On this page, you will find an extensive passages from Jay David Bolter's recent book, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. I have chosen this excerpt because it provides the context for ideas and quotations to which my essay, "E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print," refers. Thus, I attempt to allow Professor Bolter to speak for himself, to represent his own views in his own way. Some of the links in the text will take you to the bibliography while others will take you to some portion of my essay.
Bolter, J. D. Writing Space: The Computer,
Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Boston, Houghton Mifflin,
pp. 233-37.
One consequence of the networking of culture is the
abandonment of the ideal of high culture (literature, music, the fine
arts) as a unifying force. If there is no single culture, but only a
network of interest groups, then there is no single favored literature
or music. Nor is there a single standard of grammar or diction in
writing. Elizabeth
Eisenstein has argued convincingly that the printing was a force
for cultural unification during the centuries when the modern nation
states were being formed. "Typography arrested linguistic drift,
enriched as well as standardized vernaculars, and paved the way for the
more deliberate purification and codification of all major European
languages." (Eisenstein, 1979, vol. 1, p. 117) As we have seen,
electronic writing has just the opposite effect. It opposes
standardization and unification as well as hierarchy. It offers as a
paradigm the text that changes to suit the reader rather than expecting
the reader to
to conform to its standards.
This attitude is already widespread among
readers in the late age of print. As our written culture becomes a vast
hypertext, the reader is free to choose to explore one subnetwork or
many as he wishes. It is no longer convincing to say that one subject
is more important than another. Today even highly educated readers,
especially but not exclusively scientists, may know only one or a few
areas well. Such ignorance of the shared textual tradition is in part
the result of the specialization of the sciences that has been
proceeding since the seventeenth century. But even the humanities are
now utterly fragmented, so that a student of Latin literature may know
nothing about Renaissance poetry or the twentieth century novel.
Throughout the late age of print, however, there has been a lingering
feeling of guilt about this situation -- a call somehow to reestablish
a core of textual knowledge that everyone must possess. The last
vestige of this guilt can be heard in pleas for
a canon of
great authors, which we discussed in an earlier chapter. But the
specialization has gone far too far to be recalled. In the sciences it is
indispensable. In the humanities and social sciences it is
institutionalized. The intellectual world is now defined by
numerous "special interest groups" pulling this way and that --
Marxists, neo-Freudians, deconstructionists, cognitive scientists,
phenomenologists. All the groups are interconnected: some grew
out of others, and each sends outrunners (links) into other camps.
Thus, there are Christian Marxists, Marxist deconstructionists,
phenomenological anthropologists, Lacanian psychoanalysts who
write on literature, and so on. But an over-arching unification is
no longer even the goal....
[E]ach [field] is an incomplete and disorganized
hypertext that no one knows how to read in its entirety. But to
call this fragmentation a disaster is to assume that unity is an
achievable goal. What Macintire does not admit is that there is now no
way out of this fragmented impasse. (It is certainly not possible to
forget the lessons of the Enlightenment.) In fact, the fragmentation of
our textual world is only a problem when judged by the standards of
print technology, which expects the humanities, including metaphysics
and ethics, to be relatively stable and hierarchically organized. What
we have instead in the sciences is fruitful specialization and in the
humanities a noisy collision of conflicting groups who in the end must
agree to disagree. Anyone can enter or leave any group at any time or
maintain a combination of interests and positions that characterize two
or more camps.
In the late age of print, this situation must
appear as chaos, because print holds up stability and order as its
ideals. Even though printed materials are still the medium of
expression for all these conflicting views, the unwritten assumption is
that the disorder can eventually be set right. But in the context of
electronic writing, nothing is more natural than the centrifugal
disorder of our present cultural life. There is no conceptual problem
(though many technical ones) in feeding all these conflicting texts
into the computer and generating one vastly reticulated, self-contradictory
hypertext. The computer provides the only kind of unity now
possible in our culture: unity at the operational level. Hypertextual
publication can accommodate all the mutually incomprehensible languages
that the intellectual world now speaks, and this unification of
technique must serve as the consolation for the lost unity of purpose.
Within the hypertextual libraries that are now being assembled,
individual intellectual communities can retreat into their subnetworks
and operate with as much or as little connection to each other as they
desire. These communities may be large or small. Contemporary art,
music and literature have divided into several tiny elites and several
huge popular movements, while most of the liberal arts are now pursued
by relatively small groups of professionals. We have come to accept the
fact that a new painting, a novel, or an essay will appeal only to one
group of viewers or readers -- that each person is free not only to
dislike a new work, but simply to ignore it as irrelevant to his or her
needs. Individuals today wander through an aesthetic supermarket
picking out what interests them -- atonal music, concrete poetry,
science fiction films, situation comedies on television, or paperback
romances. We are hard put to criticize any of these choices: they are
simply questions of taste.
In the United States, the most
thoroughly networked society, the distinction between high culture and
popular culture has all but vanished. In place of the hierarchical
organization in which high culture (poetry, "serious" novels, scholarly
monographs) is valued above popular culture (doggerel, genre
literature, how-to books), we have simply different subnetworks that
appeal to different readers. None of the familiar indications of
quality apply.... The refusal to distinguish between high art and
popular entertainment has long been a feature of American culture, but
the computer as hypertextual network both ratifies and accelerates this
trend. We can now see that American culture has been working for
decades
against the assumptions of the printed book and towards the
freedom from top-down control provided by electronic writing.
The computer is the ideal technology for the networking of
America, in which hierarchical structures of control and
interpretation break down into their component parts and begin to
oscillate in a continuously shifting web of relations.
Because of this shift
from hierarchy to network, the debate over cultural unity takes its
strangest turns here in the United States.... E. D. Hirsch's
Cultural Literacy ... is a particularly instructive case. Many
readers took it as a call to return to the classics, to a fixed
curriculum of works and authors that would make one culturally
literate. But this was a misreading, as anyone can see from the first
sentences of the Preface:
"To be culturally literate is to possess
the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world. The breadth
of that information is great, extending over the major domains of human
activity from sports to science. It is by no means confined to
"culture" narrowly understood as an acquaintance with the arts. Nor is
it confined to one social class" ( p. xiii).
Hirsch is no champion
of culture in the traditional sense. For him cultural literacy is the
ability to function effectively in our current world of reading and
writing. His is an operational definition of literacy -- what one needs
to get by. Hirsch never demands deep knowledge of any subject: a
literate person simply needs to touch the surface of a broad range of
topics....
From this perspective, cultural literary does not require a knowledge
of traditional texts; instead, it means access to the vocabulary needed
to read and write effectively. And in fact this operational definition
is now making cultural literacy almost
synonymous with computer literacy. Both cultural and computer
literacy simply mean access to information and the ability to add to
the store of information. Increasingly, cultural literacy will require
working with the computer, as the computer becomes the most important
writing space in our culture. The cultural literates will be those who
can use this new medium either for their work and for personal
communication and expression. By this measure a traditional scholar,
who is at home in the world of printed books and conventional
libraries, is relatively illiterate: he may not know how to work his
way through an electronic network of information, certainly not how to
write electronically for a contemporary audience.
This new definition of cultural literacy brings us
back to the question of the canon of important works and authors. The
idea of a relatively stable canon made sense in a culture dominated by
printed books. The canon was also appropriate to a centralized
educational system, in which everyone studied the same subjects and the
same texts in order to be introduced into the standards of cultural
life. But the notion of a standard has now collapsed, and the collapse
is mirrored in the shift from the printed to the electronic writing
space, in which a stable canon of works and authors is meaningless. No
wringing of hands and no proposals for a renewed emphasis on the great
authors of the past can do much to counter the trend toward a network
culture, which is fostered not only by social preference, but also by
the very medium of reading and writing that is coming to dominate the
literacy of our society.
This prediction must seem bleak to those
who still feel allegiance to the traditional culture of printed books.
The loss is real; the hope for a cultural center based upon traditional
texts must now be abandoned. But much of the loss has already occurred
in the late age of print. The computer is only reinforcing the effects
of centrifugal forces in the twentieth century. More important, as we
have seen from the outset, the end of traditional print literacy is not
the end of literacy. .
This page is part of the article,
"E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts and Other Cultural Formations in th
e Late Age of Print."
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