Tekst en technologie

Toevallig sloeg ik Understanding Media (1964) van Marshall McLuhan open op de onderstaande passage, net nadat ik een van die artikelen had gelezen (Tim Parks - 'Reading: 'The Struggle') die zich zorgen maakt over aandacht van de lezer en de complexe stijl van de roman.

The speed-up of information gathering and publishing naturally created new form of arranging material for readers. As early as 1830 the French poet Lamartine had said. "The book arrives too late," drawing attention to the fact that the book and the newspaper are quite different forms. Slow down typesetting and news-gathering, and there occurs a change, not only in the physical appearance of the press, but also in the prose style of those writing for it. The first great change in style came early in the eighteenth century, when the famous Tatler and Spectator of Addison and Steele discovered a new prose technique to match the form of the printed word. It was the technique of equitone. It consisted in maintaining a single level of tone and attitude to the reader throughout the entire composition. By this discovery Addison and Steele brought written discourse into line with the printed word and away from the variety of pitch and tone of the spoken, and even the hand-written, word. This way of bringing language into line with print must be clearly understood. The telegraph broke language away again from the printed word, and began to make erratic noises called headlines, journalese, and telegraphese—phenomena that still dismay the literary community with its mannerisms of supercilious equitone that mime typographic uniformity.