Bea Fremderman
Bea Fremderman
(Source: petersutherland)
(via shittyweekend)
text from last year’s ED launch
((found @ eadersdigest.com ))
“EADERS began a few years ago as a communal blog project. I was interested in an idea of condensation of information that seemed to be happening, not just in our blog posts, but in conversations, emails, magazines, and books. Making a comprehensive blog entry required a certain kind of synthesis/distillation of information, textual and otherwise, that I found particular to my generation, and that I thought was changing the way we were reading and writing overall. This also seemed different than the type of synthesizing that goes into a research paper; it was about reducing to the smallest size possible and including the maximum number of possible linkages within this limited word count.
It’s been a platitude for the last five or ten years – the refrain that the internet is making us inattentive, lazy, and shallow when it comes to reading text. The techno-phobia behind much of this discourse on one side is matched by a certain belligerent flaunting of netculture, which insists that fast info-processing is futuristic and great, insisting that in the future we won’t need books. TL;DR. Too Long; Didn’t Read. Both sides of the same argument, one scared and the other self-righteous, seem to think that the speed of information transmission in bite-size chunks and the subjectivities that this engenderes – e.g. lazy with a shallow understanding, or informed on a million subjects with no sense of depth, chronology, or context – are part of our inevitable future.
It’s true that the amount of text that fits on one computer screen without scrolling is quite limited, and that images and videos are usually a faster and more direct way of relaying information online. But I’m not really interested in this scary problem of short attention spans, because I still read a lot of books, and I still read a lot online. All of us still read. But we do read differently. I’m much more interested in the way that, because of these changes, we treat text more and more like images, and how the manipulation of text takes on a spatial component online.
I often think about, for example, the way that I move through internet-space; when I click on a link, am I moving in, out, left, right, up, down? The layout for EADERS was initially conceived with this concept in mind – to progress in the way a comment thread moves each entry down and to the right, referring to and transforming the previous piece of information. What does it really mean to treat text in this way, as endlessly manipulable and reduceable?
Through its layout and its process, Eaders references in many ways the way that information gets passed through multiple channels online. Though it’s not intended to be a parallel process, the text moves through the publication, either losing or retaining specific content, tone, and reference points, in the way I imagine text, images, and video circulating around the web. And I think that the endpoint of the publication’s process, a point at which the text cannot be further reduced, remains a strong piece of writing. Condensation is the opposite of dillution. I think that this project offers an alternative to the notion that reduction is the equal to passivity in terms of reading and writing, hoping to address an internet-era attitude towards speed and breadth without, ultimately, undermining our capacity for depth.”
Peter Johansson
Peter Johansson
Peter Johansson
Peter Johansson
Peter Johansson
Elvia Pyburn-Wilk 2011
elviapw.com
eadersdigest.com
