Interactive Reading

I would like to claim that I have seen what digital text can be, and so it is much much harder for me to read digitally now. There are things I can imagine myself doing as I read, and learn from, a text. A textbook or a book about design. A coding book, or a history book. And no I dont mean a book where I see the animals I read about come to life, I mean the way I interact with it, interact with all the material together on a subject, to understand it.

How I interact with a single text is different than how I interact with a bunch of texts about a single topic; is different than how I interact with a bunch of books on a bunch of topics trying to see a through line. What I want to do changes how I engage with the text. And this flexibility is not afforded by digital text.

And so what I can actually claim is that I have seen what digital text is not.

I can see what digital text could be.

And now I can't unsee the inadequacies of its current form.

It is even more surreal because the more I look around me, the more urgent this problem seems. If machines can execute, we take the role of the designer, we take the role of the director. And if we are uneducated, unknowledgeable, we will make poor directors, we will make ill-informed decisions. Or in the words of Heimdall, we are leading us all to Hell!