This post is meant to be a follow up to Michael Wesch’s video The Machine is Us/ing Us. I titled it “part 1″ because there’s probably more I’ll have to say about this in the future.

There is no such thing as pure content. The information highway is for billboards. I was trained in cinema studies and I was taught to never separate (film) form and content. While technically, as Wesch demonstrates, web content is more separated from form than in the past, the internet is still a medium, and digital information can’t escape the formal limitations still impinged upon it.

I’m reminded of a quote from Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style:

We read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps… This makes it an attractive place for advertizing and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text… Intricate, long sentences full of unfamiliar words stand little chance… When reading takes this form, both sentences and letterforms retreat to blunt simplicity. (version 2.4, pages 193-194)

Admit it: when you see a long block of text online, you start to skim or skip over it. Every web designer knows this. Even this post is far too long for comfort. Why is it so hard to read online? Because digital information is not designed to be read, but scanned. (For more on usability and “billboard design”, I’d suggest Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.)

Web 2.0 is not just a communal effort at information management, it is the organization of digital information which tends, as Bringhurst points out, to pass over literate texts that are rhythmic, langourous, baroque, subtle and sensual. Instead, we shift our forms of information towards mixed media texts whose words are blunt, streamlined, simplified and snarky. And hopefully there will be pictures. I mean, isn’t a blog post that much better with pictures?

On a side note: texts that combined words and images, like comics, were once deemed less literate, for children. Are trends in digital information helping us get over this bias? Another side note: I think image macros and sites like ytmnd – intarweb spaces most users regard as the bane of the net – are also prime examples of “billboard design” and a trend towards fusing text and image. Now back to our regularly programmed post!

There’s a lot of pressure online to get your soundbite or pullquote in before your user clicks somewhere else. Certain things get sacrificed in the way. Including the full quotation from Bringhurst which I will put under the “cut” below:

“The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for advertizing and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text.

The screen, in other words, is a reading environment even more fugitive than the newspaper. Intricate, long sentences full of unfamiliar words stand little chance. At text size, subtle and delicate letterforms stand little chance as well. Superscripts and subscripts, footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes disappear. In the harsh light and coarse resolution of the screen, such literate accessories are difficult to see; what is worse, they dispel the essential illusion of speed. So the links and jumps of hypertext replace them. All the subtexts then can be the same size, and readers are at liberty to skip from text to text like children switching channels on TV. When reading takes this form, both sentences and letterforms retreat to blunt simplicity. Forms bred on newsprint and signage are most likely to survive.”