Why Technology Matters to Writing...
Jim Porter's article on technology and cyberwriting examines the quintessential experience of his life as a writer, from the pen and pencil, to the typewriter, to the word processor, to internet and digital media writing. Although he speaks of having learned some good habits and techniques from the slower, more deliberate acts of hand- and type-written documents, Porter eventually seems to be embracing the new face of writing, focusing especially upon the virtual community. Porter suggests a that the computer is not simply another writing tool, and that computers themselves should not be the focus of cyberwriting discussion, but rather the manner in which networking has changed the world: this, he says, is the true revolution in writing, if indeed there has been any sort of revolution. In a posthumanist/Haraway cyborgian view, the computer should not be separated from the man, but rather viewed as a part of the body of a man (or woman). Porter speaks of the refusal of humanists, in their sentimentality, to acknowledge the reality of technology and its already-well-entrenched situation in this world, and argues that as a matter of intellectual honesty, we must all realize that technology plays a role in our contemporary existence (to speak colloquially, whether we like it or not). Postmodernists seek to answer the "how" questions: How will we use/design technology? rather than asking questions as to the pervasiveness and reality of technology on mankind, as humanists do.
Interestingly, Porter's article skirts around a concept I find to be central to this discussion. In my view, Porter answers the more mundane of two questions: Is technology important to current and future writers? and HOW is technology important...? Porter seems to address the first, but mostly ignores the second. He manages to prove that technology is significant in his life, but while I found the biographical quips to be endearing (ironic, considering his inclusion of the word ethos in a number of locations), I found that retrospectively, Porter had really only convinced me that HIS life had been altered by cyberwriting and technology, while he did little to persuade me (as a theoretically unbiased audience member) that technology had changed my life as a writer. (Here, we could enter into a complex metaphysical discussion, especially considering I'm composing this abstract on a computer and keyboard to be posted on the internet - but for the sake of argument, I'll pretend I'm impartial and have no reason from experience to initially believe technology has altered writing for me.) Porter devotes most of the article's academic space to the discussion of opposing viewpoints, after which, having listed the highlights of both sides' banter, he briefly denominates a winner, but fails overall to connect these minute contests to a larger view. In short, Porter gives us as readers information but doesn't do much to tell us why it's important.
I agree with a great deal of Porter's article, but in looking back over the portions of text I highlighted (ironically, I printed this article out to read it), I find that had I come from the other side of the fence, Porter would likely have failed to convince me of anything. He has no real statistics, no citation of evidence or information gathered from his classes or interactions with students/new generations of technology users (other than his son). He calls for a redefinition of terms and a re-evaluation of our views on technology and cyberwriting, but does not begin that analysis himself. In all, I find myself viewing this entire article as an enormous question, rather than an argument or thesis. Perhaps this was Porter's intent: I'll ask some questions you should think about and you answer them yourself. But, for me, considering he seems to be so utterly convinced of the profound alteration taking place because of technology, I would have liked to see him try to tackle a few answers as well as simply posing questions. Perhaps, Porter should have amended his title: "Why [Does] Technology Matter to Writing [,Dear Reader?]"
7 comments:
I really enjoyed this piece for the first few pages and then I got tired of it. I started a few days ago and just finished it about an hour ago. I couldn't read it in one sitting. It was far too long for me.
The thing I liked about it was how he tied his life into the information so we got a personal side instead of just facts. But eventually he gave that up completely and gave us only facts. That annoyed me.
I agree that he never said why technology matters to writing, but I found it less intrusive as i think you may have, Sean. I did, as a reader, find myself thinking back to my experience learning Denelian (and ultimately denouncing it as "f#%$!@^ stupid" in my high school years, most likely adapting a more cryptic style just to bother instructors. Anyway). I thought about the first time I used an Apple II, the first time my Dad showed me the Internet. I remember our first IBM (which was synonymous with PC in our early nineties household). I thought this was the implicit goal of the piece, because I ultimately found myself deciding that although technology affects our writing, it will never eliminate it, at least for the time being.
I did have a sick, Dertuzos-esque vision come from the line "joined at the interface."
Porter is an academic, engrained in its culture and writes for its viewership. No doubt this piece was produced as apart of some tenure issue.
I agree with you Sean, this writing, as many of these of its kind, manages to produce nearly twenty pages of very dense writing to say something that could have been said in a page.
I understand that as an academic you have to provide for all the differences in opinion, cover your ass, and by virtue really say nothing at all. But please, save this drab for The Journal (it's just journal writing pasted onto the internet- evident disrespect for the digital world) don't bother with posting on the internet, no one that won't have already seen will want to see or for that matter read it.
This is the worst thing I have seen. Someone's personal narrative about their personal experiences posted on the internet verbatim as it is written in academese for a journal.
Luckily writting like this never penetrates the digital sphere.
hmmm -- I disagree with you all about this one. The reason I disagree relates to what I said about McCloud -- is all writing reducible to comic books? Porter makes a much more substantial argument than any of the other writers in terms of complexity and depth, and I believe that something valuable is lost when we no longer work through difficult texts. Not that Porter's text is all that difficult, but it is long and relatively complex.
Also, for the record, this article was written for a print journal -- Computers and Composition. He didn't write this for Web delivery. I put it on our server so that you (and I ) would be able to get to it easily, thus enacting one of Porter's points about delivery.
As to the tenure requirement for publishing, he had been a professor for over 20 years by the time this article was published; pressures for publication for tenure were long behind him.
As to the "how" of it, Sean, I'm not sure I see your point. He does on page 380 move to a discussion of "the visual breakthrough of desktop publishing." I suppose this is a bit of "why" and "how," but it seems like a crucial point of departure. Until that point, nobody thought of writing and design -- writing was emphatically not about design, and it was certainly not about delivery to an audience broader than your teacher.
His discussion of online publishing, which starts on page 382, describes the beginning of the move to networked writing (both in physical and virtual spaces) then moves on to the section, on 384, called "how technology matters."
Porter positions his argument in opposition to Dennis Baron's "From Pencils to Pixels." This is an important rhetorical move as Barron's piece informed a generation of people in the field of rhetoric and composition. Baron, in short, dismisses computers as nothing more than electronic pencils. As for persuading the opposition, Sean, this was a valuable move. He's refuting the main source for those who believe computers have no affect on writing. He's also pretty nice about it; he just says that Baron misses the point. Word processing is not the revolution: networking is.
He makes a distinction, at the bottom of 385/top of 386, between "formalism," with its emphasis on style, syntax, coherence, and organization" (386), and a scenic/contextual view of writing, in which "writing is not only the words on the page, but it also concerns mechanisms for production . . . mechanisms for distribution or delivery . . . invention, exploration, research, methodology, and inquiry . . . audience, persuasiveness, and impact . . . writing technologies play a huge role--especially in terms of production (process) and distribution (delivery)" (386).
This is the key section to me: Internet technology matters to writing because of the affects it has on the production and distribution of writing. This it seems to me is what our other authors for today are addressing as well: production and distribution on the Internet call for a completely different kind of writing (which of course brings me back to my concern that all writing might turn into comic books--not that I don't love a comic book).
Porter's next section is provocative -- I am more and more inclined to believe Harraway's assertion that we are no longer human in the enlightenment sense of that word. That is, separate entities with unique destinies. We are rather entwined in a web of technology, and we become cyborgs at the physical and mental points of interface. It makes me think of "feeling at one" with a fast car while driving, or while swimming in the ocean (swimming anywhere, for that matter). It's the sense of the self as part of a much larger system.
I also think it's worth pointing out that Porter values various kinds of knowledge that are frequently dismissed in the academy. He privileges personal narrative, which is traditionally barred from academic writing. At some of your more élite institutions, an article like this wouldn't count toward tenure for that reason -- too personal. He also emphasis the importance of feminism on thinking about technology.
I believe that the only substantive portions of this piece were sections seven through nine. Those are the only sections in which he really developed his ideas. Granted Porter does a fine job of really discussing this issue, and eventually makes many fine points-- many with which I agree. But I will maintain that this could have been done in two, maybe three pages. I am in film and there is nothing more frustrating and irritating than sitting through something that is thirty minutes that could have been better done in five.
I find it interesting that James would tell us because of his film background that the piece was hard. Could we count film in our technology? I know it has been around a lot longer than computers, but it has changed the way people experience literary works. I have a friend who stopped reading as a young teen, because he started wathing all the movie versions of books. He knows a lot of plot lines, but doesn't want to take the time to read a book. Has film and the internet shortened our attention spans so that we struggle through a 20 page article?
I'll add more later, if I have time to conduct the research I would like in response to this discussion. For me, the structure is not so much the issue as content. I did find that the piece held my attention, and that I agreed with a great deal of information contained within in it, so for the record, I state that the intention of my original post was not to refute Porter's argument or suggest that the article contained no rhetorical or intellectual value. I actually enjoyed a great deal of it and didn't find it to be too long or containing extraneous information. My only qualm (to re-emphasize my position) lay in the fact that I did not feel Porter had personally convinced ME that technology had changed MY world (these pronouns being potentially generic terms for any reader) and that although I agree with a number of Porter's points, I decided upon retrospection that the points I agreed with were points I had already been convinced of prior to reading this article. And was not his intention to make a persuasive argument that technology was changing writing (revolution)? For me, Porter did nothing to convince me of any argument I didn't already accept as truth and it felt like I was being persuaded that the American Revolution happened, as if it was a current event, 230 years after the fact. I already knew that technology had changed writing before beginning this article, but Porter did nothing for me to explicate a new or interesting method of examining this alteration. (Nota bene: I had already been briefly exposed to cyborg theory and I am, of course, familiar with global communication and networking in relation to pre-networked computers, typewriters, etc., so perhaps for me, this was all too familiar, and for another reader, it may be avant garde and provacative.)
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