The Whole Body Labors No Longer: Remediation of Thought and Writing in the Modern Classroom

As Jay Bolter notes in Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, “[e]ach culture and each period has had its own complex economy of writing, a dynamic relationship among materials, techniques, genres, and cultural attitudes and uses”(2001, p. 21).   I would argue that the English classroom is in many ways a distillation of these materials, techniques, and uses. However, in my fifteen years of teaching, I have seen this economy undergo a remediation, in that “a newer medium takes place of an older one, borrowing and reorganizing the characteristics of writing in the older medium and reforming its cultural space” (Bolter, 2001, p. 23). This remediation has forced me to reconsider how children form and express their ideas and opinions, and through the readings presented in Module 3, I see how the shift in attitudes towards text through the ages of civilization– concurrent with shifting writing technologies – is mirrored in the choices my students make to formulate and express their ideas.

Ong states that “print both reinforces and transforms the effects of writing on thought and expression” (1982, p. 115).   With the invention of print, the notion of words as things or objects led to its commodification (Ong, 1982). In my classroom, I see two significant examples of this shift. The first is one that Ong acknowledges: plagiarism. This “private ownership of words”, fostered by the advent of print, is responsible for establishing rules and attitudes within the classroom that may be in danger of shifting in the remediation that takes learning and expression into the open domain of knowledge on the Internet. The second example of commodification is this “quantification of knowledge” (Ong, 1982, p. 127) that comes about when referring to the quality or validity of ideas as a word count. With the establishment of printed letters as units (Ong, 1982), literate cultures – and many students in my classes – have come to see the conveyance of thought in terms of the number of words, paragraphs, or pages. I might argue that this dynamic of quantifiability significantly determines how we negotiate and express ideas, certainly more so than in oral cultures. In many cases, the concept of a word count becomes the single most significant parameter – second to the topic – to a form of text-based expression. Students of all levels – from high school to graduate school – in some way associate the quality of a response with the amount of words used, something that likely did not occur in oral cultures.

Another classroom expectation that may reflect the remediation of oral and handwritten traditions into print is the notion of electronically printed final copies. Ong remarks that “printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form (1982, p. 129). Until recently, the modern classroom held draft versions of compositions in roughly the same regard as manuscripts of old, “in dialogue with the world outside their own borders” (Ong, 1982, p. 130). Students were openly encouraged to create an initial version of a composition that was subject to discussion and alteration, both with the reader and audience, and the reader and himself. Yet more and more do students and writers avoid this process, looking to create the final, authoritative, print version of their ideas seemingly from the moment they are conceived.

In today’s English classroom, the remediation of writing technology includes the practice of spontaneous editing and revision; changes are made seemingly before ideas are fully formed. At the very least, there appears to be an extreme blurring of the distinctions between thought, expression, and final, definitive statement. This no doubt due to the constant “backward-scanning” (Ong, 1982, p. 102) that Goody refers to. These distinctions become even more imperceptible when writing technologies move beyond the realm of electronic word processing for the purpose of physical printing, and into that of the Google Doc. No longer do students afford themselves the benefit of physically printing and submitting a document. The Google Doc has all the benefit of mutability provided by the wax tablet, combined with all the finality of a printing press. In this sense does Bolter see electronic writing as a “great refashioner, […] reintroducing characteristics that have belonged to a variety of marginal techniques of the past” (2001, p. 23).

Without suggesting technological determinism, the current remediation of writing technology appears to coincide with the emergence of the Net Generation and its proclivities toward expression in various non-traditional processes. From Don Tapscott’s article, “Net Geners Relate to New in New Ways” (2008), the latest generation of student favors speed, flexibility, and innovation as part of his mediation with the world. This can certainly be applied to students experiences in the classroom, where traditional notions of the writing process seem to be at risk of remediation, in response to students’ desires for speed and flexibility in reaching their perceived superlative form of expression. As seen in the examples given above, “electronic writing may […] participate in the restructuring of our whole economy of writing” (Bolter, 2001, p. 23).  Without even entering into the discussion of how video, audio, image or hyper-textuality remediate expression and literacy in the classroom, we can see how changes in writing technology have already fostered a restructuring in this regard.

References

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2^nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and Literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.

Tapscott, D. (2008). Net Geners Relate to News in New Ways. Nieman Reports; Winter2008 62(4) 18-19.