Tuman, Myron. Word Perfect: Literacy in the
Computer Age. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, pp.
41-43.
How different things are as we approach the end of the twentieth
century, with practically all aspects of print literacy, and in turn,
the industrial culture on which it is based, under attack. Verticality
now loses its spiritual dimension, its association with the sublime,
and knowledge is instead associated with hierarchical forms of
governance, what Harlan
Cleveland calls 'vertical structures of command and control' (p.
61). Truth is still above the masses, but it is now conceived, not as
something rarefied or spiritual but as a trade secret at the top of a
corporate pyramid -- what separates holders of 'truth' from the people
below is not knowledge but institutional greed and power. Meanwhile,
instead of Faustian man, committed to an endless, solitary quest for
knowledge, the new age, Bolter speculates, is marked by the programmer,
someone whose work at every step makes him or her aware of the physical
limits of electronic time and space. The programmer,
Bolter contends, does not make
bold new discoveries but instead subtly manipulates
finite parts within a finite world: 'He remains in the confined logical
universe of his machine, rearranging the elements of that universe to
suit the current problem'
((1984, p. 223).
This
programmer, this student of a new online literacy, is exempt from
Knoblauch and Brannon's imperative 'to make valuable
statements about the meaning of his own experience' (p. 12),
to probe the unexplored territory of his own psyche....
The new world of online literacy
replaces the search for psychological depth of print literacy with a
rediscovery of the creative power of craft and manipulation. With the
ascendancy of online literacy we can expect specific changes in
literacy education as well as broad changes in cultural values. No
longer will it be possible, for example, to continue Knoblauch and Brannon see as
'founded on this perpetual search, not on authoritarian premises and
unassailable dogmas of antiquity' (p. 52), should continually produce
critiques of its own assumptions. Yet the ever-growing attack on print
literacy, the rejection of the symbolic, transformative power of the
literate text, as articulated in the writings of Eric Havelock, Jack
Goody, David Olson, and Walter
Ong, among others, is more than perpetual revisionism. Instead it
is a clear symptom of the emergence of a new post-industrial
sensibility, one that rejects the status of texts as higher or more
logical expressions of symbolic knowledge, texts as the embodiment of
history, philosophy, literature, science, and other ways of
understanding the world not immediately supported by the traditions,
often the prejudices, of the group. For industrial culture, it was precisely the ideal,
innovative, anomalous component of this symbolic content that was responsible for the immense
value afforded literacy. While educators may have discussed literacy in terms of transcription
skills, it was always the power of the text, as an extension of the transformative power of
technology, to change both the individual and the world that was at issue.
Tuman, Myron. Word Perfect: Literacy in the
Computer Age. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, pp.
53-66. On April 7, 1817, three enterprising young publishers
called upon the great English poet and scholar, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, hoping to convince him to accept the position of editor of a
new encyclopedia project.... While neither his health nor his
temperament proved suitable for such a project, Coleridge did agree to
write a 'Treatise on Method', to be used as the Introduction to the
encyclopedia, in which he outlined the principles for organizing all
human knowledge, a problem of increasing interest today given the huge
database capacity of modern computers and ... the seemingly geometrical
increases in information, although at the time, one that did not seem
to have much to do with literacy.
For the literate mind prior to the advent of computers, the central
problem of human knowledge had to do, not with finding one's way
through a forest of information, but with achieving genuine insight,
usually expressed in terms of vertical movement. The original thinker
gains a deeper (or higher) understanding, mainly through undertaking a
more intense analysis of a single given situation or creative work --
in literary study, for example, a reader undertakes successively more
intense readings of a poem or short story, just as a writer in turn
works more intensely at producing poems and short stories that reward
such readings. In such a world the most valuable knowledge is not some
huge concordance of ideas but the searing thought of a single
philosophical or poetical mind, a thinker whose magnum opus (if
only a single mathematical theorem) may lie unpublished, even
undiscovered, for generations but, due to its brilliance, will
eventually come to light, exerting its influence on readers, without
public fanfare or the hype of publishers. It is the intensity of the
writing experience -- literally its distance (up or down) from a common baseline--that
assures
that a truly exceptional work will be found by any reader capable of climbing the
necessary heights
(or plummeting the depths). In true romantic spirit, the great work should remain
hidden until the
reader, as if on a quest is spiritually ready to find it....
Best known as a Romantic poet and literary critic, Coleridge was also a
product of an older rationalist tradition that was preoccupied by the
larger question of the general structure of all human knowledge: how
does one move from one experience or piece of information to the next?
How does one structure the totality of knowledge so that individuals
can use it for their own distance purposes? .... [H. G] Wells' solution, like
Coleridge's, is to call for more powerful means of organizing
knowledge.... What we need, finally, is not more original thought but
'the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge,
ideas and achievements ... the creation, that is, of a complete
planetary memory of all mankind (p. 60)....
[Just a small intrusion here: see the Yahoo List for a
nascent WWW attempt to structure all Web knowledge.]
The online text is nothing but a database out of which new readers
construct paths to meet their specific and individual needs -- it is
akin to a board game, a place where many individual pieces are
connected by the rules for play. Meanwhile the author of the online
text is nothing but the source (often corporate rather than personal)
responsible for establishing and maintaining the rules for operating
that database. There is no longer any basis for the central notion of
print literacy, that literate exchange involves the comprehension of
the unity of knowledge or vision represented by structures in either
the distant author or the present (and seemingly stable) text.
What there is, instead, is the new notion of the fully engaged reader
-- the performer as well as the listener. For its advocates, hypertext is a medium for literate
exchange that truly engages students, lifting them out of the passivity
and lethargy associated with being only the receivers of other people's
prepackaged ideas. It stands in opposition to traditional patterns of
learning.... Landow's students in his hypertext-based literature
course, Context 32, are asked to do more than follow predetermined
links. They are encouraged to add their own comments and their own
links to this ever-expanding web of information about English
literature. And in wandering through and connecting the links in such
a web his students are engaging in the central activity of education --
the development of independent critical thinking....
What remains unclear in all such discussions of hypertext is the
connection between the associative thinking of this 'new' literacy and
the critical thinking of print literacy. This question, in turn,
raises the larger one about the connection between print literacy and
online literacy, and here the most obvious and most immediately
appealing argument is to see computers as adding to, not reversing, the
best that has come before.
Tuman, Myron. Word Perfect: Literacy in the
Computer Age. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, pp.
61-62.
Technology does powerfully affect literacy, but Landow seems only
interested in those technologies that enhance (deepen) our experience
with print. The more we know about a literary work, or presumably a
painting or musical composition, he suggests, the deeper our experience
of it. Landow rejects the tension, explicit in New Criticism, and
implicit in print literacy generally, between gathering information
about the text and having a private, intensely personal experience of
it -- hypertext, the ultimate
information-gathering tool, thus becomes the ultimate reading
environment. His imaginary scenario, however, only masks this tension
between conflicting models of reading. While Landow does describe a
student reading Great Expectations at a computer terminal -- the
opening hypertext screen coinciding with the title-page of the novel,
each successive screen representing the next printed page -- using an
elaborate hypertext system for such a purpose is a clear exampl
[An annoying editorial intrusion: when was the last time you saw
someone practicing the craft of memory at an arts and crafts show?]
The reading and writing of individual texts may also become crafts in
the world of online literacy. There the object of exchange will not be
the individual text but literature itself, defined as the full
extension of the connective and storage capacity inherent in hypertext,
what Nelson defines as 'a connected system of documents.' Thus there
is for Nelson the literature of Dickens, and the
literature of English literature, and even the
literature of literature, which is to individual literatures (of
Dickens, for instance) as the universe is to the galaxies, hence his
term, the docuverse. Reading a Dickens novel on a hypertext
system that gives one access to the wider (complete?) literature of
Victorian England naturally encourages wider-ranging questions, in a
process that reaches far beyond the scope of any one class....
Tuman, Myron. Word Perfect: Literacy in the
Computer Age. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, pp.
68-69.
One can hardly question Bolter's sense of the intensity required of a
reading of a single hypertext fiction, but consider as well the
different sort of problems confronting another hypertext reader --
Landow's imaginary student, Jane, sitting at the computer console
preparing to read Great Expectations. It is impossible to deny
that many students in George Landow's English literature survey at
Brown University profited from using the extensive hypertext system as
a means of preparing for classes. Discussions were livelier -- and why
shouldn't they be when students had quick and easy access to a range of
secondary sources about the texts under consideration? Anyone who has
taught literature knows that students are frequently baffled by the
complexity and at times stylistic impenetrability of the literary texts
themselves, and, consequently, relish all sorts of classroom aids into
the materials. One might argue we live in an age that routinely
discuss many cultural icons -- from Marx and Freud to Allan Bloom and Alice
Walker -- not by reading their works but by reading and, more
frequently now, viewing popular discussions about their works. But
Jane, faced with the task of actually reading Dickens' novel, must
nevertheless plow through approximately 180,000 words of text,
some eight and a half hours of intensive labor (at the rate of 360
words a minute), with no guarantee of attaining a satisfactory level
of understanding unless her comprehension skills are above
average.
Students in Jane's situation, in much larger numbers than any of us
care to admit, have long turned to literary guides, simulacra of the
texts -- the most visible being the boldly striped Cliff's Notes
-- to provide them an easier path through (and, at least as often,
around) complex and long literary texts. What Bolter does not consider
in his discussion of the experience of reading Joyce's 'Afternoon' is
what happens when the story is not a self-contained fictional universe,
read by someone interested in having a rich aesthetic experience, but
only a tiny part of a vast hypertext network. One where harried and
information-driven readers, instead of spending a few hours exploring
Joyce's constantly shifting story, can find out the least they need to
know more readily by clicking on screens containing background
information about Joyce, interactive fiction, and the story itself.
The point at issue here is not whether the hypertext environment can
support the level of aesthetic reading associated with print literacy, especially
for those fully acculturated into the world of print -- but how
different the experience of reading the most aesthetically complex
hypertext may be for 'readers' in the future who will be fully
acculturated into an electronic world, possibly ordinary students of
the next century who have no sustained experience of print. Just
how likely is it that people for whom reading has become an act
defined largely in terms of using the computer either to access
needed information on demand or to be entertained by the
slam-bang integration of 3-D graphics and CD sound will be
willing -- or able -- to sit before a terminal patiently selecting the
paths in a single author-designed hypertext in order to have
something akin to a traditional literary experience?
We seem to have little idea of just how dynamic (hyperactive?) the
computer screen is likely to become once the hardware and software are
in place to support real-time video and the wizardry of multimedia. Richard Kearney cites a
relevant and troubling, albeit undocumented, statistic: 'that since the
arrival of multi-channel press-button TV in the US, less than 50 per
cent of American children under the age of 15 have ever watched a
single programme from start to finish' (1988, p. 1). [I just can't
resist popping in here: if the statistic Tuman cites is undocumented
(fabricated? a guess?) then it is not a statistic and cannot be either
relevant or troubling. If this is the sort of critical thinking that
comes from print literacy's preference for deep study in solitude, I'd
say we were due for a change! But perhaps we should get back to the
regularly scheduled, authorized voice here, eh?] Some might be
tempted to find hope in such numbers, given the
dreadful programming on TV, yet 'zapping', as anyone
with such a device must realize, has far more to do with pacing
than with judgment, more to do, that is, with our exploiting the
hypertextual capability of a new online technology in order to
assemble a more pleasing (more postmodern?) procession of
images. Our ability or willingness to attend closely and for
prolonged periods of time to the narrative experiences of others --
the basis of nineteenth-century novel reading and until recently
twentieth-century television watching -- is intimately connected
to our broader experience of print culture and the inner
consciousness that it both demanded and rewarded. A new cultural
landscape, one grounded in computer technology, will affect all of
us, professors and students alike. All of us, and not just hyperactive
adolescents, will zap.
Tuman, Myron. Word Perfect: Literacy in the
Computer Age. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, pp.
65-66.
If any text is, like a hypertext, no more than a collection of
fragments, the author becomes no more than that personage charged with
collecting and arranging that material. Behind our traditional notion
of the author as a unifying force responsible for creating the text ...
is not a human being but an historical construct. The future of
authorship may have less to do with a single vision of writing defined
in terms of invention, creativity, and copyright than with earlier multiple visions. In the thirteenth
century, for example, Saint Bonaventura spoke not of one type of
producer of books but four: scriptor, one who 'might write the
works of others, adding and changing nothing';
All forms of computer-based writing seem to be returning us to a world
of multiple notions of authorship, based on multiple notions of texts.
The concept of the author, Foucault argues, since the eighteenth
century tied it to bourgeois notions of 'individualism and private
property' (1984, p. 119) and embodied it in the image of 'a necessary
or constraining figure', is in the process of changing like society
itself, loosing all connection to an identifiable human form,
disappearing as it were into a vast system of writing, the rules that
govern what is considered writing. What can change -- including our
sense of what it means to be an author -- likely will change, not just
as some may have first interpreted Foucault, in some metaphorical sense
but in real and practical ways. As with "E-literacies:
Politexts, Hypertexts and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print."
In a world defined by a single literature rather than a multitude of
texts, reading becomes essentially a means of finding one's way -- one
moves, not ever deeper into a single text in quest of some
world-altering hermeneutic understanding, but playfully between texts,
from side to side as it were.... Hypertext thus supports the wider
contemporary movement away from a serious, introspective, relentlessly
psychological (and often Germanic) hermeneutic tradition of
interpretation -- one often associated with modernism, despite its
unmistakable nineteenth-century romantic origins -- and toward a
decidedly more ludic (and often Gallic) postmodern concern with
defining reading, and cultural criticism generally, as the play of
signs.
compilator, one who 'writes the work of others with additions
which are not his own'; commentator, one who 'writes both
others' work and his own, but with others' work in principal place,
adding his own for purposes of explanation'; and, finally,
auctor, one who 'writes both his own work and others' but with
his own work in principal place adding others' for purpose of
confirmation' (Eisenstein, 1983, p. 84).
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