[iDC] Media dies more slowly than some would like

[Myron Turner]

I was interested in the quote from Derrida, because I immediately felt 
that there is something more than restructuration going on, one form 
being absorbed by another.  The differences in technology make for 
differences in experience.  What is reading for us was not at all 
necessarily what it was for people in earlier times.

The medieval manuscript, for instance, is very difficult for us to 
read.  Visually, it is quite different from the printed book; there are 
very few visual clues. Punctuation, as we know it, for syntactical 
division, did not appear until the Renaissance. Reading in the medieval 
period was bound up in orality.  When people read, even to themselves, 
they apparently moved their lips, read aloud, because reading was 
embedded in community.  The last vestiges of communal reading as a 
widespread phenomenon seems to have all but disappeared in the early 
20th century, probably because radio supplanted the earlier practice of 
people reading aloud to one another.  How many of us has the patience to 
listen to someone else reading a novel to us?  Yet, that was not 
uncommon in the 19th century.  Even the publication of novels differed 
in the 19th century, often appearing serially in periodicals.  We are 
(and were) willing to put up with this in radio and tv and and movies, 
which took up the serialized format, which still remained grounded in a 
communal sensibility.    But the solitary reader, which is what we have 
been for the past 100 years, assumes an experience of independence from 
external distractions and obligations.  All that exists, for this 
reader, is the book.

Interestingly, as McLuhan foresaw, the Internet has returned us to 
communal forms of reading, it has forged a bridge between the solitary 
reader and the community of readers.   It is solitary, because it is 
reader and screen.  But, on the net we don't read books; we read 
"pages",  we read hypertext.  We read actively within a community of 
interests.  And we read responsively, because reading on the Internet is 
bound up in conversation.

Historic changes in reading change us; they change the angle at which we 
engage the world.

Myron

Derrida:
>  The codex had itself supplanted the volume, the volumen, the scroll. 
> It had supplanted it without making it disappear, I should stress. For 
> what we are dealling with are never replacements that put an end to 
> what they replace but rather, if I might use this workd today, 
> restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives 
> endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with 
> a new economy 

-- 

_____________________
Myron Turner
http://www.room535.org