By now, many of you will have read the Slate piece on how online reading differs from reading on paper. It was the sort of piece that elicited a great deal of head-nodding, often prompting a simple ‘yup‘ as a response. With the topic sorta’ being up my alley, I thought I might write a long piece in response to it, chock full of long paragraphs, big words and deep ideas – but stopped myself.
Fuck that, I thought. I’ll just make a list. So:
1) How does language function? One of the primary ways in which language ‘works’ is through referentiality – i.e. it points or refers to something beyond itself. Simultaneously however, it only actually ever points to itself. When I say the say the word ‘tree’, I only make sense of that word in terms of other words – i.e. that it is a large, woody plant – and never really get outside language. So language occupies a very weird space where it remains enclosed in itself while always pointing to something beyond itself.
2) What might we then say about language on the page? So, if language occupies this weird dynamic of inside and outside, when we read, you could say that language works in a projective manner. You see words on a page, associate them with concepts that exist in the world and then piece those concepts together into a picture or an argument or story. I tend to think of it like a sort of mental version of the escape and return of a boomerang – language asks you to leave where you are only to return to where you were. This is, very roughly speaking, imagination.
3) How, if it all, does language differ on the screen? If language on the page asks its reader to move her/himself into the space of imagination, then on-screen language must do something similar. But I think something that may differ is ‘where you are asked to go’. While all language is always pointing to other language, words on the internet often point directly to other random shit. So while language works the same way in terms of entering/creating consciousness, words on the screen differ in that they also point to the world that lives behind the screen and the words themselves.
4) So, one way to think of this is simply in terms of distraction. Because the screen is dynamic and can be so many things – word processor, book, movie screen, games console, canvas and so on – consistent reading is difficult because the screen is itself inconsistent. Instead, it is constantly morphing and clamouring for your attention, flickering between presence and absence about 60 times a second.
5) But another way to think of this is the possibility that language functions differently on the screen. So if I say that on-screen language points to a world behind it, how does this differ from the book? After all, if language is constantly gesturing to things beyond itself, how do electronic words differ from printed text? Well, it’s not completely different. But what it does do is destabilise the physical and cognitive barriers between sets of information and their locations. When I read online and come upon a word I don’t recognise, I open up another tab, look it up and continue. But more than that, when I come upon a historical event, a cultural touchstone, a literary reference, it’s all there. I no longer read in vertical silos; rather, I move laterally between systems of thought.
6) So one way to articulate this difference is the contrast between vertical and lateral thinking. In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts argues that print reading lends itself to a sort of introspective depth and ‘internality’. While I scoffed at first, the more often I directly contrast online reading with book reading, the more I am inclined to agree. And the disparity in the functioning of language – where printed language points to the imaginative space and screen language to the virtual space (and yes, the potential for conflation here is deliberate) – may be one way to think about why reading practices are changing.
7) But finally, one cannot posit hard-and-fast rules for all websites. Take this beautiful piece on Salon about a failed affair (those two links are the same – I was just curious how the choice of which words to use as links might change how one reads the sentence). It is in many ways “old-school” – literary, wordy and requiring concentration. One would obviously not read a forum thread or a link blog in the same way. So, returning to the screen’s multiplicity of functions, we have to remember that we cannot simply speak of ‘online reading’ in a singular, straightforward sense.
