"Reading Problems" by EH

Reading Problems

Looking through Counterpunch this past weekend to see if there was anything there worth putting up for disqussion here, I noticed “Unleashed Graphic Designers – Art Over Function,” which is a complaint by Ralph Nader that graphics are rendering unreadable the text they are supposed to be complementing. Here’s an excerpt:

Admittedly, this is the golden age for graphic artists to show their creativity. Editors have convinced themselves that with readers’ shorter attention spans and the younger generation’s aversion to spending time with print publications, the graphic artists must be unleashed. Never mind what the ophthalmologists or the optometrists may think. Space, color, and type size are the domain of liberated gung-ho artists.

There is one additional problem with low expectations for print newsreaders: Even though print readership is shrinking, there will be even fewer readers of print if they physically cannot read the printed word.

I have tried, to no avail, to speak with graphic design editors of some leading newspapers about three pronounced trends that are obscuring content. First is the use of background colors that seriously blur the visibility of the text on the page. Second is print size, which is often so small and light that even readers with good eyesight would need the assistance of a magnifying glass. Third is that graphic designers have been given far too much space to replace content already squeezed by space limitations.

Function should not follow art. Readers should not have to squint to make out the text on the page. Some readers might even abandon an article because of its illegible text! One wonders why editors have ceded control of the readability of their publications to graphic designers. Editors cannot escape responsibility by saying that the graphic designers know best.

I am not taking to task the artists who combine attention-getting graphics with conveyance of substantive content. A good graphic provides emotional readiness for the words that follow.

However, in the February 17, 2019 Sunday edition of the New York Times, the page one article of the Sunday Review Section was titled, “Time to Panic,” about global climate disruption by David Wallace-Wells. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. The editors wanted to strike fear in readers to jolt their attentiveness to such peril, through a lurid two giant fingers with a human eye in between. A dubious attempt. Taking up the entire first page of the precious Sunday Review section (except for a hefty slice of an ad for the Broadway play “To Kill a Mockingbird”), smattered by three paragraphs of small, white and almost unreadable text on a dark pink background, is counterproductive. Less graphic license and clearer type would have had art following function.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/01/unleashed-graphic-designers-art-over-function/

This type of increasingly unreadability has irritated me too. Like old Nader, my eyes have weakened and I would really like to have text crisp against its background and of sufficient size that I don’t have to get a stronger pair of reading glasses every few months until I’m legally blind. Small cream text on a pale pink background annoys me, and despite the fact that I’m supposed to get the graphic designer's “feminist” message. I probably won’t attempt reading it, and will question the intelligence of the editors and, by extension, of the message the text might or might not have. If that’s my immediate reaction, imagine that of a misogynist.

But as a former composition teacher, the prioritizing of the image over the text bothers me more. In the English departments where I taught up until a few years ago, there was a similar attitude that Nader notes among editors – readers’ attention spans have shortened and we must compensate with more non-text input – that is, striking visuals. Apparently in the teaching profession proper and the larger educational sphere, the media, there’s a growing attitude that we’ve lost the battle for higher literacy and should go with the flow (which is always, of course, downhill). Remarks that we live in an oral and visual culture, delivered with a shrug, have become commonplace.

At the last meeting I attended for adjuncts, the freshman English administrator told us that the old days of teaching rational arguments and critical thinking were over, which came as something of a shock to me – like, how can you teach writing an argument without dealing with rules of argument? The administrator went on to say we should start teaching using memes.

At first I thought he meant Dawkin’s original sense that ideas, fashions, and behaviors are like – or even maybe are – biological entities that leap from one host human to another, evolving and determining the course of societal propensities. I thought that might be an interesting way to go, as I’m fascinated by how moral fashions and political attitudes are disseminated by various means, propagandist and otherwise. And I think it’s intriguing and indicative that Dawkins played with the idea that ideas are, really, actually, biological, ie physical.  

But no, the administrator meant slapping a few words on an image, the kind of stuff you see on the threads all the time. The example he offered was a photo of Gene Wilder as Willie Wonka with the words “You know…” at the top and “I do not accept late papers” at the bottom. I thought, “Holy shit, the infantilization of the public just made another major advance.” But aside from that lame-ass example, the idea seemed to be that the teacher should flash such memes at the students and the students will react to them, which will produce lively classroom discussions, and to ditch the hopeless effort to get them to comprehend the complexity of an argument without even, you know, pictures. If a picture is worth a thousand words, who needs the words? The presentation proceeded with a colorful image of how to write a paper that looked a lot like the Candyland board. It including cartoon images of students springing from one station on the road to another, like the road to an A paper is pretty much like the Candyland road to winning the game, or the one to Oz, where you get those degrees.

OK, I’ll stop bitching about the degradation of the Amerikan educational system, but is what Nader talking about related to my little narrative above? When major, arguably serious (mffft) newspapers like The Grey Lady decide the image can, or maybe should, overwhelm the text, must I revise my opinion of that administrator to that of forward thinking intellectual?

Furthermore, I was thinking of how the infamous picture of Nick Sandmann was read as meme, that picture that says it all about the white Supremacist Amerikan male, embodying encroaching fascist power, who smirks contemptuously at the oppressed but wise and brave “other” among us – which turned out to be, at least in my opinion, an entirely horseshit reading. If you slap a few critical words onto that image, you can really get a game-changer going.  

Clearly, powerful images can open up perception in good and bad ways; the medium is neutral but its uses are surely not. For instance, the postcard of a deep-South lynching, with the crowds of white families smiling and picnicking at the scene with a black man hanging from a tree-branch, is a damned powerful image that does say something irrefutable about the murderous racism of that time and place. Yet when the left embraces the quick emotional communication at the expense of fact-gathering, real analysis, and argument, are we going in the right direction?  

Of course the right is into the power of the image also, arguable even more so. This question of the mounting importance of image over text reminded me of a Baffler article, “Eat Your Chart Out,” which examines the proliferation of right-wing charts that don’t really make any sense at all, but are disseminated as instructive and even factual throughout social media.  

Question for anyone reading this and game: without reading the text that article’s author,  Jon Greenaway, provides and just looking at “figure 2,” can you make anything sensible out of it? https://thebaffler.com/latest/eat-your-chart-out-greenaway