Okay, so stupid Google won't let me respond in full (too much text) so here's the continuation of my responses for the second post.
Scott et al:
Indeed! In the case of new media, I wish I could use the cliché “Times they are a’ changing,” but I’d be a decade too late for my part. An older friend of mine told me at a conference, “the internet is the future,” meaning specifically that we academics (he being an old IBM mainstay in his seventies) should get with the program and hit the internet wave while it’s still rising. It’s funny to think about it like that (the internet as a novelty still), but for some reason what he said didn’t seem incredibly dated to me at first. I suppose my knee-jerk reaction dates me in some respects.
I started thinking about attention in regards to technology (and not just writing technology) when I was trying to (yet again) wrap my head around the full implications of new media as new media. When I think about new media, I free associate “computers.” Since computers are a kind of multi tool—maybe even an über tool—it occurred to me that our thought processes (and ludic engagement such as point and click superseding scrawl and erase) are increasingly dominated by computer time. Time certainly isn’t the only dimension at play, but it seems apt to wonder at how our work process is affected by loading programs, saving, printing, and all of the other interactive minutiae involved. The short (though incomplete) answer is that computers are flippin’ fast. That speed on one hand helps me, personally, to commit more thoughts to paper than I could even begin to eke out in pencil. On the other hand, I’m not as immediately considerate of what I type (maybe my blog posts so far are a good indication of that, hrhrhrhr). Naturally, there are tons of other components involved even in this one crappy example. What we gain and lose will partially depend on individual practice, but mediums predispose—rather than predetermine—particular sorts of products. The best way I can explain my thoughts on this are through guitar noises (*sigh*). Much easier to play blazing leads on an electric with lower gauge strings, but sometimes the rich boom of the acoustic carries a desirable resonance. Maybe it’s the same with writing mediums. Maybe I’m out of my mind. Or both?
I sort of wonder if Walter Benjamin—in regards to his ideas on authenticity and mechanical reproduction—is haunting me. I’m not even sure that I agree with him. I’m stressed at the potential “fast food” implications of mass-produced language, but I don’t think that we should clip a bird’s wings just because we perceive it flies more wildly the higher it gets. Good grief I’m full of bullcrap metaphors today.
Understanding the potential disjoint between new media writing and old media techniques is important for me (I think) as a teacher, but also as a student. However, I’m long gone from the days of handwritten essays, scrawled in my own blood and drool, and I can’t say that I’d really ever want to go back. Though, I do think it’s important to consider just how transitioning from one medium to another affects writing, since so many students come from diverse technology backgrounds. Maybe that I way I can explain the benefits of writing essays in long prose versus “IDK.” Though I guess it would be pretty lol to see something like that.
I suppose my projected ambivalence towards the idea of new media can be best explained as me being crotchety. Not so much being cranky, but rather like someone who has lost something, knows he has lost it, but can’t quite put his finger on what went missing. Gah, I’m venturing too far out into the waters of aesthetics. In any case, I don’t really believe that life without computers would be simpler: just complicated in different ways. I must admit that the idea of “going back” is simultaneously terrifying and revolting (and yes a bit whimsical too—how Janus-faced I am). There’s no going back, even if Snake Pliskin turns off all electricity in the world ala Escape from L.A.—we’d just have to learn to cope with a writing world post computers, which we would probably find as a unique challenge altogether. I seriously don’t want to go back to using those dorky pencil grippers, though some of them did have cool colors.
No comments:
Post a Comment