Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 15:58:21 -0500 From: Revised List Processor (1.7e) Subject: File: "EJRNL V1N2-1" To: David Pirmann _______ _________ __ / _____/ /___ ___/ / / / /__ / / ______ __ __ __ ___ __ ___ _____ / / / ___/ __ / / / __ / / / / / / //__/ / //__ \ / ___ \ / / / /____ / /__/ / / /_/ / / /_/ / / / / / / / / /__/ / / / /______/ /______/ /_____/ /_____/ /_/ /_/ /_/ \___/_/ /_/ October 1991 _EJournal_ Volume 1 Issue 2-1 ISSN 1054-1055 An Electronic Journal concerned with the implications of electronic networks and texts. University at Albany, State University of New York ejournal@albnyvms.bitnet There are 426 lines in this issue. CONTENTS: Editorial 31 lines. by Ted Jennings The Brent-Amato Exchange 216 lines. by Doug Brent College of General Studies University of Calgary and Joe Amato Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign DEPARTMENTS: Letters (policy) 11 lines. Reviews (policy) 11 lines. Supplements to previous texts (policy) 12 lines. Information about _EJournal_ (subscribing, etc.) 45 lines. PEOPLE: Board of Advisors Consulting Editors ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright 1991 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away the journal and its contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and all financial interest is hereby assigned to the acknowledged authors of individual texts. This notification must accompany all distribution of _EJournal_. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E D I T O R I A L [line 1] Charter subscribers may have noticed that this issue is enumerated, somewhat unconventionally, "Volume 1 Issue 2-1 ." We are still experimenting with the format and distribution patterns that networks permit; this episode involves picking up on the "thread" concept familiar to users of other lists and bulletin boards. This present "mailing" contains *only* an exchange of views about the "Re/View" that constituted Issue 2. If there are subsequent comments about this exchange between Doug Brent and Joe Amato, or about the original review, or about the book by Jay Bolter that Joe reviewed, we could extend the discussion into issue 2-3 and beyond -- while concurrently e-mailing Issues 3 and 4, devoted to different subjects. Meanwhile, recent subscribers in particular will find Joe Amato's original Re/View of Jay Bolter's book useful --perhaps necessary-- for appreciating the exchange in this issue. You will receive that issue, _EJournal_ Vol 1 #2, if you send the following message [ addressed to LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1 ]: GET EJRNL V1N2 We are experimenting with ways to arrange our Bitnet Fileserver so that readers won't be stymied by its antediluvian restrictions. The message INDEX EJRNL sent to LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1 will trigger an up-to-date readout of what is available -- including the file EJRNL INDEX. Suggestions about smoothing the relationships among readers, the journal, the medium (and libraries) are always welcome. Ted Jennings [l.31] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Brent-Amato Exchange [line 1] by Doug Brent College of General Studies University of Calgary and Joe Amato Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [Doug Brent sent this response in July; I forwarded it (anonymously) to Joe; Joe's reply came back almost overnight. The delay in publishing the exchange is _EJournal_'s fault, not theirs. Ted Jennings] * * * * * Joe Amato's review of _Writing Space_ is a useful and provocative document. However, I would like to respond to it by picking holes in two specific aspects of it: Amato's quarrels with Bolter's format, which I think are misplaced, and his ideas on the "darker side" of hypertext, which I would like expanded. First, Amato takes Bolter to task for not pushing his printed document farther in the direction of hypertext, a direction in which, Amato argues, it is already beginning to drift as it becomes less linear and more aphoristic toward the end: I would argue that Bolter, for all his attention to the work of novelists such as Joyce (of both varieties), gives relatively short shrift to several (late-) print-age techniques that might well have provided his final section with a bit more oomph. . . . Specifically, had he broken with sentence/paragraph structure -- even within his print-bound format -- the resulting *aesthetic* reflexivity could, I think, have avoided what must otherwise be read as a sort of tacit irony, the irony implicit in having to use print for a discussion of un-printable technologies. (l. 205) I think that this quarrel over form misses completely Bolter's point (or else Amato simply doesn't *accept* Bolters point, which is fine but he doesn't say that). Bolter argues that writers such as Joyce, Tzara and others resorted to their disorienting techniques precisely because there was no other way to accomplish the fragmentation that they sought. Their only writing tool was linear print. In the computer age, he claims, these techniques are unnecessary because the electronic writing space is available to do the job. One does not have to write against the grain of hypertext to produce a Dada poem; hypertexts come pre-deconstructed, their oppositions and tensions exposed rather than hidden. [l.46] Thus the print writing space is freed to do what it does most naturally: act as a vehicle for relatively linear argument. Since Bolter's book is also available as a hypertext, why bother to do badly in print what can be done in the alternate medium? This is the most general lesson of the technological perspective on communication. Texts, and even thoughts, will automatically flow into the shape that is most congenial to the technology in which they are created, unless the creator goes to extreme lengths to kick them out of those ruts. In the electronic age, there is no longer any need to expend that amount of energy to kick print out of its linear rut. Second, his displeasure with Bolter's linear form has, I think distracted Amato >from his other task, that of pointing out the "darker side" of Bolter's scenario that he alludes to repeatedly throughout his review. I am quite convinced, with Amato, that the scenario does indeed have a darker side, and I think Bolter is too, although Amato is right that he chooses not to dwell on it. But I have difficulty making out from Amato's review exactly what this darker side *is*. He states that "it is as yet far from clear that networking may not itself merely represent a further trivializing of human experience, a way of de-tuning the political consciousness of groups of individuals" (l. 233). This seems to be the essence of this darker side. But Amato does not develop, to my satisfaction at any rate, the details of *why* this should represent a further trivializing of human experience. And so I would like to end with an invitation to Amato to expand on these ideas. Why would we "find ourselves at some point unable to re/view the ideological consequences inherent in such apparent self-authorization" (l. 248)? What is wrong with a world in which ironic efforts to criticise culture, including deconstruction, have ceased to be against the grain and become natural to the medium? Is it simply that they will thereby become less self-conscious? I find myself unable to answer these questions by examining Amato's review. [l.80] In short, even though Amato's dissenting voice cannot be embedded in Bolter's text as it could be in hypertext, perhaps he could nonetheless take advantage of this non-hyper space to expand on and clarify his comments. Doug Brent College of General Studies University of Calgary [Here follows Joe Amato's reply to Doug Brent's response to Joe's Re/View of Jay David Bolter's _Writing Space_]: Good, constructive commentary. But let's see if I can't clarify my seemingly more tenuous reservations regarding Bolter's work, in accordance with the aforementioned "two specific aspects" of my re/view: That texts and thoughts "will automatically flow into the shape that is most congenial to the technology in which they are created" suggests that one might do well to interrogate such technologies thoroughly to determine with some precision the types of aesthetic freedoms and constraints they "automatically" present to "creator[s]." True, due to the development of electronic media such as hypertext, some may no longer perceive the need to "kick print out of its linear rut." For these folk, print is a dead duck, and has been so for some time now. It is surely a comment on this "late age of print" that, even among this group, ambivalence tends to be a shared sentiment. I simply have trouble in accepting, wholesale, Bolter's contention that the general features of progressive twentieth century artistic and intellectual achievements have anticipated the non-linear, fragmented nature of electronic media -- in effect, that the advent of hypertext has evidently made apparent the teleology of these older forms -- a claim that, however much I may agree with it in principle, requires perhaps a good deal more practical elaboration than even Bolter has managed. There would seem to be a tendency among hypertext commentators to put the car [sic] before the horse. Viewed against the more traditional scholastic context, what needs to be looked at more closely, as I see it, are the assumptions we bring to our engagement with electronic media, assumptions rooted in the methods, insights and critical conventions of the twentieth century. In order to accommodate this process, older print technologies will undoubtedly have to be rethought, for the technological ferment that has provided for the emergence of newer technologies represents a fundamental departure from the prerogatives of earlier print forms (take cybernetics, for example), hence affording the opportunity to view things in a new light. And a 'new light' might well entail a fresh approach. [l.124] Specifically, I would ask for a more palpable sense of what is meant by electronic "writing space," and, because older print forms -- which are presumably at stake in this transition -- have provided the standards against which we are currently, and by default, evaluating the newer technologies, it is hardly begging such a question to suggest that one attempt something a bit more imaginative than conventional reference to the (by now) well-documented aesthetic conventions of late twentieth century literary inquiry. (That Bolter's text is available as a hypertext still does not address the print-based predicament.) Hence, assertions such as "One does not have to write against the grain of hypertext to produce a Dada poem" -- which would itself seem to imply that writing Dada poetry is aesthetically and, more to the point, politically at one with the aims of electronic media -- might be made to suffer a more rigorous critical examination. O.K. -- so Bolter is not a poet (at least, not to my knowledge). Yet he is a hypertext co-author, a writer. And I believe a bit more legible d-d-discomfort on his part might have made me feel a bit more comfortable. Surely print is up to the task. It may be a matter of taste, finally, but matters of taste are invariably a function of community norms, and the academic community is chock full of such norms. Regarding the "darker side" of Bolter's text: this is indeed given relatively short shrift in my re/view, largely due to my misgivings as to what I took to be its already excessive length. Fortunately, my respondent has provided me with a convenient articulation on which I would like to "expand": What is wrong with a world in which ironic efforts to criticize culture, including deconstruction, have ceased to be against the grain and become natural to the medium? Is it simply that they will thereby become less self-conscious? Even assuming that "deconstruction" might be "natural to the medium" -- the sort of claim, with its premise of a "natural" deconstructive element, that, as I argue above, requires a good deal more elaboration (and perhaps revision) -- what is meant, precisely, by "ironic efforts to criticize culture"? How on earth could electronic media ipso facto guarantee any such thing? Were I to assume that everyone had access to electronic media, that a majority utilized such media on a regular basis, that such media facilitated a variety of cultural criticism, and that such criticism was -- because of non-linearity? transience? aphorism? density of reference? fragmentation? abdication of authority? -- ironic (and effectively so), would there be any point in attempting to substantiate in what ways such "efforts" had "thereby become less self-conscious"? Would such a "world" -- one evidently replete with active, culturally informed contributors -- trouble itself with such questions? Indeed, given the obvious benefits of remaining in the medium -- on-line, as it were -- why would *anyone* bother to provide answers? The implication would seem to be that active engagement within this newer medium somehow *automatically provides for* those critical efforts directed toward a richer understanding *of* the medium, and un-self-consciously, to boot. [l.174] My commentator has, in effect, trivialized ideological inquiry by suggesting, to use Bolter's formulation, that the new medium will "incorporate criticism within itself," an example of the sort of casual hyperbole that I take to be, again, symptomatic of much of the debate endemic to these new technologies. Of course, if we assume that electronic media are merely the evolutionary outcome of a long line of progressive technological innovations, then the "naturalness" of such transitions obscures the vast resources, public and private, that have had a hand both in the production and commodification of information (to speak in broad sweep). In concrete terms, one way of looking at this "darker side" is to consider the extent to which this vast network of knowledge workers -- currently predominantly white males -- ultimately determines the nodes, or data, of hypertext databases. Surely one may cite similar occasions for abuse pertaining to the older technologies. And surely hypertext promises to circumvent difficulties inherent in print by -- to paraphrase a much-touted benefit -- facilitating the forging of links between various knowledges. Yet this does not obviate the need to examine the sorts of control constraints and technological biases that have been designed and built into the machines -- software, hardware and all. Even a pragmatist like myself would grant that human experience is trivialized whenever experiential options are assumed *exhausted* by a specific material reality. Hence I find it difficult not to raise at least an eyebrow at the fact that the relationship between electronic media and the users (or consumers?) of such media might be defined in terms of a presumed correspondence between simulation of mind and mind itself -- as I argue in my re/view, a potentially closed loop with little or no provision for negative feedback (entirely ironic?). That print was culpable on the count of similar, and tacit, delimitations does not warrant the view that the liabilities of hypertext should go unchallenged, as I am certain my commentator will agree. There are many reasons to be suspicious of global technological trends, trends that literally incorporate (presumably) multinational agenda. Aphoristically speaking, one might ask whether the good things in life really *don't* come easy. Joe Amato Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [l.216] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Letters: _EJournal_ is willing publish letters to the editor. But at this point we make no promises about how many, which ones, or what format. Because the "Letters" column of a periodical is a habit of the paper environment, we can't predict exactly what will happen in pixel space. For instance, _EJournal_ readers can send outraged objections to our essays directly to the authors. Also, we can publish substantial counterstatements as articles in their own right, or as "Supplements." Even so, there will probably be some brief, thoughtful statements that appear to be of interest to many subscribers. When there are, they will appear as "Letters." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reviews: _EJournal_ is willing to publish reviews of almost anything that seems to fit under our broad umbrella: the implications of electronic networks and texts. At this point we are still hoping to review a hypertext novel, and have no other works-- electronic or printed --under consideration. We do not solicit and cannot provide review copies of fiction, prophecy, critiques, other texts, programs, hardware, lists or bulletin boards. But if you would like to bring any publicly available information to our readers' attention, send your review (any length) to us, or ask if writing one sounds to us like a good idea. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Supplements: _EJournal_ plans to experiment with ways of revising, responding to, re- working, or even retracting the texts we publish. Authors who want to address a subject already broached --by others or by themselves-- may send texts, preferably brief, that we will consider publishing under the "Supplements" heading. Proposed "supplements" will not go through full, formal editorial review. 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To "get" one of the files in the EJRNL Listserv, send GET (where is the name of the file that you wish to have sent to you) to LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1.BITNET . ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Board of Advisors: Dick Lanham, University of California at Los Angeles Ann Okerson, Association of Research Libraries Joe Raben, City University of New York Bob Scholes, Brown University Harry Whitaker, University of Quebec at Montreal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Consulting Editors - October 1991 [North American addresses are at Bitnet sites.] ahrens@hartford John Ahrens Hartford ap01@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool crone@cua Tom Crone Catholic University dabrent@uncamult Doug Brent Calgary djb85@albnyvms Don Byrd Albany donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College ds001451@ndsuvm1 Ray Wheeler North Dakota eng006@unoma1 Marvin Peterson Nebraska - Omaha erdt@pucal Terry Erdt Purdue Calumet fac_aska@jmuvax1 Arnie Kahn James Madison folger@yktvmv Davis Foulger IBM - Watson Center george@gacvax1 G. 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