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EJournal Volume 01 Number 02-1
From LISTSERV@uacsc2.albany.edu Tue Jan 5 16:00:02 1993
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 15:58:21 -0500
From: Revised List Processor (1.7e) <LISTSERV@uacsc2.albany.edu>
Subject: File: "EJRNL V1N2-1"
To: David Pirmann <pirmann@cs.rutgers.edu>
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October 1991 _EJournal_ Volume 1 Issue 2-1 ISSN 1054-1055
An Electronic Journal concerned with the implications
of electronic networks and texts.
University at Albany, State University of New York
ejournal@albnyvms.bitnet
There are 426 lines in this issue.
CONTENTS:
Editorial 31 lines.
by Ted Jennings
The Brent-Amato Exchange 216 lines.
by Doug Brent
College of General Studies
University of Calgary
and Joe Amato
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
DEPARTMENTS:
Letters (policy) 11 lines.
Reviews (policy) 11 lines.
Supplements to previous texts (policy) 12 lines.
Information about _EJournal_ (subscribing, etc.) 45 lines.
PEOPLE:
Board of Advisors
Consulting Editors
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This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright 1991 by
_EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away the journal and its
contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and all financial interest is hereby
assigned to the acknowledged authors of individual texts. This notification
must accompany all distribution of _EJournal_.
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E D I T O R I A L [line 1]
Charter subscribers may have noticed that this issue is enumerated, somewhat
unconventionally, "Volume 1 Issue 2-1 ." We are still experimenting with the
format and distribution patterns that networks permit; this episode involves
picking up on the "thread" concept familiar to users of other lists and
bulletin boards.
This present "mailing" contains *only* an exchange of views about the "Re/View"
that constituted Issue 2. If there are subsequent comments about this exchange
between Doug Brent and Joe Amato, or about the original review, or about the
book by Jay Bolter that Joe reviewed, we could extend the discussion into issue
2-3 and beyond -- while concurrently e-mailing Issues 3 and 4, devoted to
different subjects.
Meanwhile, recent subscribers in particular will find Joe Amato's original
Re/View of Jay Bolter's book useful --perhaps necessary-- for appreciating the
exchange in this issue.
You will receive that issue, _EJournal_ Vol 1 #2, if you send the following
message [ addressed to LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1 ]: GET EJRNL V1N2
We are experimenting with ways to arrange our Bitnet Fileserver so that readers
won't be stymied by its antediluvian restrictions. The message INDEX EJRNL
sent to LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1 will trigger an up-to-date readout of what is
available -- including the file EJRNL INDEX.
Suggestions about smoothing the relationships among readers, the journal, the
medium (and libraries) are always welcome.
Ted Jennings [l.31]
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The Brent-Amato Exchange [line 1]
by Doug Brent
College of General Studies
University of Calgary
and Joe Amato
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[Doug Brent sent this response in July; I forwarded it (anonymously) to Joe;
Joe's reply came back almost overnight. The delay in publishing the exchange
is _EJournal_'s fault, not theirs. Ted Jennings]
* * * * *
Joe Amato's review of _Writing Space_ is a useful and provocative document.
However, I would like to respond to it by picking holes in two specific aspects
of it: Amato's quarrels with Bolter's format, which I think are misplaced, and
his ideas on the "darker side" of hypertext, which I would like expanded.
First, Amato takes Bolter to task for not pushing his printed document farther
in the direction of hypertext, a direction in which, Amato argues, it is
already beginning to drift as it becomes less linear and more aphoristic toward
the end:
I would argue that Bolter, for all his attention to the work of novelists
such as Joyce (of both varieties), gives relatively short shrift to
several (late-) print-age techniques that might well have provided his
final section with a bit more oomph. . . . Specifically, had he
broken with sentence/paragraph structure -- even within his print-bound
format -- the resulting *aesthetic* reflexivity could, I think, have
avoided what must otherwise be read as a sort of tacit irony, the irony
implicit in having to use print for a discussion of un-printable
technologies. (l. 205)
I think that this quarrel over form misses completely Bolter's point (or else
Amato simply doesn't *accept* Bolters point, which is fine but he doesn't say
that). Bolter argues that writers such as Joyce, Tzara and others resorted to
their disorienting techniques precisely because there was no other way to
accomplish the fragmentation that they sought. Their only writing tool was
linear print. In the computer age, he claims, these techniques are unnecessary
because the electronic writing space is available to do the job. One does not
have to write against the grain of hypertext to produce a Dada poem; hypertexts
come pre-deconstructed, their oppositions and tensions exposed rather than
hidden. [l.46]
Thus the print writing space is freed to do what it does most naturally: act as
a vehicle for relatively linear argument. Since Bolter's book is also
available as a hypertext, why bother to do badly in print what can be done in
the alternate medium?
This is the most general lesson of the technological perspective on
communication. Texts, and even thoughts, will automatically flow into the
shape that is most congenial to the technology in which they are created,
unless the creator goes to extreme lengths to kick them out of those ruts. In
the electronic age, there is no longer any need to expend that amount of energy
to kick print out of its linear rut.
Second, his displeasure with Bolter's linear form has, I think distracted Amato
>from his other task, that of pointing out the "darker side" of Bolter's
scenario that he alludes to repeatedly throughout his review. I am quite
convinced, with Amato, that the scenario does indeed have a darker side, and I
think Bolter is too, although Amato is right that he chooses not to dwell on
it. But I have difficulty making out from Amato's review exactly what this
darker side *is*. He states that "it is as yet far from clear that networking
may not itself merely represent a further trivializing of human experience, a
way of de-tuning the political consciousness of groups of individuals" (l.
233). This seems to be the essence of this darker side. But Amato does not
develop, to my satisfaction at any rate, the details of *why* this should
represent a further trivializing of human experience.
And so I would like to end with an invitation to Amato to expand on these
ideas. Why would we "find ourselves at some point unable to re/view the
ideological consequences inherent in such apparent self-authorization" (l.
248)? What is wrong with a world in which ironic efforts to criticise culture,
including deconstruction, have ceased to be against the grain and become
natural to the medium? Is it simply that they will thereby become less
self-conscious? I find myself unable to answer these questions by examining
Amato's review. [l.80]
In short, even though Amato's dissenting voice cannot be embedded in Bolter's
text as it could be in hypertext, perhaps he could nonetheless take advantage
of this non-hyper space to expand on and clarify his comments.
Doug Brent
College of General Studies
University of Calgary
[Here follows Joe Amato's reply to Doug Brent's response to Joe's Re/View
of Jay David Bolter's _Writing Space_]:
Good, constructive commentary. But let's see if I can't clarify my seemingly
more tenuous reservations regarding Bolter's work, in accordance with the
aforementioned "two specific aspects" of my re/view:
That texts and thoughts "will automatically flow into the shape that is most
congenial to the technology in which they are created" suggests that one might
do well to interrogate such technologies thoroughly to determine with some
precision the types of aesthetic freedoms and constraints they "automatically"
present to "creator[s]." True, due to the development of electronic media such
as hypertext, some may no longer perceive the need to "kick print out of its
linear rut." For these folk, print is a dead duck, and has been so for some
time now. It is surely a comment on this "late age of print" that, even among
this group, ambivalence tends to be a shared sentiment.
I simply have trouble in accepting, wholesale, Bolter's contention that the
general features of progressive twentieth century artistic and intellectual
achievements have anticipated the non-linear, fragmented nature of electronic
media -- in effect, that the advent of hypertext has evidently made apparent
the teleology of these older forms -- a claim that, however much I may agree
with it in principle, requires perhaps a good deal more practical elaboration
than even Bolter has managed. There would seem to be a tendency among
hypertext commentators to put the car [sic] before the horse. Viewed against
the more traditional scholastic context, what needs to be looked at more
closely, as I see it, are the assumptions we bring to our engagement with
electronic media, assumptions rooted in the methods, insights and critical
conventions of the twentieth century. In order to accommodate this process,
older print technologies will undoubtedly have to be rethought, for the
technological ferment that has provided for the emergence of newer technologies
represents a fundamental departure from the prerogatives of earlier print forms
(take cybernetics, for example), hence affording the opportunity to view things
in a new light. And a 'new light' might well entail a fresh approach. [l.124]
Specifically, I would ask for a more palpable sense of what is meant by
electronic "writing space," and, because older print forms -- which are
presumably at stake in this transition -- have provided the standards against
which we are currently, and by default, evaluating the newer technologies, it
is hardly begging such a question to suggest that one attempt something a bit
more imaginative than conventional reference to the (by now) well-documented
aesthetic conventions of late twentieth century literary inquiry. (That
Bolter's text is available as a hypertext still does not address the
print-based predicament.) Hence, assertions such as "One does not have to
write against the grain of hypertext to produce a Dada poem" -- which would
itself seem to imply that writing Dada poetry is aesthetically and, more to the
point, politically at one with the aims of electronic media -- might be made to
suffer a more rigorous critical examination.
O.K. -- so Bolter is not a poet (at least, not to my knowledge). Yet he is a
hypertext co-author, a writer. And I believe a bit more legible d-d-discomfort
on his part might have made me feel a bit more comfortable. Surely print is up
to the task. It may be a matter of taste, finally, but matters of taste are
invariably a function of community norms, and the academic community is chock
full of such norms.
Regarding the "darker side" of Bolter's text: this is indeed given relatively
short shrift in my re/view, largely due to my misgivings as to what I took to
be its already excessive length. Fortunately, my respondent has provided me
with a convenient articulation on which I would like to "expand":
What is wrong with a world in which ironic efforts to criticize
culture, including deconstruction, have ceased to be against the
grain and become natural to the medium? Is it simply that they
will thereby become less self-conscious?
Even assuming that "deconstruction" might be "natural to the medium" -- the
sort of claim, with its premise of a "natural" deconstructive element, that, as
I argue above, requires a good deal more elaboration (and perhaps revision) --
what is meant, precisely, by "ironic efforts to criticize culture"? How on
earth could electronic media ipso facto guarantee any such thing? Were I to
assume that everyone had access to electronic media, that a majority utilized
such media on a regular basis, that such media facilitated a variety of
cultural criticism, and that such criticism was -- because of non-linearity?
transience? aphorism? density of reference? fragmentation? abdication of
authority? -- ironic (and effectively so), would there be any point in
attempting to substantiate in what ways such "efforts" had "thereby become less
self-conscious"? Would such a "world" -- one evidently replete with active,
culturally informed contributors -- trouble itself with such questions?
Indeed, given the obvious benefits of remaining in the medium -- on-line, as it
were -- why would *anyone* bother to provide answers? The implication would
seem to be that active engagement within this newer medium somehow
*automatically provides for* those critical efforts directed toward a richer
understanding *of* the medium, and un-self-consciously, to boot. [l.174]
My commentator has, in effect, trivialized ideological inquiry by suggesting,
to use Bolter's formulation, that the new medium will "incorporate criticism
within itself," an example of the sort of casual hyperbole that I take to be,
again, symptomatic of much of the debate endemic to these new technologies. Of
course, if we assume that electronic media are merely the evolutionary outcome
of a long line of progressive technological innovations, then the "naturalness"
of such transitions obscures the vast resources, public and private, that have
had a hand both in the production and commodification of information (to speak
in broad sweep).
In concrete terms, one way of looking at this "darker side" is to consider the
extent to which this vast network of knowledge workers -- currently
predominantly white males -- ultimately determines the nodes, or data, of
hypertext databases. Surely one may cite similar occasions for abuse
pertaining to the older technologies. And surely hypertext promises to
circumvent difficulties inherent in print by -- to paraphrase a much-touted
benefit -- facilitating the forging of links between various knowledges. Yet
this does not obviate the need to examine the sorts of control constraints and
technological biases that have been designed and built into the machines --
software, hardware and all.
Even a pragmatist like myself would grant that human experience is trivialized
whenever experiential options are assumed *exhausted* by a specific material
reality. Hence I find it difficult not to raise at least an eyebrow at the
fact that the relationship between electronic media and the users (or
consumers?) of such media might be defined in terms of a presumed
correspondence between simulation of mind and mind itself -- as I argue in my
re/view, a potentially closed loop with little or no provision for negative
feedback (entirely ironic?). That print was culpable on the count of similar,
and tacit, delimitations does not warrant the view that the liabilities of
hypertext should go unchallenged, as I am certain my commentator will agree.
There are many reasons to be suspicious of global technological trends, trends
that literally incorporate (presumably) multinational agenda. Aphoristically
speaking, one might ask whether the good things in life really *don't* come
easy.
Joe Amato
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[l.216]
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Letters:
_EJournal_ is willing publish letters to the editor. But at this point we make
no promises about how many, which ones, or what format. Because the "Letters"
column of a periodical is a habit of the paper environment, we can't predict
exactly what will happen in pixel space. For instance, _EJournal_ readers can
send outraged objections to our essays directly to the authors. Also, we can
publish substantial counterstatements as articles in their own right, or as
"Supplements." Even so, there will probably be some brief, thoughtful
statements that appear to be of interest to many subscribers. When there are,
they will appear as "Letters."
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Reviews:
_EJournal_ is willing to publish reviews of almost anything that seems
to fit under our broad umbrella: the implications of electronic networks
and texts. At this point we are still hoping to review a hypertext
novel, and have no other works-- electronic or printed --under
consideration. We do not solicit and cannot provide review copies of
fiction, prophecy, critiques, other texts, programs, hardware, lists or
bulletin boards. But if you would like to bring any publicly available
information to our readers' attention, send your review (any length) to
us, or ask if writing one sounds to us like a good idea.
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Supplements:
_EJournal_ plans to experiment with ways of revising, responding to, re-
working, or even retracting the texts we publish. Authors who want to address
a subject already broached --by others or by themselves-- may send texts,
preferably brief, that we will consider publishing under the "Supplements"
heading. Proposed "supplements" will not go through full, formal editorial
review. Whether this "Department" will operate like a delayed-reaction
bulletin board or like an expanded letters-to-the-editor space, or whether it
will be withdrawn in favor of a system of appending supplemental material to
archived texts, or will take on an electronic identity with no direct print-
oriented analogue, will depend on what readers/writers make of the opportunity.
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Information about _EJournal_:
Users on both Bitnet and the Internet may subscribe to _EJournal_ by sending an
e-mail message to this address:
listserv@albnyvm1.bitnet
The following should be the only line in the message:
SUB EJRNL Subscriber's Name
Please send all other messages and inquiries to the _EJournal_ editors
at the following address:
ejournal@albnyvms.bitnet
_EJournal_ is an all-electronic, Bitnet/Internet distributed,
peer-reviewed, academic periodical. We are particularly interested in theory
and praxis surrounding the creation, transmission, storage, interpretation,
alteration and replication of electronic text. We are also interested in the
broader social, psychological, literary, economic and pedagogical implications
of computer-mediated networks.
The journal's essays will be available free to Bitnet/Internet
addresses. Recipients may make paper copies; _EJournal_ will provide
authenticated paper copy from our read-only archive for use by academic deans
or others. Individual essays, reviews, stories-- texts --sent to us will be
disseminated to subscribers as soon as they have been through the editorial
process, which will also be "paperless." We expect to offer access through
libraries to our electronic Contents, Abstracts, and Keywords, and to be
indexed and abstracted in appropriate places.
Writers who think their texts might be appreciated by _EJournal_'s
audience are invited to forward files to ejournal@albnyvms.bitnet . If you are
wondering about starting to write a piece for to us, feel free to ask if it
sounds appropriate. There are no "styling" guidelines; we would like to be a
little more direct and lively than many paper publications, and less hasty and
ephemeral than most postings to unreviewed electronic spaces.
This issue's "feature article," and those from other issues of
_EJournal_, are now available from a Fileserv at Albany. We plan to distribute
a "table of contents" to a broad population occasionally, along with
instructions for downloading. A list of available files from the _EJournal_
Fileserv may be obtained by sending the message INDEX EJRNL to this address:
LISTSERV@ALBNYVMS.BITNET .
To "get" one of the files in the EJRNL Listserv, send GET <filename>
(where <filename> is the name of the file that you wish to have sent to you)
to LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1.BITNET .
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Board of Advisors: Dick Lanham, University of California at Los Angeles
Ann Okerson, Association of Research Libraries
Joe Raben, City University of New York
Bob Scholes, Brown University
Harry Whitaker, University of Quebec at Montreal
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Consulting Editors - October 1991
[North American addresses are at Bitnet sites.]
ahrens@hartford John Ahrens Hartford
ap01@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool
crone@cua Tom Crone Catholic University
dabrent@uncamult Doug Brent Calgary
djb85@albnyvms Don Byrd Albany
donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College
ds001451@ndsuvm1 Ray Wheeler North Dakota
eng006@unoma1 Marvin Peterson Nebraska - Omaha
erdt@pucal Terry Erdt Purdue Calumet
fac_aska@jmuvax1 Arnie Kahn James Madison
folger@yktvmv Davis Foulger IBM - Watson Center
george@gacvax1 G. N. Georgacarakos Gustavus Adolphus
geurdes@rulfsw. Han Geurdes Leiden
leidenuniv.nl
gms@psuvm Gerry Santoro Pennsylvania State University
nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs Rochester Institute of Technology
pmsgsl@ritvax Patrick M. Scanlon Rochester Institute of Technology
r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State
ryle@urvax Martin Ryle Richmond
twbatson@gallua Trent Batson Gallaudet
usercoop@ualtamts Wes Cooper Alberta
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University at Albany Computing Services Center:
Isabel Nirenberg, Bob Pfeiffer; Ben Chi, Director
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Editor: Ted Jennings, English, University at Albany
Managing Editor: Ron Bangel, University at Albany
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State University of New York University Center at Albany Albany, NY 12222 USA
