Words on a screen

Everyone is blabbing on about digital slates and ebook readers and electronic print and whatnot.

Everyone seems more than happy to pour words that have been written for one medium (say a novel) into another (say an ereader) without a second thought.

But we desperately need some new thinking about new forms of narrative better suited to the screen than the page. The way we make meaning from words on a page is not the way we create meaning from words on a screen.

Words on the page are typically columns of text formatted into blocks of paragraphs each indented by five character spaces. (Unless you want to drive everyone crazy like Neitzche and run your words in one endless column so dense as to be almost be unreadable. This is how he wanted his writing published. But he ended up arguing with a horse, so you may want to rethink that.)

Words on the screen are typically titles, credits, subtitles and lower third crawls or pull throughs. Conventions arrived from the technology of the day, ranging from hand-painted title cards adding sense and story to silent films through to Chryon Channel Boxes if you’re thinking of starting a cable television station.

Writing for the page in the age of the screen seems anachronistic at best, perverse at worst.

It’s like we need a new language.

A new form.