After class last night and going over Bolter again, I was struck by Bolter’s very short discussion of typography in Chapter 4. He asserts that, “the computer window recalls the page in a printed book, which is also a stack of two dimensional planes”; however, one can reorganize windows–both reading space and writing space–within the frame of the computer screen to one’s own liking and needs, leading the reader to engage in both visual and verbal modes of reading (67-68).
I don’t feel like I have any really clear or deep thoughts, but I feel like there is more to this. Not only can we personalize our desktops, but we can personalize nearly everything out the windows we use–whether we’re reading from Word, email, the web, etc. There’s only so much a reader can do with the actual structure of a book–break the spine, bend the corners of pages down (to this day, I feel guilty about doing this because a teacher in second grade told me that it kills fairies!), write in the margins.
Bolter says that there’s no one configuration of hypertext that can reproduce the same professional, pleasing element of the printed word, that it’s the shifting configurations, the movement that makes meaning in hypertext (68). Even with this moment, we all have preferred ways of viewing hypertext. I read anything that’s text heavy in Safari because it’s easier to magnify, but I use Firefox for Twitter and Facebook. The way i shift my windows, my hypertext pages falls into patterns, just like the way I read books. I can’t magnify the text in a printed book with a subtle movement of my fingers, but I can look for a different edition.
I wonder what it means. Do we carry our print reading habits to the computer, to guide and/or possibly restrict our mode of reading here? Can we pretty seamlessly switch between the two because they mirror each other in some ways? Just some thoughts…
















