Hypertext detractors

The second half of this century has seen the rise of three modes of electronic performance that happen to be short: the sitcom, the music video, and the sound bite.

New forms always attract critics, and these three have never lacked for detractors. Many have argued that these forms are debased by their brevity, and that electronic media are responsible for shortening our attention spans. In some quarters. These popular genres are dismissed as superficial spectacles that titillate and numb the debased tastes of the masses.

In the same vein, New Media -- notably hypermedia -- are widely assumed to appeal to the same demands for spectacle and brevity. Multimedia edutainment, for example, is praised by its supporters for its appeal to the "MTV generation" while detractors decry youth's loss of immersion in the pages of a good book.

But cultural observers always decry the debased tastes of youth. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought for jazz and Joyce and D.H. Lawrence against the sneers of their elders. Young Romans flocked to hear Catullus and Ovid even as senators declared their poetry a threat to the commonwealth.

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New media in education

One of the problems we have with the use of new media in education is the problem of teachers. It is often said that the students know more about the new media than the teachers. What is the situation in the United States, and what do you think can be done to encourage teachers to use the new media in education?

David Kolb - It is a difficult problem in the States too. I think it is true that many of the younger students do know much more than the teachers, particularly students about 12 to 13 years old, not yet in university, who seem to have grown up with computers in a way that even people three or four years earlier did not. My experience is - and I think this is pretty general - that many teachers use word processing and perhaps e-mail and perhaps they surf the Web for various purposes and they are comfortable with these things, but it is not clear to them how they would use them in the classroom because they are mostly receptive activities or versions of things that were done before in other ways. What we’ve found is that the best way to encourage the teachers to experiment is to provide examples and to show what other people perhaps in the same school or nearby or in another university are doing, so that teachers can imagine. They won’t necessarily duplicate the examples, but they’ll begin to think: Oh! Maybe I could find a way to do something like that. The difficulty of course on the university level is that teachers have different subjects and there aren’t always examples to be found in some subjects. They are more in the sciences, for instance, and fewer in literature, and very few in philosophy. So teachers can shrug and say" Well, it works over there but it won’t work here. We need to work on that by providing examples and better communication of examples from other locations. As for motivation, I think you have to deal with the question of what the teacher gets out of it. There is someone who has done a great deal of work on hypertext in the classroom and he said: Using new media in the classroom does not make the teacher’s task easier but it makes it much more fun, more spirited, and much more satisfying. I think that is the kind of motivation we have to work with. Not that you’re going to ease the burden of the teacher but rather that you’re going to inspire and encourage and give the teachers more fun and spirit in what they are doing.

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Link everywhere the best as you can

According to Jeff Jarvis, there is a new rule now on the web : Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.

Try this on as a new rule for newspapers.

That’s not how newspapers work now. They try to cover everything because they used to have to be all things to all people in their markets. So they had their own reporters replicate the work of other reporters elsewhere so they could say that they did it under their own bylines as a matter of pride and propriety. It’s the way things were done. They also took wire-service copy and reedited it so they could give their audiences the world. But in the age of the link, this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary. You can link to the stories that someone else did and to the rest of the world. And if you do that, it allows you to reallocate your dwindling resources to what matters, which in most cases should be local coverage.

This changes the dynamic of editorial decisions. Instead of saying, “we should have that” (and replicating what is already out there) you say, “what do we do best?” That is, “what is our unique value?” It means that when you sit down to see a story that others have worked on, you should ask, “can we do it better?” If not, then link. And devote your time to what you can do better.

In the rearchitecture of news, what needs to happen is that people are driven to the best coverage, not the 87th version of the same coverage. This will work for publications and news organizations. It will also work for individuals; this is how a lone reporter’s work (and reputation) can surface. We saw that happening with the Libby trial and Firedoglake’s liveblogging of it. As Jay Rosen said at our NPR confab last week — and I’ve heard this elsewhere — theirs became the best source for keeping up on the trial. Reporters and editors knew it and were using it. So those same reporters and editors should have been sending their readers to the blog as a service: ‘We’re not liveblogging it, but they are. We’ll give you our analysis and reporting later. Enjoy.’ That is where the architecture of news must go because links enable it and economics demand it.

There’s another angle to this: News is not one-size-fits-all. We don’t get all our news from one source anymore. We get bombarded with news all around us. So we all knew that Anna Nicole Smith was dead (or, in Jack Cafferty’s immortal words, still dead). So that means that not every newspaper needs to cover that story in depth.

It certainly means that The New York Times needn’t. So why did the Times devote considerable space and reporting and editing talent to the Anna Nicole story this week? They added nothing more to the story. It’s not what they do best. At the least, if they felt they really needed to cover it, they should have used the AP. Online, they certainly should have just linked to the many, many other sources that are covering it. And then the paper could have used its resources for news that matters and news that they can do uniquely well.

So why did they do it? They didn’t want to be left behind. They perhaps even didn’t want to seem snotting (as if the Anna Nicole story were below them and their readers). But that’s not the issue. Making the best use of their resources and talent it. They need to take advantage of the link.

Newspapers are getting more comfortable with linking out even to competitors. This takes it farther. It says that the best service you can perform for yourself and your readers is to link instead of trying to do everything.

And once you really open yourself up to this, then it also means that you can link to more people gathering more coverage of news: ‘We didn’t cover that school board meeting today, but here’s a link to somebody who recorded it.’ That’s really no different from saying after a big news event, ‘We weren’t there to take pictures, but lots of our readers were and here they are.’
So you do what you do best. And you link to the rest. (Jeff Jarvis)

That is the new architecture of news.

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Literacy as an apparatus

Gregory Ulmer:

Literacy is an "apparatus," which is not a neologism but a common term given specialized meaning in media studies.

I borrowed it from media studies to name the matrix of a language machine, partly social and partly technological, that operates in a given epoch. An apparatus is not only a technology (e.g. the alphabet, paper, ink etc) but also an institution and its practices developed along with the technology (Plato founded the Academy, the first school, and invented "method" -- the PHAEDRUS is the first discourse on method in the Western tradition -- and pedagogy -- the dialogue form -- and of course the categorical system of "concept.").

One of Plato's inventions was to take the verb "to be" which served only as a copula at the time (helping verb to link subject and predicate: "Achilles is angry"), and add to it the function of ontology: asking after the "being" of a thing ("What IS justice?"). Aristotle gave the title METAPHYSICS (a neologism) to the book he wrote after his PHYSICS, in which he developed further this practice of defining entities in terms of their properties.

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What Booksquare tells us about teenagers

Booksquare today has an interesting muse about what makes the ebook experience potentially viable, and it is not the kind of DRM-laden entrapment that many vendors are providing now.

Rather, the model should be that developed in other content areas, such as video."With the expectation that media -- whatever kind -- will be accessible on demand. For my money, no matter what cool this or that is launched by major entertainment media, it's the YouTube model that exemplifies today's environment. Love it, hate it, don't understand it, YouTube works. You don't have to do anything special to access programming. This "just works" ability is what today's consumer desires ... and it's the base level expectation of today's youth."

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Bookmarking across the web

Books have always been a word of mouth business,

so we leverage social media to enable easy sharing of book samples across email, social networks, and social bookmarking sites. We rely on book buyers to help curate our books, so the better books rise to the top and the lower quality ones drop to the bottom. We make heavy use of intrasite hyperlinks to help book lovers tap into the collective knowledge and tastes of others, and of course we offer community-contributed book reviews.

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Education and Hypertext to JD Bolter

Roy Christopher: Hypertext will greatly influence/wholly form the next paradigm of education. Do you agree?

JDBolter: The influence of hypertext on education will come about because of and through the World Wide Web. It is amazing to me how quickly and easily the computer, the Internet, and the Web are being accepted into American education. Compare the reception of the other ‘new media’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: photography, film, radio, and television. American education has given only a marginal place to these media, and, at least in the case of television, it has been openly hostile. None of these media forms has seriously challenged the textbook as our main educational resource. On the other hand, there is a near consensus that computers belong in schools, that schools should be hooked to the Internet, and that students should be given (censored) access to the Web and in many cases should learn to create their own Web pages. This ‘networking’ of American education may result in a hypertextual style of writing. I think the principal effect, however, will be more emphasis on visual communication: using images in addition to or in place of words. This could be significant, when we remember that American education has been principally verbal for centuries. Learning to read and write (words) has been the center of the educational process. I’m not predicting that verbal literacy will cease to be important, but I do think that visual literacy may began to claim a place in our educational programs.

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Principles

Although Lev Manovich's "The langage of New Media" emphasis is primarily on cinema rather than electronic literature, his "five principles of new media" have helped to define the distinctiveness of new media forms in contrast to print and other electronic media such as broadband television.

Four of the five follow in straightforward fashion, respectively, from the binary basis for digital computers (numerical representation), object-oriented programming (modularity and variability), and networked architectures with sensors and actuators (automation). The deepest and most provocative for electronic literature is the fifth principle of "transcoding," by which Manovich means the importation of ideas, artifacts, and presuppositions from the "cultural layer" to the "computer layer" . Although it is too simplistic to posit these "layers" as distinct phenomena (because they are in constant interaction and recursive feedback with one another), the idea of transcoding nevertheless makes the crucial point that computation has become a powerful means by which preconscious assumptions move from such traditional cultural transmission vehicles as political rhetoric, religious and other rituals, gestures and postures, literary narratives, historical accounts, and other purveyors of ideology into the material operations of computational devices. This is such an important insight that, although space does not allow me to develop it fully here, I will return to it later to indicate briefly some of the ways in which it is being explored.

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Wholeness and fragmentation

A concern with issues of wholeness and fragmentation, along with a focus on the material aspects of cultural media, identifies an important area of contact between the work of cultural critic Walter Benjamin and that of Lukacs.

In the important essay "The Storyteller," Benjamin argues in a mode reminiscent of Lukacs's narrative of gradual historical fragmentation that in the modern world the ability to tell meaningful stories is rapidly becoming a lost art. Storytelling for Benjamin is first and foremost a means of conveying advice for dealing with "real" life, but he suggests, writing in the tumultuous days of post-World War I Germany, that the modern world no longer makes sense. "Reality" itself is thus increasingly problematic, and there is no longer any meaningful advice to give. "The art of storytelling," he writes, "is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out". Benjamin suggests that events in the modern world (particularly World War I) have led to a general devaluation of human experience:

"For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power". And if experience is no longer meaningful, then it follows that the exchange of experiences in meaningful ways (the fundamental requirement of effective storytelling) is no longer possible".

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RSS and ubiquity

So today RSS is a great distribution medium. Why?

Because it has become ubiquitous. If you are an online writer with readers and you do not utilize RSS, then you are simply missing out. Smart hypertextual solutions are leveraging blogs, photos, video, podcasts to stay in touch with readers daily. Other services, like del.icio.us (owned by Yahoo), allow users to publish and subscribe to feeds, enabling powerful social networks outside the website...

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Hypertextual images

Though some theoretical discussions of hypertext have suggested that the label "hypertext" refers not just to linked alphanumeric data but also to linked texts that include images and other media, few theoretical studies of hypertext's linking capabilities have actually addressed the specific characteristics of hyperlinks whose linked elements include images. Until relatively recently, in fact, most of them have tended to focus almost exclusively on hypertext--in the narrow alphanumeric sense.

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Electronic media to disseminate new forms of identity

What happens is not simply an increased "efficiency" of interchange, enabling new avenues of investment, increased productivity at work and new domains of leisure and consumption, but a broad and extensive change in the culture, in the way identities are structured.

If I may be allowed a historical analogy: to Mark Poster, the technically advanced societies are at a point in their history similar to that of the emergence of an urban, merchant culture in the midst of feudal society of the middle ages. (...) A new identity was constructed, gradually and in a most circuitous path to be sure, among the merchants in which a coherent, stable sense of individuality was grounded in independent, cognitive abilities. In this way the cultural basis for the modern world was begun, one that eventually would rely upon print media to encourage and disseminate these urban forms of identity.

At the moment, electronic media are supporting an equally profound transformation of cultural identity.

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Socializing agent

An average American high school graduate spent more time in front of the TV than in the classroom!

The mass media is a powerful socializing agent. For sociologists significance of the media is not limited to the content of media messages. Media affect how we learn about our world and interact with one another. Media literally mediate our relationship with social institutions. We base most of our knowledge on government news accounts, not experience. We are dependent on the media for what we know and how we relate to the world of politics because of the media-politics connection. We read or watch political debates followed by instant analysis and commentary by "experts." Politicians rely on media to communicate their message. Similar dynamics are present in other mediated events such as televised sports and televangelism. Media is part of our routine relations with family and friends. They define our interaction with other people on a daily basis as a diversion, sources of conflict, or a unifying force.

Media have an impact on society not only through the content of the message but also through the process.

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