Chapter 1: Interface
Electronic essay “Hypertext Is Dead (Isn’t It?)” began as an email conversation based on a town hall discussion vis-a-vis which turned digital and was eventually “edited” and published as a Kairos article. Brings up the questions of who receives “credit” for the publication (for the purposes of workplace advancement or CV) and “what constitutes recognizable scholarship” (4).
Brooke says his goal is to fill the gap between our understanding of static text and digital rhetoric (5) and “to fuse rhetoric and technology” (6), but after I’ve finished reading the first 4 chapters, I’m still looking for that gap to be filled. Why would he lump databases into a discussion about rhetoric? Yes, a narrative and a database both provide various levels of information, but so does the user’s manual for my car, yet no one is trying to force its square peg into the round hole of rhetoric.
Brooke claims that “technology is transdisciplinary, cutting across the full range of activities we engage in as professionals, rather than subdisciplinary” (5). Yes, technology is not just a writing thing or a math thing, but this push to find “rhetoric” behind every key stroke or piece of code seems a stretch to me.
Wysocki’s gap defined: “there is writing about how to analyze or design isolated individual texts and there is writing about the broad contexts and functioning of media structures in general (p. 6)” (4). Brooke proposes “a shift from text to interface” (7), but who is doing the shifting? The authors? The critics? The audience? Is all digital text to be seen as interface? How does he define “interface”?
He is correct to say that New Criticism, with its focus exclusively on the work to the disregard of the author, cannot be the standard for New Media theory (9-10); however, his call to create a “new” evaluation focusing on invention instead of theory seems misplaced. Movers and shakers of the past did not have a formal “invention” description or evaluation set in place, yet they still created something new (detective fiction, O’Connor’s focus on the grotesque (“shouting” at her audience), Faulkner’s circular time references, etc.). Theory does “requir[e] an object that is stable, isolated … and consistent” (10); such is true for any discussion or critique of a shared experience. Otherwise, it would not be “a shared experience” which is my understanding of good (great) literature: we are sharing the human experience.
Landow’s 4 Rhetorics of linking:
- Orientation
- Navigation
- Departure
- Arrival (14)
Is this discussion of “hypertext” specific to a narrative with links which change the story line? He is assuming that his audience clearly understands his terminology and its usage, but he succeeded in confusing me (which isn’t hard, really).
What is wrong with the assumption that “we learn to write by reading exemplary texts by professionals” (15)? Isn’t that how many things in life are learned, like how to be considerate of others or what is expected in social situations? (see, for example, Albert Bandura’s social experiments with the Bobo doll to support “Social Learning Theory” and “Observational Learning”)
Concept of “remediation” from Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) introduces “the idea that ‘the content of any medium is another medium’” (16). Brookes talks about it as an approach to bridge “the gap,” but he dismisses its effectiveness. One problem with this theory is the idea that we must make associations with known things (like the book The Martian Chronicles; concepts such as husband or family may not be a Martian concept, but in order to explain the relationships he saw on Mars, he had to use those terms).
“…[T]he idea of shifting authorial responsibilities to the reader is a frequent feature of hypertext theory” (20). How is the term hypertext being used here?
Brookes says that literary criticism doesn’t have the answer, nor does McLuhanist remediation; instead, he proposes “actionary” instead of “re-actionary” methods (22). Because the written [textual] words in hypertext are often changing, we can’t rely on literary criticism. He wants us to shift our thinking from “(textual) objects” to “(medial) ecologies” (23).
Chapter 2: Ecology
I had a hard time tracking from this point forward. Brooke’s attempt to apply the “canons of rhetoric” and the trivium as analogies didn’t work for me. I felt like he was trying to cram a round peg into a square hole (sorry I’ve used this analogy before but it describes my thinking).
The 5 Canons of Classical Rhetoric
- Invention
- Arrangement
- Style
- Memory
- Delivery
Off the bat, he dismisses the last two, which completely throws the analogy to me.
The 3 Modes of Rhetoric
- Forensic
- Deliberative
- Epideictic
The 3 Proofs
- Logos
- Ethos
- Pathos
We don’t teach our students to think of “[w]ritten words [as being] divorced from any context” (33), regardless of the fact that they don’t turn their papers into speeches. Again, this causes his analogy to fail for me.
If the canons don’t fit inside “theory” and “practice” (36), then why try to make them work to help understand/explain New Media? Isn’t he trying to create a new theory?
Brooke references the link between using language and text not just to communicate but also as “social activities” (38); perhaps he is trying too hard to discuss rhetoric when he should be discussing social aspects of New Media? (See my reference previously to the Bobo doll)
Brooke’s new trivium would consist of the ecology of code (the basic units being used), the ecology of practice (how those units are used), and the ecology of culture (relationships) (48-49) (sounds like a preacher!).
Chapter 3: Proairesis
Model of textual economy: “…insistence on the social, cultural, and contextual position of the writer; the participation of readers and audiences in the construction of meaning; and the necessary imprecision of language – all positions that refute the traditional notion of the author/inventor” (62). With my Christian world view, I place more importance on an author (creator) than the New Critics, but I still have the entire rhetorical situation (author, text, audience) in mind. The entire rhetorical situation is necessary to match LeFevre’s concept that the audience is involved in invention (65).
A Disciplinary Ecology of Invention
Brooke sees Invention as part of the Ecology of Culture because the author cannot be isolated from the culture around him nor the culture of the audience he is trying to reach. This closes the gap between author and audience and ties in LeFevre’s concept described above.
DeWitt says that invention is “a layering of episodes . . . [or] ‘moment[s] of invention’ [which] occur when students notice something and when they see relationships and make connections” which can continue to produce more moments of invention (67). He wants us to “tolerate disorder” but all learning is messy, right?
The Death of the Hypertext Author
Brooke now discusses Invention as part of the Ecology of Practice (71) while working to dispel the notion that the author creates in isolation (68-69). Landow’s “readerly and writerly” texts is discussed here.
This section should have answered my question regarding the use of the term hypertext, but I’m still uncertain. “If electronic writing requires a more active, involved reader, one that produces the text as she reads, then it stands to reason . . . that the author’s responsibility for and control over the text are proportionally less” (73). How is the phrase “produces the text as she reads” translated concretely? Do links change the story line?
Hermeneutic and Proairetic Invention
“Barthe argues that any individual literary text is an interface, an individualized interaction with a ‘galaxy of signifiers’ and literary strategies” (75). I almost want to say, “Duh.”
Barthe’s 5 Codes *colored codes make texts “readerly”:
- Hermeneutic
- Semantic
- Symbolic
- Proairetic
- Cultural
Hermeneutic: “operates through the establishment of an enigma, void, or mystery – an absence – that will be fulfilled eventually, but is held in suspense. The hermeneutic marks the goal(s) toward which the reader (and the plot and characters) are headed” (75).
Proairetic: “indicate[s] actions or events – ‘whoever reads the text amasses certain data under some generic titles for actions . . . and this title embodies the sequence’ (p. 19)” (75).
“Between the ‘truth’ of the hermeneutic and the ‘empirics’ of the proairetic, ‘the modern text comes into being’ (p. 30)” (75-76). “The simultaneous push of action and pull of meaning combine for us in the desire for closure” (76). This closure is important for reducing pluralities and limiting the reading of a text. Any action (proairetic) which does not lead toward the resolution or actualization (hermeneutic) is extraneous.
Summary: this concept moves us away from the author’s goal in creating a text to instead thinking “what should the audience do after coming into contact with this text?”
Virtual(ized) Authorship
Footnotes were the first hypertext ♥
Why did Brooke not add a 4th ecology called the Ecology of Connections? He mentions it when discussing how authorship is now viewed as contributors to the larger discussion (79).
Brooke uses the concept of a deck of cards not carrying any meaning “outside of a particular set of rules and one or more players. Similarly, there are many new media ‘texts’ that do not ‘mean’ in the same way that we might argue that a particular poem or essay means something. This presents an obvious challenge to our ecologies of invention, which focus almost exclusively on the production and construction of meaning” (81).
Proairesis: INV-Engines
What does this sub-title mean? What are INV-Engines?
Brooke claims that since “the human is a crucial element in moving from possible to virtual . . . the technological, as a site of distribution within an ecology of invention, is important for moving from actual to virtual in our inventional practice” (81).
Instead of having our students ask the hermeneutical question, “How do I start?” with the goal of writing something that meets the approval of the teacher, we want them to play with “proairetic invention, a focus on the generation of possibilities, rather than their elimination until all but one are gone and closure is achieved. Closure is no less important now than it ever has been, but with the advent of new media and interfaces that resist closure, proairesis provides an important corrective to the hermeneutically oriented inventional theory that has prevailed in our field to date” (86-87). Is this merely an unnecessarily deep discussion of various methods of prewriting? First students have to generate their thoughts before they can eliminate those which don’t fit. Is Brooke saying students should no longer eliminate? At what point do they stop generating?
Chapter 4: Pattern
Discussion of the dismissal of arrangement: “…any arrangement that the writer of hypertext might practice becomes irrelevant to the reader who can invent, discover, view, and/or test their own forms” (90). Again, in what context are such statements made? The rules of grammar and syntax still remain, whether text is electronic or on paper. Like any game using a deck of cards, we expect to be able to know and follow the rules. Oh, here Brooke agrees with me (he, he!): “The idea that hypertext, or new media in general, no longer has a use for arrangement is not a particularly persuasive one” (91). Then why in the world does he keep bringing up all these concepts which have very little merit? He continues by saying, “The mistake that each of these writers makes is to presume that arrangement must be an all-or-nothing affair” (91). These guys have too much time on their hands.
From Sequence to Pattern
Scott Rhettberg says that instead of focusing on Chronological order, web sites have to think Geographically (93). Yep, makes sense. Branched out, this translates into “Space trumps time” on the screen. But isn’t that true of a book in hand as well? Yes, we do read books with an assumption that the information will be presented chronologically (blasted Faulkner), but the words on the page of a physical book still take up space. As e.e. cummings and other imagist poets have shown us, spatial arrangement can provide just as much meaning as chronological ordering of words.
While this statement may be a true representation of New Media culture, I’m not sure I agree with its premise: “New media writing subverts the expectations that we have for print texts” (93).
“…the Web offers us what Weinberger calls ‘places without space.’ Ideally, this means that we should be able to find some middle ground between the sequentiality of the printed page and the ‘confused heap’ that Quintilian warns against” (96).
Isn’t Bernstein’s discussion of the hypertext cycle (96) another way of discussing Networking? Node leads to node and back again.
Databases, Data Mining
Manovich mirrors my questioning of trying to connect these discussions of New Media to Rhetoric: “Many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end; in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other. (p. 218)” (98). Yes!!! Trying to connect databases to rhetoric is like trying to connect my car’s user’s manual to rhetoric. I don’t need any convincing; I just need to be able to USE the information.
Of course, Manovich may not have played with databases because he later claims that the list cannot be ordered (98). I do understand that we can derive meaning from database information but I wouldn’t go so far as to call that meaning a “narrative.”
Tagclouds: what Wordle does (the more a word is used, the larger it becomes)
I finally did my own research of my understanding of the term rhetoric and located this link from Purdue OWL.
Since I think of rhetoric mostly as argument, where audience, text, and author are all important, it’s no wonder I’ve been lost during these conversations. Even the discussions of “narrative” and “story” don’t fit into my understanding of rhetoric.
But a video on the Purdue OWL web site explains that any form of information can be seen as rhetoric. I need to chew on that a while.