Instead of transparency, they strive for hypermediacy, an intense awareness of and even reveling in the medium. (25) In one sense the goal of representation has been transparent presentation. (25) Each medium seems to follow this pattern of borrowing and refashioning other media, and rivalry as well as homage seems always to be at work. (24) digital technology changes the “look and feel” of writing and reading. (23) We might call each such shift a “remediation,” in the sense that a newer medium takes the place of an older one, borrowing and reorganizing the characteristics of writing in the older medium and reforming its cultural space. (23) In its role as a great refashioner, electronic writing is reintroducing characteristics that have belonged to a variety of marginal techniques of the past. (22) Whenever a dominant technology is challenged, there may be a major refashioning of the culture's writing space. (19) technologies do not determine the course of culture or society, because they are not separate agents that can act on culture from the outside. The technology of modern writing includes not only the techniques of printing, but also the practices of modern science and bureaucracy and the economic and social consequences of print literacy. (19) The technical and the cultural dimensions of writing are so intimately related that it is not useful to try to separate them: together they constitute writing as a technology. (18) Electronic writing still requires our physical interactions with terrestrial materials - with the keyboard, the mouse, and the computer screen. WRITING TECHNOLOGIES AND MATERIAL CULTURE ![]() Ancient and modern writing are technologies in the sense that they are methods for arranging verbal ideas in a visual space. (15) There are good historical (as well as etymological) reasons, however, for broadening the definition of technology to include skills as well as machines. (14-15) The computer's capacity to adjust the text to each user's needs, which is uncharacteristic of the classic industrial machine, derives from the unmechanical materials of electronic technology. Is Heim's analysis naive in assuming that word processing relieves the writer of the materiality of writing? (13) Writing, even writing on a computer screen, is a material practice, and it becomes difficult for a culture to decide where thinking ends and the materiality of writing begins, where the mind ends and the writing space begins. (11) This ideal of cultural unity through a shared literary inheritance, which has received so many assaults in the 20th century, must now suffer further by the introduction of new forms of highly individualized writing and reading. (11) In the ideal, if not in practice, an electronic text can tailor itself to each reader's needs, and the reader can make choices in the very act of reading. The strict requirement of unity and homogeneity is relatively recent. The material in a book must simply be homogeneous by the standard of some book-buying audience. (10) Yet our definition of textual unity comes from the published work we have read, or more generally, from the current divisions of academic, literary, and scientific disciplines, which themselves both depend on and reinforce the economics of publishing. Other forms of electronic writing do all these things, making the text from the writer's point of view a texture of possible readings. The word processor treats text like a scroll, a roll of pages sewn together at the ends, while its visual structures are still typographic. (9) the word processor is not so much a tool for writing, as it is a tool for typography. (7) Much of what American conservatives think of as the “culture wars” is in fact an argument about modes of representation. (6) The question is whether alphabetic texts can compete effectively with the visual and aural sensorium that surrounds us. (4) Such tensions between monumentality and changeability and between the tendency to magnify the author and to empower the reader have already become part of our current economy of writing. (3) This is also the best way to think of the late age of print, as a transformation of our social and cultural attitudes toward, and uses of, this familiar technology. ![]() (2) Although print remains indispensable, it no longer seems indispensable: that is its curious condition in the late age of print. Introduction: Writing in the Late Age of Print (xiii) the computer is not leading to a new kind of orality, but rather to an increased emphasis on visual communication. Notes for Jay David Bolter Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |