"I Read Where I Am. Exploring New Information Cultures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Various)
8. Flowing Together – Vito Campanelli
Maybe it’s trite but when I reflect on the evolution of reading modalities I cannot do without thinking that, in the present historic moment, we are witnessing an epochal 'change of status': from the invention of the alphabet to mechanical movable type printing and even to deconstructionism (Derrida, above all), the text was organized into rigid structures that, despite the heterogeneity of their evolutionary trajectories, have come to constitute as many cages. We know that a cage means a condition in which every possibility is ordered to remain confined within it, so that – to take some practical examples – the interpretation of a written text or its reworking, not being able to take place outside that precise form/cage in which the text was shaped, inevitably end in adapting themselves to the rules of the game and to the set of finite possibilities of that very context. The various dominant forms, characteristic of specific ages, have determined the 'thought form' of their time, so that alphabetic writing is a prerequisite for the emergence of historical consciousness; the printed book is crucial for the spread of a generalized confidence in the linear progress of science, without which there would be no industrial revolution; and so on.
The form/cage also assumed the function, somehow, of social glue, in fact, old and new generations, conservatives and progressives, despite the apodictic distance of their instances, have had to confront each other from a common ground: they have had to sit at the same table or – if you prefer – behind the same bars. Today, with the digitization of the text, we see a radical change that – in my opinion – must be identified with the abandonment of all form/cage. The text, in fact, becomes fluid and begins to flow along with other data, therefore, together with any other cultural expression and with contemporary identities and existences. Everything is included in a flow which, by its very nature, denies itself to any stable form. Everything becomes transitory and in this new condition, establishing new rules of the game (a temptation which many cannot resist) is quite like writing on the foreshore: it is something that will last only until the next wave. Obviously in the last twenty years old media forms and metaphors (such as the page of the book) have been mostly used; however – and this is the key point – no one and nothing can prevent the same content (only illusorily fixed in a form) beginning to flow in a kaleidoscopic range of different configurations. Stripped of any structure, without any predetermined and sequential paths, reading becomes a flowing together with the other elements of the flow, creating temporary (even ephemeral and extemporary, if you like) relationships and configurations. Fantastic, isn’t it?
I love this new condition and I believe I have been privileged to have lived on both sides of this epochal 'change of status'.
Vito Campanelli is new media theorist and teaches Theory and Technics of Mass Communication at the Universit#224; degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale'.