Architects are forgetting the need of human beings for half-light, the sort of light that imposes a sense of tranquility, in their living rooms as well as their bedrooms. About half of the glass that is used in so many buildings - homes as well as offices - would have to be removed in order to obtain the quality of light enables one to live and work in a more concentrated manner, and more graciously. We should try to recover mental and spiritual ease and to alleviate anxiety... The pleasures of thinking, working, conversing are heightened by the absence of glaring, distracting light.
Luis BarragánThe quotation from Barragán suggests creating and collecting uncluttered, calm, elegant spaces for the Internet where different activities and media can reside in easy, agile and graceful consort. All in half-light, scaled to a person and to portability, individually tailored places where reflection and refinement can flourish...richly furnished, intimate, harmonious.
Each individual starts from their own place, their electronic residence, to which they can return in an instant, a place with varied rooms and windows, but sharing a common detailing, the moldings and fixtures of the interface, so that the diversity of resources - images, sounds, words - can come together without jarring or dissonance.
I am looking for settings that are convenient, well-made and a pleasure to use (the Vitruvian triad: commodity, firmness and delight). They can be better compared to architecture than literature. (Hence beginning with Barragán) It is not a question for me of is technology or content most important, but what is the nature of the relationships established to time and space that are being opened by this collection - do they encourage "the pleasures of thinking, working, conversing"?
It was on fine crimson paper and folded in striking taste. Genji felt his heart beating as he opened the letter. But when he examined the writing he found it extremely childish. He wished he could stop Murasaki from seeing it for the time being - not the really wanted to keep anything from her, but in view of Nyosan's rank it seemed a shame that anyone should know how unformed her hand still was. To hide the letter, however, would certainly make a bad impression on Murasaki, and so he unfolded it in such a way that she could glimpse bits of it out of the corner of her eye as she lay next to him...
Murasaki's first glance told her that it was indeed a childish production. She wondered how anyone could have reached such an age without developing a more polished style. But she pretended not to have noticed and made not comment. Genji also kept silent. If the letter had come from anyone else, he would certainly have whispered something about the writing, be he felt sorry for the girl and simply said, 'Well now, now you see that you have nothing to worry about.'
The Tale of Genji, Ivan Morris, tr.
This long quotation from Genji is full of varied and complex kinds of communication and the assumptions on which they rest - moral, cultural and aesthetic. What I would like to focus attention on is how 'real' knowledge, that on which definitive judgements are made, comes from Nyosan's calligraphy, not the contents of the letter, but how it was written. Murasaki can judge this and the writer at a glance, seeing only bits of it.
This is just one of example of so many that can be found in literature and in life of how communication at its core comes from the execution of acts and the specific expression of idea and feeling are read as who and what a person, or group, ‘really’ is. There is nothing original or surprising in this observation. It can be helpful though in sorting out and clarifying the discussions about communication by electronic means.
It is a reminder that even when we have the whole we often find the meaning we are looking for in the parts, that we invest meaning in skills and abilities far beyond their apparent importance and that we do this especially often when it is something of the greatest significance to us.
Letter writing in all literate cultures give us a grand and deep field to look at for how communication which is not face-to-face can establish its own ways of revealing and concealing. Along with Heian Japan, I suspect that 17th century Holland with the combination of a dependable postal service and a population flung wide by the exploration and colonization would be an excellent place and time in history to look at for revealing comparisons as might the 16th century court of Akbar.
These and many others can help get around the crippling notion that electronic communication is just a truncated form of face-to-face communication and not another form with its own structures, subtlety and ways of telling.
Then, perhaps, we can move out of the circles these discussions so frequently run in. It may also be possible to see that our time and tools are not totally unique and that there is a wealth of recorded experience to draw on.
First, service to the author, searching for the form best suited to his theme. Second, service to the reader, making reading as pleasant and light for him as possible. Third, the giving of the whole an attractive appearance without imposing too much self-will.
Giovanni Mardersteig
And how to make the “reading as pleasant and light...as possible”?
A web site is not an ad, it need not try to sell an idea but, rather, make an attractive space to work and play. So many sites, to use an analogy from print, open up looking like they are dustjackets, a kind of promotion, rather than a title page, an indication of a beginning. Don't assault the user - attract and provide safe haven.
To do that you need to guide the reader through the site and there is a rich set of tools to ease their way. Most of these are obvious. Most are often ignored.
In English and many other languages we read from top to bottom and from left to right. If we want to indicate that something is important we make it bigger, bolder, brighter or different. We indicate where a document or section of document begins using at least one of these signals. Usually only one is needed and almost never more than two. (For instance - Letters or Letters.)
We recognize a hierarchy of importance, that usually starts from the top, in which the most important is presented as the biggest and most distinctive and words become less pronounced as we go down the the list.
We can read most easily lines of about 8 to 10 words and more than 12 makes it difficult for most of us to follow. Words are easiest to read if they are dark and the background is plain and light.
Most of these standards are nearly as old as written language and common to most systems of writing when they are adjusted for the differences of direction in which the sentences are read - up to down as Chinese and other Han based languages usually are or right to left as in Hebrew and Arabic. They are commonly observed on the Web and work effectively. Look for instance at Breaking News or or Dave Winer's excellent site.
If these standards are so old and in common use why do I bother to spell them out? Because self-proclaimed authorities like David Siegel and Joe Gillespie (just two of many) are accepted and embraced by so many users of the Web.
They are examples, to my mind, of self-will run riot without any concern for making the experience of the words 'pleasant and light' or even legible - and teaching others to follow their lead. What they advocate needs to be examined with a disinterested and informed eye. Then, I suspect, intimidating rather than attracting the reader will be seen for what it is: the abuse of power.
I admire compression, lightness, and agility,
all rare in this loose world.
Elizabeth Bishop
Strayed Crab
There are three writers whose work on the Web I admire very much: Maggy Donea, Anne Lamott and Camille Paglia. All three are lively, intelligent, funny and outrageous. The first is a computer systems administrator, the second a novelist and the third a scholar. All three are wounded, crippled, burdened or ostracized in some way - an alcoholic, sexually abused as a child, a single mother, an immigrant, a lesbian - and put that at the center of their writing. They do it very well, draw me in, make me laugh with them and at myself and make me live through some of their anger and sorrow.
But something is missing. Something that Elizabeth Bishop, a poet who died more than twenty years, had. Bishop certainly had wounds enough to talk about - she was an orphan, asthmatic, alcoholic and a lesbian. She was also a writer and poet who said in the same short prose piece, speaking through the crab: "I believe in the oblique, the indirect approach, and keeping my feelings to myself."
Instead of confessions and personal revelations she gives us insights and perceptions of such delicacy, sly wit and precision that I, at least, gasp and think "How did she do that?" and realize that another small corner of words and the world has been opened up.
The tough part is to also realize that it is so hard to hear her voice in this loud and loose world. As good as they are Donea, Lamott and Paglia, and they are among the best writers on the Web, don't appear to put any value on compression, lightness or agility, and never are oblique. But then it seems like a silly thing to ask of them in the midst the shrill, self-consumed and rootless writing that surrounds them.
How can we keep the oblique alive? Can we approach our thoughts and feelings crab-wise? So much is missed, rolled over and flatten out otherwise.
A little more than a year ago I put out, for five months, an on-line a monthly, non-breaking space. Publishing was a pleasure and I especially enjoyed doing the graphics for it. They were kept as small as possible to make loading over a slow connection reasonably fast and the graphics and text were as well integrated as I could make them. The pages were well received by those who visited them and let me know about it. I made several Web friends through them.
I quit putting up non-breaking space in December of 1995 to turn my attention to other things and when I returned to start another site I got stuck.
Nearly everything I looked at seemed too cluttered and too slow to download. My expectation was that backgrounds would disappear as blink had and that was wrong. They were nearly everywhere, as were three dimensional illusions. These make the web sites look, to me, like stamped-out cup lids or illuminated plastic signs.
Several years ago I spent six months reading about the history of late 19th and early 20th century type and book design. A classic essay from late in that period is Beatrice Warde's The Crystal Goblet. (The date is wrong on this excerpt, it was first published in the 1930s, under her pen name, Paul Grandjean. She worked for Monotype in England and was close to Stanley Morison and Eric Gill.) It is about what she saw as the ideal container for the printed word but fits text and images on a computer screen equally well.
This phrase sticks out for me: “...because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.” The reverse of that seems to be true of so many Web sites. True for two reasons in particular: the first is being enamored of the newest technical twist, be it frames, Shockwave, Java or VRML, and the second, and, this is more persuasive and profound, is aping print and/or TV ads. Both of these disturbing and distracting ways of approaching Web design ask to be addressed with some searching questions and thoughtful work. We need to learn about how to best make it reveal beautiful things and not make the container the object of attention.
...with Java plus VRML you can turn a Web page with dead, two-dimensional information into a three-dimensional environment that you can fly through. In essence, the problem with the Web today is that it's dead information. When you add Java, the information comes alive. When you add VRML, you get dimensionality.
Paul Saffo in a c|net interview about the future of the Internet.
These remarks by Saffo ask for a response because they indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of different media, particularly in how they work within kinds of space and movement. To say that a two dimensional space is, by definition, dead and that a three dimensional one is alive is to ignore what has been done in both kinds of space throughout human history, to not realize that they are different in what they can do and that the strengths of the various formats are what should be examined.
Each needs to be studied in depth, not dismissed as moribund; this also needs to be done with movement and its twin, stillness. Even more attention needs to be given to refine ways for the interrelationships between these and the other kinds of connections so they can be made graceful and transparent. Among these are the relations between different kinds of discourse - visual, verbal and audible, still and moving, three dimensional and two dimensional, spatial and temporal and many to many, one to one and one to many.
This is especially true if Esther Dyson is right:
Right now the Internet is really just a platform that lets you send and receive information. But tomorrow the Internet will be like the ether we breathe--a kind of information ether that we all dwell in.
This ether, as it is evolving, is a complex, many layered, richly textured medium. It is also an inclusive one because it won't have to leave anything out for technical or economic reasons (all media will be possible and all will cost next to nothing to publish with no additional cost for a larger number of users). Restraint in media will only be necessary for reasons of intent and taste and these ask most for an artificer who is thoughtful, imaginative and knowledgeable.
This is, I believe, supported by Jaron Lanier, one of the parents of VRML:
The point of virtual reality is to be able to jointly explore the possibilities of the imagination, not to re-create the physical world. What technology can do is encourage us to be freer in our imagination.
In this encouragement to move away from the literal mindedness that is holding back some of the very real possibilities of the uses of virtual reality, there is an important truth - it is uncultivated imagination and unexplored sources for it, rather that technique that is, that is holding back the development of the Web. I have said in an other context that those of us working in this medium need to look at other artists than Escher, images than fractals. Now I would add Toy Story.
Not that these are worth looking at, but they really don't require our full attention, especially since there is so much other wonderful work that can inspire us to extend and explore our imaginations, to make them freer, more disciplined and productive. It is in the end deeply important to be connected to the past and the finest work in it and to see how it can instruct us in shaping this new ether.
A synthesis of media is not new - think for a moment about operas, medieval cathedrals, Chinese scrolls, Northwest Coast transformation masks in use, films ... the list is nearly endless, all we need to do is look and remember that the divisions we make today are recent, academic and no longer too useful, and even destructive - as they are in Saffo's remark
And sentence that is right
(where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
T.S. Eliot
Little Gidding
Writing for the Web suffers from prolix academic prose, pop journalism and puerile self-declaration. Most of what is here is too long, superficial and self-involved.
Bacon invented the English essay late in the 16th century. His are usually between 500 and 750 words (about three screens worth - a reasonable limit) and every word has a place and every phrase is memorable. He doesn't nag nor hector, but he does give the reader something to "weight and consider". News that stays news, brief and wise, it is work that endures, read some of them. They are fine models for the kind of clear, concise and intelligent writing that suits this medium well.
It is a simple metaphor, based on daily experience: the notion of beauty as we use it in common speech to describe our experience of a fine day - clear, temperate, uplifting, pleasure giving. It isn't one that finds it place in discussions and, therefore, thought about good art and good work. It is there, but only available to the relaxed will.
I have by my side a book from the university library, De Aetna by Pietro Bembo, in a bilingual edition published by Officina Bodoni in 1969. There are 3 or 4 different versions of this edition all with the original Latin set in the typeface Griffo and the translation (if my memory serves these are in Italian, German, English and French - the one I have is in Italian) set in Bembo. It concludes with a discussion about the history of the modern cuttings of this Aldine face and the choices Morison and Mardersteig made, especially about the inclusion of varients of different letters.
(Both Bembo and Griffo are 20th century typefaces based on the the original published by Aldus Manutius in 1496 using type cut by Francesco Griffo. Stanley Morison was responsible for design of Bembo and Giovanni Mardersteig for Griffo. The original face of Griffo's was probabily the source for Garamond's type and hence all Old Style faces.)
The book is one of the most beautiful I know. It is also one of the most unobtrusive. There is nothing insistant or strident about it, nothing that calls for your attention, but holding it and reading it give me, at least, deep pleasure and a sense of uplift because Mardersteig really got it right in ways designed to make it go unnoticed, yet so perfect if attended to.
This is no Oxford Bible, Bruce Rogers famous work. Not imposing and designed for special occasions, it is a little more than six by nine inches, well but plainly bound, simply beautiful and unextraordinary as a day can be. Mardersteig provides me with a moral compass for the design and presentation of information and commentary in whatever format - print or pixels:
...giving of the whole an attractive appearance without imposing too much self-will.
The codex book is what we usually think of as a book - rectangular pages bound together, with words and, sometimes, pictures on them. But it does not necessarily take the form of an autonomous work like a novel or a treatise on a single subject. What made it so useful is, as O'Donnell points out, that you could find the information you were looking for, make the comparisons you wanted to without examining every page. As tables of contents, indices, footnotes and bibliographies developed the form of the codex book became more and more useful. Whether it was printed or hand-written didn't matter, but rather the fact that the book was made up of pages that could be added to, subtracted from and rearranged. (The notion of the set, inviolate text came later - when I am not certain. Was it a Renaissance creation? - another example of the assertion of the importance of the individual - or did it come with the industrial revolution? - as a self-contained product. I like to hear from anyone one who has insights into that... )
James J. O’Donnell:
The codex had several advantages over the roll. First, its size was limited only by the strength of the user (or the user's furniture); much more material could be contained in a single unit. Second, the codex could be taken apart, put together, and rearranged at will. This meant that several different authors and titles could be combined and recombined with minimal difficulty. Third, and of greatest importance, non-linear access to the material in the volume was possible; by this I mean simply that the reader did not need to shuffle through every page of information from beginning to end to find what she was looking for -- with appropriate indexing or dumb luck she could pop the book open in the middle and find what she was looking for quickly. It is that third feature that offers the genesis of the revolution for which the codex stood and that offers the most important key to...our present situation.
St. Augustine to NREN: The Tree of Knowledge and How It Grows
According to an essay by Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin in Science and Civilisation in China, Vol.5, Pt. 1, Cambridge, 1985, Joseph Needham's remarkable multi-volumed work, the paged book, was developed independently in China, growing out bamboo slatted books and, later, from the Buddhist palmleaf sutras, and were the dominate form in the Sung (after 1000AD). It included a variety of innovative ways to make it simple to locate the right class of book (by color coding) and the information in the book by easily accessed pagination. It diverged in the way in which binding as a device for protection and storage was conceived, but in most other ways is surprisingly similar in structure.
It is the flexibility of the form that made the codex format so revolutionary, so useful and so durable - what other tool is so widely used and so little changed since the 4th century? It is these qualities that also make me want to use it not printing or fire as the innovation against which to compare the opening out of digital information.
Can the electronic tools being developed embody the same wisdom, simplicity and modesty that is embodied in the book?