Spritz app & disappearing text

I’m sure many of you have heard about the app Spritz by now. If not, here’s a link to an overview of it on the Huffington Post.  Essentially it’s an app that shows you one word at a time, in quick sequence. The basic idea is that by using this app you’ll be able to read a given text much more quickly because every word has an “fixation point,” which is just to the left of the centre of the word.  The fixation point is where your brain begins to process the meaning of the word, and so by emphasizing the fixation point of every word in red and by centring the text in the app window, the reader should be able to process individual words up to five times more quickly than traditional reading.

Although such an app seems like a useful tool for last-minute cramming or a quick overview of the news, the app—or at least as it’s presented by the Huffington Post—emphasizes how this app can be used to read novels more quickly. Spritz also claims the app actually improves comprehension. Although it is surprisingly easy to keep up with the 500wpm example (available at Huffington Post), I’m not sure I would want to read all of Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in this format. I would also be interested in knowing whether our brains can process foreign-language words or names as quickly as we can process words in our native language.

 The best way I could think of to describe this app is as a synchronic reading experience. Because you can only focus on one word at a time, the rest of the text—what I consider to be the past and future of a book, or a kind of diachronic / temporal scale—disappears, or is erased. At first I thought that such an approach to reading must be one that is unique to digital text, but a few years ago I had to read Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons for a class. It's a really bizarre experience: each word you read seems to make sense, at the time, as existing in a sequence, but after only a few words, you have no idea how you got to where you are, or what connection exists between this word, and the word you started with. I don't think that makes any sense, but it's the best way I can think of describing what it's like to read Tender Buttons. Actually, another way might be to think of the ground disappearing beneath your feet so that it always feels like you're on solid ground, but when you look back, there's nothing there... Perhaps it is best summed up by Stein's essay Composition as Explanation: "In the beginning there was the time in the composition that naturally was in the composition but time in the composition comes now and this what is now troubling every one the time in the composition is now a part of distribution and equilibration." (or not). If I remember correctly, the central idea is that the moment of composition is always now.

I am realizing now that perhaps I did not make a very clear connection between the Spritz app and Gertrude Stein... All I mean is that when words flash on the screen in front of you, totally isolated from the rest of the text, I think that it encourages a synchronic reading of the text in a way that might not be very different from Stein's continuous present. While I have very little interest in reading Proust using the Spritz app, I am kind of interested in reading Stein in this format.