Hi everyone,<\/p>\n
Hayles explains that sometime between 1995 and 1997 a shift in Web literature occurred: before 1995 hypertexts were primarily text based with \u201cwith navigation systems mostly confined to moving from one block of text to another (Hayles, 2003).\u201d\u00a0 Post 1997, Hayles states that \u00a0\u201celectronic literature devises artistic strategies to create effects specific to electronic environments (2003).\u201d<\/p>\n
Bolter and Kress both contend that technology and text have fused into a single entity. That is, in the latter half of the 20th century, the visual representation of text has been transformed to include visual representations of pictures, graphics, and illustrations. Bolter states that \u201cthe late age of print is visual rather than linguistic . . . print and prose are undertaking to remediate static and moving images as they appear in photography, film, television and the computer (Bolter, 2001, p. 48)\u201d Cyber magazines such as Mondo 2000 and WIRED are \u201caggressively remediating the visual style of television and digital media\u201d with a \u201chectic, hypermediated style (Bolter, 2001, p. 51).\u201d Kress notes that \u201cthe distinct cultural technologies for representation and for dissemination have become conflated\u2014and not only in popular commonsense, so that the decline of the book has been seen as the decline of writing and vice versa (Kress, p.6).\u201d In recent years, perhaps due to increased bandwidth, the WWW has had a much greater presence of multimedia such as pictures, video, games, and animations.\u00a0 As a result, there is a noticeably less text than what appeared in the first web pages designed for Mosaic in 1993. Furthermore, the WWW is increasingly being inundated with advertisements.<\/p>\n
Additionally, text and use of imagery is also evident in magazines that also use visual representations of pictures, graphics, and illustrations as visual aids to their texts. Tabloid magazines such as Cosmo, People, and FHM are filled with advertisements. \u00a0For example, the April 2008 edition of Vogue has a total of 378 pages.\u00a0 Sixty-seven of these pages are dedicated to text, while 378 pages are full-page advertisements.<\/p>\n
While there are increasingly more spaces, both in cyberspace and printed works, that contain much imagery and text, there still exist spaces that are, for the most part, text-based.\u00a0 This is especially evident in academia.\u00a0 For example, academic journals, whether online or printed, are still primarily text. Pictures, graphics, and illustrations are used almost exclusively to illustrate a concept and, to my knowledge, have not yet included video.\u00a0 University texts and course-companions are primarily text as well. \u00a0Perhaps, as Bolter states, this is because \u201cwe still regard printed books and journals as the place to locate our most prestigious texts (Bolter, forthcoming).\u201d However, if literature and humanistic scholarship continues to be printed, it could be further marginalized within our culture (ibid).<\/p>\n
Despite there being a \u201cbreakout of the visual\u201d in both print and electronic media, Bolter makes a very strong argument that, text can never being eliminated in the electronic form that it currently exists.\u00a0 That is, all videos, images, animations, and virtual reality all exist on an underlying base of computer code. \u00a0\u00a0What might happen instead is the \u201cdevaluation of writing in comparison with perceptual presentation (Bolter, forthcoming).\u201d The World Wide Web is an example of this.\u00a0 The WWW provides a space in which millions of authors can write their own opinions; Bolter is, in fact, doing this for his forthcoming publication \u201cDegrees of Freedom\u201d.\u00a0 The difference between Bolter\u2019s text and others is that he uses minimal use of imagery and relies almost entirely on his prose to convey they meaning of his writing. \u00a0Be that as it may, Bolter contends that the majority of WWW authors use videos and graphics to illustrate their words (forthcoming). Text will remain a large part of how we learn absorb and communicate information, however, \u201cthe verbal text must now struggle to assert its legitimacy in a space increasingly dominated by visual modes of representation (Bolter, forthcoming).\u201d<\/p>\n
John<\/p>\n
References<\/strong><\/p>\n Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print<\/em> [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.<\/p>\n Bolter, Jay David. (forthcoming). Degrees of Freedom<\/em>. Retrieved November 28, 2009 from http:\/\/www.uv.es\/~fores\/programa\/bolter_freedom.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n