Reading open-ended texts

Steven Johnson on the future of reading. (via explore-blog)

Probably the biggest change is going to come from the changed definition of what we’re reading. More and more, texts will evolve the way Wikipedia entries evolve; the idea of a finished text, where all the words have been locked down, will start to seem a little less orthodox—something you’d expect from a novel, but not from a magazine article, say. And that open-endedness will likely mean that the reader is capable of participating, adding links, commenting, suggesting new avenues for exploration, fact-checking. So we’ll have to read in an even more focused way, I suspect, knowing that we can have a say in where the text eventually goes. So there you go: ebooks and digital text are keeping us from skimming *and* forcing us to engage with the text more directly. Who would have thought it?

Source: blog.findings.com

Summary

“Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies” - Siegfried J. Schmidt

Central issue: media culture studies as a research program

    “How do we construe our realities via cognition and communication by media use? How do the technical and institutional conditions of a specific system of media or of networks of media systems shape our thinking, feeling, remembering, and value orientation? Is there an a priori set of media techniques?” (SJS, p.7)

A history of literary studies:

  •  Hermeneutic position: “They favored exclusively text-immanent analysis (…) which excluded the contexts in which literary texts are produced, distributed, received, and post-processed.” (SJS, p.2)

                > Literary texts = “(…) ontological self-contained entities whose interpretation could only be achieved by specially gifted scholars, since (…) interpretation cannot be learned.” (Ibid.)
                                > Remark: Signifies that the process of attributing position, value or worth is obscured in a institutionalized environment.

  •  Pragmatic position: “The more or less homogeneous hermeneutic mainstream was replaced gradually by a number of rivaling approaches (…) characterized by a strict disbelief in masters, authorities, and intuition, and a strict belief in rationality, explicitness and precise terminology as a solid bases for teaching and learning literary scholarship in a scientific way[1] (…).” (SJS, p.3)

                > Literature = social phenomenon/phenomena

  •  Communicative position: (Schmidt & ELS) “(…) move from literary texts to the literary system.” (Ibid.)

                > Literary system = “(…) the mutual interaction of four domains of activities: 1) the production, 2) the distribution, 3) the reception, and 4) the post-processing of literary texts.” (Ibid.)
                                > Social literary system = “(…) defined by the self-organizing interaction of four types of processes (…) [related to] matters deemed literary by the agents in these processes.” (SJS, p.4)
                                > Semiotic literary system = “(…) the complete set of phenomena deemed literary texts by a social community in a specific period.” (Ibid.)
                                                » Remark: “Regarding the semiotic system, two interrelations have to be taken into account: the interrelations between the items in the semiotic system (intertextuality) (…) and the interrelation between semiotic items and value systems which single out these items as literary texts.” (Ibid.)
                > Literary texts = “(…) result of highly conditioned social processes[2].” (SJS, pp.3-4)

Observations:

  •  “(…) literature is but one medium among and competing with other media and that is the whole media system of a society which establishes the difference of management in every usage of media offers. In other words, the literary system is embedded in the media system of a society.” (SJS, p.6)
    + “Literary texts as special media offers produced and treated by a special social system, namely the literary system, play a specific role compared to all other media offers with regard to all relevant perspectives. Their production, distribution, reception, and post-processing on the one hand differs from that of other media offers, on the other hand it has to be redefined with the advent to any new media system.” (SJS, p.7)

                > “Above all, new media tend to transform traditional concepts of author, recipient, meaning, distribution, information, creativity, fiction, etc.” (SJS, p.6)
                                » “The introduction of private broadcasting (1980s) and the rapid growth of the internet (since 1994) gradually transformed industrial societies into media societies. (…) Media systems served as instruments by which societies observed themselves and by which media systems observed one another.” (Ibid.)
                                                »> Concequence:“People learnt the lesson that most of what they knew they knew via media.” (Ibid.)
                                                + “Since all and everything can be observed, everyone learns to know that everything could be seen and done in another way, i.e., the experience of contingency becomes omnipresent.” (Ibid.)
                                                                                > These observations are similar to the observations of the New London Group.

  •  “There is enough empirical evidence to show that students nearly never read in their leisure time what they are forced to read and to interpret in school.” (SJS, p.5)

                > Guideline questions for education:
                “What is the function of literary instruction, what are the long term effects, and how do students understand this part of their education?” (Ibid.)


[1] Remark: “We underlined again and again that empiricity should not be misread as search for objectivity or truth. Instead, the claim for empiricity signaled the intention to concentrate on social processes which resulted in literary phenomena through the activities of literary agents and to realize this concentration in an empirically intersubjective way.” (SJS, p.5)

[2] On collective knowledge:
Collective knowledge as canonical scripts (cf. Bruner)
“Collective knowledge is not to be understood as an entity but as the result of the processes of reflexivity, thus encompassing the cognitive ‘content’ of the expectation(s) agents attribute to each other as collective knowledge in the sense of an operative function.” (SJS, p.7)
                > Scripts and Imagined Communities (cf. Anderson)
                “A model of reality is established by the social-reflexive references of agents enacted through actions and communications and it is solidified as a symbolic-semantic order by /of language.” (Ibid.)
                + “Collective knowledge is ‘passed on’ to new members of a society via processes of socialization. It becomes collectively effective by virtue of the operative fiction that everyone expects everyone else to dispose of basically the same kind of knowledge.” (Ibid.)
                                » Wittgensteinian philosophy:
                                “The model of reality must necessarily be presupposed as valid for all members of a society so that agents may, in situation-specific operations of distinction, ‘make sense’ by reference of this model and communication such sense socially by means of linguistic references.” (Ibid.)
                                                > Humans as symbol-users (cf. Burke)
                                                “Language permits the schematized designation and the designative constancy of categories and semantic differentiations for all the members of a society, in that it stabilizes collectively the possibilities of concrete references by means of semiotic materialities (signs).” (Ibid.)

»> Culture as a program:
“(…) ‘culture’ as I understand it does not feature as an observable entity ‘existing as an object’. Culture as a program realizes itself in concrete actions, as performed by agents in the form of offers of options and schematizations of options for purposes of reference to the model of reality valid for all the agents of a society who make use of precisely these functions and expect all other agents to proceed grosso modo likewise.” (SJS, p.8)
                > “Models of reality and cultural programs (…) do not only co-emerge, they form a mutually constitutive framework of interactive dependencies in the sense of general system theory.” (Ibid.)

Source: docs.lib.purdue.edu

Summary

“What’s Next for Text?” – Richard A. Lanham

Observation: “All text is digital in origin. Fixed print has become printout, one substrate of expression for a pre-existing digital code. (…) Other, digital, displays (…) now compete with the printed page for final display. These digital displays can recreate the full electronic expressive space, a three-dimensional, dynamic world, as the flat, fixed world of print cannot.” (RAL, p.16)

Central issue: “(…) books are not going to die, and neither is the literature contained in them. That is not the question the future market place will debate.” (Ibid.)
   > “(…) the competing substrates for textual display find themselves surrounded by a larger sphere in which text must compete against image and sound in all kinds of mixtures, many of them much newer, more complex, and more adroit than our familiar villain, broadcast television.” (RAL, p.16-17)

Presumption: “We hear on every side that we are living in an information economy (…). But information is not scarce. We are drowning in it. The scarce commodity is the human attention required to make sense of the data tsunami.” (RAL, p.17)
   » ATTENTION ECONOMY
                > Not new to anyone who is in the business of communication (like authors)…
                                “The typographical conventions and metaphorical densities which separated prose from poetry were also decisions about how to compete for readerly attention. So were the basic decisions about verbal style (…). So were the rhetorical figures of sound and arrangement (…). Superimposed on the traditional choice of styles, prose or verse, a new layer of stylistic choice faces anyone who would communicate in text. What display device do I choose? And what stylistic rules come with it?” (Ibid.)

Rhetoric of print:
   (Ong) “(…) the perfect rhetoric would be to have no rhetoric at all. Thought becomes a private, or even an antisocial enterprise.[1]” (RAL, p.20)                           
                “Text (…) seeks to monopolize our attention.”
                                > creation of “(…) a fixed two-dimensional space from which the distractions of ordinary three-dimensional behavioral space have been carefully sieved out (…).”(RAL, p.21)
                                                > juxtaposition of orality (auditory) and literacy (visual)
                                                                > Odd because in everyday communication, speech relies heavily on gestures (thus: combination of sound and image).
                                                                “Gesture, and the presentation of self of which it forms a central part, constitute an enormous band of our expressive spectrum.” (RAL, p.20)
                                                > construction of two-dimensional space
                                                                > Odd because “(…) vision for the two-eyed Homo sapiens is a stereo, a three-dimensional spatial event, and three-dimensional spaces was outlawed by the flat, consecutive text created by the Greek alphabet.” (RAL, p.26)

“When our reference point is stuff, when physical objects are what is ‘really real’, than our attitude toward these objects, our attention, while real enough, is fundamentally derivative. (…) Stuff doesn’t change. Our attitudes toward it change all the time. (…) When the scarce commodity is not stuff, however, but the attention we bestow on it, then change is not the special case of stasis but vice versa. Stasis is the printout, the snapshot; change is the underlying reality, the enduring code.”  (RAL, p.34)

»> “The whole weight of these alternative display modes [interactive/hyperactive/dynamic text] recaptures this history [illuminated manuscripts/illustrated or animated text] instead of (…) repudiating it. We have always craved rich, mixed, competitive, antiphonal signals.” (RAL, p.21)
   > “We were born into three dimensions, not two (…), and we feel intuitively at home nowhere else. We can read silently in two dimensions, but part of us always wants to get back to the world we evolved in.” (RAL, p.28)
   > “We want to be able to read in layers, for main arguments, secondary ones, detailed evidence, in ways not linear but, as now we must call them, hypertextual.” (RAL, p.25)
                > “Computer graphics has been intensely self-conscious about the act of seeing from its beginnings, necessarily so if it is to recreate the visual world as it has done.” (RAL, p.27)
                                > “When reading text in three dimensions, the reader’s ‘position’ or ‘viewpoint’become literalized. The primary stylistic, and social, skill, situational awareness, takes on a three-dimensional positional equivalent.” (RAL, p.23)
                                                »> “They are making us see how we see, and doing this around a core of letters.” (RAL, p.27)


[1] “You can argue with a printed text but you can’t make it change its mind.” (RAL, p.20)

Source: proftgreene.pbworks.com