| I don't believe that reading is a "passive" activity. "[Tom] saw a new girl in the garden--a lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long-tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes."
(Tom Sayer, by Mark Twain) Reading this, we all pictured the girl in our minds. But I believe the exact image of the girl I have is different from yours. This is our mind working and filling in the gaps of the information that it believes to be missing. Some people may see the girl vividly, filling it with details like some freckles and an embroidered dress while others will simply see a blonde girl with blue eyes. But our ming WORKED to make that. In the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, he says that the most import place in a comic book is the place between the pannel, where our mind rushes in to fill in the gaps, to connect the action. Even movies have this. We have the jump cut, that can be considered a jump from one panel to another (with the implicit "space in between"). We also have the "places outside the scene". If someone goes away to get a coffee, we can picture it happening. If the scene is being filmed in a room, and we can only see 3 of the walls, we KNOW there is a fourth one. And, besides it all, with every medium we consume, we have the "baggage" we take with us. Our knowledge of previous stories, movies, songs, books; our own opinions on the theme and even if we had a good or bad day will influence our experiencing of the "object" (book, movie, etc.) It isn't because we're not moving our hands that the medium becomes "passive". Books are what they are. And they are good at it. The author's fault is that he is trying to change books while what he should really be doing is creating a new medium. |