blogging as new literacy paradigm

Tales from the blogosphere:
Blogging is the new .... whatever
Blogging as digital text paradigm


Case study of blogging. To what extent does blogging constitute an exemplary form of digital textuality

Newness but also informed by analogue practices

Technological affordances ate strong but so too are established analogue cultural practices.


Blog structure reinforces notion of single authorial voice.

Rather than merging or blurring notions of writers and readers, blogs' dual structure clearly demarcates the two roles.

Comparisons
Blog as
Bedroom
Diary
Online space to compensate for offline

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Interesting discussion board exchanges with Jackie

Subject: Re:Halliday and Kress	Topic: Discussions Task 2
Author: Anthony McNeill	Date: 15 November 2008 10:38

This thread's a bit .. um ... threadbare so I thought I'd post something. I'll try to answer Julia's question but will finish on a rant ... I struggled with this activity a bit as I couldn't readily apply what I'd read to the Shrek and HP web sites. There didn't seem to be an obvious connection between the Halliday (about early years language development and learning) and Kress (about images and learning) texts. The 'Introduction to the grammar of visual design', heavily informed by Kress and van Leeuwen's Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, looked a much more relevant text, with lots of concepts to apply to a 'reading' of the two sites. Reading Kress (draft chapter not interview) again though, a few lines struck me;

As the screens are becoming simultaneously the sites of multimodal texts, these are becoming read in accordance with the spatial logic of image.

The point he's making is that images - and screen-based texts operating according to the "spatial logic of the image" - don't necessarily have a fixed reading path; there are multiple lines of inquiry readers can follow according to their needs/preferences. Our two web sites allow this via a menu/site structure that encourages random clicking until you alight upon stuff that floats your boat. Kress cites another writer that makes this very point:

... information is material which is selected by individuals to be transformed by them into knowledge to solve a problem in their life-world’ (Boeck, 2003)

In a non-linear text - and a screen-based one whose underlying logic is that of the image is non-linear - users can make selections that are personally meaningful; they don't have to read the whole lot. The final extract I found interesing is this one:

To return to reading just for one moment: in the former situation, reading aimed to gain truth to the original authority of the text, which delivered knowledge; now reading aims for a truth which arises out of the individual’s interest. The former is now unlikely to deliver relevant knowledge; the latter can. Indeed, reading is now close to the making of the text: it is sign-making on the basis of engagement with materials ‘in the world’.

Kress sets up a binary: print-based texts are all about authorial authority and author-controlled meaning; screen-based texts are spaces where authority has been decentred and where meaning making resides with the reader.'Then' readers had to make do with pushy writers deciding what was meaningful; 'now' readers can select, filter, combine and make meaning. I'm not so sure about this. I think readers of print-based texts have always made personally relevant meanings of the texts they read; Emma Bovary reading herself in the fiction of Walter Scott, Roland Barthes reading himself in the work of Proust or the adolescent reading his/her life in current teen fiction or film. And do we always read linear print-based texts in a linear way? I read The Old Curiosity Shop a few years ago and found myself skipping the drippy, Victorianly sentimental chapters featuring Little Nell and her grandad so I could get back to the funny-grotesque chapters with Quilp and Dick Swiveller. I don't lose agency just because I pick up a book; I don't gain it because I log onto a computer. Is there a chapter to be written on 'Kress and technological determinism'? Reflection and rant over. I'm going to have a nice cup of tea and a lie down now ...

Subject: Re:Halliday and Kress	Topic: Discussions Task 2
Author: Jackie	Date: 16 November 2008 17:16

hope that was a nice cup of tea Tony. Here's a biscuit to go with it. I think it is the extent to which technologies determine reading paths which is important. I am more inclined to read sequentially through a novel (even if I do skip a few pages here and there) than a web site. And I agree with Kress's basic point about the authority of the text becoming more decentralised...again, it isn't a binary, as you point out, more a question of degree.

Subject: Re:Halliday and Kress	Topic: Discussions Task 2
Author: Anthony McNeill	Date: 16 November 2008 18:10

Hi Jackie, Thanks for the biccie - I feel much better now! You write "I am more inclined to read sequentially through a novel (even if I do skip a few pages here and there) than a web site". Are we comparing like for like though in terms of genre? Could genre be more important than technological platform in informing reading paths? I'll read a novel sequentially too but will dip in and out of a collection of academic essays (e.g. 'Multiliteracies'), selecting what's interesting/relevant to me (i.e. activities Kress associated with screen-based texts). It's entirely possible that some web sites will predispose (I prefer 'predispose' to 'determine') readers to adopt a more linear reading path with less branching off. I feel that Kress may be inaccurately homogenising digital texts. Finally, here's a screenshot of strangely usable but suspect iPhone app called 'Classics':

Subject: Re:Halliday and Kress	Topic: Discussions Task 2
Author: Jackie	Date: 20 November 2008 09:01

oh, where do you get that app from, Tony? yes you are right about genre and the way in which the reading of novels is similar across platforms but I still feel the affordances of page and screen are different and lead to different behaviour in the main . You migth also be interested in Karen Littau - 'Theories of reading: Books, bodies and bibliomania. 2006 Polity press

Subject: Re:Halliday and Kress	Topic: Discussions Task 2
Author: Anthony McNeill	Date: 21 November 2008 10:59

Thanks for the ref Jackie - it looks really interesting. The app is from the iTunes Store. I bought it out of curiosity really - to trace the iPod's shift from audio, to video, to smart phone, to portable gaming device and now, potentially, to Kindle or Sony Reader competitor. It's interesting though that we have 'new' technology (iPhone or iPod Touch) but 'old' ethos -the texts that come with the app are canonical and arranged in a bookcase!

Really interesting your comment that "the affordances of page and screen are different and lead to different behaviour in the main". I think I'm uncomfortable with the view that the properties of technologies "lead" users to behaviours that can be easily predicted. There is some technological shaping of social action certainly, but also so many other contextual factors at play too that skew how we interact with print or screen-based texts. My hunch is that the history of technology is a history of users doing things they weren't supposed, or expected, to do with it.

JM writes "I am more inclined to read sequentially through a novel (even if I do skip a few pages here and there) than a web site". Are we comparing like for like though in terms of genre? Could genre be more important than technological platform in informing reading paths? I'll read a novel sequentially too but will dip in and out of a collection of academic essays (e.g. 'Multiliteracies'), selecting what's interesting/relevant to me (i.e. activities Kress associated with screen-based texts). It's entirely possible that some web sites will predispose (I prefer 'predispose' to 'determine') readers to adopt a more linear reading path with less branching off. I feel that Kress may be inaccurately homogenising digital texts.

Kress on page to screen

Discussion board post from 15th November 2008:

This thread's a bit .. um ... threadbare so I thought I'd post something. I'll try to answer Julia's question but will finish on a rant ...

I struggled with this activity a bit as I couldn't readily apply what I'd read to the Shrek and HP web sites. There didn't seem to be an obvious connection between the Halliday (about early years language development and learning) and Kress (about images and learning) texts.

The Introduction to the grammar of visual design, heavily informed by Kress and van Leeuwen's Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, looked a much more relevant text, with lots of concepts to apply to a 'reading' of the two sites.

Reading Kress (draft chapter not interview) again though, a few lines struck me;

As the screens are becoming simultaneously the sites of multimodal texts, these are becoming read in accordance with the spatial logic of image.

The point he's making is that images - and screen-based texts operating according to the "spatial logic of the image" - don't necessarily have a fixed reading path; there are multiple lines of inquiry readers can follow according to their needs/preferences.

Our two web sites allow this via a menu/site structure that encourages random clicking until you alight upon stuff that floats your boat.

Kress cites another writer that makes this very point:

... information is material which is selected by individuals to be transformed by them into knowledge to solve a problem in their life-world’ (Boeck, 2003)

In a non-linear text - and a screen-based one whose underlying logic is that of the image is non-linear - users can make selections that are personally meaningful; they don't have to read the whole lot.

The final extract I found interesing is this one:

To return to reading just for one moment: in the former situation, reading aimed to gain truth to the original authority of the text, which delivered knowledge; now reading aims for a truth which arises out of the individual’s interest. The former is now unlikely to deliver relevant knowledge; the latter can. Indeed, reading is now close to the making of the text: it is sign-making on the basis of engagement with materials ‘in the world’.

Kress sets up a binary: print-based texts are all about authorial authority and author-controlled meaning; screen-based texts are spaces where authority has been decentred and where meaning making resides with the reader.'Then' readers had to make do with pushy writers deciding what was meaningful; 'now' readers can select, filter, combine and make meaning.

I'm not so sure about this. I think readers of print-based texts have always made personally relevant meanings of the texts they read; Emma Bovary reading herself in the fiction of Walter Scott, Roland Barthes reading himself in the work of Proust or the adolescent reading his/her life in current teen fiction or film.

And do we always read linear print-based texts in a linear way? I read The Old Curiosity Shop a few years ago and found myself skipping the drippy, Victorianly sentimental chapters featuring Little Nell and her grandad so I could get back to the funny-grotesque chapters with Quilp and Dick Swiveller.

I don't lose agency just because I pick up a book; I don't gain it because I log onto a computer. Is there a chapter to be written on 'Kress and technological determinism'?

Reflection and rant over. I'm going to have a nice cup of tea and a lie down now ...

Microcontent

I came across this quotation:

After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate - database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other. (Manovich, Database as a Symbolic Form) http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2007/10/05/lev-manovich-on-user-generated-content-video-vortex/

Not sure where I'm going with it yet. It's about 'microcontent' - disparate bits that might be reused and shaped into a narrative.

Digital Textuality and Dadaist aesthetics

I came across a really interesting article in Fibreculture Journal (currently one of my favourite journals on mew media/technology and culture) on similarities between certain practices in digital culture and dadaist aesthetics. The first line hooked me as I feel that much writing adout digital texts and digital cultural practices privileges their 'new', 'novel' or 'innovative' characteristics and disregards ways in which they can actually be quite conventional or similar to early analogue cultural practices:

Too often the discourse surrounding contemporary digital art and electronic literature treats these artifacts as if the most compelling aspects about them are their novelty, their very newness. (Rettberg 2008, n.p.)

Rettberg goes on to argue that "electronic literature can be best understood as a polyglot literary and artistic avant-garde movement that owes a great deal technically, aesthetically, and ideologically to various avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, beginning with Dada."

• collage/remix
• integration of the audience into the reception (construction?) of the work
• random acts of creativity
• use of 'found objects'

I think one of the errors of focusing exclusively on innovative features of digital texts is that you end up producing a definition of digital textuality that describes an avant-garde or experimental minority of users, rather than a much more conventional majority. References Rettberg, S. (2008). Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature. Fibreculture Journal. 11. Retreived 13 Nov. 2008 from <http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_rettberg.html>

More on "intimist" discourses about the book

Riverside, CA: I really don't have a question. I just want to say that I- and many others like me-would never in a million years trade the intimacy and tangibility of an actual book for any type of electronic reading device. Imagine reading Dostoyevsky or Thomas Mann or Virginia Woolf and not having the satisfaction of turning the page or holding the book in your hands or smelling the musk of the paper. Really, this whole thing sounds like a horrible scheme to mechanize the entire reading experience and suck every drop of romance and intimacy from it.

Live Talk: Levy on the Future of Reading Join NEWSWEEK's Steven Levy on Tuesday, Nov. 20, at 2 p.m. ET, for an hourlong discussion on how technology will change the way we read. Retrieved 11 Nov. 2008 <http://www.newsweek.com/id/70858?tid=relatedcl>

last bastion of analog

"Books are the last bastion of analog" Jeff Bezos

What are the advantages of the Kindle?

• ability to change font size
• storage capacity (up to 200 books)
• wireless connectivity (allowing content to be purchased from online Amazon store and installed immediately)
• annotation and text selection tools

Levy, S. (Nov 26, 2007). The Future of Reading. Newsweek. Retrieved 11 Nov 2008 from <http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983/output/print>

Umberto Eco on the future of the book

... in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else.
Eco, U. (1994). The Future of the Book. Retrieved 11 Nov. 2008 from < http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>

I like this quote because I think I'd probably stress the persistence of analogue cultural practices. There's also a book too that might be worth getting on ILL even though it's probably hopelessly dated (digital time moves very fast):

Nunberg, G. (ed.) (1997)The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Earliest written reflection on digital texts

This is the first written reflection on digital textuality that I can find. It's from my Eduspaces blog used for the Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning module (University of Edinburgh MSc in E-learning) taken in Semester 1 and posted on 3 December 2007.

Back to the 80s: Derrida on texts and iterability

As ever, I find Sian a good person to think with (and sometimes against ). Here's the most recent theme she's got me thinking about.

Sian writes:

I think that digitisation represented quite a radical de-stabilising of text in particular, and that when that text became networked, it entered an even more volatile state in which it became increasingly problematic to talk about textual 'stability' and association notions of truth/knowledge. (Bayne 2007)

I take issue with Sian's view of digitisation in a couple of ways:

1) I think it's inaccurate to homogenise all digital texts. Here's Joensuu (2005):

... it is not fair to treat the existing digital literature as one “lump”. Electronic literature is divided in different categories. Digitalization of (already) printed literature – conserving classic literature and making it electronically available – is very different from genuinely digital texts, new literature published as a digital file (to be read from computer screen or hand-computer) or texts that take full advantage of digital opportunities, such as interactivity, linking, updating, programming, multimedia, or internet. These sorts of “originally digital” texts base their logic of functioning and textual dynamics on digital technology – thus being impossible to print.

2) I'd claim that arguments about the destabilisation of the text have been applied for many decades to printed (pre-digital) texts. For example, Jacques Derrida has argued consistently that what we communicate textually cannot be interpreted in a stable or predictable way that assumes authorial intention has been sucessfully 'transmitted'. Derrida characterises text as inherently “iterable … able to break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely unsaturable fashion” (Derrida, 1982, p.320).

References

Bayne, S. 03 December 2007. Re: Are we making too much fuss about the perceived digital/pre-digital divide? Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning discussion board week 11. [online]

Derrida, J. (1982) 'Signature, Event. Context.' Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago UP.

Joensuu, J. (Jun. 2005) "Intimate Technology?: Literature, Reading and the Argumentation Defending Book and Print," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved 03 Dec. 2007 from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/02-joensuu.php>.

Keywords: IDELautumn07

Posted by Anthony McNeill | Edit | Delete

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Comments

1. As ever, Tony, you are a great source of interesting reading, links and ideas! I enjoyed Joensuu, though it struck me that 'intimist' discourses are increasingly applied in describing relations with the digital - particularly to mobile objects like laptops and pdas. The old fetishising anti-digital catchprase 'you can't take it to bed with you' seems increasingly irrelevant these days. Anyway, more in WebCT....

   Sian Bayne on Tuesday, 04 December 2007, 13:11 CET # | Delete

2. btw, I really think you'd enjoy Mark Poster on this, if you haven't already read him. 'What's the matter with the internet?' (2001) is excellent. He also has a new one out - 'Information please: culture and politics in the age of digital machines' (2006), which I haven't yet read.

   Sian Bayne on Tuesday, 04 December 2007, 13:15 CET # | Delete

First post from the iPhone

This blog will be used to record my ongoing reflections on the characteristics of digital texts.

I want to track my evolving understanding of digital textuality as this is probably a topic I'll write about for my module assessment (JD dropped a hint that this might be an option).

I'll be attempting to re-collect fragments of my reflections posted to different parts of the web and so I'll be copying a few posts from earlier blogs - The Digital Migrant and the Eduspaces blog used for Introduction to Digital Environments for Online Learning.

I'll be adding new content as well as I work through new readings and engage with new ideas.

The blog will, therefore, eventually comprise of fragments of pre-texts, first thoughts, unfinished reflections, reading notes, random ideas.