Mobile text is more legible to contemporary readers than static text.

Are we able to read a text if we don't want to read it? If it doesn't continually snatch our attention? If a text moves or if you must act to read it—if you must make a choice or cope with change—how much easier does it become to focus?

The most crucial question maybe of all time and definitely of this time is: how do we make people read and understand text? This essay expands the word "legible" to consider what screen-based practices might make text more likely to be read.

"Legible" can mean "clear enough to read" (ty OED⇗): is the contrast high; is the font normative; do the colors fail to clash? But we "can" read a text only when it's also “enjoyable or interesting to read."

Many have studied what colors/fonts/sizes/etc. make texts easy on the eyes. That kind of legibility is important, but let's mistrust UX/UI conventions that claim "legibility" as incentive while failing to make people read.

What’s at stake is not only our ability to make people read. The uniformity UX/UI designers proliferate in the name of "legibility" is also dangerous, in that it erases the interface itself. Interfaces are most invisible when we are accustomed to them; every time we imitate the interfaces of Google or Instagram, we fortify the invisibility of those interfaces. If an interface is invisible, its source (perhaps big tech) becomes more internal to us: our defenses go down; we are more vulnerable, more easily manipulated. We must not let the interface be invisible, must constantly remind the reader of its materiality (a nod to Tung-Hui Hu⇗, who shows the sweet cloudiness of code as dangerous illusion). As I write elsewhere⇗, we must disrupt our continuity w machines, if we are to question the authority of the corporations they serve. This is extra urgent in 2025, when near-all big tech explicitly supports the genocidal U.S.-far-right. We must ask: when people say “legible,” do they simply mean “closer to the visual norms big tech has set out for us”? And what does big tech stand to gain from our conventionality?

The Norman door⇗ is an emblematic UX/UI concept. It claims that the ideal door (or website) (the anti-Norman door) is one you don't notice. Originally described in 1988, the Norman door is obvious progeny of the 1932 crystal goblet⇗: here, the metaphor is positive (we want the goblet, not the door) and asserts that typography should be "invisible"—a concept later much-decried by more adventurous postmodern and contemporary designers. But erasing type is one thing; there's much more at stake when we erase interfaces.

Despite my refusal to build an orthodox interface, I toy with conventions known to make reading easier on the eyes. The yellow-orange-green spectrum is more comfortable for being in the middle of the visible spectrum (as opposed to blue, from which we hide behind glasses); the orange I've chosen is a more feral color within that spectrum. And many studies show faster reading w serif fonts like this (Garamond). It’s also old-print-media wisdom that narrow and justified texts allow the eye to get into the swing of repeated identical movement—and I maintain the AA-recommended color contrast ratio. Finally, canonical internet-y shorthands (eg. bc, w) quicken the reading and more closely resemble the texts to which we are increasingly accustomed.

A student recently asked why, if you have a point to make (we were discussing Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon⇗) you don't write it into an essay or article? Why not use conventions that she said, repeatedly, "we know" make things easier to read? Why not make the point linearly, as we "naturally" think? The class and I responded that a) art/poetry exist to say what can't be said straight and b) [more relevant here:] if "we knew" what would make people read a text—really read a text, such that it stokes compassion and understanding—this world would be a v different and much better place.

Fundamental theories of physics since Newton and Galileo suggest no inherent direction of time; from a scientific perspective, our perception of time as "linear" is often treated as an irrelevant illusion. Ted Nelson⇗, an early e-lit theorist, wrote that we do not think or experience life linearly. Right: we may remember the past "like it was yesterday," imagine our future more vividly than we see the present, and/or "relive" past trauma (so vivid in sight/scent/touch! in the body!) If we do not live linearly, why should we pretend to read or write linearly?

Hypertextual writing—ie., writing that can be moved—is easier to write when you start: the connections flow freely, "naturally". But that same hypertextuality makes a text (this text) very difficult to finish: how can I refine where sprawl is so comfortable? One of the questions I ask my net.art students is: how does your work end and what is the meaning of that mode of ending? And, relatedly: how do you advise the reader of the piece's scope, in a medium that offers no innate indication of scope (eg., the thickness of a book, the size of a room, etc.)? Why would anyone continue in the contract of attention if they do not know how much more attention they owe?

Three concussions: in March 2020, someone trying to mosh at a party headbutted me; in summer of 2021, I was pummeled by a wave into a piece of broken pier; that fall, I was standing-cycling v fast (it was cold, I was upset) and didn't see a pothole bc I'd left my lights at home and broke my fall with my head, on a stopped car. For three years, screens showing any movement caused me pain, vertigo, and/or nausea. I closed my eyes in subway cars, wore sunglasses at the gym. I learned to like podcasts to keep up w the news. For a cumulative year, I could barely text. I had to leave countless events bc of too-extreme lighting or screens: karaoke (I weirdly made this mistake multiple times), sports bars, art shows with screens. I still need bluelight glasses, am hurt by overhead LEDs. But I realized, during that time, that we're missing something in our conversations about legibility/access.

What made certain media and information consumption inaccessible/illegible to concussed-me was precisely what, at other times in my life, had made them more legible: typical of the internet-raised, I'd filled my life w moving texts. And that was bc, in my uninjured state, these texts were easiest to read.

Text that is visually uninteresting is less legible, bc if we are bored, we will not read. Advertisers, early internet users, and bodega owners have always known this: moving text is eye-catching, and therefore more likely to be read.

We the internet-raised are famous for our distractability, ADHD⇗, etc.

"Contemporary readers" is an imperfect (class- and culture-blind) shorthand, but I use it to be grand. By "contemporary readers," I mean those who grew up w the internet and v internet-y older readers; I do not refer to readers of any age who have had limited access to the internet.

We the internet-raised read much more mobile text (making plans, falling in love, getting our news) than static texts. How could mobile text be illegible, when internet-raised readers both gravitate toward and are trained to read on such texts? And of course, those who accuse us of "not reading" are absurd: so much digital activity is text-based.If people are concerned that our generation isn't reading more valorous/valuable content, then the form needs to step up.

Concern for humanity's cognitive abilities has been central to Luddite/anti-tech stances since Plato, who fretted that the popularization of writing (yes, a technology) would hinder our ability to memorize. More recently, TV was supposed to "amuse us to death⇗." So let's call these boys-who-cried-wolf and trust that today's tech won't be the tech that ruins us.

The static/mobile text dichotomy is not one I've seen elsewhere, but it feels specific and necessary here. "Static text" is text that moves only in minimal ways (via page turn and/or scroll). Static texts are not less powerful than mobile texts; they are simply less legible. The word also recalls the "static" of a failing TV screen or telephone or recorder—a proto-glich, a time-honored refusal of technology (does technology refuse, or is it refused?).

(Static text requires effort of attention not necessary for mobile text and is therefore less legible; however, that same attention forges intense connection between author/reader; ease/legibility aids comprehension but may hamper connection; when there is continual active consent—when we are not driven, but rather choose, every moment, to give attention—a heftier bond grows. In a world filled with reports of increasing alienation, we still need static literature—if one of the most important functions of literature is to make us feel less alone.)

By "mobile texts" I mean any written words that move or may be moved. These are often tech-mediated—and I am working in a long tradition of writers who idealize the potential interaction between tech and text.

Some mobile texts are independent of tech, and some static texts are tech-mediated; my mobile/static dichotomy decenters the conditions of textual production—and allows mobile texts to be situated in a broader canon. As many have pointed out (thinking mostly of Hayles⇗), interactive texts or texts that may be moved have a long history: from encyclopedias, to volvelles⇗, choose-your-own-adventure⇗ books, and late-modern/post-modern literary experiments by ppl like Nabokov⇗ and Cortázar⇗. Non-tech-mediated moving texts include protest signs and helicopter banner advertisements on the beach. On the other hand, tech-mediated texts that only move via "scroll" (which word boasts its affinity with the ancient) are no less static than the text in a typically linear book.

In/around the 90s, many wrote w great hope that tech-mediated text (by a thousand glorious names: hypertexts, technotexts⇗, cybertexts, ergodic texts⇗, and e-literature) would revolutionize our way of reading, being, thinking. But that 90s dream hid away, shame-faced, when the wild wild net turned into a sterilized shopping mall w only three-ish huge stores, no exit (circa late-2000s)—and did revolutionize us, but in a way that was hard to trust.

Why do I pick up a theoretical thread that, after a short-lived energetic spurt, laid vaguely dormant for most of my own lifetime? Why is my personal epitome of interactive essay something John Cayley⇗ published three years after I was born? If the praises of mobile texts have already been sung, why do I sing them again, now?

Over the past 10ish years, something has changed. I started ORAL.pub in 2016 to publish "poetry/art made for and inseparable from the web," precisely because almost no one I knew had heard of net.art or e-literature or hypertextuality, etc. (For context, and any measure of salt: I was a 23-yo product of AZ inner-city public schools—who'd fraternized oft with the students in the very fancy MFA at my college and spent a year artsy-partying in NY.) Even in 2019/2020, when I first taught web art, max. one or two students per class knew what it was—even in programs dedicated to tech-related art. Now, in 2025, tho I teach in the same department, over half my students arrive w serious knowledge of the subject, and many more net.art publications have launched. A new generation of net.artists has turned up—and the fantasy of the 90s theorists I love is finally congealing.

Why are these new net.artists emerging now? Maybe it's a critical mass thing: finally, there are enough artist- and poet-age people who grew up on the internet to build a vibrant conversation. Or maybe we just need some time to warm up to a new tool before we can let is give us beauty or meaning or intensity (thinking of the slow starts of film, photography). But some straw broke some back.

These new net.artists and net.art-lovers are different from the those in the 90s, whose attitude was one of hope/play, ie.: "look at this fun new tool-toy; it is all-good; it will bring true equality to humanity." Unlike them, we grew up in the house that tool-toy turned out to build, have seen the violences of that house. Some of us still play, but for many this tool is here to break, to rebuild, to construct tunnels and trap doors and through-the-wardrobe fantasy. We are using a tool we know too well, a tool we've seen sin; we are here to exorcise it, to stretch/strengthen it into health, to make it a weapon against its previous masters⇗.

Moving text has existed for longer than text that can be moved. Moving text is not interactive text, and it wouldn't be included in many theorists' definitions of tech-mediated text.

Examples of moving texts: scrolling banner alerts on news channels, animated titles⇗ in films, programmable LED signs⇗ in store windows, and early-internet gifs (eg. "click here")⇗. None of these follow conventions that contemporary UX/UI preachers "know” make texts easier to read. But moving texts proliferate so insistently bc: we do read them. Are they not, then, more legible? Are hundreds (thousands?) of NYC bodega owners, news channel owners, and advertisers wrong?

Text that can be moved (or interactive text) is a more recent advent than moving text: for many, it arrived in the 90s, w technologies like the internet, PCs, and cellphones. Of course, this essay itself consists of text that can be moved.

The interface of this essay maintains certain conventions, while asserting its own materiality—maybe in the way that modernist painters asserted the flatness of the canvas or the thickness of their paint. Here, each text appears when you want and you drag it where you wish, sustaining your own shapes of logic. Lines in the background shine a spotlight on your movements. And you can always check how much is left.

The structure of this essay rejects not only linearity, but also the flattening of nonlinearity (or hypertextuality) into branching mind-map-like charts. These impose false hierarchies, prioritize items closest to the center or top. But an element far from the center may be the core of a hypertext: what matters is not the number of steps you take to reach a text, but the energy that propels you through those steps. For that reason, all texts here appear at random positions, with no visual reminders of their connections.

Rejecting the mind-map-like chart also allows unidirectional links—as in, no text, in itself, lets you know where you clicked to birth it. This allows for more specific structural meaning. The text to which many texts lead is read recursively, a crucial refrain. On the other hand, a text that leads to many other texts is both centralized and decentralized: links suggest service to something more important, do not seem to belong to the initial text, poke holes in it.

On nearly all my websites, I include (usually v simple) p5.js sketches that register your cursor-prints. These impose human imperfection (how messy our movements) on the often-sterile internet, remind us that computation itself is physical, and undermine the moral irresponsibility allowed when we anonymously lurk. They also offer the opportunity to stim (repetitive/mindless activity that helps one concentrate or self-soothe).

At the bottom of this page (on the desktop version), you can toggle on/off all essay-bits that you've yet to open, to get a sense of this essay's scope You can also make all texts extra small (and zoom in/out and about), in case a bird’s eye view helps you get the lay of the land.

The end! Hey wow! You've managed to open all "gobbets" (and now you know their secret name). Thanks for passing your time here. Please send your thoughts via email or dm.

"A New Legibility" was written and built by Theo Ellin Ballew⇗. You can toggle on/off everything you've yet to see, or make everything extra small. [Thanks extremely, for thoughtful feedback and encouragement, to: Allison Parrish, John Cayley, Erin Vanderhoof, Joseph Buckley, L Fahn-Lai, and Haider Riaz Khan.]