Stalking the Digital Rhetoric

Michael E. Cohen

The Tyranny of Choices
Back around the time of "Switched-on Bach" and the heyday of the Moog synthesizer, I remember someone discussing the artistic difficulties of creating electronic music. It seemed that, for each parameter constituting a sound that the artist could control, the artist had to control it. In other words, the expressive freedom that the technology offered had its price: you had to work harder to create each note.

So it is with text. When it's digital, text is containerless, almost Platonic: it is (or can easily be made) separate from its appearance. Many parameters that control how a text appears on the screen and how the reader gets to read it are directly under the author's control; so, following the Moog principal, the author has to control each of them.

Here are just some of the questions that any author writing for digital media must answer:

• Which typefaces will you use?
• In which sizes?
• How much text will there be per page?
• Are there pages?
• How linear do you want to make the text?
  
• What sorts of interactive apparatuses will you supply to help your reader move through the text?
  
• Will the text contain other media as well?
  
• What sort of software will present the text?
  
• What sort of machine will be needed to run that software?
  
• How will the reader obtain the text?

If rhetoric is concerned with the arrangement and delivery of words, these are truly rhetorical questions. Unfortunately, this gets us nowhere. As far as I know, there isn't a rhetoric of the digital arts to help us; there's nothing like the tradition of classical rhetoric, which, among other things, served to contain, arrange, and codify the choices available to an author. Nor does it seem likely that a comprehensive digital rhetoric will emerge any time soon, not so long as economic forces, competitive practices, and human ingenuity continue to remold and expand the digital landscape.

In our market-economy, high-tech, fallen world, these questions do not fall into the domain of rhetoric, but into those of graphic design, human interface, technology, marketing and distribution. Furthermore, these are domains into which the typical print author has never had to step. The publisher supplies the graphic design, half a millennium of book mass production defines the interface, the printer handles the technical requirements, and the publisher and distributors coordinate the marketing and distribution. The print author may have an opinion about each of these domains, but seldom has any control over them, and usually possesses little expertise in them.

When it comes to digital text, however, we're thrown back on our own devices.

The Price of Freedom
The bewildering freedom that digital media forces upon the author is not unlimited. And it does have its price.

Take an extended piece of writing from the print world, say, a book consisting almost entirely of prose, containing reasoned argument, extended analysis and illustration. Although, technically, it is quite easy to port such a book to the screen virtually intact, it will, nonetheless, undergo a sea change.

The change has much to do with reader conditioning and expectation, the incidental limitations of the digital technology, and the nature of the human perceptual and manipulative faculties.

Readers accustomed to printed books expect material to be presented in certain ways: the traditions of typography, the mechanics of book production, the conventions of print (including page numbers, footnotes, tables of contents, illustrations, bibliographies, indices, and so on), all go into what a reader expects a book to look like, to physically be, and to contain.

First of all, we can forget about replicating what the book physically is when it becomes digital: even the most unobservant reader will quickly notice the difference between a desktop monitor with keyboard (or even a laptop computer) and a bound collection of paper sheets. The book's words may be exactly the same on both, but (even for readers quite used to reading from the screen) there is always that nagging perception that the book on screen is NOT the same thing as the book on paper. We sit in a different way, our eyes are at a different distance from the text, the light that our eyes receive is transmitted rather than reflected, we use different physical gestures to move through the text. Our bodies (backgrounded and marginalized as they are when we read) insist to us that the digital text is not a book, and at some level of consciousness we hear that message.

The intense interaction that is reading, that alchemical transformation of glyphs to thought, requires an enormous and complicated engagement of the reader's perceptual and intellectual faculties: change any part of the experience and the nature of the interaction changes. Simply put, the experience of reading from the screen feels different from the experience of reading from the page. And whatever feels different to us, we feel differently about. We judge it differently, we understand it differently, we think about it differently.

Just for starters, digital text requires that the reader pay more conscious attention to the interface than does book text, and that hampers the reader's customary escape into the paths of pure thought. Merely having to remember that you click here to turn the page in this digital book, but that you slide the scroll bar over there to continue reading in that digital book, creates a small, but still experientially quite significant, distance between the reader and the digital text. After all, with paper books, if you've turned one page you've turned them all; the simple physical gesture, once learned, suffices forever, and you can read happily without having to think about how to turn a page ever again (until you get a paper cut). Digital books are not yet quite so operationally transparent.

Then there's layout to consider. Book text is neatly packaged in nice, uniformly sized containers called pages. In most cases, these containers are taller than they are wide. With rare exceptions, each page in a book is exactly the same size as all the other pages. For a reader, this is very comforting: you always know where you'll find the text.

Digital text also appears inside of a container--the screen--but most digital screens are usually wider than they are tall. That's a bit of a problem: for most readers, extensive passages of text are usually easier to read when they are arranged in columns of relatively short lines. The screen's shape is not very text friendly.

In fact, the screen evokes the proscenium arch more than it does the page. And text is just another actor on that stage, free to wander in, hit its marks, and then exit, stage left...or right, or up, or down. After all, digital text usually appears inside of a window on the screen, and the text in that window can extend beyond the window's edges, meaning that the reader has to physically position the text in the window, as well as position the window on the screen.

By this time, of course, it is a cliche that digital technology has made manifest the illusion of the fixed text. Yet even in those cases where the digital text itself really is fixed (that is, write-protected), that immutability usually only applies to the text's content, not its location. Digital text seldom stays put. While book text sticks to the page, digital text floats in a half-imaginary world, sometimes near the top of the screen, sometimes near the bottom, or hanging off the right, or peeking in from the left. One has to grab digital text with both hands, seemingly, and make it hold still before one can read it.

We are creatures that move around in a three-dimensional physical world, and we have wonderful mental mechanisms for figuring out where one thing is in relation to another thing. We remember things that way, too: ask me where that penetrating analysis of such and such can be found, and I'll tell you that appeared it about so far into the book, and so far down the page. But the thickest book is microscopically thin when projected onto the screen's phosphorescent coating, and the page the passage appears in has uncertain dimensions in an uncertain space. The comfort of physicality is replaced by search tools and screen widgets, and one has to think a lot more consciously about how to find the passage one is seeking when text is digital. This is not to disparage digital search engines: they can also open a text in ways that no paper book can. But they do put the reader in a different physical and psychological relationship to text.

On the page, text can easily be central. At most, it shares its space with still images as fixed and permanent as the text itself.

But, the digital display does not descend from the page but from television, the movie screen, and the stage. Its incessantly twinkling pixels put color into motion, shadow into shape. Static though any particular image may appear on it, in fact it is in constant flux, repainting its face many times each second. A passage of text on it is in just as much motion as a video game.

And we know this. Our human perceptual systems can be fooled, at one level, into blending a fast-changing sequence of still frames into smooth motion or static display, but at another level they do detect the flickering of the screen redraw. It doesn't matter whether we detect this consciously or not; we do detect it, and it is just one more unit of distance that the digital display inserts between the reader and the text.

Furthermore, we know what to expect from the paper page, and we know what to expect from the screen. The page is designed for the fixed text, the frozen image. It has little other reason to exist without them. The screen, on the other hand, is designed for the moving image, so much so that early digital displays could be ruined if a single image was left on them for too long; screen savers are our archeological evidence of this.

We expect, and take some comfort from the fact, that the book page is reliable, and that nothing will suddenly intrude upon it without our knowledge and active collaboration. We also expect, sometimes with anticipation and sometimes warily, that the screen will always change, whether with our knowledge and collaboration or not: the marching seconds in the digital clock on our task bar, the sudden appearance of a window announcing "you've got mail," the dread system bomb that wipes out our virtual world. Even that flyspeck of the mouse cursor, resting now here, now there, reminds us that the screen is an active place, the denizens of which live in constant motion.

The level of heightened awareness that the screen evokes in us (creatures of the savannah still, and still watching for movements in the underbrush) can be very engaging and pleasurable, but the cognitive mechanisms and perceptual systems it engages are not necessarily the most effective ones for manipulating abstract, complex ideas.

Tap-dancing the Text
Clearly, the same freedom that digital technology confers upon the author can also devalue the very text that it is the author's function to create. It is not that text is ineffective, obsolete, and a candidate for the digital boneyard. Text is not dead.

But it does live in a different eco-system. And to flourish in that eco-system, it must adapt.

Recall that we want to port "a book consisting almost entirely of prose, containing reasoned argument, extended analysis and illustration" into the volatile and distracting digital environment. And we've seen that the time-honored techniques for presenting a complex reasoned argument in text will not be as effective in the digital realm as they are on paper. The reader's escape into the realms of pure thought is harder in the face of the digital display than it is in the face of the page. So be it. Let's work with that, rather than against it. The screen is not conducive to the contemplative mood. Fine, so let us figure out what moods we can use instead. And maybe we can use the axioms we've developed to help us find our way.

Axiom:	The attention paid to manipulating an interface cannot be paid to the untangling of a complex argument.
Corollary:	The interface implies active participation.
Leveraging Technique:	Use active participation to help make the argument.
Examples:	Construct a text that has active clickable links between one section of the argument and another. Present a main thread of the argument and use pop-up elaborations in separate windows to provide the details. Ask Socratic questions that require reader participation in order to reveal the answers.

Axiom:	The more attention you pay to figuring out where you are, the less attention you pay to being where you are.
Corollary:	Clearly identified signposts and landmarks help you find out where you are.
Leveraging Technique:	Provide extensive locational and navigational information.
Examples:	Develop a graphic clickable "map" of the main points of your text that will let the reader move around in it. Make extensive use of color and typography to identify the text's sections. Provide a way for readers to place their own trail-markers in the text. Index the text as many ways as possible and develop an easy-to-understand way for the reader use those indices. Dice your text into small, discreet, browsing-size chunks that are visually identifiable by size and shape.

Axiom:	On screen, static text has to share its space with many actors, all of them more perceptually engaging than it is.
Corollary:	A chorus line is easier to follow than a three-ring circus.
Leveraging Technique:	Use other media to support your text.
Examples:	If you can find a picture that is worth a thousand (or even a hundred) of your words, use the picture along with, or instead of, the words. Use spoken word when voice and tone are particularly important. Describe processes (even abstract processes) by actually showing them, putting them into motion with video or animation. Remember that text can move, too.

Conclusion
The rhetoric of interactive text has yet to be written. And before it is, what we think of as text, and what we think we need to use text for, will change and change again. The collision of print and pixel is leading to a cascade of changes in our culture, our economy, our sense of self, our view of time and of space. Don't expect this to slow down in our lifetimes.

Enjoy the ride.

Copyright © 1998-2002 Michael E. Cohen