I discovered in that I am perhaps a print remediation casualty. Either that or I am completely normal. In returning to my studies, I discovered that I struggle to learn strictly through digital means. In other words, I need a hard copy, a highlighter and a notepad — handwritten notes are critical for me in the learning process, but herein lies the rub; I can’t think or write without a word processor. It‘s a bit of a paradox, or is it? Writing aids learning and computers aid thinking. Two different processes and two different media.
The ideas that caught my attention in this module were ideas around the book as a thing, self-contained, comfortable only with finality, giving birth to originality and creativity, independent of outside influence (Ong 123-131). The movement to this way of thinking was naturally slow and mediated by orality and limited literacy. It is deeply ingrained now, however, and suffering, among many conventions, a significant disruption in the form of hypertext.
Assuming that Ong is correct in citing printing as the origins of the ownership of words and that this influenced secondary orality into a tamer, less antagonistic, more controlled expression, mediated by the confines and conventions of print, then it is a natural progression to think about print and hypertext in the same fashion. Bolter suggests that we are in the late age of print and as such, “our culture as a whole may come to associate with text the qualities of the computer (flexibility, interactivity, speed of distribution), rather than those of print (stability and authority)” (11). He suggests also that “hypertext is not the end of print. It is instead the remediation of print” (28). The remediation disrupts conventions in educational best practice and shakes up the notion of originality.
Institutions of education may struggle to catch up to this print remediation because in hypermedia, “a literary work . . . is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language itself”, and in doing so, “subverts the concept of the text as self-sufficient, hermetic totality, foregrounding, in its stead, the fact that all literary production takes place in the presence of other texts” (Keep, C., McLaughlin, T., & Parmar, R. 1995). This intertextuality, in its remediation of print, shifts the educational focus, refreshingly, from originality and containment to one of fluidity and synthesized, critical expression, where “the reader’s own previous readings, experiences and position within the cultural formation also form crucial intertexts” (Keep et al.). This remediation stands to loosen some rigid and outdated ideas about original thinking.
References
Bolter, David J. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print
Keep, C., McLaughlin, T., & Parmar, R. (1995). The electronic labyrinth. Available: http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0228.html
Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge.
