The Future of Text

"I grew up wanting nothing more than to see my words in print, and so my online work these days sometimes seems bittersweet. A few of my fellow creative writing graduates even consider me a traitor to the paper tradition. But in fact, the way we view text has been in flux since long before Gutenberg, and will remain so well after the present generation has turned its final page. An unusual museum exhibit, “Experiments in the Future of Reading,” now on view at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey, is an imaginative and playful reminder of just how fluid text can be....

The XFR exhibit is definitely thought provoking. One example: a tilting table, three feet on a side, on which the entire glowing surface is the reading area, covered in text several inches tall. Push one side of the table down and text flows across and down as if pulled by gravity; tilt it to another side and a different topic flows in. In one example, the tilting table contains folk-tales from half-a-dozen sources—Indian, Chinese, Native American and so forth. Depending on how you tip the table, you can read one or several at the same time, as words in various colors flow from each quadrant of the table....

In the end, XFR does just what Balsalmo suggests: it underscores the limitations of our current notions of text. We inherited the tradition of paper books, newspapers and magazines-forms of technology so highly evolved and accepted that we no longer regard them as technology but as permanent institutions. And at the same time we are still so early in our transition to electronic displays that everything we have come up with thus far—from personal computer screens to dedicated e-books—strikes most serious readers as crude and uncomfortable.

What is it that makes us uncomfortable? At heart, much of what we miss in current electronic text display is the additional information and functionality that printed matter contains in its physical presence. We know by shape and heft whether we’re buying a magazine, a newspaper or a book. We flip through pages to know whether we have a long or short read ahead of us; we bookmark, dog-ear, fold, tear or clip." [Newsweek]

While I agree with all of the points made in this article, my only caveat is that many of the assumptions we make are based on our place in that timeline. When information starts out in a digital format, there is less to lose. When a generation of kids grows up with information that lives its entire life in a digital format, expectations will be different.

There is no better proof of this than a comment made by Lori Bell at the SLS Tech Summit last month. While it is uncomfortable for most of us to lack the inability to "scan" the length of a digital title (how fat/thin is it?), younger readers don't have this problem. In fact, the lack of pagination is an incentive to them, because they're not worried about how many pages are left to read.