This week's blogging question is great because it has forced me to answer a question I had never considered. How does form effect meaning? What came to mind in answering this question is a novel experience I have had with the Kindle. In Eric's post, he touches on the thickness of a single book containing many works by the same author. As you read a collection like that you gain a visible and tangible experience of progress. The left side of the book grows thicker and the right side grows thinner. Except if you read on a Kindle!
The Kindle maintains the same thickness no matter how long your book. This is pretty obvious, but consider how that changes your experience of progress through a book. The software designers of the Kindle have added little progress meters, location numbers (not page numbers...leaving the book behind?), percentage complete, and time left in book. In place of changing thickness we now have a multitude of ways to quantify our progress through a book. However, my recent and novel experience comes as a result of turning off all the progress indicators. Now I simply read, change the page, read, change the page, read, and, on and on.
Forgive this tangent for a second. Anders Hektor wrote a book about information behaviour called What's the use? In his book he describes an Information-Activity called "Unfolding." Unfolding is an activity in which we engage with an information source for a sustained and uninterrupted period of time, aka, reading.
Okay, so what I found was that the absence of a progress indicator dramatically changed my experience of unfolding. I had fewer distractions while reading, and thus my reading seemed to carry-on while I experienced a loss of a sense of time or progress. I truly enjoyed this deeper dive into the novel I was reading. Novels are great for sustained reading, and my ability to extend that sustainment, that unfolding, was a really cool experience.
The Kindle maintains the same thickness no matter how long your book. This is pretty obvious, but consider how that changes your experience of progress through a book. The software designers of the Kindle have added little progress meters, location numbers (not page numbers...leaving the book behind?), percentage complete, and time left in book. In place of changing thickness we now have a multitude of ways to quantify our progress through a book. However, my recent and novel experience comes as a result of turning off all the progress indicators. Now I simply read, change the page, read, change the page, read, and, on and on.
Forgive this tangent for a second. Anders Hektor wrote a book about information behaviour called What's the use? In his book he describes an Information-Activity called "Unfolding." Unfolding is an activity in which we engage with an information source for a sustained and uninterrupted period of time, aka, reading.
Okay, so what I found was that the absence of a progress indicator dramatically changed my experience of unfolding. I had fewer distractions while reading, and thus my reading seemed to carry-on while I experienced a loss of a sense of time or progress. I truly enjoyed this deeper dive into the novel I was reading. Novels are great for sustained reading, and my ability to extend that sustainment, that unfolding, was a really cool experience.
I think you have a very good point here. I know that my own reading habits are very goal driven. Sometimes it works in accord with the structure of the book (I want to finish this chapter before lunch) but often its very forced (I want to get halfway through the book by tomorrow or I want to read fifty pages by the end of the day). By taking away any means of tracking progress, it focuses your attention on what you're reading now, not what you want to have read. I wonder how that would impact the reading of a thriller, where the very content of the book is supposed to drive the reader on.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Eric, that I tend to monitor my progress by how far into the book I've read and that knowing my progress changes my experience of a novel. I know that when I read The Hunger Games: Catching Fire I can remember being very close to the end of the novel and knowing that there were still about a dozen tributes still alive and thinking, "How is this possibly going to end in less than 100 pages?" I feel like having some sort of progress indicator helps me to anticipate what might come next in a novel and that might be lost without having the indicator.
ReplyDeleteI also monitor my progress by the thickness of the remaining pages (no kindle for me, thank you! :)), but I actually have a different reason - I pace myself better that way. There are many times when I'm enjoying a book so much that I don't want to finish reading it too quickly. If I see that I'm more than half-way through, I slow down and savour the experience of reading. I'm afraid that if I had no indicators I would get to the end too abruptly... It's an interesting experiment, though, and I might take out an e-reader from the inforum one day just for that purpose.
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