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tags: Books
Digital writing is doubly attenuated; it is ’oral’, yet it lacks the social and physical cues accompanying speech, and although it is a form of writing, it has no physical substance.
rel:Manicule, Body in Books and Analysis of Love
As physical objects, books and letters have served as embodiments of experience and of the ’personal touch’. It is harder to give up documents as physical objects than books or letters.
Writing in the past involved the manipulation of tangible materials, digital writing consists of only pixels on the computer screen, no ink, no paper, no pen, no pencil.
Hypertext changed the rhythms of reading. There was less fixity of the text. Text was developed in modular chunks, having associated rather than linear structure. Readers can change the text too.
A playful orality emerged in digital writing - digital letters, like email, “feel” like chatting and many linguistic features are speech-like.
Thought
Are image memes more a product of digital culture? I understand something like a knock-knock joke or a funny postcard could have meme-like qualities, but the internet meme seems to be so much on overdrive, so virulent at times, that it is something distinct.
The culture crystallizing around digital writing may place far less value on originality of substance, important in literate culture, and more on stylization and an ambience of ’togetherness’, based on community of interest among individuals dispersed in place and time.
The central thesis of this paper is that in past analyses of differences between oral and literate cultures, we have ignored or underestimated certain important continuities between them.
In oral cultures, important aspects of meaning are conveyed in Performance. We read without direct access to authors.
Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)
CMC is typically compared by social psychologists to face-to-face communication, not to other forms of writing.They view it as lacking in ’social presence’, or having ’reduced bandwidth’, in comparison with face-toface communication. Researchers refer to the lack of non-verbal cues - absence of facial expressions, gestures, intonation, information on appearance and dress of the communicator, or the physical setting. Often, the sender’s age, gender and social status are unknown.
rel:Improvement to social media
Walter Benjamin’s (1969a) famous concept of the ’aura’ of an object is applicable to books, letters and documents. Like all objects, texts have their own aura, including the physical changes that particular copies or exemplars may have undergone, over time - the crumpled pages, faded bindings, print, or handwriting, fingerprints, smudges and so on - and the history of the hands that have touched them. As a consequence of processes of disembodiment, in the digital era this aura of texts is now being eroded.
Aura
via Tate The term was used by Walter Benjamin in his influential 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin argued that ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.’ He referred this unique cultural context i.e. ‘its presence in time and space’ as its ‘aura’.
Sartre: rel:Book Structures
I began my life as I shall no doubt end it: amidst books. In my grandfather’s study there were books everywhere… Though I did not yet know how to read, I already revered those standing stones: upright or leaning over, close together like bricks on the book-shelves, or spaced out nobly in lanes of menhirs… I disported myself in a tiny sanctuary, surrounded by ancient, heavy-set monuments… I would touch them secretly to honor my hands with their dust, but I did not quite know what to do with them, and I was a daily witness of ceremonies whose meaning escaped me: my grandfather … handled those cultural objects with the dexterity of an officiant… At times, I would draw near to observe those boxes which slit open like oysters, and I would see the nudity of their organs, pale fusty leaves, slightly bloated, covered with black veinlets, which drank ink and smelled of mushrooms.
Leigh Hunt:
’When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally. I like to lean my head against them … give me a small, snug place, almost entirely walled in with books’
rel:Manicule, Body in Books and Analysis of Love
We experience books as extensions of our selves (Belk, 1988). Some people still make them their own by pasting or stamping bookplates in them.
Books as gifts:
Just as a book we own becomes an extension of our own self (Belk, 1988), so a gift book becomes an extension of the giver - because he or she chose it, wrapped it, inscribed a personal message in it, handed it to us.
A text file sent by email will not usually be an acceptable gift, but a CD-ROM of, say, literary works, attractively wrapped, is already making a fine gift for some.’
Standardized print did away with the peculiarities of the handwriting of the scribe or author, and with the idiosyncrasies of pagination and visibly corrected mistakes. Original manuscripts, handwritten or even typed, with erasures and changes discernible to the reader, have been a treasured source of information for scholars.
Letter Writing
The sensuous aspects of letter writing. The letters of one of the early masters of calligraphy, Chen Zun, were prized more for their calligraphy than for their content
In traditional Japan, all aspects of writing were intensely aestheticized. Letters normally took the form of poems, exquisitely penned on paper of an exactly appropriate texture and in ink of the correct degree of blackness; folded with dexterity, and attached to a spray of seasonal flowers, they were entrusted to a page attired in a manner worthy of his master’s dignity.
First, it was necessary to choose paper of the proper thickness, size, design, and color to suit the emotional mood that one wished to suggest, as well as the season of the year and even the weather of the particular day. The calligraphy, of course, was at least as important as the actual message, and often the writer had to make numerous drafts with different brushes before producing the precise effect he wishes… Having finished his letter, the writer would carefully fold it in one of the accepted styles. The next step was to select the proper branch or spray of blossom to which the letter must be attached. This depended on the dominant mood of the letter and on the imagery of the poem. It was also correlated with the color of the paper: blue paper for a willow twig, green for oak, crimson for maple, white for an iris root.
In West they spoke of Penmanship (legibility, speed, and ease) rather than Calligraphy.
The typewriter was developed between 1830 and 1850. One company ironically called an early ornate version “The Caligraph.”
NOTE
Etymology - calligraphy greek kallos (beauty) and graphein (write) - kalligraphos (one who writes beautifully)
rel:Love Letters Made Easy - Gabrielle Rosiere
Love Letters
Many will find the thought of love letters in the standard ’memo’ format of email an offputting prospect. Some might even feel that love letters sent by email arrive too quickly, spoiling the delicious experience of waiting for the letter to arrive, the suspense before opening it.~ Certainly, no one can yet perfume an email letter. While in prison, Vaclav Havel wrote to his wife that he used a perfumed letter from her to aromatize his locker, and asked her to perfume all her letters, because they evoked a time and place when they were together.
They seem trivial - a few predictable words scribbled onto the back of a view of a sunset. However, once again we encounter the theme of a physical object used to concretize and to share an aspect of human experience
In medieval England, the transfer of lands was often accompanied by the transfer of a symbolic object such as a clod of earth, or a knife or sword belonging to the donor (Clanchy, 1979; Earle, 1888; Hibbitts, 1992). When documents came into use, knives were sometimes attached to them, to make the transfer ’real’.
Signatures
Signatures are especially critical in written performative acts. The precursor of the modern signature is the personal seal, known from ancient and medieval times in both the East and the West (Avrin, 1991; Chiang and Miller, 1990; Collon, 1990; Gaur, 1984). In medieval times, individuals touched their sword to a document. Anglo-Saxon legal documents often concluded with a list of names of witnesses; a cross usually appears next to each name. However, witnesses did not actually sign their names (they were illiterate), or even draw the cross; both were inscribed by the scribe. Instead, they merely touched the document with their swords
New Aesthetic
In a host of ways, computerization is fostering a new aesthetic based on simulation. One can customize one’s reading and writing environment, by experimenting with fonts changing color schemes, using commercial screen savers and background ’wallpaper’, or even designing one’s own, e.g. by digitizing a favorite photograph. P
Members of the (asynchronous) FOODWINE discussion list have periodic wine tastings. A list of wines is distributed to members, who are to purchase them, sample them within a given time span, and then send their tasting notes to the group. This group also has ’Foodstocks’: the menu of a designated restaurant is discussed by members in postings to the list; a group living in that location meet there for a meal, and then discuss the meal on the list. 16 I myself recently attended an online dinner on IRC, in which the same menu was to be eaten simultaneously at each remote site.