- Email: [email protected]
Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print
Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 499–502
Book review
Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print Jay David Bolter (2nd ed.), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001, 232 pp. Matthew D. Barton The University of South Florida, 2914 Ramada Drive, Apt. 181, Tampa, FL 33620, USA
Jay David Bolter begins his second edition of Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print by acknowledging that electronic writing technologies have changed so much in the last nine years that much of what he wrote in the first edition is now obsolete. This obsolescence springs mostly from the rise of the World Wide Web, which brought hypermedia solidly into mainstream America. Bolter’s new edition analyzes the hypermedia phenomenon from many intriguing perspectives, all the while promising to show how “hypertext and other forms of writing remediate the forms and genres of print” (p. xii). Remediation, for Bolter, is not a matter of taking a stand against print, but rather of realizing the unique capabilities and rhetoric of hypermedia. To help us understand this new rhetoric, Bolter offers parallels to older writing technologies: the ancient papyrus roll, the codex, the medieval manuscript, and, finally, the printed book. Each of these technologies offered distinct practical advantages over their predecessors, but, more importantly, they brought change to the culture that produced them. Bolter demonstrates that whenever our culture remediated its primary writing technology, the way authors and readers conceived of writing also changed. The kind of conceptual change that Bolter now believes hypermedia is bringing to our culture is not leading towards a new kind of orality (a prophecy he made in the first edition), but rather to “an increased emphasis on visual” (p. xiii). Future writer will certainly have words at their disposal, yet their livelihood will depend on an ability to manipulate images. Of course, this change from the textual to the visual has been happening for many years thanks to cinema and television, but these technologies were expensive and exclusive. Few members of our culture had the power to create or commission these works. Email address: [email protected] (M.D. Barton). 8755-4615/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 8 7 5 5 - 4 6 1 5 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 1 3 9 - 1
500
Book review / Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 499–502
The ease with which even novice computer users can create and publish web pages, however, makes the trend towards visual communication more widespread than ever before. Bolter has taken time to consider the political and rhetorical implications of this shift towards the visual. In the well-designed web page, Bolter argues, the image is far more than a visual aid to help understand the text. Instead, text becomes a textual aid that brings order and unity to the images. Authors can no longer think of text as a transparent medium through which readers glimpse their ideas. Web surfers know that clicking a word on a web page may open a window, download a file, or bring them to another site. Words on the electronic screen are not always (or even usually) passive; they are active and usually serve as beacons. Almost every word one sees on the well-known Yahoo! homepage doubles as a “hot link” that, when clicked by the mouse, brings the viewer to another site or page. Modern web surfers expect the words they see to have this kind of function as well as a literal meaning. Bolter points out that the shift from the textual to the visual is also happening in popular magazines and newspapers: “Popular prose today seems constantly to be trying to become more visual and sensuous,” Bolter writes, “words no longer seem to carry conviction without the reappearance as a picture of the imagery that was latent in them” (p. 54). Bolter believes this cultural tide comes from the deep-set desire of humans to know things as they really are, rather than to receive them second- or third-hand via arbitrary symbol systems such as the alphabet. Hypermedia, which Bolter argues is a kind of picture writing, “refashions the qualities of both traditional picture writing and phonetic writing” (p. 58). As web-authoring software makes it easier for users to create dynamic, image-laden documents, standard prose will become more a liability than an asset. “It becomes hard to imagine how traditional prose could successfully compete with the dynamic and heterogeneous visual experience that the Web now offers,” Bolter writes (p. 70). This is one point that I find problematic. Unlike Bolter, I do not find it so difficult to imagine standard prose competing with hypermedia. If I did, why would I buy Bolter’s book? Like me, bookstore owners do not seem to be fretting over the competition from the web—indeed, one of the most popular web sites ever, Amazon.com, specializes in selling traditional printed books. Bolter also discusses how changes in writing technology change the “idea” of reading: “To read is to follow one path from among those suggested by the layout of the text,” Bolter explains (p. 100). In standard prose, the reader usually begins at page one and reads through to the end, although allusions, footnotes, and indexes can make a printed text more dynamic. In the case of the encyclopedia, readers seldom begin at the first page, but once they have found a useful entry, they read it from start to finish. Bolter argues that hypermedia forces the author and reader to carefully negotiate reading paths. Readers expect the third page of a print dictionary to contain the same text when they turn back to it, but readers of a web dictionary may discover that the “back” button takes them somewhere else, or to a different part of the page from before. Bolter best explains this feature of hypertext in the chapter of his book dealing with interactive fiction, a genre that evolved from computer games. Interactive fiction allows readers to choose how they wish to experience the narrative. Unlike a traditional print novel, which Bolter sees as fixed, an electronic interactive novel is dynamic. Readers of interactive novels have much more control over the text than the readers of print novels, mostly because the interactive novel brings the reader in as a participant of the writing process. For example, readers of a web novel
Book review / Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 499–502
501
might choose whether a character dies at one point of the narrative. Whichever choice they make will drastically affect the outcome of the story. Does this mean that interactive fiction gives readers more power over the narrative than traditional print fiction? Bolter argues that a web reader’s ability to make choices that affect the development and outcome of the narrative places her in a position of power. I question whether the ability to make such choices is advantageous not so much to the reader as it is to the writer. After all, I could publish a printed novel of blank pages and claim that it was even more dynamic than interactive hyper-fiction because the reader of my novel must write a story from scratch. I could also argue that print readers already have power in fiction, since they choose to read, recommend, or condemn. These are all intriguing points that I wish Bolter had pondered in his work. Bolter also argues that new authors need a new definition of authorship. Perhaps one of the most recurring themes in Bolter’s work is that the days of the single-authored, single-subject book are numbered. Bolter asks, “Why should a writer be forced to produce a single, linear argument when the writing space allows a writer to entertain and present several lines of thought at once?” (p. 107). What is far more likely to prove useful to hyper-readers are web sites that bring together arguments and thoughts from many different authors (including themselves). I wonder, though, about Bolter’s contention that these community-created texts, which do offer great potential to advance or contest knowledge, will inevitably become the chosen medium of a new generation of scholars. Such a change would require our entire culture to change from one that rewards individual achievement with one that celebrates, literally, the machine. Is such a change desirable? According to Bolter, the current generation certainly does not think so. In one of the most ironic critiques I have read on the subject of the scholar’s reticence to embrace digital writing, Bolter insists that “although the World Wide Web has become one of the most popular and economically favored forms of communication, the traditional academic essay as a form has not changed much, if at all” (p. 111). Even poststructuralists, whose discourse Bolter believes is most suited to hypermedia, have been unwilling to “challenge the voice of the text by experimenting with hypertextual form” (p. 112). Though hypermedia makes dynamic arguments easy and even obligatory, poststructuralists have eschewed the medium in favor of print—which Bolter suggests can only poorly imitate an actual dialogue. Hypertext can imitate real dialogue best by implementing “chat rooms,” which capture the users’ keyboard input and reproduce it for all other visitors to see. I would challenge Bolter’s assertions here by pointing out that hypertext dialogues only speed up dialogues that also take place in print. After all, no book truly contains the “last word” on a subject; it is always up to some future scholar to update, re-interpret, or challenge such a book by printing her own. Hypermedia’s dynamism, for me, is found in its speed and cost advantage over print media. Bolter writes, “Although scholars are aware that popular culture is using new media to renegotiate the relationship between the verbal and the audiovisual, they continue to write about this renegotiation in printed essays, often without images” (p. 113). Of course, Bolter is not innocent of this hypocrisy either; after all, Writing Space contains few images. With the exception of a unique in-text system (such as ≥54) to refer his reader to a related discussion in another part of his book, Bolter’s text does not deviate from the conventional scholarly monograph. What makes Bolter’s criticism of these scholarly curmudgeons even more ironic
502
Book review / Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 499–502
is that the web site advertised in his last chapter was not functional at the time of this writing. Perhaps this could be a reason for so many scholars preferring print. Another reason for this preference might be to achieve the notoriety that scholars like Bolter acquire when they publish books! If Bolter had produced a web page instead of a book, would I be reviewing him now in a scholarly (print) journal? I wish that Bolter had addressed these perplexing ironies. Still, I do not feel that these ironies reduce the effectiveness of Writing Space. Any printed book that attempts to do what Bolter has attempted could not avoid them. Within 232 pages, Bolter covers everything from the evolution of hypermedia (from ancient oral poetry) to how it is informed by critical theory and shapes writing the self. As computer technology advances and becomes more available, compositionists will face tough questions and challenges, and Writing Space is full of them: “Will written verbal communication come to be regarded as an ancillary form, to be used when microphones or cameras fail or when the Internet connection is degraded?” (p. 213). Bolter does not claim to know the answer to such questions. Instead, he explores them thoughtfully and honestly, not seeking so much to “shut the case” as to open it wider for investigation. As a compositionist with a professional interest in computers, I find Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print a great investment in time and money. It is the kind of book that inspires a thousand other books. Bolter’s style is never convoluted or obscure; his tone retains a good balance between scholarly and conversational. I know many of my colleagues avoid composition books about computers because they dread computer jargon or esoteric programming theories; they have nothing to fear here. Indeed, I highly recommend this book to instructors of courses in computers and composition, computers and society, or any such course that strives to make students aware of the relationship between computers, culture, and composition. I would also offer this book to experienced scholars and computer programmers who seek a fuller grasp of the current conversations in the field of computers and composition. This is a book that readers will want to keep within easy reach. Matt Barton teaches writing at the University of South Florida in Tampa. His interests are rhetoric, visual rhetoric, computers, and history.
Book review
Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print Jay David Bolter (2nd ed.), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001, 232 pp. Matthew D. Barton The University of South Florida, 2914 Ramada Drive, Apt. 181, Tampa, FL 33620, USA
Jay David Bolter begins his second edition of Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print by acknowledging that electronic writing technologies have changed so much in the last nine years that much of what he wrote in the first edition is now obsolete. This obsolescence springs mostly from the rise of the World Wide Web, which brought hypermedia solidly into mainstream America. Bolter’s new edition analyzes the hypermedia phenomenon from many intriguing perspectives, all the while promising to show how “hypertext and other forms of writing remediate the forms and genres of print” (p. xii). Remediation, for Bolter, is not a matter of taking a stand against print, but rather of realizing the unique capabilities and rhetoric of hypermedia. To help us understand this new rhetoric, Bolter offers parallels to older writing technologies: the ancient papyrus roll, the codex, the medieval manuscript, and, finally, the printed book. Each of these technologies offered distinct practical advantages over their predecessors, but, more importantly, they brought change to the culture that produced them. Bolter demonstrates that whenever our culture remediated its primary writing technology, the way authors and readers conceived of writing also changed. The kind of conceptual change that Bolter now believes hypermedia is bringing to our culture is not leading towards a new kind of orality (a prophecy he made in the first edition), but rather to “an increased emphasis on visual” (p. xiii). Future writer will certainly have words at their disposal, yet their livelihood will depend on an ability to manipulate images. Of course, this change from the textual to the visual has been happening for many years thanks to cinema and television, but these technologies were expensive and exclusive. Few members of our culture had the power to create or commission these works. Email address: [email protected] (M.D. Barton). 8755-4615/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 8 7 5 5 - 4 6 1 5 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 1 3 9 - 1
500
Book review / Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 499–502
The ease with which even novice computer users can create and publish web pages, however, makes the trend towards visual communication more widespread than ever before. Bolter has taken time to consider the political and rhetorical implications of this shift towards the visual. In the well-designed web page, Bolter argues, the image is far more than a visual aid to help understand the text. Instead, text becomes a textual aid that brings order and unity to the images. Authors can no longer think of text as a transparent medium through which readers glimpse their ideas. Web surfers know that clicking a word on a web page may open a window, download a file, or bring them to another site. Words on the electronic screen are not always (or even usually) passive; they are active and usually serve as beacons. Almost every word one sees on the well-known Yahoo! homepage doubles as a “hot link” that, when clicked by the mouse, brings the viewer to another site or page. Modern web surfers expect the words they see to have this kind of function as well as a literal meaning. Bolter points out that the shift from the textual to the visual is also happening in popular magazines and newspapers: “Popular prose today seems constantly to be trying to become more visual and sensuous,” Bolter writes, “words no longer seem to carry conviction without the reappearance as a picture of the imagery that was latent in them” (p. 54). Bolter believes this cultural tide comes from the deep-set desire of humans to know things as they really are, rather than to receive them second- or third-hand via arbitrary symbol systems such as the alphabet. Hypermedia, which Bolter argues is a kind of picture writing, “refashions the qualities of both traditional picture writing and phonetic writing” (p. 58). As web-authoring software makes it easier for users to create dynamic, image-laden documents, standard prose will become more a liability than an asset. “It becomes hard to imagine how traditional prose could successfully compete with the dynamic and heterogeneous visual experience that the Web now offers,” Bolter writes (p. 70). This is one point that I find problematic. Unlike Bolter, I do not find it so difficult to imagine standard prose competing with hypermedia. If I did, why would I buy Bolter’s book? Like me, bookstore owners do not seem to be fretting over the competition from the web—indeed, one of the most popular web sites ever, Amazon.com, specializes in selling traditional printed books. Bolter also discusses how changes in writing technology change the “idea” of reading: “To read is to follow one path from among those suggested by the layout of the text,” Bolter explains (p. 100). In standard prose, the reader usually begins at page one and reads through to the end, although allusions, footnotes, and indexes can make a printed text more dynamic. In the case of the encyclopedia, readers seldom begin at the first page, but once they have found a useful entry, they read it from start to finish. Bolter argues that hypermedia forces the author and reader to carefully negotiate reading paths. Readers expect the third page of a print dictionary to contain the same text when they turn back to it, but readers of a web dictionary may discover that the “back” button takes them somewhere else, or to a different part of the page from before. Bolter best explains this feature of hypertext in the chapter of his book dealing with interactive fiction, a genre that evolved from computer games. Interactive fiction allows readers to choose how they wish to experience the narrative. Unlike a traditional print novel, which Bolter sees as fixed, an electronic interactive novel is dynamic. Readers of interactive novels have much more control over the text than the readers of print novels, mostly because the interactive novel brings the reader in as a participant of the writing process. For example, readers of a web novel
Book review / Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 499–502
501
might choose whether a character dies at one point of the narrative. Whichever choice they make will drastically affect the outcome of the story. Does this mean that interactive fiction gives readers more power over the narrative than traditional print fiction? Bolter argues that a web reader’s ability to make choices that affect the development and outcome of the narrative places her in a position of power. I question whether the ability to make such choices is advantageous not so much to the reader as it is to the writer. After all, I could publish a printed novel of blank pages and claim that it was even more dynamic than interactive hyper-fiction because the reader of my novel must write a story from scratch. I could also argue that print readers already have power in fiction, since they choose to read, recommend, or condemn. These are all intriguing points that I wish Bolter had pondered in his work. Bolter also argues that new authors need a new definition of authorship. Perhaps one of the most recurring themes in Bolter’s work is that the days of the single-authored, single-subject book are numbered. Bolter asks, “Why should a writer be forced to produce a single, linear argument when the writing space allows a writer to entertain and present several lines of thought at once?” (p. 107). What is far more likely to prove useful to hyper-readers are web sites that bring together arguments and thoughts from many different authors (including themselves). I wonder, though, about Bolter’s contention that these community-created texts, which do offer great potential to advance or contest knowledge, will inevitably become the chosen medium of a new generation of scholars. Such a change would require our entire culture to change from one that rewards individual achievement with one that celebrates, literally, the machine. Is such a change desirable? According to Bolter, the current generation certainly does not think so. In one of the most ironic critiques I have read on the subject of the scholar’s reticence to embrace digital writing, Bolter insists that “although the World Wide Web has become one of the most popular and economically favored forms of communication, the traditional academic essay as a form has not changed much, if at all” (p. 111). Even poststructuralists, whose discourse Bolter believes is most suited to hypermedia, have been unwilling to “challenge the voice of the text by experimenting with hypertextual form” (p. 112). Though hypermedia makes dynamic arguments easy and even obligatory, poststructuralists have eschewed the medium in favor of print—which Bolter suggests can only poorly imitate an actual dialogue. Hypertext can imitate real dialogue best by implementing “chat rooms,” which capture the users’ keyboard input and reproduce it for all other visitors to see. I would challenge Bolter’s assertions here by pointing out that hypertext dialogues only speed up dialogues that also take place in print. After all, no book truly contains the “last word” on a subject; it is always up to some future scholar to update, re-interpret, or challenge such a book by printing her own. Hypermedia’s dynamism, for me, is found in its speed and cost advantage over print media. Bolter writes, “Although scholars are aware that popular culture is using new media to renegotiate the relationship between the verbal and the audiovisual, they continue to write about this renegotiation in printed essays, often without images” (p. 113). Of course, Bolter is not innocent of this hypocrisy either; after all, Writing Space contains few images. With the exception of a unique in-text system (such as ≥54) to refer his reader to a related discussion in another part of his book, Bolter’s text does not deviate from the conventional scholarly monograph. What makes Bolter’s criticism of these scholarly curmudgeons even more ironic
502
Book review / Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 499–502
is that the web site advertised in his last chapter was not functional at the time of this writing. Perhaps this could be a reason for so many scholars preferring print. Another reason for this preference might be to achieve the notoriety that scholars like Bolter acquire when they publish books! If Bolter had produced a web page instead of a book, would I be reviewing him now in a scholarly (print) journal? I wish that Bolter had addressed these perplexing ironies. Still, I do not feel that these ironies reduce the effectiveness of Writing Space. Any printed book that attempts to do what Bolter has attempted could not avoid them. Within 232 pages, Bolter covers everything from the evolution of hypermedia (from ancient oral poetry) to how it is informed by critical theory and shapes writing the self. As computer technology advances and becomes more available, compositionists will face tough questions and challenges, and Writing Space is full of them: “Will written verbal communication come to be regarded as an ancillary form, to be used when microphones or cameras fail or when the Internet connection is degraded?” (p. 213). Bolter does not claim to know the answer to such questions. Instead, he explores them thoughtfully and honestly, not seeking so much to “shut the case” as to open it wider for investigation. As a compositionist with a professional interest in computers, I find Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print a great investment in time and money. It is the kind of book that inspires a thousand other books. Bolter’s style is never convoluted or obscure; his tone retains a good balance between scholarly and conversational. I know many of my colleagues avoid composition books about computers because they dread computer jargon or esoteric programming theories; they have nothing to fear here. Indeed, I highly recommend this book to instructors of courses in computers and composition, computers and society, or any such course that strives to make students aware of the relationship between computers, culture, and composition. I would also offer this book to experienced scholars and computer programmers who seek a fuller grasp of the current conversations in the field of computers and composition. This is a book that readers will want to keep within easy reach. Matt Barton teaches writing at the University of South Florida in Tampa. His interests are rhetoric, visual rhetoric, computers, and history.