A passage from Blake's "The Tyger" and iPhone technology

With the help of friend and colleague Justin I literally put the newest (most innovative) mobile networking device out there, the iPhone, to use as a literary tool: wondering, in particular, how best to exploit all of its features in order to read  a small passage from Blake's "The Tyger" poem (from the Songs of Experience):

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I tried to gather from this thought-experiment any insights into the way mobile technologies (like the iPhone) can change the nature of reading itself. I use the iPhone as the most advanced (& friendly-user) form of interactive media in general: Kindle or YouTube or Netflix, etc. could just as easily have served as my point of origin. What I discovered was that the iPhone's pure functionality, especially as it pertained potentially to user activities and behaviours, took precedence over any notion of the stationary literary product I set out with: the small excerpt from Blake almost seeming to have been forgotten.The choice of  whether to use iPhone or 'Kindle' or 'iPad' as a primary reading platform has relegated the traditional bound book to a minor player in the literacy game. My little experiment drove home the point (as nothing else could) that the "processing" (i.e. the continual accessing & updating) of  information rather than the object of inquiry itself is what guides the notion of reading in the IT Age.

I posed the question directly to Justin, "How can iPhone help you to read the opening lines from Blake's famous poem? (I could have asked myself that question but the results, of course, might have been unintentionally biased). The  steps he led me through confirmed my suspicion that online reading is purely processual and pro tempore. To begin with, reading seemed to have been redefined from the very outset. It meant research and that primarily on a 'touchscreen', and  the search for content (whatever it may be) was a matter of the iPhone's functionality: in other words, the how of reading Blake's excerpt was more important than (or perhaps entirely eclipsed) the actual verse itself. And by functionality Justin meant to draw my attention to the iPhone's primary 'applications' feature, the point from which the question (as originally posed) could now hopefully lead to some possible answers. Blake's text seemed to have been bypassed even at the start.

But what about the question? Answers? Well, the real place to begin is the 'App Store' itself, the iPhone's main storehouse of about 250 000 mobile apps, a sort of menu from which iPhone-users/readers can pick the category that's most appropriate to the reading task at hand. For answers I got more options because when we searched, say, 'Poetry', we found a free 'Poetry Magazine' site and another entitled 'Literary Analysis', a pay site that (judging by the screenshot) promised to be more detailed, more instructive. And on and on it could go. It's almost as if we were distancing ourselves from the text, getting distracted by menu options, having lost sight of the objective. To read Blake's verse in some traditional sense now seems all but impossible: textuality seems to have been submerged in pure search options.

If we want to make the iPhone work for us as a reading & data-gathering tool, it's at least got to keep us focused on the poem. Right? But it only does that in a non-traditional mode, not by opening a traditional text at the page on which "The Tyger" appears, ready for analysis or enjoyment, but rather by establishing a whole network of possible 'relations' between the poem and apps & the relevant sites to which they lead: the tendency of the iPhone user, rather than starting at Blake's poem, is to go down a highway with a potentially limitless number of off-ramps, a phenomenon which leaves "The Tyger" receding farther & farther into the background. A kind of Saussurean signifier endlessly referring to related meanings.

If the traditional text wanes, then what rises in its place? The terms 'text', 'literary analysis', even 'reading' itself mean now something different. It's all a question of means, with Blake's verse turned into an illusory Utopian dream of a fully self-explicating text that can stand alone without the technology. It's non-necessity as text is the starting point. Recall that Justin's first move was to convert the question into a research option, the text becoming a home screen with applications, not Blake's verse. And given that iPhone comes with its own preferred 'Safari' web browser (just one of many others like 'Internet Explorer', 'Mozilla'), windows of opportunity for reading the poem seem to have turned it into a hall of mirrors, with text reduced to image upon image of a poem that's the result of an infinitely regressive series of browsers, apps and sites. A feature of iPhone with which Justin (about 20 years or so younger than I am) felt perfectly comfortable.

But what about the poem? Where exactly is it in all of this? iPhone is a multimedia device par excellence that problematizes not just the traditional notion of textuality (as we've seen): even space itself is deeply realigned, the place of reading & accompanying discourse permanently fixed on entirely different coordinates that have no more to do with real 'things' than Blake's own text. Has "The Tyger" been reduced to a pure spectacle with simultaneous visual, audio and textural properties competing for the reader's attention? A resounding Yes. In fact, a combination of audio (as in 'Justin.tv') and visual (as in "Video on Demand') could change competitiveness into collaboration: the experience of the poem can, in short, be turned into a live streaming event with multiple users worldwide reduplicating the same reading experience.

The poem? Is it the same one we started out with? Are we talking about the same "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright"? If iPhone technology, one intertwined with Web 2.0, is a special case of Internet reading, then it's probably safe to say anything else put in its place would get us the same results. It's as though sensory domains, once technologized in this way, have transgressed their own boundaries & released a 'digitized' (etherealized) Other that is the form of Internet literacy. Reading isn't necessarily just a visual phenomenon (as Justin was quick to point out at the beginning): in fact, the amorphous product of touchscreens, apps & competing browsers now turns the poem into an 'epi-phenomenon', a ghostly residue of the original text. Which is the poem we began by ignorning altogether.