ABSTRACTS

Otí lia Ármeán The Answer of Typography

Keywords: book, interpretation, literacy,medium, mode, reading, screen, semio-tics, typographyThis article presents typography as asemiotic code in the landscape of chan-ging media from book to screen, and thatof changing representation primarilythrough writing to representation prima-rily through ima ge. Reading images(Kress, Van Leeuwen), navigating newmedia, understanding complex systems(like a city) requires among differentother literacies a typographic literacy too.The article demonstrates the use of typo-graphical notions through the analysis of several examples, and outlines themeaning potential of letter forms, size,colour, composition.

Pál Ke re kes – Pé ter KiszlE-book Chronicle: Chapters from Elec-

tronic Book HistoryKeywords: print book, e-book, e-reader,digital library, internet, mar ke ting, mediaIf the traditional print book is five cen-turies and a half old, the electronic bookcan only look back upon a history ofapproximately forty years. It was bornwith the Pro ject Gu ten berg, created byMichael Hart in July 1971, in order tomake free electronic versions of literarybooks available for the greater public. A pioneer site in a number of ways, Pro -ject Gu ten berg was the first informationprovider on an embryonic internet and isthe oldest digital library. During the lastfour decades, several new ways of textmanagement have been developed, andthe e-reader has become mo re than atechnical means. This publication pre-sents the development stages of the e-reader and describes the pre-e-bookreader concepts, such as Memex andXanadu, and the first reader device: Dy-nabook, created by Allen Kay, workingfor Xe rox in the mid-1970s. The onlinebookstore Amazon.com was launched byJeff Bezos in July 1995, in Seattle, after amarket study which led him to concludethat books were the best products to sellon the internet. The book portal, then theentire content plaza was a success forAma zon, but the real breakthrough hasled to the introduction of the Kindle, the

best-selling device in the e-book bu si -ness. The authors’ conception of e-bookhistory is that the digital book is the resultof an organic cultural development. The e-book and the print book are not inopposition to each other. These two mediaare complementary instruments.

Lász ló RopolyiDigital Literacies

Keywords: literacy, digitalization, writing,history of communication, media, socialand cultural impact of digitalizationParaphrasing the Church–Turing thesis, adigitalization thesis is proposed: every-thing which is or can be expressed, canalso be digitalized. For the better under-standing of the social and cultural im-pacts of digitalization and digital literacy,a historical perspective is applied. Basedon a train of thought concerning thehistory of communication and on anextension of the concept of digitalization,writing is described as a former vers ionof digitalization, i.e. the digitalization ofspeech. In this way, two historical pe-riods of digitalization can be distingui-shed, in which the methodologies wereessentially different. The first one iscalled alphabetic visual digitalization(writing), the second vers ion is calledbinary electronic vers ion (usual digitalliteracy). Applying this distinction, theconcepts of alphabetic visual literacy andthe binary electronic literacy are intro-duced, where the former is the fore-runner of the latter. Several characteristicsocial and cultural impacts are collectedin both historical periods of digitalliteracy.

At ti la Se bes tyén Charles Handy and the Eloquence of

(Self-)ManagementKeywords: bu si ness, Charles Handy, hu-manities, management, meaning manage-ment, rhetoric, self-help, spiritualisation,wordsmithThis paper tries to reveal why CharlesHandy is said to be the creator of phi-losophical elegance and eloquence forbu si ness thinking. The analysis high-lights that the dynamics between diffe-rent pragmatic agents make some, ori-ginally meditative or essayistic textpassages of Handy similar to the rhetoricof spiritual conduct working in prayersor religious meditations. This achieve-124

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ment of Handy’s oe uv re reveals how hisworks may gain literary aspects, and thusit also may be an illustrative example ofthe integrated relationship betweenmanagement and the humanities.

Zol tán Szûts Before Singularity – Between Paper

and ScreenKeywords: Singularity, digitalization, me-dia convergence, screen, print, hypertext,digital dementiaDue to the impact of the World Wide Weband due to ubiquitous computing, we areat a threshold of an event called “Singu-larity”. The development of technologyand its social and cultural impact hasaccelerated the rate of change of oureveryday environment, so that we, whoare living just before this Singularity, areincapable to comprehend it in its chan-ging nature or to reliably predict thefuture. One aspect of this change is thatthe nature of reading and writing haschanged within the digital paradigm,which means that one can be both writer

and reader, and the body, the role, andthe function of the book also requiresreconsideration. As a result of mediaconvergence, which only accelerates thearrival of Singularity, the content is nowindependent of body, space and time,and can be displa yed at any time ondigital devices. The result of mediaconvergence is that, on all our screens,whether they are computers, televisions,smartphones or tablets, we can view andconsume the same content in the samemanner, thereby simultaneously fusingalready existing media properties. Beforethe event of Singularity occurs, printedbooks and digital text share the samespace. The majority of printed worksrequire linear reading strategies, whilenon-linear, digital hypertext needs adifferent approach. This study seeks theanswer questions pertaining to the newways of thinking about books, literacyand the so-called digital dementia, thenature of human thought transformation,as well as the value of digitally recordedtexts.

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