"I Read Where I Am. Exploring New Information Cultures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Various)

10. The Revenge of the Gutenberg Galaxy – Florian Cramer

Let’s be clear, reading is not limited to alphabetic language, but is actually any act of visual or tactile perception involving interpretation of signs: graffiti tags, photographic images, sickness symptoms. Since human perception always, inevitably, involves interpretation, the line between perception in general and reading in particular is perfectly blurry.

Even reading versus listening is a questionable distinction. Our understanding of spoken words is highly modulated by visual reading – the so-called 'McGurk effect' describes how we misperceive a spoken word when the speaker's lips suggest a different word. In a world with intelligent beings, forecasting a future without reading might be futile. But it’s worth asking how we read now, and what kinds of reading we are moving towards.

Following the semiotician Charles S. Peirce’s three basic types of signs – iconic (based on semblance, whether a portrait painting or an onomatopoetic word like 'bang'), indexical (based on traces; smoke as an indicator of fire) and symbolic (abstract numbers, the alphabet or morse code) – 20th century media theories generally predicted a crisis of symbolic symbols in favour of icons, going from the mass medium of the book to the mass media of cinema and TV.

This prediction became the bottom line of the Frankfurt School 's critique of the culture industry, of McLuhan's TV-centric 'global village' after the 'end of the Gutenberg Galaxy', and of the 'iconic turn' declared by art historians since the 1990s. Even the development of symbolic machines appeared to follow this route, as computers evolved from the (symbolic) command line to an (iconic) graphical user interface. The future of culture, and of reading, once seemed inevitably visual-iconic.

The Internet alongside economic neoliberalism has completely shaken these seeming truths. Who would have predicted ten years ago that major youth culture media would not be some hypermediated mutation of MTV, but SMS, Twitter, and Facebook? Even MTV’s de-facto successor, YouTube, cannot be used by the illiterate because of keyword tagging, commenting, and searching (same with Flickr, the leading Internet platform for still images).

This requisite computer literacy in fact means a massive resurgence of symbolic literacy – the revival of a more or less classical concept of reading following a cultural and economic logic of compression. That is, reading and writing alphabetical text is often the most compressed and therefore efficient way of rapidly processing information, a notion explored early on in the Middle Ages when monks read texts without speaking them aloud. Now, in the form of e-mail and related types of electronic communication, reading and writing has taken over the workplace and dissolved the difference between work and home, between being fixed in space and hitting the road.

The symbol-centric, mobile medium of the text page has overtaken telecommunication, but instead of the monk’s contemplative codex, we find a second wave of industrialization and escalation of workplace efficiency.

Florian Cramer is director of the Piet Zwart Institute and head of the research programme Communication in a Digital Age.

'Florian Cramer having received about 30 work-related e-mail messages while writing this text.'