I thought to compare the text on the page to the text on my screen. Word for word, they were exactly the same. I was shocked. What happened? Why did a text that read so well in galleys read so shambolically online?
The uniquely powerful insight of the 20th-century discipline of cultural anthropology as formulated by the great French thinker Claude Levi-Straus was that culture is a closed system. A tribal mask hanging on the wall of a hut in Africa or New Guinea has meaning within the culture of the tribe that produced it, which is bound up with their social structures and cosmology. Hang the same mask next to a Picasso in a white-walled room in MOMA, and it becomes a different object, embedded within the cultural system that contains 20th-century Western art. Culturally speaking, the two masks are wildly and indeed irreconcilably different from each other—even if, physically speaking, they are the same mask.
So too with the act of reading. Like every other human activity, reading is a culturally bound activity, whose meaning is determined by its relation to the larger cultural system in which it occurs.
Working in both online and print journalism, this resonates.
The former always feels tinny and thin given its context in the sheer enormity of the internet. Text on a screen is always merely text on a screen. Ephemeral.
Print, though merely ink on a page, holds up.