Breaking up with the Book

As humans continually use computers as writing and reading tools, the problem with of pretending that they will function as physical texts (books, paper) always have, worsens. Just as Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola claim that the term “literacy” carries too much baggage to be presupposed onto every other term, the idea that the computer will enable us to continue learning, reading, and composing as we always have is an extremely detrimental view. 

This was obvious in the last few texts we’ve been reading, and one of the most distinctive points for me between traditional writing and the “new” kind is the fact that digital texts appear to be author-less and unfinished, and allow for easier manipulation of language through images and multimedia.

FINISH WHAT YOU START

Meyer: “Writing has always been a messy process of writing and rewriting and rewriting again, but that’s especially true when the medium of publication is itself stubbornly unfinished. That unfinishedness permits us a greater amount of experimentation and revision, two things which make writing better.”

The first time I really thought about this concept was in high school. I had an English teacher who was one of the first teachers that didn’t mind late assignments, and would accept revisions to papers you had previously turned in – something which we rarely even see in college level English classes. He actually promoted and encouraged us to edit, revise, and send it back into him. We certainly can call a paper finished and be done with it – but there is always the question of “Could I have done it better?” Or then we learn something new about our topic, and our learning continually goes farther and farther than the very permanent words that we wrote and turned in. 

I think that’s what digital media reminds us, especially in terms of hyperlinking and the ability to so quickly move to other texts: our learning and our ideas are always expanding; there are more and more ways that we can come up with to deliver an argument or pose and idea, and digital media leaves it so open – even to other author’s ideas, that it inconspicuously encourages us to continue our search for definition and completion of our ideas. It’s almost like the Platonic search for True forms. While we might never get there, we can certainly try.

I WROTE THIS?

Sonoski: “Because hyper-readers are invariantly hyper-writers of one type or another, they de-author the texts they read in the process of re-authoring them.” (171)

I feel like this is the quote I was searching for a few weeks ago – when I was trying to discuss how interpretation works. Not only are we reading a text, but by interpreting what they say in the various patterns of reading and making meaning, and are therefore re-writing the text to our own standards and our own way of thinking. 

While traditional literary critics observed that the author might be “dead," it becomes even more apparent when we put it onto a digital screen, with unfinished ideas, and then allow the reader to rewrite those ideas with their own experience.

IT’S ALIVE!

Ultimately, it’s obvious that the way humans think is no longer linked to the book and to the page, but instead to the computer. I agree with many of these articles that we need to begin looking at the computer as a writing tool – but also think of using it differently than we have before. Because it’s not a pencil and a page, and perhaps by creating programs that make it seem that we are writing long hand actually corrupts the very thing we are using. We need to let the true nature of the computer come alive: and realize that its true form comes in an image, and not solely text.