Working Papers

However, despite the continuous historic transformations, when we witness the present relation between readers and digital environments, there is another completely different text experience worth mentioning: one of high sensitive nature that boosts its faculties with new media, which, for the first time, are part of textual fruition.

The technological means selected by the reader online, work as mechanisms, which may be there to facilitate our daily routine and to register and transmit past history. The possibility of recording events allows human experience to be eternal, i.e. beyond the inexorable death of the body or of our capacity to remember things. Through the availability of an “external archive or memory” (Babo, 2004:32), knowledge will only come back to life throughout human decision and consequent handling of devices. The organization of reading online resembles the organization of our own memory: working discontinuously and being associative by nature (Slatin).

What is happening today is that by taking advantage of new technologies we are able to blend various art options in the same reading experience. All process is both technical and aesthetic and thus possible to be named through multiple compound expressions such as: mediated/remediated reading, metamorphosed reading, penetrated reading, interrupted reading or technical reading; or even all missing terms identifying the presence of technical devices working both as mediators of reading practices and in charge of reproducing those same practices.

Just as Walter Benjamin predicted many years ago, the first consequence of this state of affairs is the crisis in the aura of work of art. In the case of the art of reading, this crisis allows it to receive a plural and multifaceted dimension characterized by fruition - opposite to the auratic environment of that elitist activity of some centuries ago. In “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction”, Benjamin defends that the mechanical reproduction has created a fundamental change in the nature of art, which has lost its “aura” by separating it from the ritual and traditional context where it has always been placed: “And if changes in the “medium” of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes. (…) To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction” (Benjamin, 1992:216,217).

This revolution in the status of art has become relevant to the new ways of exercising the art of reading today. Walter Benjamin, back in the 30s, had already forecast the present communication idiosyncrasies, by trying to understand the connections among historical, political, aesthetic and technological forces. Wondering about the consequences for art experience and for art itself when its reproduction becomes so easily available, the author argues that the age of mechanical reproduction has changed forever the political functions, social relations and the value built around art, but also our own art experience.

Having no knowledge about the promises and possibilities offered by digital media back in his time, Benjamin has managed to raise the main questions of our times: copyright and publishing issues. The capacity of reproduction in photography, radio or cinema where his studies developed, could be widen to the possibilities of electronic and digital reproduction nowadays. Each reproduction, each writing representation has modified the experience of the original for readers but also for authors in a revolutionary personal usage and manipulation of the work of art that the so-called “empowerment” has made possible.

When faced with circumstances of absence of authority and blurred frontiers of action, the reader online has to deal with a problem of scale where there are not three, fifteen or twenty characters in a novel but availability of an infinite number of participants: “And before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colourful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight. Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what is taken for intellect for city dwellers, will grow thicker with each succeeding year.”[1] (Benjamin, 1987:28)

The challenge lays in understanding these “locust swarms of print” that so stubbornly “pop up” in our daily pc routine. The new technologies get hold of readers through vital parts of their bodies (sense and intellectual organs). If, on the one hand printed books demand concentration, a careful and focused incursion in the print signs in order to grasp narrative meanings, together with a polite relationship with their guests, solitude and silence; on the other hand reading on various simultaneous and crossed semiotic environments demands dispersion and distraction. Reading online gathers documents of different interfaces (video, graphic, text) that circulate diluted through links in an unprecedented way. This places informality and instability in the present reading act in opposition to the past one (Steiner, 2001).

At this point, we should also stand out that, contrary to the print book, this question of mediation through technology is not a novelty to other forms of art as music, video or cinema. Their technical devices have always been intrinsic parts of video and musical fruition in audio, recording and reproduction activities. If the devices that mediate music and video have become so ordinary that it is meaningless to think about them as distinct elements (for they constitute a whole and do not survive without the other); reading, however, has lived through different apparatuses and through both harsh censure and delighted appraisal.

Despite all criticism and suspicion towards online routines, theInternet has offered reading the highest surge since Gutenberg, as data from latest statistics about Portuguese activities developed on the internet show.

The ever-changing process that literature online has been going through created a kind of shifting literacy that nowadays does not establish any type of borders because it shelters several different languages, areas of knowledge and of life, all co-existing in the same space. The screen becomes the face of an intense experience where all senses are invited to participate in an immensity of shocks and stimuli testing and triggering our conscience and memory. And again Benjamin: “The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis)” (Benjamin, 1992:159).

Consciousness proficiency as “screen against stimuli” is what dictates the result of our reading exercise. The more differentiated the hypertext, the more demanding the job of dealing with swelling “impressions” that sometimes are worth a moment and nothing more than that. Hence, despite the impetuous and intuitive type of reading that online literature may suppose, there is always the possibility of a much sharper and insightful reading that employs, impressions undoubtedly, but, serious usage of prior knowledge of the digital environment as well. Above all, a past memory at hand that deals with the intricate stimuli shock dispute. Thus, we assume that depending on the reader preparation level and consciousness towards this original textual arena, will the cybernetic reading be outlined as an experience of life or a mere moment to live through: “Without reflection there would be nothing but the sudden start, usually the sensation of fright which, according to Freud, confirms the failure of the shock defence”. (ibidem: 159)