Summary of Johnson-Eilola
Nostalgic
Angels, Johnson-Eilola’s (1997) book about hypertext, seems to written
primarily in response to early enthusiasts of hypertext within the humanities who
believed that the technology automatically offered a liberating alternative to
the dominating hegemony of print discourse.
Johnson-Eilola shares the dissatisfaction with print culture but argues
that hypertext, while offering potential for pedagogy that is both collaborative
and polyvocal nevertheless needs to be treated critically. For one thing, he argues, hypertext can
simply solidify existing power structures.
As Johnson-Eilola says,
“hypertext can be (and often is) articulated as a powerfully conservative
technology, a way to introduce wider groups of people more quickly and
effectively into traditional structures of power” (p. 22).
An important theme for
Johnson-Eilola is the ways that hypertext has changed the relationship between readers
and writers. While he disagrees that the
writer has been entirely replaced by the agency of a reader with choices, he
points out that “compared to hypertext, print does not seem as capable of
collapsing the reader and writer in the visible, surface-level manner enacted
by hypertext writers and readers” (p. 143).
Although literary theorists such as Barthes and others argued that
reader collaborates with the writer to make meaning in a way that is “primarily
mental and unseen, hypertext appears to make the intertextual, text visible and
active for the writer and reader… with the reader an explicit rather than
merely psychic collaborator with writer” (p. 144). This does seem to be a point worth making.
To summarize, I want to give one
quote that I think captures the starting point of Johnson-Eilola’s argument in
the book. “Despite claims of radical
novelty for the technology [i.e.hypertext] in a wide range of disciplines, the
various articulations illustrate the ways we (necessarily) map the technology
back against our conventional ways of acting and knowing” (p. 175). That being said, he does believe that
hypertext offers value as a pedagogical tool.
“At the same time, we must also remember that we are changed, that new
potentials do exist, and that our use of hypertext in writing classes and
elsewhere can be used to help students think about their writing and reading as
social and political activities” (p. 176).
Bringing new writing practices into composition classes and engaging
them critically, as Johnson-Eilola argues, can offer students long-term
benefits since “the ways in which a writer is taught to operate within a
virtual writing and research environment hold a great deal of influence over
the ways in which that writer lives and thinks” (p. 233).
Something I am not sure I agree with
It appeared to be case that for
Johnson-Eilola and some of the sources that he cites, to “think in a pluralistic,
nonlinear fashion” (144) is a virtue.
Presumably the idea is that linear thinking is laid out by an author and
therefore is a masculinist, dominating force on the reader. But in practical terms what keeps this from
becoming simply mental sloppiness, a sort of anything-goes way of thinking that
doesn’t serve students well in the real world?!
Interestingly, Johnson-Eilola goes on to cite Landow & Delany (1990)
as arguing that critical thinking is well-served by developing non-linear
habits of thought that teach students to make connections between disparate
things, and that “hypertext also helps a novice reader to learn the habit of
non-sequential reading characteristic of more advanced study. Scholarly and
scientific writing require readers to leave the main text and venture out to
consider footnotes, evidence of statistics and other authorities, and the like;
they must then integrate their evidence into a complex intellectual structure”
(quoted on p. 144). I am rather
skeptical of this pious hope. In my
experience as a graduate student and as a teacher of novice readers the more
important skill is to follow and grasp an author’s complete, linear argument
before launching out in other directions.
Following other threads too soon tends to lead to mental confusion. Advanced study requires more post-sequential
reading than non-sequential reading, I would argue. The goal is to get the argument and then make
the connections—or at the very least, don’t lose the thread of the main
argument along the way. I do—at
times—make forays away from the main text, but there is always a risk in doing
so, and it requires me to stick a mental placeholder in the main argument. The ability to keep the main argument in
working memory, however, comes from a lifetime of reading print. (Some indication that extensively hyperlinked
texts are, indeed, working against critical thinking skills comes from research on how teenagers read websites.)
I do not want to be seen as
insisting on the maintenance of print culture against all odds. What I do want to do is maintain some things
that I see as good in print culture; The techno-topians have plenty to say, and
I think to raise a contrary voice can be healthy.
Reading Johnson-Eilola and Joyce
Both of
these authors made me quite impatient. I
think a significant stumbling block was the style. Postmodern literary theory is not the scholarship
that I was acculturated into in my master’s degree. I find it facile but rather hard to
follow. Sometimes I suspect that the
main goal is to sound clever and the attempt comes across as pretentious to me. To be fair, I recognize that every discipline
and subdiscipline has its own way of talking, so I try—not always successfully—not
to be too hostile. Here is an example
from my notes. I wrote, “Hypertext turns
us in to angels without maps? We keep
returning to our conventional practices because ‘we allow our nostalgia to
channel new possibilities into old pathways’?
Which of course represents ‘existing channels of power’… (13). For pity’s
sake, we’re only talking about hypertext, not religion.”
Here is an even more frustrating
example from Joyce (2000). He calls
searches gritty “in the sense that the particularity of an evolving planet and
its creatures are gritty” (p. 74). This
was my response in my notes:
What?? Dirty like gravel? Diverse
and minutely-differentiated? Um. Explain again what this has to do with
searches. Going on: “Yet if they herald
a loss it is, I think, the cleansing and morphogenetic loss that engenders a
newness” (74). Why are they a loss? Has this
been explained earlier? The searches are approximate rather than specific?
Well, I don’t know about Joyce, but I did library searches before the days of
databases and the Internet, and those searches also had a groping clumsiness
about them, too. In what ways are newer
methods of search “cleansing”? Sorry. This guy is not communicating. I don’t admire cleverness if it doesn’t make
any sense.
To be absolutely fair, I did find some memorable and
comprehensible quotes from Joyce, but I am not sure I understood exactly what
he was getting at much of the time.
With readings
that were a little more challenging for me, an interesting and occasionally
helpful aspect was the digital annotations that were attached from a previous
reader. For example, Johnson-Eilola’s
described hypertext as lacking constraining pathways for readers. “Postmodern
articulations of this hypertext space, theorists commonly argue, encourage us
to think of reading beyond the train tracks. There are no longer, it seems,
fixed train tracks at all—only the process of readers continually retracking
the landscape, becoming writers. Writing and reading become less clearly
distinct, polarized activities” (p. 137). The quote was annotated with more or
less what I had been thinking. I also
found the summary annotation at the ends of the chapters somewhat helpful.
Because of my difficulty with
understanding him, I will not summarize Joyce’s articles, but I can give a few
takeaways. The first was useful in
seeing how things looked in 1996 when theorists were just beginning to tackle
what hypertext meant for readers, writers and society. It also gives a bit of
history of the early steps towards hypertext and hypermedia. One thing that did catch my attention was that
the article explicitly employed the network metaphor:
“Hypertext structures are often
represented as nodes and links: the nodes "contain" text, graphical
information, sounds, and so on, connected by the links, which, however, may
themselves also contain information Or at least be labeled. Depending on the
interface metaphor—the way the program visually depicts its information—the
distinction between nodes and links is not always represented in hypertext
programs, and the contents of the nodes themselves can often function as links”
(Joyce, 1996, p. 19).
The excerpts from Joyce’s (2000)
book were arguably poetic but very challenging to read. The article on the
library inspired a picture with one of the early weird metaphors.
The other chapter from Joyce’s book
had great imagery and inspired another picture,
Favorite quotes from this week
Valuable insight for pedagogy: “The activity of a community of writers can work to outweigh the weight of conventional, conservative notions of meaning. At the same time, the lived process of this activity helps to prevent the postmodernist from degenerating into nihilism” (Johnson-Eilola, 1997, p. 173)
I am hoping that this is true: “What I often say (l said it in the last chapter) in response to others who claim that the so-called MTV generation has no attention span is that in an age like ours that privileges polyvocality, multiplicity, and constellated knowledge a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings” (Joyce, 2000, p. 74)
I think this is increasingly, if differently, true: “We inhabit new forms in the presence and community of others. In a world of shifting centers, meanings are not so much published as placed, continually embodied in human community” (Joyce, 2000, p. 75)
Interesting insight on the appeal of the new and the next: “In our technologies, our cultures, our entertainments and, increasingly, the way we constitute our communities and families we live in an anticipatory state of constant nextness. There is, of course, a branch of philosophy that concerns those who see themselves as inhabiting the time before the future. That branch, eschatology, is perhaps the archetype of othermindedness and its itch of desire for constant, immediate, and successive links to something beyond.” (Joyce, 2000, p. 81-82)
Profound: “The memory of the world, materialized in the body, for which both the book and the screen stand as repeated instances of embodiment, is itself the world” (Joyce, 2000, p. 101).
Latour?
Being read with some pleasure. I will put all my thoughts in one blog next
week.
References
Johnson-Eilola,
J. (1997). Nostalgic angels:
Rearticulating hypertext writing. Norwood, N.J: Ablex Pub. Corp.
Joyce, M. (1996). Of two minds: Hypertext pedagogy and poetics.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Joyce, M.
(2000). Othermindedness: The
emergence of network culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment