Working Papers

The innovation and variability of online reading, together with the denial of limits, challenge the reader to disclose rhizomes or nodes whilst tracing personal paths to walk on (read). The rejection of material (and immaterial) boundaries with the change from print to virtual, and the elimination of the printed page sequence, invite the reader to a simulated experience of his own mind, where (from stimuli answer) narratives, readings and individualized knowledge networks are developed. Without a proper or single body (the text on paper), online literature gravitates through various media devices in an interactive exercise, which oblige access (with mouse clicks on hyperlinks) in a proposal of rapid continuous selection to the reader’s way.

Actually, it is the interactive potential that constitutes one of the most alluring and remarkable innovations of online reading. On the one hand, there is the promise, or maybe the illusion, of reaching farther and ever mounting knowledge; on the other hand, when we are reading on a screen we are constantly making choices, for there is always much more on it than we have access to, since it is impossible to access it all: “Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know the exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed.” (ibidem)

It is then necessary to be aware that in the present, rather than in former times, and particularly because of the strong coexistence of various types of possibilities, storytelling is never finished, plots are always incomplete, endings are always and controversially open. The reader has become simultaneously audience and actor, consumer and producer, dictating the result both of reception (reading) and of production (writing/creation). The wider the preparation, the wealthier and more fulfilled will the scope of the reading experience be. The result then can only but be an original form of sensitive integration through which the reader has to deal with multiple sensations at once, whilst making use of his intellectual ability and memory background, giving way to a simultaneously cognitive and perceptual practice.

Yet, this reading dimension is ultimately a desirable or utopian one not easy to reach given its constant transformations and novelties. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, Walter Benjamin says: “Historically, the various modes of communication have competed with one another. The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience”(1992:155). When we are talking about the essence of what it is to be in front of a portable computer interpreting that semiotic universe that develops on the screen, we can make use of Benjamin’s words again and state that “This is the nature of something lived through (Erlenis) to which [the reader online] has [to give] the weight of an experience (Erfahrung)” (1992:190).

Moreover, the dialogue resulting from printing, writing, sound and media, usually called “hypertext”, drives the reader to an exercise of appropriation of the digital media. When facing the screen, the reader is beyond the printed book, further away the common level of reading, in a constant transaction between technology and man, trying to establish negotiations that imply past and present social practices embedded in the same experience (Chartier, 2002). To know how to read books and images but, at the same time, understand sounds and movements, feelings and subtleties - all in one - makes it all very demanding, to say the least. We are not talking about merely new literacies, but about different literacies interrupting each other in the same space and time, and which are simultaneously necessary to understanding and decoding (or encoding) the message. The hypertext becomes itself the medium, as John Slatin already defended back in the 90’s (Slatin, 1995:167), since authors and system designers are required to discover new ways of establishing links, representing and constructing knowledge and achieving the necessary coherence.

Olga Pombo, in a very interesting project called “Enciclopédia e Hipertexto” argues that due to all these circumstances “the writer of hypertext becomes a space maker, the editor corresponds to the typographer, the reader is supposed to have space and cognitive spatiality understanding, cartographic orientation and navigation skills, thus, the text becomes, more and more, an object to read and to see” (Pombo, 2006:15).

We should not disregard the way all reading practices across history have developed according to man’s participation in the world evolution and the consequences from these changes. In his essay “The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Benjamin states that: “During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence” (Benjamin, 1992:216). Thus, the new role of the reader both as an interpreter and as a moody conscious or unconscious user mirrors the non-linear course that can easily be overplayed and denied by the present state of affairs. We are talking about a phenomenon of presence-with, reciprocity, adjustment, where meaning is only possible through intense speculation, proximity, intertextuality, all determining the intimate meeting between the reader and the reading object that grounds this more aesthesic[1] than aesthetic experience.

The complexity that this relationship accomplishes may be illustrated by the prosperous discussion on interactivity, focusing the issue on its various perspectives: from its process and features to perception (Steuer, 1992; Jensen, 1998; McMillan, 2000; 2002). The debate has been so fruitful that Lev Manovich goes further stating that “As with the digital I avoid using the word interactive (…) without qualifying it, for the same reason – I find the concept to be too broad to be truly useful (Manovich, 2001:55).

However, although different dimensions of interactivity may be pointed out, we should stand out the hermeneutic one when considering virtual environments. The reader is responsible for understanding the world as it is assembled by technology, and knowledge results of a hybrid association lived via different and mutant data. Interaction with hypertexts compels readers to make continuous efforts to understand what is happening. On this challenging reader engagement depends all information acquired; and thus the consequent and craving need, not for developing new literacy skills but for conceptualizing a combination of all of them in a transliterary approach.