Reading online?

A article from a recent series in the New York Times surveys the debate about new media and literacy, “Online, R U Really Reading.” This debate was also stirred this past year by a cover article in The Atlantic Monthly, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stoopid.” [the original article is linked to a glog I posted last semester in response to it].

Is Google Making Us Stoopid?

Such is the title of a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly. You can (if you dare risk the neurons) read it here.

I post the link, in part, because I want to get back to it–yes, reflection and further reading is possible (at least for me) in digital spaces. In fact, since I don’t subscribe to the magazine, I wouldn’t be reading the piece at all if not here. It is also the case, by the way, that I have been meditating on this piece since I stumbled upon it earlier today; and have returned her to add to this posting several times. What, then, in this technology doesn’t open up to a kind of thinking and reading we also do, when we can get our hands on them, with books?

There are ideas in this “Google” article that speak to some of our reading from the past week, and also look ahead: from Birkerts to Shelley to Hayles. I noticed that several of you in your glogging, and in class discussions from Friday 9/5, started to turn to the style of Hayles and how that differed from Birkerts. Glad to see that attention (as you know, I want us all to pay attention to style and then play with it in writing). One implication that emerged from the initial reading of Hayles: that the ease of her style (or as the case may be for some, the difficulty of her style) is in some way influenced by the computer and the world of computation that she is embracing. Denise, for example, explored that implication in her recent post. I am fascinated by that implication–and look forward to exploring it with you as we continue to read and also as we begin to give more attention (the first writing project coming up) to the ‘machinery’ of our own writing. Remember, writing is already a technology, an invention, a medium that relies and builds upon other media: language, print, pen, press, paper, book, goat skin. The Google article gets briefly into a reminder that writing technology has a longer historical life–did not begin, or come under threat, only with the internet. But as with any communication medium, I agree with the author (he cites McLuhan on this point), the medium comes to shape not just the message but its production–shapes the messenger. Our brains have been wired for writing and literacy and (since 1500) for writing in rows of print. And our brains are being wired and re-wired, I assume, now, for the different processing of information and writing (still, writing) we find in the digital library.

On this issue of a longer historical perspective on the technology of writing, Birkerts falls short. I saw this especially in chapters 3-7, where at key points I noticed that he makes brief reference to print as technology, but doesn’t elaborate (pages 70-71 are one location). There is very little discussion or understanding expressed regarding Gutenberg (and the technological revolution the printing press brings) in a book with Gutenberg in the title. Birkerts earlier distinguishes between reflection and nostalgia–and is guilty here of the kind of quick and immediate nostalgia for the book and the way writing used to be. His argument falters. The charge was also made that books and writing itself would make us stupid–it is in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” for example. So I am suspicious of Birkerts for not bringing that into his argument. Isn’t he “stupid,” in a sense, for failing to connect with this? (If only he would spend more time on wikipedia–lol! but seriously, you can at least move around in that networked environment among discussions of printing, writing, Plato, technology). Here, a problem with his logos (argumentation) affects his pathos and ultimately, his ethos. I trust him less, am suspicious that he is either not intelligent in his views of reading/writing or stacking the deck.

Katherine Hayles, to my mind, is a thoughtful guide in this regard. She published an article recently about the kind of “hyper-attention” that digital literacy develops and its difference from the kind of deep attention that tradition print-based learning cultivates. [she posted a copy of this article on her blog for her Media Theory course at UCLA; she too uses wordpress. Yet she doesn’t value one to the exclusion of the other (the move Birkerts makes). She recognizes value in both; and suggests teachers in the humanities reflect both in their teaching. Something to keep our eyes on when we read her further. And this coming week, working on the writing project, something to keep our hands and eyes on: to what extent are we influenced by the machines we use to communicate? and what are some ways we can learn to use those machines more effectively and imaginatively?

the medium is the message

After my 9.30 class Friday morning, I stopped in the library to browse some books. I went there looking for a book titled Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace and while in that section of the stacks (roughly, media and language studies, some history of writing mixed in), I cruised a few other titles–something I enjoy doing in libraries, as I enjoy doing in Google books or other online databases of books; both take up time and can be refreshingly distracting. One book I brought back with me was Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, a famous book from the 1960s by a so-called media guru. I got it to browse a few items that I felt would be worth bringing into our discussion. McLuhan defines media in that book as “extensions of man.” Contrary to someone like Birkerts, who neglects the medium of the book and tends to view media only as the new, the electronic, McLuhan understands that a medium is anything that extends the capability of a human who uses it. Thus any and all forms of communication tools are media, starting with language itself: writing, pencil, book, printing press, variety of computer mediated forms of writing and language. And in this book he extends this notion of extension: literally any tool that can be considered an extension: clothing, wheels, houses.

In the same book, McLuhan repeats a saying he made famous (perhaps you have heard of it): the medium is the message. He means in large part that the significance of any  medium  is the mediation it provides; he also means that a new medium contains aspects and traces of the old medium it supposedly replaces. A bit later in the course we will get back to this idea that has come to be called “remediation.”

Perhaps another way of putting this is to say that  a medium such as writing (print or electronic) is significant and meaningful in part (McLuhan a bit more boldly might say entirely) for the way it pulls back the curtain on the communication (or extension) it provides. This foregrounding of the medium is on my mind in the readings this week. We have Birkerts who is focused so intently and intensively on the privacy of print and writing, on the qualities of a book to be a medium of transport and self-extension–yet thinking very little about the medium (machine) of the book or even the writing that goes into it. At the other end, with Hayles and the reading we start for Friday (Writing Machines), we find an author similarly transported by literature and the private life of reading, yet who insists upon the material encounter with the medium of writing, of print, and of electronic text. And in the middle, Frankenstein. A story, it seems to me, about the mediated nature of creativity, authorial and biological; about being consigned, as humans, to the workshop of filthy creation.

McLuhan highlights for me the ways that Birkerts is neglecting to define and consider and reflect upon and understand the mediated nature of new media (instead of generalizing, too quickly brushing them off). And though he does do a better job being more deliberate and reflective regarding the media of print (all the reading and writing he discusses), there is still this problem. He gets, I think, the medium of print wrong. Consider this paragraph from McLuhan that evokes Birkerts’ senses of passivity vs. activity, except it locates the passive not with television but with the technology of literacy.

Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement. In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. [Understanding Media, 4]

I see a good bit of Birkerts in this image of detachment. Ironically, McLuhan gives us to imagine this scenario at home: parent yelling at child to put down that book, stop being so lazy, and get on the internet and do something.

What do you think?

My Work in Progress

You might be interested to know what I am thinking about, reading into, researching around, and generally speaking, currently working on as a writer. I, too, have to compost. But I also have to write and seek to publish in order to figure it out. A good deal of what this project delves into will enter into, and continue to come out of, my teaching. Most specifically, the course you are taking.  

Work in Progress:

The Scholar’s Information: Emerson’s Education in an Electronic Age

 

What becomes of Emerson’s Scholar in the Age of Google? The Scholar’s Information offers two firsts in Emerson studies: the first book to study Emerson’s sustained (and largely forgotten) interest in the theory and practice of education and the first to consider Emerson’s writing in relation to digital communication. Emerson’s understanding of the cultural and pedagogical implications of mediation in his own age of electronic communication can shed light on where we now find ourselves in education generally, literary education specifically.  In elucidating a web of relations between new and old media, between Emerson’s education and Google’s scholar, I focus on Emerson’s crucial conception of metonymy as the basis for learning—indeed, for all thinking. This notion of metonymy links Emersonian analogy with an associational thinking that is prominent in conceptions of hypertext and emphasized in definitions of digital literacy.  I am interested in what this technological correspondence between the information of Emersonian intellect and electronic pedagogy can teach us about the emergence of digital communication in the humanities—and more specifically, how the study of literature and writing can be reconfigured in light of that emergence. While focusing on Emerson’s conception of literary education, this project will also range among other versions of a metonymic pedagogy I locate in Emerson: in Benjamin Franklin’s plans for an English school; in Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas”; in the theories of John Dewey; in the emergence of cybernetics and information technologies; and most recently in calls for a rethinking of English and composition studies in arguments put forth by Robert Scholes and Richard Lanham.

 

Thus far I have completed research on Emerson manuscripts while I was Emerson Memorial Association Fellow at Houghton Library, Harvard University and published an initial article in Emerson Society Papers 2006. Presented on Whitman and digital archives (“Parts of the Actual Distraction”) at two conferences and am revising for article publication.  I am applying for a fellowship from The Library Company of Philadelphia to research 18^th century grammar and rhetoric texts and to complete an article/chapter “Learning at Hand: Benjamin Franklin’s Writing Pedagogy.” Up next is the chapter, “Googling Emerson: The American Scholar and Vannevar Bush’s Memex.”