another kind of scanning

There’s a wonderful article in the new Atlantic by Mark Bowden called “The Hardest Job in Football.” That hardest job is being the director of a television broadcast of a game. Bowden focuses on a man named Bob Fishman, whom he believes to be the best at this job, as Fishman sits in a control room before a bank of TV screens. Each screen shows what one of the many cameras scattered around the stadium is seeing, and Fishman’s job during the game is to scan that bank of screens and decide what the guy watching the game at home on his TV should be seeing at any given moment. It’s fascinating to think what cognitive skills make someone good at this. You have to be able to take in the import of an image in a millisecond — a moving image! — and, in a few milliseconds more, evaluate it in relation to all the other images you’re viewing. But can only do this well not by thinking of the intrinsic visual interest of a particular image, but rather by having in mind a narrative structure, a sense of what the game is about — and not just what it’s about in some general sense, but what it’s about at this particular moment. And that will vary according to whether a team is ahead or behind; whether they are deep in their own territory or deep in the opponents’; whether it’s near the beginning or the end of the game; even what stories have been in the news leading up to the game. The director’s narrative sense, then, needs to govern his visual sense. Fascinating stuff.

lines and interruptions

I’m still thinking — and will be for a long time — about the relationship between the act of reading a book or article or story and many other kinds of “reading” or visual “scanning.” (Earlier posts on this topic are here and here.) When you read a book your eyes scan a page, but do so with a certain regularity, with a linear motion that is only interrupted when you move from the end of one line, at the far right of the page, to the beginning of the next, at the far left of the page. (Assuming you’re not reading Hebrew.) But you know, those are very frequent interruptions of the lines! — though they are predictable, even rhythmical.

The less predictable interruptions come when you need to look at footnotes, which is one reason why books that wish to have a strong narrative momentum don't use footnotes. When I wrote my book Original Sin I wanted readers to experience it as a story, not as a work of scholarship — even though I did a great deal of research while writing it and believe that it is a work of sound scholarship — so rather than using footnotes or even endnotes I placed a “Bibliographical Essay” at the end.

You have to have great narrative skill and tact to produce a story with frequent interruptions of the line. I can think of two people who have done it well. The first is Jonathan Stroud, whose fabulous Bartimaeus books for young adult readers are lightly dotted with footnotes featuring witty and sardonic commentary from Bartimaeus himself. The other is Susanna Clarke, whose Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell has so many footnotes that you would think they would surely destroy the momentum of the tale. Yet the footnotes, most of which serve to fill in the details of Clarke’s alternative history of England, are my favorite part of the book, and many other have said the same. That was a daring move on Clarke’s part indeed, but a brilliant one, because the footnotes do as much as the story itself to create what Tolkien called a “secondary world.”

fast-twitch and slow-twitch

Okay, so in an earlier post I argued that we live in an Age of Reading, an age in which more people than ever before are reading various kinds of signs (many of them textual) all the time. I also acknowledged that these forms of reading are quite various — but they also do have certain traits in common, primarily the physical act of scanning, of casting one’s eyes across a field which contains identifiable signs, identifiable units of meaning, identifiable objects of interpretation. A student reading a novel and a quarterback reading a defense and a radiologist reading an x-ray are all performing similar actions, in this one sense at least; but we also know — and commenters on that post immediately noted — that in other respects those are very different actions that call for very different skills.

People who value acts like the reading of novels worry whether other forms of reading — especially quicker ones, like the quarterback scanning the defense, or a video-game player scanning the dangers confronting his or her character — are displacing the kinds of reading that require longer, slower kinds of attention. And this is a legitimate worry. But I wonder whether the physiological commonalities I have pointed to could, if we are thoughtful and imaginative, provide a way to get people who are already skilled at fast-twitch reading to develop their skills at slow-twitch reading. It might be that these activities are not as alien to each other, as opposed to each other, as we commonly think. That’s something I’m trying to work out in my own mind, anyway.