From Inner Space to Textual Space
Bolter (2001) in Chapter 3 of Writing Space brings up the idea of topos and topics as places as a way of describing hypertext. I think this idea really helps us organize how writing and reading are progressing not just now but also throughout the history of writing learned in Module 3.
As an initial premise I want ask how we perceive a topic or concept. For example, we’ll use ‘light.’ We immediately see in our mind what it looks like, experience the feel of it, associate positivity and negativity, connect to scientific understandings, and draw from our past experience and knowledge into our perception of the concept. In this way, a single concept carries a massive quantity of information and feels more like a three dimensional object than a linear series of phonetic sounds. What a writer does is try to reduce all these dimensions into one line on a page. This is what makes writing so difficult. We try to eliminate dimensions and as such, any sense of place. However, over time we’ve worked to restore that.
Speech has no sense of place. Ong (1984) discusses this concept in Orality and Literacy. Scrolls likewise were written without a sense of place or topos. When writers in Greek and Latin wrote, they didn’t include page breaks (as was the nature of scrolls), sub-headings or even spaces between words (Saenger, 1982). Ancient writing was a way of imitate, conveying and solidifying speech much like musical notation conveys how to play music. Only the reader had a sense of place in the text and the reader was only the medium between the audience and the text (Saenger, 1982). This lead to writing conventions that emphasized rhythmic and fluid prose that addressed an audience that did not necessarily present a “place” in writing. The flow was more important than the place.
With the invention of the codex, text was broken down. Chapters and indexes were written to help a reader access information in a non-linear way (Saenger, 1982). These modifications were made for the reader, not the audience. A reader could ask “where” is the text was the idea. Because the relationship of reading moved from text-to-audience with the reader as interpreter to text-to-reader, texts could take on more non-linear and visual forms. This culminated in highly illuminated texts and texts with marginal commentary beside the “place” in the text. In printed texts, writers usually use footnotes, endnotes and other notation to present relationships in a non-linear way
With hypertext, we move into more intricate non-linear relationships with text. Bolter (2001) suggests that texts can become less like lines of thought or speech but instead be trees of interconnected concepts each with their own “place.” Later on in Chapter 5, Bolter (2001) suggests that many encyclopaedists tried to create paths of non-linear association through organization systems like Adler’s Propaedia. However, they were cumbersome and difficult to use. In contrast, Wikipedia’s organizational system uses hypertext to create a network of text and fulfill what some encyclopaedists dreamed of. My own personal favourite example of this network is in Wikipedia’s Greek mythology pages. They are heavily hyperlinked because Greek myth has overlapping, contradictory and complex relationships between stories and characters. Wikipedia helps to present the relationships between concepts and help a reader perceive the relationships that linear text cannot accurately convey through creating places for each concept.
Over time, writers have been trying to convey their multi-dimensional world of thought more accurately. First through writing, then with commentary and intertextual connections and now with hypertext. I believe that the progression of writing technology might be the struggle to convey the complex and interconnected world of thought outside of our minds through the use of space and place (topos). Through each successive step, our writing technologies have helped improve how we convey relationships. So over time, we are becoming better communicators of complex thought.
Ong. Walter. (1982). Orality and Literacy. New York: Methuen.
Bolter. Jay David. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. New Jersey: Erlbaum.
Saenger. Paul. Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society, Jan 1, 1982; 13, Periodicals Archive Online pg. 367-414. Accessed June 24, 2015: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/1297911610?OpenUrlRefId=info:xri/sid:summon&accountid=14656
Image From: http://www.romansociety.org/nc/imago/searching-saving/page/29.html
Hi Bryan. Thank you for your clear explanation of Bolter’s (2001) concept of topos. You’ve explained how the remediations of writing, from linear scrolls to interconnected hypertext, have increased our ability to convey the complex, multidimensional concepts that we hold in our minds. Ong (2003) also explains the relationship between ‘places’ in the mind and the visible places in a document when he writes about the loci (the Latin equivalent of the Greek topos), and traces this concept to the art of rhetoric, at the intersection of orality and literacy. I think that your list of communication remediations could begin with speech, then writing and so on to hypertext, acknowledging that the first medium for conveying our thoughts is speech. When writing about electronic writing, Bolter (2001) tells us that “all previous writing technologies were virtual as well, in the sense that they invited writers and readers to participate in an abstract space of signs.” We first enter this abstract space through the use of spoken language which can only hint at the complexity of our thoughts.
Wikipedia’s Greek Mythology pages are a good example of how hypertext can effectively convey the interconnected stories of mythology. You’ve noted that these myths have “overlapping, contradictory and complex relationships”. It’s interesting to note that these myths originated in an oral culture, and are most effectively rendered in hypertext, instead of a more linear writing format. The oral presentation of these myths would have included more than simply verbal components, encompassing “a total, existential situation” (Ong, 2001). It may be that hypermedia comes closer to the immediacy of the oral presentation.
References:
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Ong, Walter J. (2003). Orality and Literacy. Routledge. Retrieved 31 May 2015, from