Seven Red

I’ve been reading a lot about eye-tracking studies in preparation for next quarter’s graduate course.

For a fairly in-depth discussion of the subject, there’s no better site than Eyetrack III.

The studies are both weirdly ahistorical and strangely seductive, although, to be fair, most of the research is well aware of its limitations.  (The fascinating work in psychology on phenomena like the attentional blink universalizes without qualification, by way of contrast.) Ahistorical, then, by design: these studies aren’t really making claims that reading has always worked a certain way, or even that it works a particular way across cultures, which would be absurd even on its face, given different reading directions.

They avoid – as does most of the work on “attention mapping” – the well-researched work on the history of attention, like Jonathan Crary’s very interesting Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, or even Lanham’s The Economics of Attention. It’s certainly fair, at this point, to ask what these histories can teach us, other than the inherent variability of phenomena like attention, and how that can help us design snazzy ad-driven web sites. Like most of the work on document design, these studies tell us how people read, not how they might read, or how that mode of reading produces particular sets of consequences. That’s fine, I guess.

As this site – with its interminable paragraphs – itself amply demonstrates, even getting to the way we read now is a mighty jump for some. But there’s still the faint feeling of self-justification involved: you should organize your site/document this way, because this is the way we read, because sites are organized this way, because this is the way we read. But it’s worse than even that, because the repetition of the design structures actually produces the kind of reading that it is ostensibly responding to; this is truly like Nietzsche’s little story of hiding a ball under a bushel and then being amazed to find it there.

Obviously, there are limitations to attention, and perhaps constants in the way we read (we call these strata); you can’t just do anything. Those studies in Gestalt psychology (however dubious) are likely seeking such stratified formations. The other studies on attentional blink do likewise, and they are useful (see, for example, an interesting collection The Limits of Attention: Temporal Constraints in Human Information Processing). But I’d much rather see people producing new attention structures and their attendant subjectivities than merely replaying, again, the attention structures we currently enact. Of course, that’s an avant-garde desire, and it might be that such experiments should be left to some kind of avant-garde, while the rest of us just get the current design structures right. And maybe it’s even admirable that so few can pay attention to those avant-garde designs.

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