Digital Literacy: Transformation or continuance?

by TMD

9 comments

1 Peter Hill { 09.19.09 at 7:39 am }

Hi,

I’m not sure this is the right space, but here I am….
Anyone there?
I was interested in what Bolter said about transparency and hypermedia. It gave me an idea for my Creative Writing 12 class. I showed the class Auden’s poem ” Musee Des Beaux Arts” on Breughel’s painting ” The Fall Of Icarus.” Then showed Breughel’s painting on the LCD projector. Finally I asked my class to choose one of the characters in the painting and respond to Icarus’ fall. I was amazed as they wrote from the perspective of the sheep, fish and ploughman.
Not quite virtual reality, but they could enter into the poem and painting through the use of digital representation.
Thanks, Mr. Bolter.

2 Melanie Wong { 09.19.09 at 8:24 am }

Hi!

My first post and I hope I am posting in the right space too. I was fascinated by Bolter’s ideas as well. The whole concept of “writing as a technology.” Specifically I thought alot about how he says that “the computer’s virtuality [has] refashion[ed] the writing space of the printed book and the manuscript.” It made me think about people who are avid bloggers ( I am part of this community). How these individuals have take the written discourse and as Bolter says “refashioned” writing. Blogging is so fascinating to me because of how you can add videos, music and photos and it is not just written text.

Warriner (2007) writes in her article “[these individuals]…create transnational communities of practice [online], and utilize multimodal designs as part of these communication practices” (p. 209). Blogging is a way, from my experience, for my second language learners to develop their writing skills and to connect with other individuals online. It is a powerful tool for teachers and students.

It is exciting to see how we have moved from old media (books) to new media (screen) (Kress, 2003). There appears to be so many more possibilities.

I look forward to the rest of this class.

3 Erin Garcia { 09.19.09 at 4:22 pm }

The mention of multi-lingual entries on Wiki encyclopedias in “Digital Literacies” intrigued me. This summer I was researching an infamous gangster from Quebec, Monica la Mitraille, and the information available on Wikipedia in English was very limited compared to when I just switched to searching the French pages. Despite the known limitations of the humanities area of Wikipedia, this discrepancy was very useful to me for future research topics which may be better searched for in culturally connected languages. Within my second language classroom, it will also provide more incentive for students to conduct research in the target language, rather than in the mother-tongue first and translating after.

4 Chelsey Hauge { 09.19.09 at 11:25 pm }

Some thoughts… sorry this is so long!

What I find interesting about Bolters’ work, especially as it intersects with Innis, Ong, and McLuhan, is that he thinks about technology as a set of skills, which is inclusive of machines, as well as non-machine skills like writing. Bolter even cites Plato’s conception of the alphabet as technology. While Pope and Golub warn against linguistic determinism as Bolter has warned against technological determinism, it seems as though there is a place for language as technology in this argument.

If writing is technology, a point I would agree on, and Bolter argues that language is structured, for literate people, through written work (could we even say remediated? He talks about language of literate being structured around paragraphs and sentences, conventions of the written word), and points to poetry and storytelling as no more natural than writing or computing. Poetry and storytelling, in Ong’s conception of oral culture, are then mediated by the body, and are also constructions- Bolter writes, “The very materiality of writing binds writing firmly to human practices and therefore to cultural choices” (Bolter, p.19) and then goes on to day that tech and cultural practices together form writing as technology. We might make the same argument for language.

I am rather caught up in this debate about technological determinism, because while I do not think technology acts alone, I do think writing, print, digital literacy, etc—structure the way we access knowledge. McLuhan, technological determinist he definitely is, makes a good point in his famous idea “the medium is the message.” Surely, the medium structures the way in which we access knowledge, and thus the way we organize knowledge. Of course, this access and organizing is situated in cultural development and movement and is not a force enacted on cultural through technology alone. Different kinds of people use different technologies in distinct ways- even the book. Radway writes about how the diverse ways women use romance novels to carve out time for the self- and to say technology has the same affect on many individuals is useless. At the same time, Bolter criticizes McLuhan for referring to technology as an extension of the human body, something Hayles has also does when she writes that new media technologies extend “embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis” (Hayles, 1999, p. 287). It would seem that if we “know” from our bodies, and if new media allows us to “know,” differently—i.e., through holding a cell phone with information about local bars on it in our hands, and using that cell phone to direct us to a new place—extends how we locate ourselves and how we map the space around us through our bodies. That is situated culturally and is not dependent only on technology, because the development of an iPhone app allowing you to map bars is culturally situated.

Bolter also writes:
Literacy is, among other things, the realization that language can have a visual as well as an aural dimension, that one’s words can be recorded and shown to others who are not present, perhaps not even alive, at the time of the recording. Literate people know that words can be placed in a visual space and have continued existence in that space (Bolter, p.16)

I am interested here in what the realization that language can have a visual dimension has to do with the conception of the object. It has been a while since I read the Ong work, but if I am not mistaken, he ties the ability to write to the ability to conceive of language as object, and this way the ability to objectify. Dobson and Willinsky talk about this as the ability to make the word, and the world, tangible. I wonder to what extent there is a relationship between writing and objectification, and power. This relationship might explain notions now about race, sex, gender and class as well as the digital divide. Dobson and Willinsky note that “digital literacy is so closely connected to the traditional association of literacy and democratic rights” (p. 295). In thinking about Wikipedia, where knowledge is represented through a democratic process where individuals contribute to define and frame issues over a long period of time (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009), things are very different than writing in print, as the process is collaborative. I am curious to explore the role of the design and the architecture of networked spaces facilitates the engagement of different kinds of individuals in building knowledge on open-source software and spaces, and the understanding or misunderstanding of digital encoding of design affects how individuals can potentially be mobile within these sites.

5 Jeff Miller { 09.20.09 at 8:28 pm }

Bolter describes remediation as a process of cultural competition between or among technologies. While Bolter focuses his attention on writing and reading, it is easy enough to see this dynamic at work in other areas like music. Bolter’s contention that remediation is a competition between different technologies certainly rings true to me as I type away on my computer while listening to digital music on iTunes. I recall buying my first 45 RPM record on vinyl, then 8 tracks followed by cassette tapes and even a format called an L-cassette. All of these formats were analogue media designed to reproduce hi-fidelity music in convenient locations on the latest technology. With each successive “advancement” in technology, I was encouraged to shift to a new format, and with some of them, like cassettes, I was even able to make my own recordings (though I had to ignore the warnings about the evil of piracy and giving out recorded tapes by the recording association). Then came the digital revolution. I now had the privilege of repurchasing all of the LPs (long playing records) or cassettes I had already paid for, so as to replace them with snazzy and shiny Compact Discs, optical media filled with binary code, ones and zeros that could be decoded by a laser to reproduce music, but this time with so much more fidelity that the old masters created for analogue reproduction sounded terrible. What progress! And then came MP3 files, Napster and the Internet: suddenly music didn’t need any physical medium in order to be accessed a played. I no longer had to carry a box of cassettes so long as I had my iPod. And now, with an iPhone or computer, I don’t even need to have my music with me, as I can stream it directly from my home anywhere I am, or just pull down streams of music through the network (much better than radio, of course, as I get to choose all of the music myself).

Throughout these massive shifts in the physical size and technical delivery of my music, I was reasonably content (though not paying attention to how many times I was re-buying music I had already paid for, and not terribly racked with guilt when I decided not to pay for it). While the format had changed radically, the product was still the same. This situation nicely parallels Eisenstein’s (1979) description of the printing press as an agent of social change: “the absence of any apparent change in product was combined with a complete change in methods of production, giving rise to a paradoxical combination of seeming continuity with radical change.” It did not really matter that I had moved from a small wax disc, to a magnetic tape, to an optical disc, to a digital file streamed from the Internet: I was still listening to my music. The distribution channels and industries that depended upon the physical distribution of analogue or digitally produced music did not fair so well during this same period of time (though there has been no diminishment in the amount of music available). Those in the business of selling music are as distrusting of digital music as were the vellum producers in the early 16th century as they clucked about the impact of the printing press on their bottom line. Apart from distribution, however, the shift to digital music has not just resulted in an endless stream of musical bits (though that is wonderful in its own right). The relationship we have with music has shifted, has been refashioned to the point that it is no longer necessary to just listen to what was recorded by an original artist. This last weekend, for instance, Girl Talk was in Vancouver, creating music often referred to as “a lawsuit waiting to happen” because of his technique of sampling together hundreds of other songs into his own new creations. He was a central case in the wonderful movie rip: A Remix Manifesto (http://films.nfb.ca/rip-a-remix-manifesto/), recently produced by the National Film Board. His creations are hypermediated to the extreme, opening up questions concerning authorship, ownership and fidelity at a bit-rate that blows apart pre-digital configurations of music distribution. The remediation at work in Girl Talk’s music does not just compete with previous forms: it refashions the space within which we understand those forms, and this has an impact that goes beyond the economics associated with the music industry. Perhaps I won’t have to buy my music yet again, considering how radically groups like Girl Talk have shifted the space of performance.

6 Heidi { 09.20.09 at 8:54 pm }

Although I am interested in many of the issues brought forth in the readings, I will respond to just a couple of topics (I have a habit of writing too much!) that Chelsey has included in her commentary (I’m a strong believer in collaborative discourse online!)…

I’d like us to consider that perhaps McLuhan is not a technological determinist but that his work could be viewed in other ways. The dictionary defines determinism as “the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will [with] some philosophers [taking] determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.” It’s a pretty heavy word. In the context of technology, it implies that machines have control over humans. McLuhan’s words inspire the creative mind to imagine the possibilities for a technologically deterministic society of human beings overtaken by the control of media. David Cronenberg’s 1983 film “Videodrome” is one example that comes to mind, depicting the imagined effects of a proposed television show that after repeated viewings would eventually control the TV viewer’s mind. The film shows us a hypothetical society in which massive doses of “videodrome” create a new outgrowth of the human brain, an outgrowth that can potentially produce and control hallucinations to the point of changing human reality. If one gets past the bizarre sci-fi concept, the idea of a technological object having control over its users’ minds may not be all that different than the state of internet culture today. However, back to my point… although McLuhan wrote about the inherent power of media, his description of technology being an extension of ourselves was pointing to the fact that technology is connected to us and, in essence, is us….meaning, in other words, we have the power to determine how technology is used. I’ll refer to a portion of a paper I wrote earlier this year…

In an interview in 1969, McLuhan is quoted as saying, “….Understanding is half the battle. The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message, that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them. And this is a vital task, because the immediate interface between audile-tactile and visual perception is taking place everywhere around us. No civilian can escape this environmental blitzkrieg, for there is, quite literally, no place to hide” (McLuhan, 1969). Richard Cavell (2008) has brought McLuhan’s argument into contemporary discourse by writing about his interests in “biomedia,” elaborating on McLuhan’s notions of technology not only being an extension of the human but being human, stating: “McLuhan…was arguing that…technology is the pre-condition of thought insofar as it is the pre-condition of being, at which point technology and “being human” collapse into each other” (Cavell, 2008, Section 1, para. 4). In applying this theory to digital literacy in contemporary culture, Cavell reiterates what I feel to be a significant point to consider from McLuhan’s often undervalued theories: “In any communication, it is the sender who is sent” (Cavell, 2008, Section 3, para. 3).

Cavell, Richard (2008). McLuhan and the Body as Medium. In J. Hauser (Ed.), Sk-interfaces: Exploding
Borders—Creating M 2008): 32-41

The Playboy Interivew: Marshall McLuhan (March, 1969). Playboy Magazine

Also really interested in unpacking the last portion of Chelsey’s post: “I am interested here in what the realization that language can have a visual dimension has to do with the conception of the object.”

Although not having read the Ong literature, I am going to suggest that Bolter is putting forth the idea that the object (or machine) of writing should be extended to include the methods and skills, both physical and conceptual. He refers to this when he says, “the craftsman must develop a skill, a technical state of mind in using tools and materials” (p. 15) Bolter describes how “method” in writing can be the intention of arranging ideas in a visual space, and that this can be considered no less technological. Does this understanding align with yours, Chelsey?

7 Chelsey Hauge { 09.21.09 at 2:15 pm }

Heidi,

What I take from Ong, is that in order to participate in an oral society, you must be there to listen/hear/receive what is being shared. Those who are there/were there participated in a unique event. Not so with print culture. With writing and print, there is a reader- someone who can read about the event and imagine having been there from far away. This goes along with what Innis says about space-bound and time-bound mediums.

Ong writes, “Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity,’ in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing.”
Ong 105

This phrase in particular makes me think of objects, objectifying, and notions of ownership through objectification.

I’m also quite interested in what Jeff has written about in terms of remediation and refashioning the space of performance. Though Jeff is writing about music, I see lots of links in video and digital media, and especially in thinking about remediation and refashioning the space of performance, in virtual spaces like SecondLife where performance is overt and there are entire sims made of mashups. I think this coincides with Bolter’s idea that literate people know that words can be placed in a space and have continued existence in that space- what happens when that space is virtual and the emphasis is on performance?

Looking forward to class.

8 Heidi { 09.21.09 at 2:51 pm }

Thanks for the dialogue Chelsey! I look forward to getting more into Ong…

Just thought I would post a link that I found to something brought up last class — those codes that we interact with to get access to certain websites (CAPTCHAs).
Sept. 16th: “Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a free CAPTCHA service that also serves as a means of digitizing printed books and newspapers. Among other things, the Mountain View web giant is looking to juice its ever-controversial library-scanning Book Search project.” Go to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/16/google_acquires_recaptcha/ to learn more.

9 Cory Theodor { 09.28.09 at 12:47 pm }

Type (and) Writers:
I recently saw a friend’s computer wallpaper that caught my eye and I thought it might interest our class, especially as a continuation of some of the engaging discussion that I’m reading here. It was two hands hovering over an old Continental typewriter. For me it captured two basic questions that surround the development of writing technology. First, the picture focuses on the hands; the body is the intermediary between the writing technology and our selves, and the body’s presence is the constant through each zeitgeistish change in writing technology. Handwriting is the writing technology that most often emphasizes this relationship to the hand, but each development since handwriting has preserved this body-technology contact. The physical nature of writing remains. The picture (of the typing hands) appears within the media of a computer screen and is mirrored by the actively used keyboard of the computer. The computer user recognizes the correlation between the picture of the typing hands and his or her own hands (a mirror effect), drawing an ideological line between the typer of days past and the typer of today. This transhistorical line between the two pairs of hands connects the similarities between old and new writing technologies, but it also highlights the changes between them. The old technology of the typewriter, in the case of the picture, is embedded within the computer screen, showing the pattern of incorporation that changing technologies follow. The black and white picture framed by the newer media of the screen presents the picture as artifact, an encapsulation of time. But, I’ve raised a contradiction, albeit a valuable one. Does the presence of the body (especially the hand) mediate between different histories, i.e. old technologies mirror new ones? Or, is there something drastically different between the outdated (yet fetishized) writing technology of the typewriter and its “reflection” that lives in current time? One half of this mirroring effect is a picture, and the fact that it is a picture holds it in a local historical time, while the other half of the reflection is a living being (you are the computer user here and now). The real questions, then, are: are the changes in writing technology simply a reimagining of a constant mind-body-mediator dynamic? Or, are there philosophical changes that accompany each change in writing technology? If we do see changes since the time that the typewriter’s hands were photographed over the Continental keyboard and our own hands, then what has been gained and what has been lost through these technological changes? While these questions are interesting to explore, they are relatively unanswerable. The one thing that we can take away from my friend’s computer wallpaper is a reminder that writing technology (even though the word technology has somehow been associated with newness) is certainly not a new development and that while you are writing on your fancy mac you can simultaneously be aware that this act is performed in relation to previous and upcoming writing technologies.

Any thoughts?

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