The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing

Please review my research paper on my wiki-  Photography:  Historical and Cultural Impact.

Thanks,
Sarah

I found a great site by Ted Nelson called “Ted Nelson’s Computer Paradigm Expressed as One-Liners”. It examines the cultural ramifications of the web and hypertext with a bit of humour. You can visit it here: http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html

A gem under the section titled Two Cheers for the World Wide Web: “The Web is the minimal concession to hypertext that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly make” (Nelson, 1999)

Reference

Nelson, T. (1999). Ted Nelson’s computer paradigm expressed as one-liners. Available Online 29, October, 2009, from http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html

My research project on Braille can be viewed on the class Wiki page here!

Please view my project on the rise of the newspaper in America (focusing on Boston from 1690-1719) at the course wiki.

Please note that my assignment was created in the spirit of hypertext, and as such, it is best to view in wiki rather than me pasting here.

Enjoy!

What do YOU think?

One might be inclined to view William Blake’s illuminated books as throwbacks to mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. Yet they should rather be understood as “remediating” older media. According to Bolter (2001, p. 23), remediation occurs when a new medium pays homage to an older medium, borrowing and imitating features of it, and yet also stands in opposition to it, attempting to improve on it. In the case of Blake’s illuminated books, one of the older media being remediated was the mediaeval illuminated manuscript, but another medium being remediated was the printed book, which in Blake’s time had already been in use for three centuries.

Blake adopted the way in which the richly illustrated texts of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts combined the iconic and the symbolic so that the former illumined meaning of the latter, the images revealing the spiritual significance of the scripture. Blake also seized upon an aspect of illuminated manuscripts which would later impress John Ruskin as well (Keep, McLaughlin, & Parmar, 1993-2000)—the way in which they served as vehicles for self-expression. The designs of manuscripts such as the Book of Kells and the Book of Lindisfarne, for instance, reflected the native artistic styles of Ireland and Northumbria and often depicted the native flora and fauna of those lands as well. Blake also adopted some of the styles and idioms of illustration found in mediaeval illuminated manuscripts, producing images in some cases quite similar to ones found in mediaeval scriptures and bestiaries (Blunt, 1943, p. 199). It seems that he also embraced the idea, embodied in the creation of illuminated manuscripts, that the written word can be something sacred and powerful and that it is therefore something to be adorned with gold and lively colours.

Blake’s illuminated books broke with the medium of mediaeval manuscripts mainly by virtue of that which they adopted from the medium of the printed book. Blake produced his illuminated books first by making copper plates engraved with images and text, deepening these engravings with the help of corrosive chemicals. He then used inks to form impressions of the plates on sheets of paper, often colouring the impressed images further with watercolour paints (Blake, 1967, p. 11-2). His use of the copper plates and inks bore similarities to the use of movable type and ink to create printed books. For many years it was believed that, despite this similarity, Blake developed his illuminated books partly as a reaction against the mass production of books, hearkening back to the methods of mediaeval craftsmen – specifically the artists who produced illuminated manuscripts –  who created unique items rather than mass produced articles. Consequently, it was believed that after he produced the copper plates for the illuminated books he created only individual books on commission. This belief, first championed by 19^th century writers who claimed William Blake as a predecessor (Symmons, 1995), has recently been overturned, however, by the work of Joseph Viscomi. As a scholar and printer who attempted to physically reproduce the methods that Blake employed to create his illuminated books, Viscomi concluded that Blake mass produced these books in small editions of about ten or more books each (Adams, 1995, p. 444).

The primary way in which the illuminated book was meant to improve on the printed book did not lie in the avoidance of mass production, but rather in the relation between the image and the word. In printed books, engraved images could be included with the text, but as the text had to be formed with movable type the image had to be included as something separate and additional (Bolter, 2001, p. 48). In Blake’s illuminated books, in contrast, the written word belonged to the whole image first engraved on the copper plate and then transferred to paper. It participated in the imaginative power of the perceived image, rather than just retaining a purely conceptual meaning. As with the text of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts, the words in Blake’s illuminated books often merge the iconic and the symbolic (Bigwood, 1991). For example, in plate 22 of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the description of the devil’s speech trails off into a tangle of diabolical thorns. Furthermore, the words are produced in the same colours used in the images to which they belong, and partake in their significance—light watercolours being used in the first edition of the joyous Songs of Innocence and dark reticulated inks being used in the gloomier Songs of Experience (Fuller, 2003, p. 263). As John Ruskin later observed, this ability to use colour in the text of illuminated books made it a form of writing that uniquely expressed its creator’s imagination (Ruskin, 1888, p. 99).

Like several other artists of his time, Blake was disturbed by the mechanistic and atomistic conception of nature first put forward by the ancient philosopher Democritus and then later revived around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by natural philosophers. This was the conception of nature as consisting of atoms in an empty void operating in accordance with mechanistic laws. Blake saw this as connected to the type of rationalism that would impose strict laws of reason on the mind and imprison the divine creative power of the imagination. Like others who opposed the mechanistic and atomistic worldview, Blake was particularly repelled by the mechanistic account of colour offered by Isaac Newton, voicing his objection to “Newton’s particles of light” (Blake, 1988, 153). It was thought that such an account treated colour in isolation from the power of the imagination to which it was naturally connected. It was also seen as severing colour from the living spirit of nature—the poet Goethe famously offering a complex alternative theory of colour which saw it as the result of a dynamic interaction of darkness and light.

For Blake, the printing press would at the very least be symbolic of the mechanistic an atomistic view of the world, the words in the printed text no longer partaking in the power of the imagination and the visible image but rather consisting of atoms of movable type and lying separated by voids of empty space.  The primacy of the imagination would be better served by the medium of illuminated books, where the image did not only illuminate the conceptual meaning of the word but also subsumed the word and imparted a deeper significance to it. The imagination was of central importance for Blake, who was a professional engraver as well as a poet, and for whom the medium of the image was a more fundamental part of his life and work than the written word (Storch, 1991, 458).

The ability to mass produce texts in which the image was primary and the written word secondary would have implications for literacy and education insofar as it could widely disseminate works that encouraged imaginative and perceptual understanding over strictly conceptual thought. While the illuminated book as such never became a widespread medium, some of the principles involved in its remediation of the illuminated manuscript and the printed book survived in the medium of the comic book and the graphic novel, which could also be said to realize some of its implications. These works were also mass produced and also differed from the printed book through the relation between the word and the image. For example, the way in which the symbolic word is made to partake in the imaginative power of the iconic image can be seen in the development of comic books in Britain. Early 20^th century British comic books generally consisted of rows of images without words, each image having a block of text below it. When comic books adopted the style that introduced speech bubbles, thought bubbles, and sound effects into the image itself, the words became part of the action.

The illuminated book can also be seen as a precursor of hypertext and its remediation of the printed word, specifically insofar as the image in hypertext is coming to dominate the written word (Bolter, 2001, p. 47). In this regard, hypertext could also be said to be carrying through the implications that illuminated books posed for education and literacy. This is not to say that there are not significant differences between these media, of course. Creators of hypertext may look to the illuminated book for inspiration but leave behind the more laborious aspects of the medium, such as the use of copper plates and corrosive chemicals. This may be seen as both an improvement and a loss. One feature of the illuminated book absent in hypertext is the close connection between the work and the bodily act of creating it. As Carol Bigwood observes (1991, p. 309), reading Blake’s illuminated books is a perceptual experience in which we sense the movements of Blake’s hand and the rigidity of the copper on which the image was first made. So while the illuminated book remediates the printed word it may itself be remediated by hypertext.

References

Adams, H. (1995). Untitled [Review of the book Blake and the idea of the book]. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53(4), 443-444.

Bigwood, C. (1991). Seeing Blake’s illuminated texts. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49(4), 307- 315.

Blake, W. (1988). Selected writings. London: Penguin.

—–. (1967). Songs of innocence and of experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1794).

Blunt, A. (1943). Blake’s pictorial imagination. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 6, 190-212.

Bolter, J. D. (2001) Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2^nd ed.). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Fuller, D. (2003). Untitled [Review of the book William Blake. The creation of the songs: From manuscript to illuminated printing]. Review of English Studies, 54(214), 262-264.

Keep, C., McLaughlin, T., & Parmar, R. (1993-2000). John Ruskin, William Morris and the Gothic Revival. The Electronic Labyrinth. Retrieved from http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0236.html

Ruskin, John. (1888). Modern Painters (Vol. 3). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Storch, Margaret. (1996). Untitled [Review of the books Blake and the idea of the book & Blake, ethics, and forgiveness]. Modern Language Review, 91(2), 458-459.

Symmons, Sarah. (1995). Untitled [Review of the book Blake and the idea of the book]. British Journal of Aesthetics, 35(3), 308-9.

Dear ETEC 540 colleagues,

• Please find our research paper in its entirety below.  In keeping with our theme of radio in education, we have also decided to present our research in an abridged, primarily oral format on voicethread. You can listen to, view, and comment on this presentation by clicking the following link: http://voicethread.com/#q.b691487.i3656629

• In addition, we have also created delicious page to share our some of our resources with you.  Please feel free to view or add any of the links at  http://delicious.com/fvdeshoo/radio

Thank you, and we hope you enjoy reading, hearing and viewing our work!

Michael & Stephanie

________________________________________________________________________

On the air:  Educational Radio, its history and effect on literacy, and educational technology implementation

Michael Haworth & Stephanie Hopkins

ETEC 540

October 26, 2009

“For it is the special glory of radio that it transcends boundaries, annihilates distance and creates a stronger sense of national unity and international brotherhood.” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1941 (Nwaerondu, 1994, p. 2)

Educational radio: An introduction

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the development of what we now know as “radio” began.  The work of scientists and inventors such as Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, Lee De Forest, and many others laid the foundations for all forms of radio broadcasting (“History of Radio”, 2009).  Starting in the early 1920’s, radio stations began transmitting to a relatively small, but growing number of listeners.  Concomitant with the growing popularity of radio broadcasting was an increasing interest in its use in education.  The reach and immediacy of radio provided educators with a new and potentially powerful medium through which to support and modify education.  While firmly affixed in an oral and aural realm, from the outset, the purpose of educational radio has been to complement the existing curricula and strong reliance on written text within Western education systems of the twentieth century.  Furthermore, educational radio set the stage for later educational technologies, providing a framework for the adoption and implementation of these technologies that has continued to date.  In this introduction to and analysis of the history of educational radio, our purpose is three-fold: we hope to demonstrate how educational radio supported text-based education; describe how the inclusion of radio supported student literacy; and propose that the foundation of educational radio provided a framework for future efforts in the implementations of educational technology.

Prior to the development and wide-spread deployment of television, radio was the first electronic mass medium (Lewis, 1992, p. 26).  Starting in 1920 in the United States, locations such as Detroit and Pittsburgh were initial launch points for radio broadcasting (Ackerman, 1945, p. 2).  By 1922 there were thirty radio station transmitters and 60,000 receivers in use (Ackerman, 1945, p. 2).  The number of radio transmitters and receivers in the United States continues to increase such that in 1942, Seerley Reid stated that “radio is an indispensable and indisputable part of American life” (p. 115).  With its advent, the radio allowed anyone who had one to listen to news or other informational broadcasts without having to wait for the newspaper, or even listen to live entertainment without having to physically be there.  Lewis (1992) described this profound change in dissemination of information by stating that, “the new medium of radio was to the printing press what the telephone had been to the letter: it allowed immediacy” (p. 26).  From the time that the first sounds were broadcast over the U.S. airwaves in 1920, the two main functions of radio have been to entertain and to inform. As Ackerman (1945) noted, “no entertainment medium [had] ever before faced the insatiable demands which [were] laid upon radio” (p.10).

Radio in education: A brief historical overview

The use of radio as an educational tool further augmented its informational function.  Programmes designed specifically for K-12 and post-secondary education were developed, both by private broadcasters and by radio stations set up exclusively for the use of education. Students, in traditional classroom settings (or individually via distance education) could listen to programs, or with the use of transceivers, could interact with radio programs.  In this manner, students would receive educational programming that expanded on their classroom learning.  Alternatively, not all educational efforts in radio were praised.  According to Saettler (1990), “the first years of [American] university broadcasting were generally ineffective because many a professor repeated his classroom lecture before the microphone without realizing that a good lecturer was not necessarily an effective broadcaster” (as cited in Hokanson & Hooper, 2000, p. 542). The varying degrees to which the effectiveness of educational radio was perceived set the stage for discussion of future educational technologies and their effect on education.

In addition to targeting students, progressive educational radio could also focus on teachers, assisting them in “learn[ing] progressive Deweyan methods of teaching” (Cavanaugh, et al., 2004, p. 3).  A good example of the imposition of education philosophy is in the distribution of radio teaching manuals at the Wisconsin School of the Air (Bianchi, 2002, p. 142). In these teaching manuals, ideas for strengthening and contextualizing radio programming in the classroom were suggested; such ideas were largely based on Dewey’s philosophy of experiential or activity-based learning (see Dewey, 1938). Teachers who created programs at the school agreed with the Deweyan philosophy and through programming, tried to demonstrate that when the classroom teacher actively facilitated learning, students were more attentive and involved (Bianchi, 2002, p.144). Thus, the new medium of radio was seen as aiding in the promotion and implementations of new, promising educational theories for teachers and students alike.

The implementation of educational radio in the U.S., Canada and Australia

Three locations in the world have had a strong background in implementing radio in education: the United States, Canada, and Australia.  While other nations also developed educational radio programs, a brief examination of the implementation of and distinctions between radio implementation in these three countries highlights some of the major developments in the field, as development was not evenly distributed in the world or even within a country (Reid, 1942, p. 188).

Educational radio in the United States was provided both by educational institutions and by private, for-profit broadcasters.  Starting in 1921, broadcasting licences were held by universities in Utah, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (Casey, 2008, p. 46).  By 1925, 171 licences had been granted (Farley, 1952, p. 18).  In addition, K-12 education systems in Ohio and Wisconsin were developing “schools of the air”, that would provide curriculum for use within traditional schools and distance education programs (Reid, 1942, p. 118; Williams & Nicholas, 2004, p. 111).  In the case of the Wisconsin School of the Air, founders chose to offer programming that would complement the elementary curriculum, especially in rural areas where teachers were expected to teach many subjects in multi-grade classrooms (Bianchi, 2002).  In this case, students were able to experience programming such as in music or other specialized field where the teacher may have little or no knowledge in that area.

In 1930, private broadcasters such as Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS) (“American School of the Air”), and the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) began developing educational radio programmes on a variety of music, science and social studies topics for use by students (Bagley, 1930, p. 256; Reid, 1942, p. 132-133).  Again, these programmes met with a variety of success from being described as meeting, “in a fairly meritorious way the conditions that education broadcasting must meet if it is to be a useful adjunct to school instruction,” (Nasseh, 1997, para. 7) to a 1940 college-level course offered by radio that “failed to attract any enrollments” (Bagley, 1930, p. 257).  Lewis (1992) suggests that private broadcasters may also have been encouraged to develop such programmes by lobby groups such as the “National Committee on Education by Radio” and “the threat of legislation,” by the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (p. 31).  As is the case with any major technological advancement, particularly in education, educational radio in the United States met with a collision between adversity and bewilderment; by so-called “technophobes” and “technophiles” (Postman, 1993).

Canada developed educational radio in a somewhat similar fashion to the United States, albeit on a smaller scale.  Radio programmes were developed both for traditional classrooms and distance education.  Starting in 1925, the Canadian National Railways (CNR) radio network broadcasted musical appreciation programmes (Buck, 2008, p. 80).  The following year in 1926, CNRV, the CNR radio station in Vancouver broadcasted directly to Point Grey School for the Deaf and Blind (Buck, 2008, p. 80).  The CNR radio network later was transformed into the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, which ultimately became the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The CBC continued to provide educational radio programmes for provinces such as British Columbia (Buck, 2008, p. 8586), where other educational radio broadcasts took place through various provincial ministries of education via local radio stations. For example, CMHS in Nova Scotia provided government endorsed educational programming, while in Edmonton, Alberta, local station CKUA was the vehicle for educational radio (Buck, 2008, 86).  Similarities and differences existed between the Canadian and American systems: in the United States, nation-wide broadcasting was lobbied for while in Canada, despite the similarity in the methodology of educational radio programme delivery, regional variances in educational radio demonstrate the diversity and locality of the Canadian education system.

Development of educational radio in Australia evolved in very different conditions.  Due to low population densities in many areas of the country, K-12 students in remote locations either needed to attend boarding school, or work with postal-based correspondence school materials (Australian Government, 2007, para. 5).  Through the support of the Royal Flying Doctors Service, shortwave radio broadcasts began to be delivered to outback students in 1948.  By 1956, the “School of the Air” (SOTA) was developed and as of 2005, sixteen schools were in operation (Australian Government, 2007, para. 6-7).  The SOTA program focused on student to teacher, teacher to student, and student to student radio communication rather than general scheduled programme broadcasting (Fowler, 1987, p. 119).  The shortwave transceivers that students and teachers used allowed for synchronous, bi-directional communication so that both teachers and students could communicate directly with one another.  Major benefits for students with this distinct approach are, “the feeling that the teacher is close at hand and the knowledge that he or she is being supported by the team approach of SOTA and PCS [Primary Correspondence School], and is [therefore] motivated by hearing the response of his or her peers, to perform well” (Fowler, 1987, p. 120).  The differences between the Australian educational radio and the programs developed in the United States and Canada are described as being “distinctly Australian” (Moriarty, Danaher, & Danaher, 2003, p. 134), and as in the case of the North American ventures, various implications for education can be observed.

Making connections: Implications for education

While educational radio developed in different forms depending on the country and specific conditions, its primary goal was to complement and improve existing educational programs (Bagley, 1944, p.257).  Although Thomas Edison predicted otherwise, radio programmes were not intended to supplant existing, text-based educational curriculum, but rather to, “supplement, or to stimulate, the study of subjects offered in schools” (Hinrichs, 2004, p. 6; Ackerman, 1945, p. 13). Educational theory of the day proposed that active engagement of students in materials, interactivity and engagement between teacher and students, as well as opportunities for more experiential learning would create a more solid, successful learning environment (see Dewey, 1938).  By being offered in conjunction with traditional text-based curricula, educational radio made all of this possible.

This was especially true with the Australian School of the Air distance education programs.  The Australian Government Culture Portal notes that in the SOTA program, “every student is provided with a mail delivered printed program with accompanying resources.  This material is then supplemented by on-air lessons” (2007, para. 12).  Students would work on printed curricula that would then be sent to the SOTA teacher for marking.  Radio’s involvement in supporting and strengthening text could occur before, during, and after the writing process: teachers could provide direct lessons via radio on the written material, provide ongoing engagement and consultation with the student while working on the assignments, and finally, provide direct feedback on completed and evaluated work (Fowler, 1987, p. 120).  This process provided a level of connectedness due to the synchronous communication afforded by radio that would not be possible with previous postal-only distance education programs, and allowed students to feel less isolated, and in turn, more engaged in their lessons. In addition, students and teachers were involved in an educational experience which included and valued orality as well as literacy, contributing to the overall literacy education of students.  As Ong (2002) theorizes, the use of technologies such as radio in education lends itself well to the use of literacy theories such as speech-act and reader-response theory (p. 166-168).  Moreover, much of the research on distance education programmes to date has shown that the use of multimedia technology in general has led to increased achievement among distance learners over classroom learners (see Williams, Nicholas & Gunter, 2004, p. 118).  In Australia, the delivery of distance education, and thus the literacy education of students were significantly enhanced by the inclusion of radio in education.

The United States and Canadian educational radio systems differed significantly in overall design from the Australian version.  These programs were meant primarily for unidirectional broadcasting of general programmes to a widely distributed learning audience within the traditional classroom setting.  However, these programs too promoted text.  The Ohio School of the Air suggested that the programs offered, “creative possibilities for English, speech, and dramatics teachers in developing students’ interest in radio writing and radio production” (Reid, 1942, p. 139).  In 1932, Benjamin Darrow, founder and first director of the Ohio School of the Air stated his hope that, radio may come as a vibrant and challenging textbook of the air” (Hinrichs, 2004, p. 6).  The reading and writing of text was supported by educational radio.  Using radio promoted a new form of educational technology while introducing potentially new, progressive teaching methodologies into the classroom setting.  As Boulter’s (2001) ideas about “remediation” suggest, the radio remediated print technology such that text technologies such as the newspaper became secondary to the radio in engaging and interacting with students.   Teachers were able to draw on resources outside of the classroom in a new way with a sense of immediacy that would not be possible in pre-radio forms such as newspapers or films.  In addition, with the distribution of teacher’s guides, programs such as the CBS American School of the Air were able to assist the teacher in using the provided programmes to their suggested best potential (Ackerman, 1945, p. 13), foreshadowing the lucrative teacher resource business that exists currently in education.  Although the American and Canadian educational radio systems were different from the Australian one, these too had the potential to change educational practices and facilitate reading and writing.

Advantages and setbacks: Paving the way to the future

Cook and Nemzek (1939) stated that, “the invention of printing and textbooks did much to give to education in its present form.  Some persons feel that the effects of radio may in time be equally far reaching” (p. 105). While there was a fervent wish for radio to become a strong player within education, this did not come entirely true.  In North America, educational radio had several impediments to its widespread adoption in education systems.  One of these impediments was the issue of availability of radio transmitters and receivers.  During the “golden age of radio” a time that saw many homes equipped receivers, a limited numbers of schools were equally provisioned.  In Ohio, a state in which schools were noted as “being more advanced in the use of radio than were schools through the country”, according to a 1941 survey, only fifty-five percent of Ohio schools were equipped with radio units (Reid, 1942, p. 119-121). Moreover, radio receivers of the time were of a fairly bulky size that limited portability and mobility; they were usually large console units which were required to house the heavy vacuum tubes and other necessary electronics.  The onset of World War II created another obstacle in that the available number of vacuum tubes was diverted from civilian to military uses, thus reducing the number of new radio receivers and repair supplies for existing sets (Ackerman, 1945, p. 3).  Another problem still was that radio reception quality could be mixed due to geography or distance for students in Australia and the United States (Fowler, 1987, p. 120; Reid, 1942, p. 123).  Programme scheduling could also be an obstacle to adoption.  Without the aid of any recording device, timing is vital in synchronous communications such as radio.  All parties need to be transmitting and receiving at the same time, and all of the required communication components must successfully come together or communication does not happen.  A final hindrance to the widespread adoption of radio in education is that teachers and students needed to be prepared to interact with the content of the radio programme.  Planned curricular outcomes from radio programs needed to be considered, as “mere ‘listening-in’ may be a profitable expenditure of time in connection with an occasional program; but the more significant and more enduring benefits can come, if contemporary educational theory teaches us the truth, only when the learner is inspired to some effort on his own” (Bagley, 1930, p. 256).  In order to reach widespread acceptance as a beneficial educational tool, it was imperative that radio be utilized and evaluated as such a tool, rather than the hasty, uninvolved use by what Postman calls “one-eyed prophets” (1993, p.5), or by educators who practiced traditional, non-engaging methodology in conjunction with its use in the classroom.

Although educational radio did not necessarily meet all of its intended aspirations to be as far reaching as textbooks, educational radio has survived in some forms.  The School of the Air lives on in Australia and CKUA in Alberta continues to broadcast educational content, and networks such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the CBC still produce content that is suitable for classroom use, even if not specifically designed with such a purpose in mind.  In the future, researchers might wish to explore this general interest in educational or documentary radio programming as related to the more recent technology of podcasting.

Educational radio also had the effect of foreshadowing future implementation of educational technology.  It can be debated that the manner in which other technologies such as television and the Internet were incorporated in education because of the framework that was previously laid out by radio.  Casey (2008) states that, “instructional radio paved the way for distance learning opportunities through television technology” (p. 46).  Even further, Cavanaugh, et al. (2004) argues that based on the educational radio implementation model, “television, audio and video conferencing, the Internet, and other technologies have been adapted for the needs of young learners” (p. 3).  Radio in education, a pioneer of educational technology, created a legacy for itself by setting the stage for the development of other technologies still used in education to date, and perhaps will continue with other technologies in the future.  As Lewis (1992) notes, “radio still captures the imagination, too.  As a child once said, he preferred radio over television because ‘the pictures are better’” (p.32).

References

Ackerman, W. C. (1945). The dimensions of American broadcasting. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 9(1), 1-18.

Australian Government. (n.d.). The School of the Air and remote learning. Australia’s Culture Portal. Retrieved October 17, 2009 from http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/schoolofair/.

Bagley, W. C. (1930). Radio in the Schools. The Elementary School Journal, 31(4), 256-258. doi: 10.2307/996158.

Bianchi, W. (2002). The Wisconsin School of the Air: Success story with implications. Educational Technology and Society 5(1), 141-147.

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2^nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Buck, G. H. (2006). The first wave: The beginnings of radio in Canadian distance education. Journal of Distance Education, 21(1), 76.

Casey, D. M. (2008). A Journey to Legitimacy: The Historical Development of Distance Education through Technology. TechTrends, 52(2), 45-51. doi: 10.1007/s11528-008-0135-z.

Cavanaugh, C., Gillan, K. J., Kromrey, J., Hess, M., & Blomeyer, R. (2004). The effects of distance education on K–12 student outcomes: A meta-analysis. Naperville, IL: Learning Point Associates.

Cook, D. C., & Nemzek, C. L. (1939). The Effectiveness of Teaching by Radio. The Journal of Educational Research, 33(2), 105-109. doi: 10.2307/27526643.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Indianapolis: Kappa Delta Pi. Preview retrieved from http://books.google.ca/books?id=UE2EusaU53IC&dq=%22Dewey%22+%22Experience+and+education%22+&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

Farley, B. (1952). Education and Television. Music Educators Journal, 39(2), 18-20. doi: 10.2307/3388644.

Fowler, B. (1987). Aussat and all that! Reaching the Australian outback. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 3(2), 119-128.

Hokanson, B & Hooper, S. (2000). Computers as cognitive media: Examining the potential of computers in education. Computers in Human Behavior 16, 537-552.

Hinrichs, R. (2004). A vision for lifelong learning: year 2020. European Journal of Engineering Education, 29(1), 5-16.

History of Radio. (2009, October 21). In Wikipedia, the free encylcopedia. Retrieved October 23, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio.

Lewis, T. (1992). “A Godlike presence”: The impact of radio on the 1920s and 1930s. Magazine of History, 6(4), 26-33. doi: 10.2307/25154082.

Moriarty, B. J., Danaher, P. A., & Danaher, G. R. (2003). Situating and interrogating contemporary Australian rural education research. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 18(3), 133-138.

Nasseh, B. (1999). A brief history of distance education. Adult Education in the News, available at: www. seniornet. org/edu/art/history. html (accessed 2 October 2004).

Nwaerondu, N. G. (1994). Educational radio: A tool for rural change. Retrieved October 17, 2009, from http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED390624.

Ong, W.J. (2002). Orality and Literacy (2^nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Postman, N. (1993). The judgment of Thamus. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage.

Reid, S. (1942). Radio in the Schools of Ohio. Educational Research Bulletin, 21(5), 115-148. doi: 10.2307/1473784.

Stevens, K. (1994). Australian developments in distance education and their implications for rural schools. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 10(1), 78-83.

Williams, P., Nicholas, D., & Gunter, B. (2005). E-learning: What the literature tells us about distance education. Perspectives, 57(2), 109-122.

My assignment was completed on the UBC Wiki format. Please view on the site! I hope I have posted this correctly. Enjoy!

http://wiki.ubc.ca/Course:ETEC540/2009WT1/Assignments/ResearchProject/SilentReading

Mass Media—Radio to TV 1950-1970

 Radio and television are highly influential mass media. Transforming technological achievements do not end up in a vacuum, without repercussions— individuals, society, language itself, cultural, political and religious institutions are part of the sphere of media influence and in turn, influence media.  Radio is our ears on the world, and television our eyes on the world.

We allow these machines into our lives and homes. Life has changed between the time radio dominated the airwaves, and subsequent widespread adoption of TV. What unforeseen effects occurred? Do we as consumers stop to analyze these things? Does the TV belong in the children’s bedroom?

Historical and Cultural Perspectives

The radio and TV are both passive, non-interactive media—information only goes one way (Beatty, 1998). As each new invention arises, fears of how they may be used and misused contribute to a reluctance to adopt them. Looking back, they now seem more benign to authoritarian societies in the setting of our current times, as we now have the 2.0 web, which has empowered all with access and know how. Power is out of the hands of the few, and interactions and information access is around user-based choices, not network or radio station control of content. But as radio and then TV emerged, those times were important to the history of communication because this represented a way to transfer information—as instantaneous mass media, much different than the printed word. Aural, and then subsequently visual data was in the pipeline.

Kramer (p 5, 1991) proposes mass media is really quite old—he sees libraries as mass media which evolved from the very first mass medium, writing. He reviews how telegraph and Morse code were the first steps towards instantaneous communication. Morse’s first words on the device, he quoted were “what hath God wrought”; acknowledging the early inventors’ appreciation of the widespread impact for the future, reinforces the appreciation of the primary purpose of early mass media for military and commercial interests (Kramer, p. 9, 1991).  The history of radio started with the wireless telegraph. Marconi is most widely thought of the inventor but Nikola Tesla first patented radio technology. The first commercial trans-Atlantic service was carried out by Marconi in 1907, which spawned the era of audio broadcasting starting in 1919. The Radio Corporation of America or RCA was formed in 1919 and started the Americanization of radio (Kramer, p 15, 1991).

In the context of radio, I will focus on the CBC as representative of a nation’s media in both radio and television and representative of the transition that occurred. According to the CBC archival website on the history of CBC/Radio Canada, there were a number of landmarks, summarized as follows.

The year 1901 was marked by the first wireless trans-Atlantic telegraph, and 1922, the first private commercial radio stations in Canada. In 1927, the first national broadcast took place and by 1932 the government created the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC). In 1937 76% of Canada was receiving CBC radio, and in 1939 CBC carried the declaration of war and subsequent wartime, and farm broadcasts and political messages as their primary messages.

In education, 1940 saw the first provincial school broadcasts, and in 1941 the CBC news service emerged. By the year 1943 the first English School Broadcast Department formed, which emphasized the role the government saw in the function of radio for the learning of young Canadians. In 1947 the first FM radio stations emerged in a few major cities, and the FM band was credited for carrying radio forward into the TV era, due to excellent music programming and audio quality.

By 1955, CBC television had emerged and reached 66% of the population and in 1958, the first coast-to coast live TV broadcast occurred and so, welcome to hockey night in Canada!  Canada developed the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) Canadian content to protect the cultural integrity from being overwhelmed by American music, TV and film industries, by supervision and regulation of the telecommunications and broadcasting (mission statement from website).

Wikipedia reports that in 1950 one million American homes had televisions. Kramer (p 20, 1991) speaks of the rise of radio appreciation purposed to spread culture and educational experiences to rural and poor. The BBC in Britain was launched to meet this need.

Radio versus television: vying for the attention of the mass audience

In this section we will compare and contrast the effects of each media. Before one dismisses the radio as a predecessor, rather than as a continuing media influence, let us consider those parts of the world that do not have infrastructure for television even today. It seems in fact, we still pay close attention to the aural presentation, which harkens back to early orality and oratory, a concept explored at length in Ong’s book, Orality and Literacy (2002).  Kramer (p 16, 1991) quotes media guru Marshall McLuhan as saying “radio affects most people intimately, person to person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and listener”. That is not a concept that is intuitive, but reflects Ongs theory. Vukmirovic (p 4, 2005) states that “radio is the most accessible information channel in the world” which probably still holds true since the Internet is still not available in much of the developing world.

On October 30, 1938, listeners heard the following apocalyptical phrase, at the end of a realistic radio show, “2X2L calling CQ. Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there…. anyone?”  That was the War of the Worlds radio broadcast that, according to history records on Wiki and elsewhere, spawned a plethora of concern, and even panic amongst listeners.  The broadcast simulated newscasts of a dire invasion. It was estimated 6 million listened, that 1.7 million listeners thought it true, and the event subsequently spawned 12 000 newspaper articles. Hitler said the panic was a sign of “decadence of democracy” and so the reaction rippled world-wide. This singular event demonstrates that in spite of disclaimers to the effect that it was fictional, radio can deeply influence and thus could subvert an impressionable audience. As far as long term influence, the event has since generated TV, movies, plays, and many analyses.  One show, lots of impact!

Kramer posits (p 22, 1991) that “world events, and the immediacy of radio news coverage made many listeners anxious about life in general” and cites the above show as an example.  In the early era of radio, it was a news vehicle. Hockey games, news, readings and discussions dominated the airways. According to Kramer (Pg 19, 1991) “broadcasting then and now, somehow makes people feel as though they are a part of something bigger than themselves, connected to the world out there”. Even though radio does not have the flashy visual aspect, it is still a powerful communication tool.

According to Vukmirovic (pp. 1-3, 2005) the radio is spoken language and one needs remembrance on the part of listener, and memorable discourse at the source. Remembrance is a selective memory process of a recipient. He cites a tri-modal theory involving the recipient, the media, and external recipient environment. Among recipient factors he feels attention, previous knowledge, attitudes and feelings, motivation, hearing skills, and recall strategies need to be taken into account.  Memory of media includes its position, the nature of the items, repetition, and how closely it meets the inner schema of the listener (Vukmirovic, p. 5, 2005). These considerations all make good sense, and help explain why the two people can hear very different things after they internalize the spoken broadcast. Kozma (1993) feels there is an interplay between physical technology, symbol systems (language, pictures, music), and processing capabilities (information received) so each medium has a profile of capabilities.

TV was invented in more than one location, and is most widely attributed to Farnsworth and Zworykin. As TV took hold in the 50s, the radio became a vehicle for popular music instead.  At that time, according to Kramer (p 27, 1991) “just as radio listening had displaced time previously spent reading, television now challenged radio as the preferred leisure time activity”,  and he cited a study which indicated “..the average American home had two TV’s with at least one of them on about seven hours every day”  and  “mid 1970s annual polls indicated that television had surpassed newspapers as the medium Americans most rely on for information, and also the medium perceived as the most credible and complete in news coverage”. Those cited studies indicate that TV had become THE pervasive medium of that decade.

 Kramer, (p29, 1991) relays that “it is well documented that people rarely watch a TV show, but rather TV, seeking the least objectionable program rather than choosing to turn it off when “nothing is on””. These observations ring very true and the phrase “couch potato” comes to mind. McLuhan sees TV as “cool” medium since it does require engagement of the watcher, but this has been widely debated.

Religious programming has become popular with TV evangelical shows spreading the Word the way the written word did with the Bible in the days of old. Political institutions have also taken the TV and used it for their own purposes, disseminating messages that sometimes border political brainwashing. Many feel that the use of media for these purposes is an abuse of power because with the exception of live debates, counter messages cannot easily be heard.  On the positive side of the coin, projects such as the UNESCO Bangkok distance education initiative described at unescobkk.org, use radio and television to improve literacy and information transfer, but using foreign media producers, in this case Educational Radio Television (ERTV) in Italy.  The initiative is used in Afghanistan also, but the use of native peoples and production facilities would have been preferred in order to ensure that the needs of the learner are fully integrated. In Beatty’s CBC lecture, he agrees “television and radio created the mass audience on a scale that had been impossible in the past. “ He builds his case, noting they were perfect tools for authoritarian governments trying to control public thought, and for corporations marketing their products.  Beatty made another excellent point, noting that early centralization and limited TV and radio licenses restricted the public’s choice.

McLuhan (p 207, 1964) scolds society for being so blind when he says “the electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Guetenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed”, and  on speaking about how deeply entrenched media can become, he notes “the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter the sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.” McLuhan implies its influence seeps into our society while we are busy and so we are effectively blind to its effects. Kramer (p 30, 1991) identified many traps including TV ads targeting kids (e.g., cigarettes, clothes), cultural homogeneity, and gate keeping by the big stations to select news and views for the watcher.  He also lists violence, sex, and stereotypical portrayals as influencing the watcher and argues that even if the effects are indirect as modern media theories propose, these traps still have consequences.  Kramer explores issues of modelling after TV stars (soap opera example), and children modelling their behaviour (social, antisocial) in sync with characters, and states, “the conclusion is that children are indeed socialized by movies and television, especially when they identify with a character they watch” Kramer also notes popular current theory is that mass media consumption leads to a spiral of silence (after Noelle-Neumann). What he means by this is if everyone is exposed to an opinion, dissenters tend to not speak up. All of these explorations alert us to just how many hot-button issues we are not aware of as typical consumers.

Beatty (1998) states “mankind has always maintained an uneasy relationship with technology, simultaneously regarding it with both reverence and fear, uncertain about whether our machines would ultimately prove to be our slaves or our masters”.  This paranoia is reflected in the writings of the time such as in George Orwell’s book 1984.

If one stops to think, in a little less than two generations from the invention of the radio and the television, we have come a long way baby. Beatty (1998) concurs, noting it is the speed of change which overwhelms us.   Beatty (1998) cites the words over the entrance to the 1893 Chicago world’s fair “science explores, technology executes, man conforms” when making the point that we have a very uneasy relationship with these mass media boxes.  McLuhan (p 208, 1964) believes “subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users”.

Regarding psychological influences, many propose that in the 21^st century, many of the attention deficit disorders stem from fast paced moving picture consumption by our youth. It is startling to compare the average length for TV commercials which used to run one to two minutes, and now generally flash multiple engaging images in 10 to 15 second slots. The jury is still out on the effect on attention span, as it is on the effects on literacy. There are so many confounding factors it is hard to attribute any effects to just TV alone. Video games are an example of a potential confounder.                                                                                           

No discussion of modern mass media is complete without mention of McLuhan’s message versus media concept. The full sentence from which “the message is the medium” was drawn is as follows: “in a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message” (McLuhan, p 203, 1964).  On the same page he notes “..the content of any medium is always another medium” e.g., the written word is content of print media.  He would say then, I presume, that for radio, the listened to word is the content of radio and the moving picture and sound is the content of TV?  But further in that passage, he reframes it as follows, “for the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs”. I think what he means is that the message not the medium is what alters the human landscape. In support of that concept, McLuhan (p 206, 1964) gives an example of a Bedouin with a battery radio and how he is impinged with much new conceptually but he points out” Western man himself experiences exactly the same inundation as the remote native”.   On the contrary side of this, everybody wants it now is a philosophy widely infiltrating the masses—we are spoiled, and want different perspectives on lots of issues as they happen on the frontlines.

In closing, Andy Worhol said in 1968 “in the future, everyone will be (world) famous for 15 minutes”.  This may be coming to pass in a way for those using the Internet to post their blogs, video and music, though a new phrase has been coined to meet today’s times to the effect that everyone will be famous to 15 other people—a tongue in cheek to social networking. Radio and TV continue to both influence society in many ways and the effects of them are still under study due to the difficulty of isolating their influence on the listeners and watchers.

References

 Beatty, P. CBC Speech Archives (1998). Coping with Convergence: Social and cultural change in the age of digital technology. March 20 Lecture to UWO. Accessed online October 19, 2009 at :

http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/speeches/19980320.shtml

Kramer, E.M. (1991). A supplementary chapter to accompany: Understanding Human Communication 4^th ed. By Adler, R and Rodman, G. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Accessed October 19, 2009 at:

http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/K/Eric.M.Kramer-1/download/papers/masscomm1991.pdf

History of Radio. Accessed online October 19, 2009 at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#Beginnings_of_radio

CBC –Radio-Canada Archive Website; 1901-1939. Accessed online October 19, 2009 at: http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/history/1901-1939.shtml

CBC –Radio-Canada Archive Website;1940s. Accessed online October 19, 2009 at: http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/history/1940s.shtml

CBC –Radio-Canada Archive Website; 1950s. Accessed online October 19, 2009 at: http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/history/1950s.shtml

CRTC Website. Accessed October 23, 2009 at: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/home-accueil.htm                                               

TV events: 1950s. Accessed October 19, 2009 at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_in_television#Events

Ong, W. J. (2002) Orality and Literacy. Routledge, London and New York.

Vukmirov, D. (2005). Radio and communication. Accessed October 19, 2009 at: http://www.brain.hr/Mind&Brain3/ABSTRACTS/Vukmirovic.pdf

War of the Worlds- radio show. Accessed online October 20, 2009 at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio)#Background

Kozma, R.B. (1993).Will media influence learning? Reframing the debate. Educational Technology Research and Development. Vol 42, No. 2 pp 7-19. (print published in 1994). Accessed online October 14, 2009 at:

http://mmtserver.mmt.duq.edu/mm416-01/gedit704/articles/kozmaArticles                                                                                 

Marshall McLuhan. [n.d.]Accessed online October 20, 2009 at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Understanding_Media_.281964.29

Unesco Education Project; Bangkok. [n.d.]. Accessed October 18, 2009 at: http://www.unescobkk.org/education/apeid/news/news-details/article/ict-transforming-education-ready-get-set-go/

Marshall McLuhan.  Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964

 NY McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., May 1964. Excerpt from NEWMEDIAREADER, II, 13. MIT Press, Cambridge and London, 2003. Accessed online October 18, 2009 at www.newmediareader.com/mcluhan-medium.pdf

Andy Worhol. [n.d.]Accessed online October 21, 2009 at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol

In the third and fourth chapters of Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong compares characteristics of orality and literacy, showing how consciousness is dramatically changed – “restructured” – by literacy.  In exploring this transformation, though, he appears to miss the full significance of the confluence of several of the changes he describes.

Ong examines orality and literacy in relation to a variety of psychodynamics of orality, characteristics of thought and expression.  He shows how oral story forms differ from literate in style and structure; the types of knowledge, and conceptualization that each favours.  He further explores differences in use of memory between orality and literacy; in what is remembered, and how.

Against this extensive background he looks at research on early textual works based on oral creations (Milman Parry on the Iliad and the Odyssey; qtd. in Ong: 58), and more recent work with living narrative poets in Yugoslavia (Albert Lord; qtd. in Ong: 59), and concludes that oral memory works quite differently than literate memory: the “fixed materials in the bard’s memory are a float of themes and formulas out of which all stories are variously built” (60).  He contrasts use of such formulaic elements with the methods and expectations of literate people memorizing from text, and writes at length about differences between orality and literacy with respect to the possibility of “stable” repetition or reproduction, and makes the point that even the idea of faithful reproduction differs between the two.

Ong relates that Lord, in his work with the Yugoslavian bards, found that “[l]earning to read and write disables the oral poet . . . it introduces into his mind the concept of a text as controlling the narrative…” (59)  This was in reference to the process of oral composing, but it reflects the fact that oral narrative is by nature fluid, that variations in the story between tellers are part of the evolution of the culture and the form.

Such variations reflect the unique storyteller, the audience and the circumstances of the telling; the unvarying essentials reflect the needs and beliefs of the group or culture.  “Originality”, Ong writes, “consists not in the introduction of new materials but in fitting the traditional materials effectively into each individual, unique situation and/or audience” (60).  Ownership of the essential story in oral culture is communal; restrictions on how a story is told or used, by and to whom, in what season or context, arise from  – and belong to – the story, the community and the culture.

This creates a world in which neither the storyteller nor the listener exists in isolation; they are dependent each on the other, partners in shaping and perpetuating narrative.  The Okanagan author Jeanette Armstrong writes that “I am a listener to the language’s stories, and when my words form I am merely retelling the same stories in different patterns” (qtd. in King: 2).

All this serves as the groundwork for a detailed examination of how consciousness itself is restructured in a literate world.  The effects are profound.  Language, through text, becomes external – “detached from its author” (78); as such it is “context-free” or “autonomous” (Ong references the work of E.D Hirsch and David R. Olson respectively; 79) and becomes irrefutable, unresponsive, and altogether unaccountable – as Ong delightfully says “inherently contumacious” (79).  It is now mediated, requiring tools (and propagating technologies)… it precipitates a fundamental shift in the human awareness of self in place, and in time; and it greatly increases the potential for restriction of access to knowledge and dissemination of ideas.

Tucked among this survey of shifts in human consciousness and culture Ong mentions the potential for private ownership of words,  noting that “typography had made the word into a commodity” (131), and acknowledges that it was a boon to the increasingly individualistic nature of human consciousness, and the growing tendency to perceive “interior . . .resources as thing-like, impersonal” (132).

Unfortunately, he pursues this idea no further, and so overlooks one of its most significant implications.  It seems that he knows it well subconsciously, yet while it informs his entire work he doesn’t actually address its implications explicitly.  The process of transferring “memory” outside the mind paradoxically makes story both external to the thinker and external to the community.  Ong has already observed that “[p]rimary orality fosters personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates” (69).  But he stops short of recognizing the full consequences of this particular psychodynamic – and sociodynamic – shift: that literacy makes possible both the private ownership of knowledge and the knowledge of private ownership in a way never before imaginable.

In an oral culture, knowledge, once shared, was ‘common’; if ‘protected’, was secret.  While knowledge had currency, and rules or custom or interests might determine what was told to whom, by whom, and when, its commodification in the modern sense was impossible.  Like the Kiowa grandmother in N. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn, oral peoples knew that words “were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold” (85).  Knowledge could not be packaged for sale, nor last year’s knowledge devalued and replaced – at a price – with this year’s.

Private ownership of land and resources is likewise enabled by literacy; being dependent on the ability to demonstrate and enforce possession.  The ability to create, delineate, and enforce ownership through what are essentially ‘text acts’ allows relations of ownership to take place at a distance; removes the need for physical demarcation and presence.  Physical possession is no longer nine-tenths of the law.  And in a literate world, the two can be combined: knowledge can be owned, controlled, traded, suppressed, or disseminated even by those who can not create it themselves.

Ong apparently does not appreciate the broader sociodynamic implications of literacy in relation to the existence of textual knowledge as a commodity.  Ironically, the money he earns for his publisher is a manifestation of what Ong overlooked.

Works Cited

King, Thomas.  The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative.  Toronto: House of Anansi, 2003.

Momaday, N. Scott.  House Made of Dawn.  New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.

Ong, Walter.  Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.  London: Methuen, 1983.

I stumbled across the proceeding new technologies as I was researching my final project.  While both the implanted touch-screen and electronic ink may bring up images of shocking encounters, I believe the possible applications of these two technologies outweigh their initial reactions.

Could implanted touch-screens be used to help the disabled interact with their environment?  Will body art of the future not only be a symbolic representation of one’s cultural values but literally link them to like-minded individuals on a global scale?  Will both these technologies become a remediation of the physical computer itself i.e., one that is outside of and/or detached from the human body?

Electronic tattoo display runs on blood

February 21st, 2008 by Lisa Zyga

The tattoo display: “Waterproof and powered by pizza.”

Jim Mielke’s wireless blood-fueled display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin…

Electronic, interactive tattoos

Thu, Jul 2, 2009

Been thinking about tattoos lately. And although this image is not a tattoo I find it really lovely. Especially the lace one….

Here’s the you tube video!

It’s Bare — a conductive ink for skin. A collaboration between Bibi Nelson, Isabel Lizardi, Matt Johnson, and Becky Pilditch.

When I think about standardization of language, my first thought is to refer to the dictionary. Sam Winston, a UK artist, has done some neat pieces that use dictionaries as a springboard for playing with language and text. What I like about this project is that the artist’s intent is to make art accessible – which in the context of this course relates back to the press as means to make literature accessible to the masses. Here is short video clip of the project Dictionary Story.

In the video clip, Winston mentions James Gleick’s article for the New York Times, Cyber-Neologoliferation as a source of inspiration. As this course has fueled my interest in language and technology, I decided to search this article out.

Before reading the article I did not have a clue what ‘neologoliferation’ meant. What I learned is that neologism refers to “a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language (Wikipedia, Neologism, para. 1). This word seems completely appropriate to use in the context of the Oxford English Dictionary and their pursuit to capture “a perfect record, perfect repository, perfect[ly] mirror of the entire [English] language (Gleick, 2006, para. 5).

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has a long history, dating back about a century and half, and has played an essential role in standardizing the English language. In his article, Gleick explores the workings of the dictionary today and how the online environment is changing the evolution of language. The OED has evolved its immense printed resource of 20 volumes in its second edition to a 3rd edition that now resides completely online. The Internet has not only been a vehicle that houses the dictionary but a tool that allows lexicographers to eavesdrop on the “expanding cloud of messaging in speech” that occurs in resources such as newspapers, online news groups and chat rooms (para. 2).

With these tactics for tapping into culture, the dictionary has moved from being a ‘dictionary of written of language’, where lexicographers comb through works of Shakespeare to find words, to one where ‘spoken language’ is the resource (para.12). Surprisingly, text messaging also serves as a source for new vocabulary. Beyond OED’s hunting and gathering processes, the general public can also connect with them to have a new word assessed for inclusion into the dictionary. The ‘living document’ of the dictionary now seems to require of the participation of the masses. With this, more and more colloquial language is being added to the dictionary (e.g. bada-bing).

The printing press worked to standardized spelling but according to Gleick (2006) with mass communication spelling variation is on the rise. With the Internet, OED is coming to terms with the boundlessness of language. In the past variations of the English language were spoken in many different pockets around the world. These variations still exist but now are more accessible through the Internet (Gleick, 2006). Peter Gilliver, a lexicographer at OED believes that the Internet transmits information differently than past vehicles for communication. He suggests that the ability to broadcast to the masses or communicate one-to-one is impacting the change in language. For OED, the ability to tap into a wide variety of online conversations affords a more accurate representation of word usage all over the world.

Standards in language help us to clearly communicate in a way that is commonly understood. This article makes me wonder, with all the slang being added to the dictionary, what will language look like in 50 years? 100 years? Will a new English language evolve? How will this affect spoken and written language? Will standards become more lax? With all these questions, OED becomes an important historical documentation of the evolution of the English language.

References

Gleick, J. (2006, November 5). Cyber-neologoliferation. New York Times. Retrieved October 18, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/magazine/05cyber.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1255864379-QjA08nvBb8FH9FU9ZHJbRg

Neologism. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neologism

Throughout the history of writing there have been significant advancements that have led to major shifts in communication technology. From the scroll to the codex to the manuscript to the printing press, technological changes have influenced how information is passed on to readers (Ong, 1984). These technological shifts are referred to as remediation by Bolter (2001). The incredible success of the penny press in the 1830’s in the United States was one of these significant remediations in communication. This radical change influenced not only the masses and mass communication but politics and educational policy in fundamentally significant ways (Saxton, 1984). Technological determinists such as McLuhan (1964) and Ong (1984) would have one believe that it was technological advancements that led to the success of the penny papers of the mid 19th century in America. However the incredible success and growth of these dailies was a result of more complex societal and cultural factors than technological advancements. Remediation, that is the shift in communication technology, continues to play a significant role in the written word.

Prior to the 1830’s in America, daily newspapers served a select group of people. Dailies were owned and produced for the upper class, urban, professional male (Saxton, 1984). However this class and racial disparity changed dramatically with the popularity of the penny press. In 1830 there were sixty five dailies in the United States with an average circulation of 1200 (Saxton, 1984). According to Saxton (1984) by 1850 there were 254 dailies with an average circulation of 3000. These dailies represented a significant change in not only readership numbers but also in content and class of people that read them. Dailies, such as the Sun in New York, were written to appeal to the working class. The content of these papers shifted from political polemics, public statement, commercial and foreign news to humour, sex, sports and crime and content that was of more interest to women and children (Saxton, 1984). There is some dispute whether penny papers were the first to make use of sensationalist content to sell papers (Nordin, 1979) however the cultural influence of these first dailies is undeniable. This change in readership not only led to the dramatic popularity of the penny papers but also led to a change in political and educational agendas.

The incredible popularity of the penny presses of the mid 19th century precipitated a change in politics in America and were the beginnings of mass media. The shift from dailies that served the rich elite to the penny papers that appealed to the masses mirrored the rise of working man’s parties in the United States (Saxton, 1984) specifically the Democratic Party as well as the abolitionist movement (Rhodes, 1993). Benjamin Day, the owner of the New York Sun, wrote (Saxton, 1984):

“there has been a great and decided change in the condition of the labouring classes and the mechanics. Now every individual, from the rich aristocrat who lolls in his carriage to the humble labourer who wields a broom in the streets, read (sic) the Sun;…Already can we perceive a change in the mass of the people. They think, talk and act in concert. They understand their own interest, and feel they have numbers and strength to pursue it with success…. (p.224)”

The papers were as described by Saxton (1984) initiated by artisan printers that promoted an urban ideology that was rationalist, secular, democratic, expansionist and fiercely egalitarian. Many of the owners of these dailies were proud of their common school education and had an egalitarian contempt for the higher learning of colleges and universities (Saxton, 1984). What is often not referred to in the literature is the tendency for penny newspapers to assert the racial superiority of Anglo-Saxon (Rhodes, 1993) and often portrayed Native Americans as savage and barbaric in order to justify westward expansionism and afro americans as “supplicant, kneeling and pleading for freedom” (Rhodes, 1993). However the ability to reach a mass readership may have facilitated the movement to a more democratic and egalitarian ethos in the United States as well as the beginnings of a popular voice for afro americans. This rise in the literacy of the working class man led to, as mentioned earlier, the development of the Democratic party. This shift in power from the rich elite to the masses certainly had an impact on politics in general not only in the United States but wherever mass media in the form of inexpensive dailies were produced. With the rise in readership came a rise in literacy. This rise in literacy coupled with the rise in power of the working class brought public education into the consciousness of the American people.

The incredible success of penny newspapers led to significant changes in technology. The popularity of these papers applied existing technologies and promoted new innovations (Saxton, 1984). Technologies imported from Europe were adapted and modified to meet the burgeoning needs of the American penny newspapers. Paper making moved from hand cranked presses to factory production becoming increasingly mechanized and steam powered. The search for cheaper methods and materials drove much of the technological innovation that occurred (Saxton, 1984). The result of this search lead to print and paper innovations that dramatically cut the cost of production. One of the most significant developments was the application of paper to the type by means of rotating cylinders made possible an output of two thousand copies an hour. When Benjamin Day started the very first penny newspaper, the New York Sun, he was producing 200 copies an hour using hand cranking technology. This rapid expansion of readership had direct influence in advancing literacy. The relatively inexpensive cost of the dailies coupled with the content that was more accessible to the masses invariably lead to greater and greater numbers reading. This in turn would have raised the general literacy levels of the population.

At times in human history certain technological and cultural advancements join in a confluence to enable phenomenal change. The rise in the popularity of the penny presses of the early to mid 19th century affected not only mass media but printing technology, politics and education (Saxton, 1984). No longer did the bourgeoisie hold the power and control of mass media. Rudimentary hand cranked presses that melded sensationalist content with a call to arms of the working class forever changed the political and educational landscape of the United States. The meteoric rise of the penny presses and their significant influence on thinking have only been eclipsed by the Internet and hypertext. If the penny presses are any indication the Internet and hypertext will forever change global culture.

References

Bolter, Jay, David (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey, London.

McLuhan, Marshall, (1964). Understanding Media: The extensions of Man. Signet Books. New York

Nordin, Kenneth, D. (1979). The Entertaining Press: Sensationalism in Eighteenth-Century Boston Newspapers. Communication Research, Vol. 6, No. 3, July 1979. pp. 295-320.

Ong, Walter (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the word. Routledge, London and New York.

Rhodes, Jane (1993. The Visibility of Race and Media History. Review and Criticism. Vol. 20. pp.181-189

Saxton, Alexander (1984). Problems of class and race in the origins of mass circulation press. American Quarterly, Vol. 36. No.2 (Summer, 1984), pp.211-234.

Thanks, Sarah

I was reading this New York Times article about Pixable and it made me wonder if a similar trend will emerge in writing. Just as Pixable envisions getting images back off the web and into traditional photo albums, will technology provide the means by which we will get text back into tangible forms?

Does the Brain Like E-Books?

This group of articles was brought to my attention.  Five authors discuss their research on ebooks and the future of literacy.  I am hoping to find some answers to many questions raised in our current reading.

I hope you find it thought provoking and look forward to continuing the discussion on this topic.

Archimedes palimpsest was thought to be lost, but it was actually recovered 1000 years later! A palimpsest is defined as “a manuscript written on parchment that has another text written over it, leaving two (or more) layers of visible writing.” (NOVA, 2003).

Archimedes was considered the greatest mathematician in Greek history. His priceless (actually valued at approximately 2 million dollars at auction) palimpsest was traced by NOVA  (2003) and makes for an interesting story related to ancient text and the development of writing technologies. Here is an excerpt:

“circa 1000
A scribe working in Constantinople handwrites a copy of the Archimedes treatises, including their accompanying diagrams and calculations, onto parchment, which is assembled into a book.

circa 1200
A Christian monk handwrites prayers in Greek over the Archimedes text, turning the old mathematical text into a new prayer book. The book is now a palimpsest, a manuscript with a layer of text written over an earlier scraped- or washed-off text”. (NOVA, 2003)

I remembered that Richard Clement  (1997) wrote about the practice of scraping off still-wet ink in Medieval and Renaissance Book Production: Manuscript Books. It is interesting to see an actual example of a 1000 year old text that survived this process! The link has some great images and additional links you may be interested in.

By the way, I found this site by using the Librarian’s Internet Index. I hope it helps some classmates with their research. I also tried to hyperlink in this post, but my links led to a 404 Error message. Ah well, the old fashioned digital literacy method of “cut and paste into your browser ” will work for the links. I posted them below. Erin

References

Clement, R. (1997). Medieval and renaissance book production: Manuscript books. Available online 16, October, 2009, from http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/culture/books/medbook1.html

Librarian’s internet index. (2009). Available online 16, October, 2009, from http://www.lii.org/

NOVA. (2003). Infinite secrets: The Archimede’s palimpsest. Available online 15, October, 2009 from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/archimedes/palimpsest.html

Nokia has developed a laptop called the OLED Scroll where the screen rolls up like a scroll.  You would unroll the touch-sensitive screen to use it. 

Check it out at: http://www.markpascua.com/2008/09/23/nokia-scroll-oled-laptop/

In a number of the readings for this course the philosopher Derrida has been mentioned, along his “graphocentric” view that writing is a more primary type of communication than speech. He is a difficult philosopher to understand, but I’ve studied his thought somewhat in the past and I’d like to try to clarify his ideas about writing as far as I understand them.

The background that Derrida was coming from, and reacting against, was structuralism. According to structuralism, words have their meaning by how they relate to other words in a whole system of language. Proponents of structuralism thus draw a distinction between language (the whole system that gives words their meaning) and speech (the things we actually say). The distinction is discussed by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in this comedy sketch

A related distinction made by structuralists was that between the signified and the signifier. The signified is the place a word takes in the whole system of language and the signifier is the spoken sound of the word or written mark of the word.

Derrida rejected the idea of a fixed system of language giving meaning to everything written and spoken, and rejected the idea that there is a signified that gives meaning to the signifier. He believed that language should be understood in terms of the signifiers only, which in turn are to be understood as dependent on acts of signifying. These acts of signifying have meaning, he thought, only in relation to all other acts of signifying. With new acts of signifying, these relations could change, and so meanings are never fixed but are open to change, their meaning being constantly “deferred”. His method of “deconstruction” is an attempt to change received meanings and received interpretations, using methods such as reversing the received view about what is important and what is unimportant in a text.

Derrida believed that the notion that speech is primary and writing secondary was based on the mistaken view that, with speech, the meaning of our words is something “present”. According to this view, the person who speaks has mastered the system of language to some extent and is an authority on what he or she means. For instance, when you speak to me I am able to respond to your questions and reply, “No, what I meant was…” The written word, in contrast, is something whose meaning is more elusive, for it depends on what the writer meant when he or she wrote it, and the writer may be absent and might even be dead when we read it.

Although he acknowledged that from a historical point of view speech appeared before writing, Derrida thought that writing revealed the nature of language more fully than speech did, for it reflected the way in which the meanings of what we say are not within our control and are constantly open to revision and reinterpretation.

The clearest introduction to Derrida’s views on writing that I have come across is in Richard Harland’s book Superstructuralism. You can see some of it here.

There’s also a movie about Derrida on google video, which is not too bad

I am enjoying the content of the two courses I am taking this semester tremendously, both via readings and sharing by keen and engaged fellow-learners. Unfortunately, I have a sense of missing much since there is such a plethora of material and it rests in many different places, both within course materials/wikis/weblogs/webCT,  and via the excellent links to further reading and viewing.  As I read through the postings while catching up after the flu, I feel all the salient points have been presented in so many comprehensive ways—what else can I say that is even remotely witty or wise? That adds to the discussion in a meaningful, scholarly way?

 In our readings, we have explored the way humans transitioned from primary orality and adapted to new ways of putting pen to “paper”. That process took from 3500 BC to now. Very recently, text is becoming more plastic and functional by integrating hypertext, and news travels very fast by widespread social network collaboration. We are moving away from solo writer, and set in “stone” letters and words, to plastic text—textology is changing fast.

Postman in Technopoly presents a position of concern around new technologies.

In Brands’ Escaping the Digital Dark Age, the loss of digitized data is explored in detail. He admonishes all to sit up and take notice of this hidden risk.

The CBC commentary surrounding the digital universal library concept is a wandering exploration of the issues of copyright, and private corporation involvement. The Kelly article “Scan this Book” explores many similar themes as in the other readings about the universal digital library.

O’Donnell proposed in the Virtual Library piece that the idea is neither new nor golden.  He speaks of the historical aspects from The Great Library of Alexandria through the Memex in the ‘40s, and expresses concern that “infochaos” will be the only thing to emerge from the debacle of the dreamed universal digital library of the future.

In the video version of funeral oration of Julius Caesar, and in Phaedrus, we saw classic oratory in the rhetoric form, which was also exemplified in the Plato Iliad excerpt. The irony of the Plato oration is that the written word is the vehicle he uses to expound his theories about the downside of writing, and he proposed that nobody who had serious and important ideas would write them down—how ironic is that! The issue Plato raises of the relationship of memory with written word is revisited in modern times in the Visible Language article, Hypertext and the Art of Memory.

James O’Donnell in “From Papyrus to Cyberspace” explored the flip side of new technologies—the downside, when we do not know fully the effects until after implementation. He believes that unpredictable change and a less intimate community are hallmarks of the modern time.  Dr. James Engell feels the state of affairs is that education is already transformed by new technologies, and the generational divide is a big one. He emphasizes instability in business and in information storage as examples of how unclear the future direction is in these frontier times.

Lamb’s article “Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, ready or not” is a good ingress into the next section of the course where we deal with the connections between text and fluidity of the web-based text realm. His thoughts about the use of wikis in academics and otherwise were a refreshing introduction to “wikidom”, the new and evolving kingdom of wikis.