English 'must reflect technology'
We've got another report on our side! While I am a proponent of teaching writing to students with and without an emphasis on technology--whatever meets their needs and gets them to think critically about what they read and experience--it looks like the UK schools are acknowledging that "schools should take advantage of the range of texts now available to teach the language, including online." Full BBCNews article is
here.
That might be obvious to some of us who rely heavily on technology as students and teachers, but it's always good to have the big name reports behind you. Hawisher and Selfe's work has been advocating technological literacy in the US for years now but this looks like a national curriculum change in the UK. And it's a curriculum that describes its aims as to give "'substantial weight to personal, social and emotional education,' and value knowledge which falls outside traditional subject boundaries." Can we say party hearty time for the narrative? ;)
What I found interesting, especially with Ryan and me being in a course in the History of Rhetoric, is that "the report also said English needed to take account of the higher profile of the oral language in society. Speaking and listening skills are vital at work and should no longer be given second place." I sure as hell know that I didn't receive much training in speaking, so I would have loved this, although I kind of prefer winging it in an extemporaneous setting rather than giving a formal presentation.
Anyway I thought it was a good news piece to share on the blog because it brings us back to a pragmatic discussion. All of the readings we've done have emphasized the theories of new media and [a la Zuboff’s Smart Machine], how the computer “has now become a universal media machine—a tool used not only for production, but also for storage and distribution” (Manovich 4). This BBC article is evidence of the education system paying attention and reacting to this “media machine,” so I am looking forward to more of those types of discussions tonight!
And then I read something else.
So, now, Manovich seems to be confirming many of the things that Hansen was saying. Sure, the death of the artifact, the reality of representation, etc. etc.
However, what seems to be emerging, (and this is rightously creepy) is the death of the mediator, rather than the medium. What Manovich's analysis proposes, I think, is that in a post-symbolic world, mediation will not be necessary. But it is this mediation that creates human subjects, right? So what we're really talking about here is the (edit: potential) death of the human subject?
The kind of interactivity allowed by new media is such that it takes us further and further away from our bodies, while telling our brains that the digital objects that we interact with are the same as analog objects. At what point do we leave the analog bodies behind for digital ones?
Ahh, I don't know. It all sounds a bit too William Gibson to me. Still, it's kinda scary.
Why does it matter?
So it's all become clear to me. Well, sort of. While I was reading Hansen, I was thinking about how hard it is for me to read for long periods of time on the screen. I looked at the introduction and saw that it was 18 pages long, so I figured that printing it would not be a problem. Copying and pasting the piece of text wouldn't be a problem either. I am, after all, seeing pages on the screen. Hansen argues that the artifact is becoming less and less relevant. He's saying that the .pdf's we are reading for class that I am printing on real pages and trying to copy and paste onto this blog have become the artifact. Except here's the problem: while we're all looking at these .pdf's as actual (virtual) pages, it's taking a lifetime for my .pdf to print out because the computer is reading the .pdf as an image and sending it to the printer in that format. My copying and pasting is not happening because the .pdf is an image and not a piece of text. It really doesn't matter whether or not we "see" these new artifacts because the computer is not processing them that way.
And another thing
Rebecca Blood's brain works better than mine. I want to go back and edit posts as new ideas come to me, 'cause this way it's just going to be a jumble.
First, Hansen uses big words that confuse me. Second, I wish I had discovered this earlier. Sorry that my understanding's subject to evolution as I read.
Anyway, so I was thinking about what I was thinking about before, and that tablet PC (Which, I was told this weekend, is NOT the future. I think they were jealous.) really jumbles things up with the ability to write on pages. Now, from what I can tell, you're not really writing *on* the digital page-photograph, but instead on top of the page in a program that attaches itself to the page-thing. That's just really messing with me.
But how does the embodiment of a digital image differ from the embodiment of analog image? It goes through one more step of mediation, yes, but does this change the actual mechanism of embodiment? Am I really missing something here? Probably.
Help me out. Sometimes this sounds like McLuhan on steroids, that the medium is the only thing and even its message is fuzzy, and other times it sounds like as long as we think of an image as something (i.e. a book page) then that's what is.
Now, wait a minute. Maybe that makes sense. So we think of a digital object as a thing and interact with it as such, while the medium has a subtle effect on who we are as human subjects. The medium effects us while we look the other way, processing the (insignificant?) images.
And voila! Everybody's right. Cog. Psych and Philosophy skip happily down the lane with one another.
Wow. I think I just completly mischaracterized Hanson to suit my own needs.
Links from the weekend
Here are two links from I guy I met this weekend that I thought were nifty. One, you've probably already heard of:
www.narratives.org
The other is what one of the guys from the above site is doing.
www.roanoke.com/multimedia/crooked/interactive.html
So, yeah, about this death of media stuff
Hi everybody. Sorry I've not been able to post more. Much, much to say about this weekend, but I guesss that'll be more approoriate for class.
Anyway, I'm sitting here reading some of the pieces that have been posted, and I can'[t get over the fact that we're reading copies of actual books in a digital form. Were we to print them, we'd be printing out not copies of actual pages, but instead digital photographs of book pages.
This strikes me as freakishly odd for some reason. Of course, this kind of thing is about to blow up, what with digital libraries and whatnot. Also, with the ability to search .pdf's, these digital copies become far more convienient that hard copies.
But I can't get over the idea that something's being lost in the transition. This would be the introduction of the impurity of perception, if I'm reading all this right.
Ok, so, if a tree fall in the forest, it makes a sound. The sound waves are created, etc. etc. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but what Bergson's saying is that the sound only takes on the meaning of "tree falling" if we hear it and assign it that meaning. However, in doing so, we lose out on what the actual sound itself embodies, that being the unmediated moment of the creation of the actual sound. Or the unmediated moment of the tree falling. Or something. I think my brain just melted.
Back to the digital book page. So, we've got the 010011010 version of the page, which is not an actual copy of the page, but instead a photograph of the page, and a digital one at that. So, like, a representation of a representation and on and on and on. Does this mean that the digital copies takes on the properties of a photograph, with all that that entails, or that it remains a page? Would Bergson say that we percieve it as a page, when instead we should be looking at it as a photograph? Or a string of code?
So what does turning something into a .pdf do to it, and does it matter?
What do you guys think?
