I thought that Chapter 3 from The Economics of Attention by Richard A. Lanham was interesting. I never thought about it before, but we do often associate shape poetry with being ‘silly’ and ‘not serious.’ This is entirely because someone was clever enough to write their words into a shape that would make sense with the poem. With our society, it’s not just the shape poetry that get’s cast aside as not serious literature. Any book with pictures of illustrations is considered lower on the reading ladder, most generally.

It’s contradictory. We want text to be clear and not confusing, but we also like the mind game of figuring out meaning. Pictures, illustrations, and shapes take away the ambiguity of words, and therefore the text is considered more simple by most readers. I am not really sure why we do this. And again,  I’ve never really thought about it before until I read the article. But it is an interesting thought, nonetheless.

It is more accepting to incorporate pictures and other non-text items into digital text. With any news story read online, we expect there to be an accompanying video clip or picture. Why is it not the same with print? It’s all about tradition, in my opinion. We are used to seeing scholarly, ‘higher,’ works of literature with text alone; contrariwise, we are used to seeing internet articles and blogs with accompanying features.