Moving Towards the Senses
Today’s discovery was Sensorium: Embodied experience, technology and contemporary art, by Caroline A. Jones.
Jones deconstructs Modernism’s rule of ocularity through writings of Clement Greenberg, Michel Foucault, and historical observations. Sensory phenomena, Jones notes, have been Instrumentalized.
We are joined to the sensory tools we have made to amplify and accompany the self. Instrumentalization is always moving to the next frontier, the next limit of our senses - and as part of the mediated sensorium, it is as old as the pressure felt by a hand grasping a bone or stick.
Since the typographic age, text has dominated the breath-driven Word. Books have come to include other media, like photographs and illustrations, yet it is still ocular in nature. One auditory inclusion, which is relatively recent, is the invention of phonics in the nineteenth century. N. Katherine Hayles notes in My Mother Was a Computer (2005), that the introduction of phonics to children gave “voice” to printed texts. She goes on to assume that the voice is that of the mother, or whomever taught the child to read.
Breaking down the sensory experience of traditional, Gutenberg reading, I have the following. (Sensory list from Lucas and Britt ‘Advertising Psychology and Research’, 1950)
Visual: Text (letter forms, negative space, layout), images (included photographs, drawings), paper texture, color, contrast, book form, size… (I realize this list is extensive)
Auditory: Page turn (audible paper quality, thickness), finger/page friction, flipping through pages (pitch, speed)
Motor: arm movement with page turn (elliptical motion), grasp (holding book open), lateral finger movement (trace reading movement), wind created by page turn
Tactual: paper texture, cover/paper texture contrast, edge thickness, quality/wear
Olfactory: paper smell, dry/damp, “old book smell”
Gustatory: None
Thermal: Untouched book vs. book warmed by hand, warmed by sun
Pain: None
Though it seems like the majority of information from Reading is conveyed optically, supporting information and physical habits (which become rituals), support the activity. In contrast, ebook/kindle reading would reduce this list visual, (limited) motor, and (consistent) tactual.
All of these sensations are a reaction to the book’s form factor, and it is debatable whether or not new media needs to include any of this (now antiquated) feedback. The challenge with new media, then, is to look beyond the tradition of the Book. It’s form factor is a result of the printing process, and one that is subject to change with new technologies. Devices such as the Kindle, or the Tag (leapfrog system), seem to be a transitional step in the future of media consumption. Though they include applications of new technology, they are exhibited in a familiar shell, riddled with skeuomorphs to provide comfort during the transition.
My modernist sense of functionalism inclines me to rid skeuo’s from new technology - after all, if their purpose is purely metaphorical it will only begin to clutter understanding of the new with the limitations of the familiar (why do we need to call it a Desktop?). However, I also believe that reading need not be a purely visual experience.
How can the experience of reading be re-created in the 21st century that does not instrumentalize a single sense or react to a single form factor?
I think I might have a thesis question.
