What's Next for Text:
4. Two Kinds of Seriousness
And so we have two kinds of “seriousness.” In alphabetic seriousness, we concentrate on looking through the notational system to the abstract reasoning beneath it. We build a monopolistic attention economy. In pattern-poetry seriousness, we accept a bi-stable seriousness which allows us to toggle from word to image, from at to through and back again. Digital expression, the familiar computer screen, creates, and assumes, a bi-stable seriousness. Perhaps that is why it often seems, to all of us print-readers, distinctly unsettling.
Under the influence of digital graphics, the shape impulse is now showing up all over the print landscape, and not only in ads but in workaday prose as well. For example, here’s an advertisement for an investment firm which appeared in The Economist.
Shrewd business persons, when they come to invest for themselves, are often “all thumbs.” Busy with their business, they lurch from crisis to crisis with their investments. Leave such decisions to Paine Webber, skilled in such prestidigitation. They know that your investment portfolio should be as unique to you as your fingerprints.
Here is another visual/textual pun, a celebrity magazine “profile” from a magazine called Mondo 2000, but printed as an actual facial profile.
The headline (sideline?) that talks about a “sentient toaster” introduces a text presented in a similarly self-conscious way, suddenly aware of what it is doing and representing it in a picture.
What does such an outburst of shaped prose tell us about the current environment for text? Clearly, a new pattern of attention is being elicited from the reader, the bi-stable attention which pattern poetry has so long incarnated. Shaped prose deliberately cultivates a competitive market economy in which words and images, and the different worlds they represent, compete for our attention.