# Mini ex 6

The first thing that springs to my mind about the difference between reading a book or a website is the materiality of the medium: the computer screen versus the paper of the book. The light of the screen can become straining to eye when reading for longer sessions, because it is so direct while the book only moderately reflects the light on the room.
The materiality also affects how we browse. In this respect the book has some contraints in its tangibility; you turn the page to reveal the next – each page is the same length and you advance in a linear fashion by turning the pages. On a website, however, the page is often scrolled through quite seemlessly and in some cases even endlessly. But there is a plethora of different ways to structure a website and style how to navigate through it that because of the material is not possible in a paper book.

The interactivity of the material is thus very different. In the book the main navigation interaction is turning pages (and maybe highlighting or writing in the margin) but on a website the cursor can click links to other pages and interact with elements in a way that makes the two phenomena quite different infrastructurally. A website is often in constant relation to the rest of the internet because of the proliferation of the hyperlink. Browsing the internet has a referential quality that is so immediate that it is very attractive to engage with, but maybe also distracting. With the use of tabs one's mind can sometimes feel broken up to multiple foci, where you have to relate and interact with many things a the same time. Again the contraints of the analogue world of the book has qualities that encourage long focused reading.

This imediacy is also a central point of the readings for today. Before computers as we know them today were invented file sorting and retrieval was a profession and as such an important (but maybe trivialised and overlooked) part of the information processing industry. Now filing is infrastructure and is happening where we cannot see and understand the data as it is because it has become imediate and engineered. The linkability of the internet is both what makes the experience useful and exiting and a way to enact gain value via the data-gathering platform infrastructure.

Is the imediate interaction on the web is distracting us from understanding what is happening behind the screen when?