Final Reflection – Remediation
The image that accompanies this post was one I took a few weeks ago in San Mateo, California. I am staying in the downtown area, where there are many shops and restaurants, including a little used book shop called B Street Books. This sign hangs in their shop window and truly is a “sign of the times”, where one must differentiate between e-reading and “Books on Paper”. I felt it was a fitting image to sign off on the course materials with.
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As Bolter’s Writing Space was written in 2001, there have many developments that can both support and refute his questioning throughout Chapter 10. First, I would like to focus on the notion that “American culture encourages individualism” (Bolter, 2001, 88%); this is absolutely evident today, and was so even before the advent of the modern smartphone, tablet, or dominant social media networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Consumers continually look for increasingly personalized hardware and software, and as corporations are quickly fulfilling that need, the social drive for personalization becomes faster and stronger. However, I don’t know that personalization in and of itself is killing the writing spaces online in lieu of purely audio-visual modes. While services like YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat are currently booming, I would argue that with personalization brings choice in media production, with digital writing, blogging, and news articles still being very dominant within social spaces. Facebook has made a notable shift in the way that articles are linked, shared, and thumbnailed to garner more clicks, not to mention catchy titles that can be categorized as “click bait” themselves. Writing isn’t everything in these spaces obviously; audiovisual modes are a part of this phenomenon too, but it is almost as if they have blended in seamlessly, while the modern user flickers between modes without a conscious thought about it.
Text messaging is a great example of continued digital writing in modern society. Although inherently social in nature, texting forces us to rely predominantly on the written word in order to communicate. While phone calls, FaceTiming, Skyping, or Google Hangouts might be faster modes of communication in general, texting provides a more casual exchange overall, allowing users to reply synchronously or asynchronously as they please, without giving away their emotive state at the time of transmission. Add in emoticons and emojis to those conversations (the topic that I completed my Multimedia Project on), and one can also enforce the tone in which the message is supposed to be conveyed by the reader.
The “information age” Bolter (2001) mentions is, today, one of multimedia production, multimodal access, and multiliterate consumption and interaction. It is a personalized environment in which one can join distinct social circles, participate in special interest groups, and collaborate openly with perfect strangers to create change (read Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think [2013] for several incredible examples of this). Literacy in and of itself is forging an increasingly loaded definition in the modern age. I would argue that most adults today would not be considered “literate” by this new standard of literacy. The ability to flicker between modes of media and technology (as aforementioned), to utilize them to consume and craft responses and discourse, and to create unique, individualized works is how one may achieve literate status in the information age.
When reflecting on ETEC 540 as a whole, my biggest takeaway was to closely analyze the remediation of technologies over the course of history, continuing into today. Each new technology and development brings with it gains and losses, periods of adoption and abandonment, and only a select few have seemed to endure for the long term. Our use of new technologies often blends in with that of the old, rather than overtaking the old completely, and that is where my hope for a continued and celebrated age of writing stands, even if the texts look a little bit different than they used to.
References
Bolter, J. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, 2nd ed. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.