_remediating print culture

1. _remediating print culture Computers and English Matt Barton

2. _database queries • What is “technological determinism?” • What is the relationship between producers, consumers, and the means of media production? • How will encyclopedias and libraries change as we move from print to digital culture? • Why have scholars stuck to print, even when discussing hypertext and new media?

3. _technological determinism • “I have made an effort to respond creatively to the criticism of the first edition—in particular on the question of technological determinism.” (xiii) • “I seemed to be suggesting that technologies themselves could change the way we organized and expressed our literary and cultural forms and even the way we think.” (xiii)

4. _another voice: Feenberg • Technological Determinism is based on the following two theses: • The pattern of technical progress is fixed, moving along one and the same track in all societies. Although political, cultural, and other factors may influence the pace of change, they cannot alter the general line of development that reflects the autonomous logic of diversity. • Social organization must adapt to technical progress at each stage of development to “imperative” requirements of technology. This adaptation executes an underlying technical necessity. --Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology

5. _let’s get critical • “The values of a specific social system and the interests of its ruling class are installed in the very design of machines even before they are assigned specific goals.” (Feenberg 14)

6. _embodied writers • “Western cultures have chosen to embody writing in various technological forms, and these choices have in turn affected the organization, style, and genres of writing and our expectations as authors and readers.” (77)

7. _on a roll • “poor at suggesting a sense of closure” (77) • “served as a script, to be consulted when memory failed” (77) • “strictly linear” (100)

8. _codex • “associated with the idea that writing should be rounded into finite units” (77) • “writers and readers were encouraged to identify the physical book with the text and to regard the end of the book with the end of the text” (78)

9. _medieval

10. _printed book • “A printed book could and did at first look like a manuscript, its appearance only gradually changing over decades.” (24)

11. _book homogeneity • “The material in a book must simply be homogenous by the standard of some book-buying audience.” (10)

12. _the politics of writing tech • “To read is to follow one path from among those suggested by the layout of the text.” (100) • “In each historical moment, with each writing technology, and with each text, the question is: how and to what extent does the reader actively participate in choosing his path through the text?” (101)

13. _homeric hypertexts • “The Homeric storyteller can adjust the tale in order to suit what he or she conceives to be the wishes of the audience.” (101) • “If hypertext could remediate the voice of the text, it might suggest a return to oral forms, such as the dialogue.” (112)

14. _choose your path

15. _other voices: Ryan • “As for the allegedly passive character of [immersion], we need only be reminded of the complex mental activity that goes into the production of a vivid mental picture of a textual world.” (11)

16. _encyclopedic impulse • “Whenever texts have become inaccessible—either because the available technology was too successful at producing texts or because the culture went into literary decline—readers have turned to encyclopedias and handbooks.” (83)

17. _encyclopedic control • “An encyclopedia reassures its reader that the texts in the contemporary writing space are under control.” (84) • “The key to any encyclopedia is its organization, the principles by which it controls other texts--and these principles depend on both the contemporary construction of knowledge and the contemporary technology of writing.” (84)

18. _compare/contrast

19. _academic new media • “Academics are not publishing their most valued thoughts about new media—the ones for which they hope to obtain tenure and promotion—in new media.” (111)

20. _future: <insert here> • “A hypertextual essay could be refashioned as a dialogue between the writer and her readers, and the reader could be asked to share the responsibility for the outcome.” (112)

21. _feedback • What is the most interesting thing we discussed in today’s presentation?