22 - The Digital Physics of Reading DeLillo

Summary

Simulating a reader's experience of quickly browsing the novel in a bookstore, Michael Sippey's mid-90s hyperfiction White Noise on White Noise highlights the changing physics of reading Don DeLillo through the marriage of codes and words. As with many digital generators, this work presents randomly selected passages from the original text of White Noise (1984) and presents the textual fragments on hyperlinked pages, in order ‘to provide an experience akin to quickly browsing through the novel in a bookstore’ (White Noise on White Noise landing page). The traditional mode of linear reading is replaced by a series of random selections and small body movements, leaving a multidimensional, navigable space for readers. The jumping, hopping and skipping of their fingers on touchpads or mouses creates a trajectory that simultaneously joins the fragments and becomes an immanent part of digital reading.

Taking the long view, the internet is changing our behaviour by encouraging a digital way of life: children born in the age of touchscreen technology may naturally move their fingers on the glass of a fish tank to check if it is a screen with multi-touch function. With more ebooks being purchased by academic and public libraries, readers can easily access the target information from virtual shelves. The logic behind the transition from the print to the digital seems to be irreversible: user experience and the call of a paperless environment are leading the way to a more digitalised world. This process is also accelerating: digital devices are upgraded to be faster, to provide a smoother user experience, to promise a more interconnected world. Children who will join DeLillo's future readership are already well equipped with e-reading products. Their brand-new reading experience is shaped by the ever-changing literary market, in which traditional narratives and new media art are trying to find a symbiotic (but maybe not balanced) way of coexistence. This makes readers aware of a potential change – not of the visible motions from page-turning to clicking, but towards a different understanding of DeLillo: with his texts released to playable open space, the writer's postmodern landscape easily collapses in a sea of constantly refreshed data.