Tag Archives: Academia

#10- Bolter (Part One)

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So I thought I had better include my first real academic reference for the annotated bibliography. Jay David Bolter, or as he is otherwise known – “the new Gutenberg” is clearly (judging by his nickname) an extremely important figure in the field of print, literature and the spread of knowledge. Bolter is concerned with literature, communication culture, the evolution of the media, the use of technology in education and the role of computers in the writing process.

Bolter is also responsible for co-creating Storyspace, the first specially designed software package for reading and writing hypertext.

Eastgate Systems advertises Storyspace as:

Every writer knows that great stories don’t happen all at once. Storyspace is a generative, flexible writing environment that lets you collect, store, and experiment with your story ideas without having to worry about how they all fit together right away. With Storyspace, no matter how inspiration strikes you — as text, as image, sound or video — you have a place for all your ideas. Use Storyspace to pick them up, move them around, and link them together.

I also had a look at some of the works that have come out of the software and found them to be really interesting sources for explaining/displaying Hypertext visually.

Patchwork Girl by Sally Jackson which tells the story through illustrations of parts of a female body that are stitched together through text and image. The narrative of the story is divided into five segments, titled: “a Graveyard”, “a Journal”, “a Quilt”, “a Story”, and “& broken accents.” The goal of the piece is to not only make the reader realize the structure of the Patchwork Girl as a whole but also realize all the pieces that must be “patched” together in order to create one unified structure. Each segment leads down a trail that takes the story in multiple directions through various linking words and images.

I found this review to be really interesting, and loved the idea that the clicking of the mouse became a compulsive act rather than a conscious one, like when your reading a book and you get so lost in it that you dont remember the act of turning the pages.

“Patchwork Girl offers the patient reader, if there are any left in the world, just such an experience of losing oneself to a text, for as one plunges deeper and deeper into one’s own personal exploration of the relations here of creator to created and of body to text, one never fails to be rewarded and so is drawn ever deeper, until clicking the mouse is as unconscious an act as turning a page, and much less constraining, more compelling.” — Robert Coover

You can view parts of Patchwork Girl here, but not all of it unfortunately, I found this quote however & I will leave you with it…

“I am buried here, you can resurrect me but only piecemeal, if you want to see the whole you will have to sew me together yourself”

Wow, just realised that I didn’t actually discuss any of the Bolter reference I found. Bloody Hypertext led me to new ideas!!!

 

#9 – Dispersed Text.

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As a text becomes linked with other texts, the ideas of multiple authors become a lexia of information.

 “destroying the intellectual separation of texts”.(Landow, PG9)

This is one of Landow’s overarching claims in his extract, Hypertext 2.0 – that singular/unitary texts no longer have as much merit due to the emergence of dispersed texts and goes so far as to suggest that

“…we must abandon the notions of a unitary text and replace them with conceptions of a dispersed text” (Landow, PG9)

 

Landow questions whether this destroys the notion of textual uniqueness and the loss of needing to contextualise a piece of writing. He also points to the way that hypertext has simplified ideas previously abstracted from the vantage point of print and has therefore created tension in the field of ‘experts’ who see their highly complex ideas almost shamefully simplified in hypertext, yet they must accept that for many, hypertext provides an ease in understanding that print versions do not.

I think this is a potential area of weakness in the extract, as Landow seems to oscillate between celebrating the death of the author and lamenting the potential aesthetic gap such a death brings. Landow is all about our ‘experience’ of a text and the ideas we bring to it, so to completely call for a replacement of unitary texts by a domination of dispersed texts is to hammer the last nail into the coffin of academic writers who refuse to, in their view ‘bastardise’ their work by making it a part of someone else’s. Yes, this may mean that their work never becomes a part of the archive of information, but it doesn’t mean it’s not valid as a stand alone piece of work. Because it sticks to one form does limit the way that audiences can interact and engage with it, but it does, on the other hand maintain a control over it’s content.

I think books/manuscripts as solid, tangible sources of information still bring people a sense of comfort and aesthetic pleasure, and I don’t think we as a society are entirely ready to condemn them. I say this having just witnessed the complete collapse of Borders, my local bookshop Seagulls & countless reports that more bookshops are having to close – but I still think we have a very innate and kind of superstitious respect for unitary texts.

…Am I simply a hopeless romantic? Or is Landow, despite his clear advocation for the use of hypertext slightly nostalgic when it comes to the potential death of unitary texts?

“loss of a belief in unitary textuality could produce many changes in Western culture, many of them quite costly when judged from the vantage point of our present print based attitudes.” (Landow, PG66)

Tutorial #4…or not.

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Okay, so rocked up to class only to find a lovely note on the door letting me know the tute was cancelled, of course, this morning i failed to check my emails. Anyway, i have decided to solider on without Hugh or Seth and update my WordPress blog all by myself. It now has a  block quote button in the kitchen sink…fancy.  Okay, so it really wasn’t that difficult, and after completing the video tutorial on beginning the Hypertext Essay i’m free to kind of blog away. So, i have decided to address one of my points of participation that I have outlined – to read more blogs/academic journals.

So, i came across this idea of Digital Identity which Wikipedia simply defines as; ‘the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the mediation of people’s experience of their own identity and the identity of other people and things’

So, when we craft an identity on the web, how ‘accurate’ is it’s correspondance with our real selves, and is this a conscious or unconscious decision that we make? Is the way we relate to our digital identity steeped simply in context, do we unconsciously follow a formula for blog writing where we feel we need to project a certain style that fits with the form? I think this idea was referenced by Inger Bergman in her lecture when she said not to ‘pose’ as something your not, to really be yourself and not follow a preconceived idea of what a blog ‘should be’.

In light of this, I did some research on the discourse surrounding online identities.  I found ‘The identity blog’ which although mainly concerned with the legalities and privacy issues surrounding digital identity, provides a great introduction on the issues surrounding it.

KEY CONCEPTS:

  • Digital identity has a complex relationship with flesh-and-blood identity/natural identity. Sometimes we want digital identity to correspond to natural identity, and sometimes we want the two to be isolated, or the knowledge of the connection to be highly controlled.
  • This leads us to conclude that digital identity must embrace both being public and being private.  It must provide both anonymity and pseudonymity.  It must embrace being public and being private.  It always exists in a context, and we expect the context to have the same degree of separation we are used to in the natural world, even though space and time no longer serve as insulation.
The whole idea of identity is one I am continually fascinated by and have found to be even more fascinating in the context of social networking, blogging and online ‘profiles’.  The idea that one can craft an entirely make believe person into existence online, to me, is both scary and intriguing, but not so entirely surprising. After all, after a long day of having to be ‘you’, i think a lot of people would find it therapeutic to lapse into the life of another. I am in no way endorsing creepy dudes posing as 15 year old girls or anything, but i think a lot of creativity, inspiration and knowledge can be found as people find a way to express the passions or ideas they perhaps feel clash with thier daily ‘flesh and blood’ identity.
In signing off, I wanted to divert your attention briefly to this website that my brother told me about. Formspring.com is a Facebook add-on which creates a kind of duplicate wall where ANYBODY can ask you ANYTHING ANONYMOUSLY. Yeah, it’s mostly just people telling you stuff they dont have the balls to say to your face, like that they like your hair cut or that your a slut or something, was my brothers first response when I incredulously asked him why anybody would want a free for all wall of abuse? I guess in these days – its just a different form of communication. As a Formspring ‘Network’ people are connected by the knowledge that the people posting questions have some knowledge of them, and that, i suppose people are noticing them.
This article, published by the New York Times provides an array of different perspectives and begs the ultimate question surrounding the legitimacy of Formspring’s contribution to ‘social networking’ – is it simply a forum for faceless insults and a place where we become unaccountable for what we say? Or does it in fact provide a space where people can exchange a more ‘flesh and blood’ conversation that they would otherwise not?
This book (Online communication: linking technology, identity and culture By Andrew F. Wood, Matthew J. Smith) also has a really interesting case study of  ‘Julie Graham’- an online identity which gathered many followers who were outraged to find out she was a complete fabrication

#7 – It’s your journey…

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“In hypertext, centrality, like beauty and relevance, resides in the mind of the beholder. Like Andy Warhol’s modern person’s fifteen minutes of fame, centrality in hypertext exists only as a matter of evanescence…” (Landow, PG89)

 

chaos“There is no final word. There can be no final version, no last thought. There is always a new view, a new idea, a reinterpretation,” (Nelson, Literary Machines)

 

“a form of textuality that goes beyond print forces us to extend the dominant notion of a text so that henceforth it is no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in the margins of a book, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself , to other differential traces…” (Derrida, Living on)

 

These are both quotes taken from the Landow extract, and take quite a philosophical platform of notions surrounding the ‘borderless text’. Derrida especially focuses on what a reader brings to the text, and how no context exists until it is engaged with by a person who will ultimately interact with it’s ideas differently to another. I like this idea, that in the act by unexpectedly clicking on a link which does not have a ‘status’ or any kind of intent behind it, and bringing your context to that piece of information that you create an entirely new experience of it’s content, that you then ‘link’ it with something entirely new. It seems that Derrida is fundamentally saying that there is no right or wrong way to enter or leave a text, because the whole idea of a tangible ‘beginning’ is based on the assumption that texts have to have a tangible ‘entrance point’ and ‘exit point’ which assumes a solid base of knowledge.

The sense you make of a hypertext depends entirely on how you choose to navigate through it, your decisions turn into your truths, what angle you choose to take. There is no ‘order’ to follow. The journey you take through a hypertext depends on the choices you make. This reminds me of those ‘choose your own adventure’ books, where a a juncture in the plot, you must decide a certain page number to go to, which defines the kind of ending you will reach. But hypertext goes beyond that, because the path is without an ending, there are no page numbers and the story can never ever be the same. Hypertext, is by definition chaotic and jumbled.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997.

SUPERVISION WITHOUT BORDERS

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Today in Networked Media, we had some serious blog knowledge imparted by a woman serious about her art – Dr Inger Mewburn who began blogging when she had her first child and then again when she began crafting her second – her PHD. I suppose blogging about motherhood gave Dr Mewburn her ability to write with personality and passion, which is points to as a crucial aspect in any kind of online publication – it’s important to be yourself and create a sense that you are present in the work and its evolution.

Her ideas surrounding surrounding building an online community were really interesting and I think very relevant to us as Media students, her idea that communities “dont just happen…they take work”, is especially important, as we are all I suppose  equal collaborators in this online project, so have a kind of obligation to contribute our ideas without being paranoid of them being ‘stolen’ by others.  I think what she was trying to say was that ‘Lurkers’, who account for 90% of a blogs traffic will always suck the thing dry and use other people’s information and that they should be ashamed of themselves!

But seriously…I like the way she framed the issue of the social media and the way it has created a sense of presence and therefore pushes us to have a different attitude about ‘knowledge’. This reminded me of the idea of presence in hypertext, and how it feels more collaborative, open and alive than simple ‘content storage’ provided in books.

Must also direct you to her personal blog – found it to be quite captivating! It also got me thinking – blogging makes teachers, may i say this, seem almost….human. Now, THAT is one giant step in blogging….

#5 – Getting Visual.

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Network Media intends to develop our understanding of writing for the web, and how practices of writing have been changed by Hypertext. It also asks us to acknowledge the separate affordances and differences between traditional media and network media, and how the linearity or each text effects the way it is read/understood. George Landow’s idea surrounding the effects of hypertext on writers and readers alike extend to the notions of status tension and hierarchy that exist between writers and publishers and more conceptually, visual language and written language. His idea’s are extremely relevant as to the affordances of writing for the web and help to elucidate both the negative and positive impact this has on authorship. He takes quite a philosophical approach to the idea of what substantiates a text and how it’s context changes it’s meaning and how we understand and relate to it. This can be garnered through his references to philosopher Derrida whose ideas surrounding a text were steeped in the contexts brought to them – “there is nothing outside the text”. This brings to light Landow’s central idea of the changes in the role of an ‘author’ and a ‘writer’ and how it is being drastically changed by Hypertext and writing on the web.

In Hypertext 2.0, Landow points to our  treatment of visual language as secondary as being derived from print technology – a positive impact of hypertext, which interlinks all kinds of medias into one solid chunk of ‘complete’ information.

“This blindness to the crucial visual components of textuality not only threatens to hinder our attempts to learn how to write in the electronic space but has also markedly distorted our understanding of earlier forms of writing” PG7

This quote really embodies the central notion of the separation of content and form that Seth outlined in our very first lecture, and how the way something is presented effects our engagement, and thus our understanding of it’s messages.

PARTICIPATION.

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“Participation is about you recognising what you need to do to learn successfully in this course. These are all the different activities that you will need to do this semester in order to do well in all the tasks. It is important for you to be able to assess and take responsibility for your own performance as a learner in this course. This participation task is designed to get you to start becoming responsible and self-directed as a student in preparation for becoming a media and communication professional”

Participation; a word which first conjures images of those dreaded ‘encouragement awards’ or over zealous football players jumping on each other’s backs after scoring a winning goal. It’s just one of those words that inextricably carries lame connotations and imagery. However, since beginning my studies at RMIT, I never really considered the act of participation and reflection as vital to my success or failure as a student. I mean, obviously I knew that to produce work i had to partake in it’s creation, but i never regarded the process of reflection as one which was vitally important in creative growth.

To me, participation means to take an active approach to your own learning, to be constantly self critical and perpetually open to new ideas and concepts. I think the moment we shut ourselves off to new ideas is the moment where we become stagnant and stubborn and in turn, produce mediocre work. Participation means to fail spectacularly rather than to coast through along the safe path, and requires a degree of honesty and the ability to own mistakes or misguided ideas. I think it’s an arduous task – to be completely able to look at your own work not only realise thats it’s less than you hoped or expected, but to be able to openly say “…yeah, i screwed up…”. To be able to learn from your mistakes is one of the most important skills, i believe, in life. In the final reflective stage of last semester i found myself really procrastinating and constantly avioding doing it, like it was an awkward conversation I had to have with myself, but once I bit the bullet, sat down and really started thinking about the task and what I had gained from it, how I would re-approach it etc, I found a plethora of new ideas, alternative techniques and simple tweaks that will influence the way I work next time.

So, basically, my whole view on ‘statements of reflection’ as lame, tiresome, and not worth the time they take has been totally changed. I value the participation process more now because I see it’s results. In a nut shell – part-icicpation – take part in your own work, assess it constantly, measure it against other standards, revisit it, don’t be afraid to trial new ideas and baccountable for the result – just go for it.

Perhaps a mistake that can’t necessarily be fixed by reflection?