Technology Will Change Reading, Learning, and Scholarship

That literacy changes with technology is not only a contemporary assertion. Elizabeth Eisenstein, for example, shows in detail how the introduction of the printing press transformed the concept, scope, and purposes of literacy between 1500-1650. She notes that such things as error reduction, decrease in production time and person-hours, and accuracy in graphs, tables, and maps, enabled not only increased literacy, but also generated entirely new ways of approaching written texts. Literacy was no longer primarily an authoritarian, religiously focused activity, but more focused on market wants, popularity, and entertainment and knowledge acquisition (rather than transmission).  In short, individuals learned and thought thought in different, newer ways. 

This rapid transformation caused a change in thinking and reading and in thinking about reading, causing a kind of generational conflict or at least a palpable disjoint, seen in the reaction of Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim in 1494, whose text De Laude Scriptorum (In Praise of Scribes) explains why, even with the advent of the printing press 40 years earlier, hand-copying of books should not go away (Brody).

Such effects are happening as well in technorhetoric, often mirroring the comments of Trithemius and his contemporaries, though without, perhaps, the sense of loss the abbot felt (but see further below).  For example, Stephen A. Bernhardt asserted in 1993 that

…as texts change, we will develop new strategies for reading and writing. Text bases will grow, becoming huge compilations of information…it will feel natural to move through large pools of information, and we will rely on learned strategies for knowing where we are, and where we want to go, and what we want to do when we get there.  We will develop new sorts of reading skills, ones based around text that is modular, layered, hierarchical, and loosely associative. We will demand control over text—over its display, it structure, and its publication….Texts will have multiple authors and grow incrementally as readers individualize and structure text for their own uses (173-4).

N. Catherine Hayles in 2002 asserts that “…new modes of attending––listening, seeing, moving, navigating––… transform what it means to experience literature….  If each era develops a literature that helps it understand (or create) what it is becoming, a better comprehension of our posthuman condition requires a full range of literary expression, print and electronic” (385).

Charles Moran, on the other hand,  asserted in 1998 that “…we will experience a… sea-change, in our students’ scholarship and out own, as we gain breadth and lose what we term “depth,” the reader’s sense that a writer has spent hours, even days, reading a single book” (206). Thus it seems that a multiplicity of ways of approaching a text is inevitable, but at the attendant cost of a traditional concept of depth of academic reading and scholarship.

These assertions are important, because they reveal a Trithemius-like transitional adjustment issue. According to Mario Morino, founder of Legent Corporation, “Change comes hardest to those with the deepest traditions” (Brody).

 We feel the hardness of this change, this generational shift, in the same manner as Trithemius, seeing his paradigm begin to morph, shift, and seemingly fade away, and a new one arising. If, as we suspect, there is a meaningful number—we assume 40 percent—of the practitioners of technorhetoric who are 35 years old or older, then there is a clear difference between about—at least—half of our profession’s way of thinking and the ways of thinking employed by our students (especially first-year students). The  thinking of the latter is more associative, much more accepting of (if not dependent on) multimedia images and effects. Indeed, this shift is actually incremental as well as generational. We note, for example, that our  2004 students approach text and its production in a significantly different manner than our 1994 students did.  2004 students are more willing to explore multimediation, and need far less “technical” instruction in creating multimediated documents than did their peers a decade earlier. 1994 hypertexts resembled traditional “papers” with a few external links and graphics; 2004 students are more willing to explore non-linearity and multimediation.

 Technorhetoric teachers will therefore have to deal with generationality and the effects of changing definitions from a position of constant change, watching their students fit different and advancing generational cohorts as they themselves try to keep up, hoping to stay in the same technorhetorical “time zone” as their students.  As challenging as this may be, if we do not want to find ourselves in Trithemius’s position, we may have no choice.

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