attempt at summarizing Lanham

Lanham asks many questions in his essay. The basic one is ‘what’s next for text?’ To answer this he reviews the history of print to show that the third dimension, oral qualities, movement and other visual stimuli have always been present in writing, although the ideals of print have more or less successfully attempted to suppress them. Lanham analyzes examples from the far and recent past to establish this connection. Digital technology brings this back and also moves readers into a different “attention economy” in which there is plentiful text but a limited amount of attention. The return of the repressed element causes unease with the instability of new textuality because we are now self-conscious about language as language. Print is now seen for what it is, as a stripped down version of what we’ve always desired. He ends by concluding that oscillation between print and the multi-dimensional space/time expression of computers is what we need and what is ‘next for text.’