the future of text | symposium
The power of digital text is often alluded to but rarely put front and centre for study or improvement.
From propaganda tweets heard around the globe faster than truth can catch up† and barrages of bots swaying elections, to a virtual tsunami of academic research texts drowning knowledge and using the notion of ‘Fake News’ to dismiss whatever doesn’t fit ones narrative, the information discussed is largely in the form of digital text.
Text is visualised rhetoric and as such it is a form of persuasion–text is seldom written without its function being to persuade the reader of its importance and truthfulness. As such, it carries vast potential to persuade in order to enlighten, to subvert or to obscure – to enlighten with knowledge, wisdom or insight, to subvert an election and to obscure knowledge through volume.
This is a case of the medium shaping the power of the message: A single sentence on a piece of paper does not hold the same power as a single sentence in a tweet and the ease of publishing vastly overpowers what was possible to print and read on paper.
The power of interactive digital text can be enormously powerful but so far we are mostly recipients of this power through passive means by simply adding to the flood of news, social media posts and academic ‘papers’ with little regard for how we can present it in the most useful way to be read. Digital text holds real, untapped potential because of its inherent interactivity and we have a choice: We can learn to control the vast sea of digital text–or be controlled by it.
If we choose control, we need to ‘take’ control and this requires real effort; effort to better understand the attributes, or ‘nature’ of digital text and this will only be possible with dialogue with people of different perspectives and the development of experimental text-interaction software systems with clear goals of augmenting our ability to enlighten ourselves and others,while constraining the ability of the written word to subvert or obscure. The media tools we build to interact with our text is not neutral.
For decades players of video games have asked what capabilities new games can offer†. It's time knowledge workers are encouraged to ask the same question of their text software.
It's time we break out of the paradigm of the printed page as Doug Engelbart urged us to do. Doug made it clear what is missing and it's up to us to implement what he told us, or to imagine how we can go even further: What's Still Missing from Doug Engelbart's Perspective.
Symposium
Key to understanding and inventing the future is to engage in dialogue which is why we have been hosting the annual Future Text Symposium since 2001. The speakers and participants are of a diverse group, from typographers to authors, artists, coders, editors, inventors, teachers and beyond–a diversity seen as crucial for interesting and useful dialogue to emerge: Symposium
The Future of Text Initiative
The Symposium is part of the 'Future of Text' initiative which also includes the book The Future of Text and the Author, Reader and Liquid software projects.
Conversation
Please contact editor and organizer Frode Hegland at frode@liquid.info if you have any questions or comments.
This website is an Adobe Muse site and some visitors find there are issues with viewing it correctly on certain platforms. We are working on this. It is also a bit of reminder that the future of text needs to be different: To post an article/a page to the web at the moment either means conforming to someone's template or hiring experts to make the page the way you need it to be. The future of text should be as simple as 'printing' or 'publishing' to the web. Can we make that happen?