Reading on Screen: The New Media Sphere. By Christian Vandendorpe

This essay sets out its stall to give a brief summary of the main points of the development of reading and writing. The development of the codex, or book form of writing, along with the development of a miniature writing form and the development of spaces between words all helped reading and writing come to the fore. Of course the printing press really helped the book take off and allowed page numbers, paragraphs and form to mould a book into what we know it as today....good luck to anybody trying to read a book with no spaces between words or no paragraphs between ideas. With the development of mass production of many diverse ideas in book form, Vandendorpe tells how people decided to browse numerous books rather than focus on one, in a way mirroring todays actions on the internet.

Our author continues to detail the development of reading and how the computer and the internet has made it so easy to pluck information from anywhere around the world with the click of a mouse and read it off our screens. There are three types of internet on-screen reading according to sources consulted by Vandendorpe; Grazing, Browsing and Hunting. Browsing being prominent with online newspapers and magazines and hunting being linked to search engines. The author briefly explores the most suitable font for screen and pages alike, citing many of the same reasons for the chosen fonts in each case.

We also see how the computer programmes for production of text and the internets digitization of books, is like the past, moving away from scroll format and into a two dimensional version of the codex to allow the reader or typer a better overview and control on their flow of writing.

Hypertext, Vandendorpe explains, allows the reader of a screen to have an ever evolving book at our fingertips when reading on the world wide web. The hypertext allows us to shift from idea to idea as the codex did at first. The hypertext however allows us to shift from book to book, an impossibility in the primitive centuries unless one had access to a vast library and a vast amount of time. The hypertext is apparently detrimental to the eye in terms of reading as it is designed to flow effortlessly along a page until a border tells it to stop. This would signal the death of the column only for the limitations of a computer screen force it to form in an orderly and neat manner that is easy on the readers eye.

In the end, Vandendorpe gives a rather philosophical and idealist view on the future development of writing and reading, citing that maybe the changes seen in the last three centuries could well be the benchmark for the range of development in the next few years of the text as we know it.