm

Notes