Technology will Change Literature and Rhetoric

In 1992, Richard Lanham, reviewing Jay David Bolter's Writing Space, asserted that "digital electronic presentation will revolutionize...the root method of presentation for...oral or oral/literate poems” such as "...poems like the Iliad, or plays like Hamlet" (p.200). A year later, Bolter himself, speaking of hypertext, asserted that

…electronic writing will make possible a new kind of essay, one in which the scholar is not committed to a single linear argument but can offer multiple explanations or even contradictions. In other words, instead of fixing on a single explanation of, say, the French Revolution, a historian could write a hypertext in which several, possibly contradictory, explanations are offered. No attempt would be made to reconcile the contradictions. In this way, the hypertextual essay would reflect the complexity of the event itself.

Michael Spooner and Kathleen Yancey implied in 1996 that technological venues such as e-mail will themselves become their own genres (252-278) rather than serving as adjunct presentation modes  to other genres.  But Craig Stroup charged in 2000, that the introduction of nonverbal images has long been considered an “encroachment” on literature, (608), based partly in “political and pecuniary interests” (610) (as well as a lack of understanding of the purpose of the image). Eventually, he stated, “…English studies will find its stock-in-trade of verbal rhetorics and literacies increasingly in competition and combination with extra-verbal codes and languages” (607).    And Gwyneth Jones in 2001, states that “…as the Internet becomes more and more like television, full of sound and vision, we lose the strange, stripped-down immediacy of a world made of words” (17).  In other words, according to Jones, multimediation can decrease, or will decrease, verbal literacy. And even Bolter asserted, in 1993, that linear text can provide a “…kind of intellectual rest and recuperation” that hypertext may not be able to provide. We see a dialogic struggle here between these claims, from the perception of technological multimediation as a re-presentation of traditional texts, to its existence as a single genre, sometimes in conflict with traditional genres.  

Therefore we find ourselves in a continuing situation of conflict, competition, and perceived loss. It is this conflict which makes these claims and their consideration so important. Indeed, the very difference of the possibilities of digital rhetoric, of hypertext, and of multimedia generates the spotlight that it often finds itself in. And the dramatic nature of some of these differences (or “competitions”) (such as the explosion of linearity by the possibilities of hypertext) only heightens these differences, which by this dramatic nature have created this conflict.  A feeling of loss inevitably follows when individuals express these fluxes in “either-or” frames. 

We see these fluxes embedded in the reactions to new literacy forms. Claims in the popular press and elsewhere that technology is having a detrimental effect on language abound; while Spooner and Yancey show email as inhabiting its own genre, Naomi Barron asserts that the effect of such new digital technologies is problematic: “As language technologies and new educational trends make it increasingly easy to blur the lines between writing and speech,” she says, “it’s up to us to decide if we have sufficient motivations not to” (269); she states that “technology propels us to view rather than analyze, cruise rather than ponder, ‘hit’ rather than read” (158); in MOOs participants can “[act] as outlandishly as they please, since their identity is concealed” (160).   The “stripped-down immediacy” is lost, as Jones says; we are presented multiple sources that will not allow for Bolter’s “intellectual rest and recuperation.”

That digital rhetoric is so obviously different from traditional linearity, and more importantly that it breaks bounds of traditional pedagogy and composition, plays itself out in each would-be technorhetorican’s mind when she or he considers the decision to use a particular technology in a particular way, and the conflicts noted above will inevitably be reflected in the pedagogy. The degree to which teachers agonize over the use of technology, or, conversely, give themselves over to the use of technology, is ultimately affected by the disparity between what she or he is “used to” on the one hand (and in the case of most instructors over 35, “used to” may suggest traditional unmediated linearity) and the promises (or perils) of newer forms, mediations, and compositions on the other.  The technoteacher may reflect on, among other things, the following:

• How will this impact the way they “write”?
• Isn’t this new composition a kind of “writing”? 
• What will the other faculty in my college, who are always asking me “when are you people going to teach these kids some grammar?” going to take this new kind of teaching, of composing?”
• Where in the so-called “real world” do these kinds of compositions have value?
• Should I even care about what the “real world” applications might be?
• To what extent should my instruction and assignments reflect the literacies they possess, or is my job to make them conform to existing ideas of correctness?
• What will happen to the “old” standards of correctness?
• Conflict, as the inevitable outcome of any paradigm shift (remember Trithemius), manifests itself most obviously in the products of the new paradigm.

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