⤡ 03.01
Ao colocar-nos no espaço da informação, o livro digital corresponde a uma nova possibilidade
de recapitulação da democratização do conhecimento.
Na produção de uma “indústria da consciência”,
a diferença entre o original genuíno e a reprodução desaparece;
aliás, o processo de reprodução é o seu próprio fundamento
(o texto ou código de programação que o constitui) e reage ao objecto reproduzido,
alterando-o profundamente (o limite do “erro” no texto, pode impossibilitar a sua forma).
Uma das diferenças neste novo posicionamento do livro através dos meios electrónicos
passa pela abolição da importância da reprodução ou da tiragem, como
legitimação da dimensão
de um público ou do valor artefactual. Na aproximaçã
o ao hipermédia, o livro questiona o entendimento dos media digitais como mero pastiche ou remediaçã
o de formas de comunicação existentes e coloca-nos a hipótese de uma mudanç
a de paradigma que requer novos métodos de interrogação e compreensão.
⤡ 03.02
The icon of the "book" that throws its long shadow over the production of new electronic instruments is a grotesquely distorted and reductive idea of the codex as a material object.
⤡ 03.03
For example, one of the novelties of digital discourse is that it makes it possible to metaphorize new (non-textual) situations that have not previously been experienced in written texts. The electronic screen can, for instance, metaphorize the working of:
▼
a.An appointment book
b.A book
c.An encyclopedia
d. A newspaper
e.A visit to a store
f.The experience of a reader looking
for specific material in a bookstore
g.Carrying out operations in a bank
h.A visit to a museum
i.A photograph album
j.An institution’s organizational chart
k.A magazine
l. A map
m. A city tour
n.Hi-fi equipment,
and so on.
This implies a universe of unknown possibilities, but insofar as each of these experiences is built up as a situation which depends on a set of specific determinations, the Web page or the hypertext has to construct the metaphors in the appropriate way so as to replace said experience and extend it to its full potential. This is why it needs rhetorical organization, and why it is significant as a product of design.
⤡ 03.04
The urgent challenge digital textuality presents for criticism is to reenvision and rearticulate legacy concepts in terms appropriate to the dynamics of networked and programmable media. No less than print literature, literary criticism is affected because digital media are increasingly essential to it, limited not just to word processing but also to how critics now access legacy works through digital archives, electronic editions, hypermedia reinstantiations, and so forth.
⤡ 03.05
This virtual space, like the e-space, or electronic space of my title, is created through the dynamic relations that arise from the activity that formal structures make possible. I suggest that the traditional book produces this virtual espace, but this fact tends to be obscured by attention to its iconic and formal properties.
⤡ 03.06
Conversely, electronic books are striving towards the opposite: they are the cheap paperbacks of our time, anti-coffeetable books. E-books are books that you can't show off, like the Great Gatsby in his library of books that he never read. They are the non-auratic, often pirated stuff that you actually want to read, or at least to keyword search.
⤡ 03.07
This evolution of devices or supports towards the electronic screen,
the consequences of which have without doubt been surprising, has led to numerous new possibilities for
the exchange of information, and for the rules underlying its production and diffusion. Images can be transported; sounds can be modulated and mixed at
a distance.
⤡ 03.08
Another strategic factor is how much you can use your own photographic memory for retrieving information. Photographic memory on paper is evident and static. You can remember the exact layout of a specific page on a magazine (even related to the time when you bought it), because it is physically in that specific place. Photographic memory doesn't work well on the screen, because it's dynamic and changes every time, even if physically it's the same place with changing contents. When you try to remember where you saw an item of information, you probably refer to the URL or the link that drove you there, but you don't have much more to help you. And the light is also very important. In the electronic media the screen is retro-illuminated. Marshall McLuhan guessed that this characteristic would induce a mystic reverence in the spectator, as the stained glass windows in the churches did during the Middle Ages. Moreover video light shines on the retina stimulating the sight considerably. Paper, on the other hand, is front-illuminated, which is much more relaxing for the sight, and its light changes according to the environment.
⤡ 03.09
iBooks also lets you take notes – marginalia.
These are horrible, but it’s a start. And then there’s the Kindle.
Not only can you highlight and make notes like you can on the iPad, but they’ve put in the the tiniest little
nod to socialising the reading experience.Iit’s nice, but it’s useless. It tells you precisely nothing,
because anyone can go through a book and pick out the 10 or 20 averagely most high-information-content sentences,
and sure enough, these will be the ones everyone picks. The quotes everyone picks are not interesting.
The quotes a few people – critics, teachers, friends, even the author themselves – pick out: those
are interesting.
⤡ 03.10
Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book.
For example, size. The experience of reading a small duodecimo, designed to be held easily in one hand, differs
considerably from that of reading a heavy folio propped up on a book stand. It is important to get the feel of a
book—the texture of its paper, the quality of its printing, the nature of its binding. Its physical aspects
provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes,
it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.
Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of
the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books.
⤡ 03.11
On the computer, however, I print,
I correct, put in my corrections, print again, and so it goes on.
I do many more drafts. In this way I might correct 200 versions of the same text. And all that still wouldn't be the complete series.
There's also a phantom version. I write my text A on the computer. Print it out. Correct it by hand, Now we have text B,
the corrections for which I input onto my computer. Then I print out again and think that what I have is a text C.
But actually, it is a text D, because while
I was putting the corrections into the computer, I would certainly have taken some
spontaneous decisions and made some further changes. Therefore between text B and D — between the text
I corrected and the corrected version on the computer — there is a phantom version that is the true version C.
⤡ 03.12
[in webpages] Traditional editorial features of reading
are not suppressed, but rather take on greater force:
typographies and the metaphorical value granted to the order of thought are maintained as decisive instruments
of
discursive organization. [...] Many Web pages are developed with the idea of traditional reading in mind, without
understanding of the inferential rules specific to hypertext. The prerogatives of significance, and even more of clarity,
define one of the rhetorical principles for the production of hypertext (that with the incorporation of movement and sound
the rules of oral rhetoric are needed more than those of the written word). [...] writers and designers in the new media
“have been using punctuation marks for expressive ends.”Thus form, color, and the different semantic operations
contributed by graphics to the organization of thought once more assume a place as instruments in the building of cognition
and expression.
⤡ 03.14
These are materially unique in digital media, even if linking merely extends the traditional reference function
of bibliography or footnotes, it does so in a manner that is radically distinct in electronic space by the immediacy
with which a surrogate can be called. Links either retrieve material or take the reader to that material, they don't
just indicate a reference route. And the idea of rapid refresh materially changes the encoded information that constitutes
a text in any state.
Date stamping and annotating the history of editions will be increasingly important aspects of the
information electronic documents bear with them. The capacity materially alter electronic surrogates, customizing actual
artifacts, or, at the very least, specifying particular relations among them, does present unique opportunities.
⤡ 03.13
⤡ 03.15
According to the most utopian claim of the Googlers, Google can put virtually all printed books on-line. That claim is misleading, and it raises the danger of creating false consciousness, because it may lull us into neglecting our libraries. Companies decline rapidly in the fast-changing environment of electronic technology. Google may disappear or be eclipsed by an even greater technology, which could make its database as outdated and inaccessible as many of our old floppy disks and CD-ROMs. Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete, because obsolescence is built into the electronic media. Google will make mistakes. Despite its concern for quality and quality control, it will miss books, skip pages, blur images, and fail in many ways to reproduce texts perfectly. Once we believed that microfilm would solve the problem of preserving texts. Now we know better. As in the case of microfilm, there is no guarantee that Google’s copies will last. Bits become degraded over time. Documents may get lost in cyberspace, owing to the obsolescence of the medium in which they are encoded. Hardware and software become extinct at a distressing rate. Unless the vexatious problem of digital preservation is solved, all texts “born digital” belong to an endangered species. The obsession with developing new media has inhibited efforts to preserve the old.
⤡ 03.16
⤡ 03.17
This experience of nonlinear reading already existed, and its presentation on computers obeys pragmatic conditions
relating to the reader—the very same reason why the above- mentioned genres came to be organized in that way.
Even in books, the exegeses or explanations of the text have been normalized within the structure of the page into
what we know as footnotes, to which the text refers. This operation now can be done on the screen, so that a node can
not only refer to a source but actually put us directly in touch with said source—the computer on its screen does
what was indicated as a necessity in the book.