Today I’m going to record and write down everything we say

some background might help making things more clear:

While you are reading, pg 195

Writing is more than just recording, it enables us to organize our knowledge better and update it more easily than would be possible using speech and memory alone.  As readers we can then take in a text unhurriedly, at our own speed; we can dissect, analyze, and evaluate language and content, and we can react to it with deliberation – possibilities that are reinforced by typography and its greater formality and standardization…
…by recording and distributing language in this way, in a nonpartisan and irrevocable form, words are exposed to searching and critical scrutiny. In that sense, text becomes quite vulnerable. Philosophers have often greeted written text with scepticism, starting with Plato (in his dialogue Phaedrus), who believed that recording text would be detrimental to memory, that it made people forgetful and was no more than an aide-memoire…
…Plato’s next objection is that you cannot conduct a discussion with a written text. Ask a question and the response is silence. And if, as a philosopher, you send your thoughts into the world recorded in writing, you can then do nothing to change them or clarify them through elucidation or rewriting.

And from B.Mau again:

In book design the event occurs in the thickness of the page. In the turning of the page the power of the page is released. it is not a matter of producing surface effects, but rather of designing the time or sequence while ensuring that surface effects do not disturb the readers experience of temporal depth by clogging her cone of vision. Typographic design becomes fundamentally about shaping time and attention.

Advertisement