Reading, Hot and Cold

How is it that we've forgotten McLuhan, just when he's reached peak relevance? ...A little meditation on media, spatial reasoning, and reading

I come from a family of readers, and I grew up before ebooks. Some of my earliest memories are of inhabiting paper books: flipping back two hundred pages to effortlessly find a name, incident, or idea that I need right now; estimating by eye how much more is left in the story; putting the book down and later picking it up and flipping it open to the exact page I was at, without using a bookmark or folding down a corner. I never thought of that ability as a distinct skill, but it is—and one that’s very relevant to our present moment.

There’s a big difference between reading on a screen and reading a paper book. This isn’t just me being curmudgeonly (I do most of my reading on my reader or phone). Humans navigate paper books differently than we navigate e-text. With a paper book, we’re like squirrels hunting down nuts stored for the winter. We use our fantastic faculty for spatial relations to record the locations of what we’re reading, as we read it. I was completely unaware of this as a kid, and in hindsight some of my later skills as a writer likely derive from my being pretty good with mental visualization, rotation of mental images, etc. I only recently realized that when I also think about a book that I’m writing, I picture it as a place—not exactly something you can visualize, but as a set of relationships between which lines could be drawn: for me the distance between a character’s crisis and its resolution is an actual distance; I can see it, in context of everything else that has to come together, as I’m working. This never occurred to me as unusual any more than my habitual way of reading a paper book did.

We consume most textual information today in an entirely different way. Studies have shown that when people read paper books, they use the fixed thickness of the book, its stable pagination, the asymmetry of left/right pages, tactile cues such as the relative lopsidedness of the book, etc., to build a mental map of the content. A paper book is somewhere between the materialized version of a classical memory palace and a set of cues for a squirrel nut-hunting. We tend to think that we access books via their table of contents, index, and cross-references—all features of the text itself—but there is also an extra-textual system for accessing the information in a paper book (let’s just call it a codex from here on). The physical characteristics of a codex make it into something like a proprioceptive database. For example, knowing how two plotlines in a layered narrative unreel through the pages at different rates, one can picture the milestones and relationships between them, as stable positions in the actual object you’re holding. This means you can often, with a single page-flip, move to exactly the point in the story that you’re thinking about, to reread a scene or description. What makes this different than a computer database is that it does not rely on string-matching, the way that search functions on computers do. It’s a different mechanism; you don’t have to remember the exact name of that minor character introduced earlier; you know where to find them.

If you were raised reading on iPads and phones, you might not develop this skill. With e-texts, your experience of reading is necessarily linear: things are only forward or backward in the stream of data you’re unreeling. You lack the codex lookup system in these situations, and if you never learned it, you might not be able to apply it to paper books as you read those. I find this an alarming prospect, because I strongly suspect that the vast majority of books written before the 21st century assumed the reader would use just that system. It may not have been overtly coded into the text the way a table of contents or index is, but the codex system let writers create texts with a certain level of density because they knew they could rely on their readers to decode at that level. The wondrous flip-side of my alarm at what we might be losing is the realization that authors have, for several centuries at least, been building an extra-textual layer into their works, generally without realizing it (I would take works such as Finnegans Wake or House of Leaves as exceptions).

A codex teaches the reader to think in places. An ebook teaches the reader to think in streams.

What It Means to be Cool

So, with a codex you organize the book in your mind by remembering “that passage was near the top of a right-hand page” or “this diagram was about two-thirds of the way through.” A codex provides fixed landmarks, persistent spatial relations and embodied interaction (hand motion, page turning). The reader forms something like a mental floor plan of the book. By contrast, text read on screens, especially reflowable text, lacks stable pagination, and the location of information even changes with font size. Scrolling erases landmarks your squirrel-mind would otherwise use to flag where to find things. “Place” collapses into “position in time, ” so memory becomes sequential rather than spatial.

You remember when you saw something, but not where.

Now, if you recall your Marshall McLuhan (especially 1964’s Understanding Media), you’ll know about his idea of hot and cool media. Cool media are participatory, while hot media make you a passive recipient. Even within a single artform you can have either: manga are cool because you are asked to bring your visual imagination to fill in the white spaces and expand your vision beyond the panels on the page; in a Mervyn Peake novel, on the other hand, you are presented with an overwhelming amount of detail, turning you into a kind of conceptual camera aimed at the story. Famously, film is a hot medium and TV (until recently) was cool.

Understanding Media is where we get the phrase, “the medium is the message.” It’s important that we remember that idea now, because lately the narrative has become that “it’s the algorithm.”

It is not the algorithm that is messing with your head. It is the medium it’s expressed in.

It matters more how you are consuming your news, than what news you are consuming. (Or so McLuhan might have said.) Look at it this way: A paper book trains you to think about knowledge as something you move around inside, whereas a screen conditions you to believe that knowledge is something that passes in front of you. Is it any surprise if one of these activities fills you with a sense of agency, while the other fills you with helpless dread? Doomscrolling was never a thing, before screens.

As an aside, maybe it was: way back in 1985, I briefly had a summer job at the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum in Brandon, Manitoba. It’s located on one of the hundreds of air bases Canada built to train 144,000 airmen during the Second World War. Anyway, one of the objects in the museum’s collection was a scrapbook. In it, an anonymous news-reader had cut out and pasted news items about the war. They start with the invasion of Poland in late 1939, and there are many of them. The scrapbooker was hoovering up everything he or she could find out about the war. This continues until June, 1940, when suddenly the next entry is… Christmas, six months later. A tragic period of emotional trauma is written in this gap. For our scrapbooker, the war was interesting and entertaining, something happening to someone else—until suddenly, France fell. Then it got real, so real that they stopped collecting, cutting, and pasting. Maybe they stopped reading and listening to the radio entirely; we’ll never know but we can imagine it. In a museum full of bombers and machine guns, nothing ever conveyed to me the sense of raw panic that 1940 must have wrought in people as did the missing entries in that scrapbook.

There’s a corollary in studying and comprehension of complex ideas. I read everything from the biographies of composers to current physics to history. Shlock-scifi for mindless fun, philosophy for thinking. Lately, since I’ve had a little money to do so, I’ve been buying paper editions of those ebooks that have had the biggest impact on me. Not only do I like to support the authors, but these are all books I fully intend to reread, perhaps numerous times. When I’m dealing with the paper version, I will be able to build that spatial palace of memory for its ideas. Among other things, this fosters a greater sense of ownership and control of what I’m reading; this is not just because computer files are ephemeral; it’s about my ability to internalize the structure of the book. A codex gives you a greater sense of control. Because of its lack of spatial markers to aid in navigation, text on a screen reduces our ability to move around in what we’re reading; we are therefore always at the mercy of what the author is saying now, as opposed to being able to check on and ruminate over what they previously said. Doomscrolling, with its intrinsic sense of helplessness, is built into the medium.

If this was going to be a Luddite screed, I’d segue at this point onto the topic of AI summation and rail against the institutionalization of shallow reading. But I’m all for getting AI to summarize stuff for me. It’s like asking a friend their opinion on a book you’re thinking of reading. At times, talking with ChatGPT can feel like being trapped in an elevator with an expert on medieval ink-making; you can have fun doing a shallow but broad dive into a topic you might not seek out on your own, and learn the basic outlines. Then you’re in a position to decide whether you want to find out more.

I treat learning in general this way. There is, first and foremost, conversation with family and friends. Then, there are the shallow and easily-customized summaries of news, TV, and social media. Each step provides some knowledge, but more importantly should point to where to go to learn more. From the Internet and other media, I get to ebooks and on-line journals. And finally, if I want to fully inhabit a set of ideas, and feel a sense of ownership and agency towards them, there is paper.

This approach might not work for you. On the other hand, you may have better study habits than me. If so, I’d love to hear them. Let’s talk.

Who knows? It might lead me to a new book.

—K

Postscript: My Library

I’ve been thinking for a while about throwing open the doors of my personal library to show people what’s in it (this is also a great way of garnering suggestions). There are a lot of ways I could do this, but what I think I’m going to do is write a series of short reviews (not critical pieces, but summaries of what these books have meant to me) for my paying subscribers first, with access to everybody else coming after some time (say, a year). They’ll be short and to the point, and my plan is to be entirely random—just grabbing, say Ancient Inventions one week, The Making of Victorian Values or 1493 after that, and Stanislav Lem’s Fiasco the next, that sort of thing. What do you think? Is that something you’d be interested in seeing? Suggestions are definitely welcome.