Reflection – musing, rumination

First, the disclaimer: I don’t feel reflective.  Reflexive, in one sense of the word, yes.  Musing – or bemused.  But not reflective, which suggests calm, unhurried contemplation of a reasonably quiescent subject.  Fat bloody chance.

In large part this is due to personal circumstances… the start of my grad studies adventure coinciding with a serious family illness and an (unrelated) major change to our household structure and dynamic.  In smaller part it is due the steep learning curve involved in taking a course in this (to me) new environment.  I’ve been a student for a very long time, and I figured I knew the drill.  Appears someone changed the layout of the parade ground while I was in the loo.

The effect, anyway, is rather like what I used to experience in the race car when something went seriously sideways – all of a sudden, tunnel vision: everything disappears except a few things right in front of me, obscured by a vision of my bank manager’s ugly mug.  And way too much time spent searching frantically for things that suddenly aren’t where they should be – like third gear, and my sense of confidence; and the two hours’ worth of work I’m dead certain I completed last night.

The effect, anyway, is rather like what I used to experience in the race car when something went seriously sideways – suddenly, tunnel vision: everything disappears except a few things right in front of me, obscured by a vision of my bank manager’s ugly mug.  And way too much time spent searching frantically for things that suddenly aren’t where they should be – like third gear, and my sense of confidence; and the two hours’ worth of work I’m dead certain I completed last night.

So in addition to reflecting on the content of this course I am spending a lot of time reflecting on the form.  An example: I have been a moderator for a couple of online forums in the past; a very busy one on relationships and sexuality, which could get extremely heated at times (no pun…), and another of race drivers and officials, which was less busy but not much less heated.  I was struck in both contexts by how the combination of medium and a topic brought out – and influenced – the ‘writer’ (often an otherwise very latent one) in their participants.  And similarly I’m noticing how this medium is influencing my own approach to ‘academic writing’, and the conventions and assumptions that have formed it for years.  Most noticeably, I feel freer from the constraints of traditional academic style (which I confess tends to give me a rash anyway).

But the medium also leaves me feeling much less certain that I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing… I worry persistently that I’ve missed finding something important, lodged in some ‘corner’ of the course site that I have overlooked.  And things are constantly changing – in appearance and in content.  The ‘course readings’ keep proliferating… some days this seems very exciting, and other days it just seems damned unsporting.  My response to all this varies between a sense of liberation and perhaps even defiance – “If it were really important, it would be front and centre, and anyway, we’re not bound by convention here – I can do this my way!”, and a constant sense of being out of touch and scurrying around at an ever-growing distance behind the field.  It’s… disorienting.

Which really gets to the point of this particular rumination, and how it relates to text and technology…  it boils down to this: that for most of its history, text has stayed where it was put – and now, it doesn’t any more.  In many ways, it has become as transitory and mutable as voice.  I think this is important to be aware of when we think about comparing orality and literacy in an environment of computer technologies.  The written word has lost some of its fundamental difference from speech, and gained some significant similarity – in a small way, of course, but importantly nonetheless.

(Image – copyright The Walt Disney Company 1986; found on a Hallmark postcard… posted on the bulletin board of a colleague who teaches English but only because we don’t have any real Oral Communication courses hereabouts.)