Category Archives: Experience

“It’s handwritten, but not by me!”

by Tim Gorichanaz Experience, Handwriting, Technology

Ah, the personal touch of a handwritten note.

Ever since the dawn of type, people have been talking about how special handwriting is. In type, the English alphabet has only 26 letters (make that 52, counting lowercase and capitalized forms), but in handwriting, there are infinite letters. Just think of all the ways you can write the letter g and have it still be recognizable. (Indeed there is an entire blog dedicated to this letterform.) When we read something handwritten, we get a sense of the personality and emotion of the writer. This is why, when printed Bibles came along, people found the words a bit lacking in spirit. And it’s why handwritten letters are so special for us, even today (if a bit sloppier).

With digital technology, we’re no longer limited to keyboards and mice for input. With trackpads and touch screens, we can combine some of the personality of handwriting with the capability of electronics. The latest update to Apple’s iOS on the iPhone and iPad takes advantage of this, giving people the opportunity to send handwritten and drawn messages. Recipients can even replay the drawing to see how it came to be.

iOS 10 handwriting feature

While exploring this feature, I was struck by what seems to be an absurdity: It comes loaded with a number of pre-written messages—hello, thank you, happy birthday, etc.—that you can simply tap and send. That is, you can send a handwritten message without actually having to write it. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised—it turns out ghostwriting love letters is a sustainable business (and I feel like it figured in the plot of a novel I read once, but I can’t remember what it was).

Still, this seems tremendously weird to me. Wouldn’t a recipient find it disingenuous to receive the exact same text again and again? Though, then again, will people actually use these pre-made messages? For now, all I can do is speculate.

 

To word a world

by Tim Gorichanaz Experience, Rhetoric

The poet Muriel Rukeyser told us, “The world is made of stories, not of atoms.” Of course there is some kind of world made of atoms out there, but it’s not my world. I don’t see through atomic microscope eyes. I don’t see with utterly detached scientific objectivity. No, I’m a person, just like you, awash in the world—a world made of stories.

blue-marbles

Too often, we seem to forget this. We seem to wish we were more mechanical. We talk about our minds as if they were computers—some even dream of a technological singularity that will obsolesce our very bodies. But this theoscientific point of view misses a whole swath of the universe: the lifeworld. Philosopher Roger Scruton presents beautifully the duality of the scientific perspective of the universe and that of the lifeworld: Whereas the scientific perspective hears sounds, the lifeworld hears music.

I’ve been thinking about worlds a lot recently. I wrote a piece on Medium about how we create lifeworlds to inhabit simply by being human—I describe in particular the ultrarunning world. And recently I saw the film adaptation of the eponymous literary masterwork The Little Prince, in which we travel from world to world. We don’t literally travel from world to world, but rather we come to inhabit others’ lifeworlds—represented in the book and the film as tiny planets.

One of the pleasures of the lifeworld is that we share it, with innumerable beings—common things like scissors and tomatoes (as oded by Pablo Neruda), and of course other people. Besides this automatic, passive sharing, we can welcome others to participate in our lifeworld by opening them up to it. We do this through communication.

One way to communicate is through the written word, a very powerful way to share lifeworlds. We tend to assume that writing merely represents—for instance, the word “tree” represents the thing in real life that we call a tree. Certainly writing does this, and some writing—above all technical writing—relies on it.

If writing could only represent, it would go nowhere in trying to create a bridge between lifeworlds. But we know writing can do more—we’ve all gotten lost in a novel, for instance, taken over by the characters’ lifeworlds. Writing evokes the lifeworld in this way not by representing, but by presenting. It’s not the words themselves, which only represent; rather, it’s somewhere between and among them where the presentation unfolds. This is what your English teacher meant when they told you, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s why a summary of a novel does no justice to the experience of reading the novel. It’s why thoughtlessly adapting a novel to a different medium can be disruptive. That’s what it means to word a world.

The reading experience

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, Experience

What’s a book? We have a number of ways of answering that question. On one hand, a book is a physical object, a rectangular thing with pages held together with binding. My copy of Candide is a book. On the other hand, we also think of a book as the words that inhabit that object. When someone sees you reading Candide and says, “I’ve read that book,” they probably don’t mean they read the same copy you’re reading, but rather a different copy—perhaps from the library. So there’s a sense that all the different copies of Candide in the universe are somehow the same book. Nowadays, these copies aren’t all in print—we have web-based text versions and audiobook versions, for instance.

Thinking about books in this way can serve us well enough, but we have to be careful. Different technologies have different possibilities for use—for instance, a tablet is multifunctional, whereas a printed book only does one thing—and exist in different social climates—for instance, a person may not feel comfortable using their smartphone in a certain part of a city. Both these things present affordances which constrain and enable how we use technology. And since books are presented through technology (we don’t live in the world of The Matrix yet), each book has a set of affordances through which a reader’s interaction with that book unfolds.

In many cases, a text presented in different technologies might be close enough that we’d be justified calling them all the “same.” For instance, the book White Noise by Don DeLillo presents a narrative that seems to be conveyed similarly whether it’s read in print or listened to in audio form.

But some authors specifically take advantage of the possibilities of a technology in making their book. I call this “entanglement,” because in books like this, the form and the content become entangled to a degree that can’t reasonably be ignored. An example of this is the book The Neverending Story, in which different colors are used in order to present the narrative—and the narrative is diminished in editions that print it in only black ink.

At iConference this year, I presented a study I did on people’s experiences reading two books I felt were entangled in a similar way—Ulysses, by James Joyce, and Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace—to see how people experienced these books in print, audiobook and Kindle formats. What I found was that, though people in all formats “got” what the books were about in terms of content (plot, themes), only the people who read the print editions talked about having deep, transformative, personal experiences with the books.

Now, this isn’t to say that print is better and that’s the end of the story. Rather, what I conclude from this study is that a book is likely best in the form its author intended, particularly when it is entangled. When a book is adapted, it is wrested from that entanglement and becomes, as a result, impoverished. While this cannot be seen if we think of a book as just the verbal content of its text, it is quite visible when the reader’s experience is taken into account. What’s important to note in all this is that audiobooks can be entangled just as can movies and webcomics.

What results is an important lesson for publishers and designers who are adapting books from one format to another: Put the reader’s experience first.

If you’re interested in reading more, I’d invite you to read my paper “Novel Experiences: On Page, In Ear, On Screen,” which is available in the open-access iConference 2016 proceedings. You may also be interested in the book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, by David Levy, and others that I have listed on my Reading List page.