The Mighty Funnel of Corporeal Finitude

 

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By the exigencies of undergraduate student impoverishment as much as anything else (printing isn’t free!), my first experience in voluminous on-screen reading was journal article research in my undergraduate years. I never thought much of it at the time, except that I knew my reading rhythms were much different on a screen, and that my eyes got distinctly more exhausted from over-prolonged bouts of the activity.

One key aspect of my experience of on-screen reading is that it necessarily felt scattered and fitful. I came into the habit of using the mouse curser to highlight passages and lines as I read them, so as to help pace and mark what otherwise felt like an undifferentiated roll of text. I felt that the digital medium channeled a kind of impatience in my reading, which was not necessarily a problem in research, as my experience of journal articles is that they are usually padded and structured to be skimmed in the very fashion I was going about it (but that’s a whole other topic)

I speak of my journal experience in the past tense, because I gained privileges to a departmental printer at my work locale, and have been granted free reign to print journal articles for the first time. I discovered quite quickly that I consumed printed articles much more methodically and with more fervent focus then in my previous screen based experience. What I particularly like about printed articles, especially as I get a more grounded feel for my possible disciplinary niche, is that I now have a physical folder of Journal articles I’ve read and annotated that I can browse or reach into when I want to chase a citation or review something. This personal academic ‘armory’ of deployable readings gives me a sense of grounded competence in my field, if not a childish weapon hording satisfaction.

Beyond the Academic confines, I’ve never read much of anything for pleasure on a screen if I can help it. Notable exceptions being Forum posts, especially games and Wikpedia, which is probably my chief source of time-killing amusement on the internet. I reserve fitful on-screen reading for fitful types of documents, that is, ones that are not very long, or ones that are broken into many sub-sections that need not be appreciated in a meaningful whole.

Generally I find that lugging books is a small price to pay for the funneling of attention and sense of place-making that occurs as I go through a real text. And funneling is the word. The limitations of the printed page are its strengths. It forces one into inevitable confrontation with what it merely is, without a sudden flicker to another thing completely. 

Sometimes I am inclined to think, that if one is not interested or prepared to read said thing with that kind of intimacy of focus, perhaps one shouldn't be reading it all.

-Ben