A
Meshing of Minds: The Future of Online Research for Print and Electronic
Publication
Michael
Day
A
chapter in New Worlds, New Words:
Exploring Pathways for Writing about and in Electronic Environments. John
Barber and Dene Grigar,
eds. (
Abstract:
This
chapter will not suggest that the current model for research leading to
publication will ever disappear. It
will, however, suggest that the electronic media will have made possible so
many more forms of contact between and among minds and archived information
that either the definition of research will change, or we'll have to come up
with a new word for what electronic research will have become.
In
the past, and in other cultures (and perhaps in the future?), people were not
and are not so concerned with the ownership of words and ideas, or with the
privilege of originality of thought.
Ideas were, and are shared because they make sense and add to the common
good. Could the collaborative
communities forming on the Internet help us get past the objectification and
commoditization of the words and thoughts so prevalent now in the publishing
and legal arenas?
Already,
the network of information sharing has become decentralized and rhizomatic, having, like the Internet, bypassed some of the
major institutionalized sources of information.
Publishers and academic institutions may never disappear, but their role
in research and the dissemination of information will have to change, in that
publishers will have to move some of what they print to the online realm, and
academic institutions will need to recognize the importance of online research
and publication.
Anyone
and everyone who wants them will have web pages, but we'll cease to care about
the proliferation of junk on the web because search engines will have improved
to the point that we'll be able to find more of what we need and less of what
we don't. And because the novelty will
have worn off and schools will teach critical web literacy, researchers will be
able to identify and avoid biased and poorly documented sources.
But
the primary focus for this chapter will be the ways in which the Internet and
the web will allow research to become even more collaborative, and the
possibility that many of the researchers who collaborate will care much less
about who owns ideas and who gets credit for them than they do about making
those ideas available to the widest possible audience.
For
some, the act of research itself is becoming a vastly different process. Of course, the migration of much information
to the web makes these sources available from the personal computer, but more
and more researchers are also using E-mail and synchronous environments such as
MUDs and MOOs to tap what
Howard Rheingold call the "living database" of connected scholars on
the Internet.
Within
the living database, one can still quote and cite "experts" in a
field, but more and more, because of the synergistic nature of knowledge
formation within the online media, it is impossible to identify a single source
for an idea, so crediting a source other than the group is close to
impossible.
This
new form of "research" is largely conversational, not at all like our
traditional notion of publication, in which we carefully build an argument
through page after page. It is dialogic,
even polylogic, and often makes use of dialectic
reasoning. The speed and convenience of
online exchange of ideas allow greater inclusion of the voices of others
engaged in agonistic discourse. It
allows interaction and response to be incorporated into the weave of a
"document," changing the very nature of what we will call a document.
As
others in this volume have noted, web publishing of research allows much faster
dissemination of ideas than print publication.
And since webbed publications generally are not purchased, they can
spread further, into more hands that need them.
These factors problematize issues of
ownership, copyright, and originality, and will force the research and
publication community to recast ethical and legal constraints on the usage and
sharing of information.
___________________________________________
In
order to divine the future of research, it may be useful to first look back to
the past, and then to extend our gaze to cultures around the world. For our current notions of
originality and ownership of words and ideas are heavily dependent upon a
historical turn of events, a turn which did not affect all cultures equally. And when all is said and done, the larger
forces of history and the worldly context will play upon what research will
have become in 20, 50, or 100 years.
In
the prehistoric world, oral storytelling and oral histories carried much
knowledge through time. What a culture
knew and shared was only by virtue of a person or people being able to remember
it by telling and retelling it. Even
during these times, the authority or truthfulness of the words could be
strengthened by reference to a particularly well-known leader or storyteller,
who was reputed to have uttered them.
But ownership and authorship were not as important as was sharing the
words and ideas.
The
carryover from the ancient world into written and printed works in medieval
times can be found in what Walter Ong calls "oral
residue" in printed texts
(Chapter 2 of Rhetoric, Romance, and
Technology). That is, although a
text may have been hand copied or rudimentarily printed, it retains much of the
feel and structure of an orally transmitted story. More important, though, is the fact that
texts were shared among people and often read aloud, for few were
literate. So texts were not always seen
as private artifacts experienced in solitary confinement. They were public and communal, an act of
sharing. (cites to be added here)
Moreover,
the texts of this age were extremely derivative. Chaucer's stories, such as
the Canterbury Tales, were
based on other stories he had read or heard.
His style and delivery may have been different, but overall, the stories
were nearly identical to plays and stories which had previously been presented
by some other author; even the frame technique he used came from Bocaccio's Decameron (cite)
Further,
the idea of single text authorship was not well-established up through the
middle ages, other than the exceptions of Chaucer and the Gawain poet and some
biblical writers. Most of the texts of this age were not accredited to anyone;
they were public tales, passed from the oral storytelling tradition into text
without much accounting for the authorship or ownership of the stories.
For
instance, all the Arthurian legends existed long before they showed up in the
manuscripts. The stories were written
down, but the notion of a single author of the tales was not important because
ideas were to be shared,
They were part of a community memory, not something to be owned
and hoarded.
Moving
to Shakespeare's plays, we know that they were taken from a variety of sources,
including Holinshed's Chronicles, and we know that
Shakespeare was none too careful about documenting these sources. It was transmitting the story, not the name
of the author, that was considered important. Careful
research tells us that Hamlet came
from Saxo Grammaticus' Historia Danica (c.
1200)" by way of Francois de Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques
(1576), and that The Winter's Tale,
came from Pandosto: The Triumph of
Time a popular novel by Robert Greene, 1588. Even King
Lear came from a story called: The True Chronical
History of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella.
As
we can see, much sharing and copying went on just a few hundred years ago, but
these days, historical scholars of literature have a driving impulse to ascribe
authorship, originality, and ownership to texts written in a time in which these
issues did not seem to matter. Why is it
such a big issue to us in the modern and postmodern age?
Classical
education relied on educational practices that lasted well into the
renaissance, such as the imitation of good models that was the mainstay of the
rhetorical education which formed one third of the trivium. (Murphy 49-50) It was no crime to copy the style and idea structures of
others; indeed, such copying was considered the best way to develop one's own
skills in written and spoken communication.
Books
of the age, such as Erasmus' De Copia, and other rhetorical treatises with emphasis on
the topoi (topics or commonplaces of argument), made it
clear that there were only a few basic kinds of ideas, and that one learned to
communicate well by using them, and imitating good models. There was little emphasis on sources of ideas
except when one needed to add an ethical appeal to the argument by
name-dropping.
Scholars
of oral tradition such as Walter Ong maintain that
the use of commonplaces and imitated phrasings is formulaic and represents a
holdover from pre literate times. (Ong 16) From the age
of oral tradition up through the renaissance, the prevalent belief was that
knowledge and ideas were communally owned, so that they could not be owned or
stolen. Good ideas and stories were passed along on as much on their own merit
as on the merit of the author's name.
I
choose
In
Further,
standards of citation and intellectual property are somewhat more lax than in
the
Second,
this trend is even more evident in some of the scholarly writing I looked at in
The
way we teach research in the
Perhaps
the tendency toward more leniency about ownership of ideas in Japan arises not
only out of an urge to share and be community minded, but also because people
understand that every idea we have, as original as we might think it to be, is
actually prefigured and influenced by the ideas of others. In a way, this chapter is
not mine at all, but instead was stolen in fragments from talks I have given
and from everyone I have read and heard (who in turn stole it from
others). This is but one part of what
Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence” in his book of the same title. If nothing
is original, why should we be so concerned with being original or attempting to
own the ideas we think are ours?
This
concept is certainly in accordance with the common stereotype of the Japanese
as group minded. The tendency, described
in detail by Doi Takeo in The Anatomy of Dependence, suggests that
an average Japanese never thinks as an isolated
individual; knowledge, thoughts, actions and behaviors are all socially
constructed by the group. Knowledge is shared willingly by all for the
common good. Similar notions govern
attitudes in other Asian countries; the rampant piracy and copyright violations
on software, music, and videos in much of
Our
current emphasis on ownership and originality of ideas, to some degree, comes
from the rise of the romantic notion of the individual author, alone in a room,
writing completely original work. The
evolution of the modern university hiring, tenure and promotion system also
forced scholars to make sure that they received proper credit for what they
published, and that all published research was sufficiently original (ie, not borrowed and not collaboratively produced). Finally, the royalty system, with the promise
of profit from original copyrighted-protected works, brought us to our current
zealously protective and litigious attitudes toward ownership of ideas and
words.
It
is no accident that Ong subtitled his most popular
text, Orality and Literacy, "The Technologizing of the Word," for it was the
technologies of the printing press, distribution transportation, and electronic
media which brought about the major shift in the ways in which words were
conceived and disseminated.
In
his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House
Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday eloquently
describes the spiritual effects of the technologizing
of the word. His character, the Rev.
John Tosomah preaches:
In
the white man's world, language . . . -- and the way in which the white man
thinks of it -- has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and
literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so
commonplace. On every side of him there
are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers,
letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversation. He has diluted and mutilated the Word, and
words have begun to close in upon him.
He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word
itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no
return. It may be that he will perish by
the word (95)
Words
have become commodities, objects to be bought and sold. Through the Rev. Tosomah,
Momaday may want to indicate that the transfer of
wisdom though oral storytelling is better than its dissemination through
printed words. Yet novelists such as
Leslie Silko and Toni Morrison claim that
contemporary writers can reclaim and disseminate some of the power of the old
stories by careful retelling in print, through what Morrison refers to as
"village literature." The
combined and collaborative wisdom of the peoples of the earth can carry us
forward in wisdom to a future just as replete with stories, in fact more so. For the stories in print
can be spread far and wide, and the potential for even greater sharing grows
with electronic media and the Internet.
Implicit
in Momaday's critique of our modern use of words is
the threat that print and computers will desiccate and dilute words. Does the absence of a human voice and a body
voicing words suck them dry? Do
electronic words lose meaning and effect, didactic or poetic? Is computer-mediated communication somehow
inhuman? Certainly, the specter of
dehumanization is the stereotype we've seen in this century through novels such
as Orwell's 1984 and Vonnegut's Player Piano -- in these books computers
meant centralized control and the death of individuality.
The
current media hysteria over the dangers of the Internet only serves to whip
public opinion into a frenzy, with visions of chat
room pedophiles and a generation of computer geeks walled off from the world by
a glass screen of light and pixellated words. For example, I recently read about two
college students, at either end of their dorm room, chatting with each other by
e-mail on their computers, rather than face each other and speak. Some of the absurdities of CMC do seem
worrisome.
Even
if some of these problems are becoming a danger, I see another, more positive
trend evolving, one that brings people together instead of separating
them. Purists will argue that no true
community or relationship can exist without physical presence, because
community means that living bodies are gathered in the same place. However, we
do know that some of the pioneers of cyberspace have found many benefits to
doing collaborative research on the Internet, and most, if not all of them would argue that the gathering of minds in Internet
discussion groups constitutes a form of community.
Indeed,
the Internet may have been created for the US Department of Defense to route
sensitive information anywhere in the
Internet
media have helped researchers overcome geography, distance, separation, and
isolation from their peers, and have already increased the speed and volume of
research interaction. Print-bound
research had to be submitted to journals, and research communities had to wait
months, even years, for new ideas. Those
who wished to respond or contend then had to repeat the lengthy cycle of print
publication to be heard.
The
fast-and-furious controversy over cold fusion on the alt.fusion
usenet discussion group in 1989 is one early example
of the way in which the speed and convenience of the Internet can change the
process of research and dissemination of results. In less than a month, cold fusion as a potential
energy source was reported, discussed, and generally found to be less promising
than originally thought. In the archived
cold fusion discussion (see the URL in the Works Cited list), one finds several
messages a day carrying the debate forward, and adding new information. In
conventional academic journal publishing, this same process of discovery,
report, and discussion of findings usually takes years. As my colleague Robert Corey notes, Internet
e-mail discussion has become a fine mesh of scrutiny through which new ideas
and discoveries are filtered before they ever reach print.
Further,
according to Rheingold and others, researchers on the Internet have begun to
form online communities based on interest, not geographic location. Previously, researchers around the world had
no easy way to come together to chat informally, except for the occasional
conference for those that could afford it.
Now many researchers are using e-mail discussion groups, and sharing
their findings on web pages.
And
yet, many claim that the sense of place and belonging which is so important to
the wisdom of the oral tradition cannot be replicated in cyberspace. This much is true: in the foreseeable future,
we will never have bodies in cyberspace, all science fiction depictions to the
contrary. However, there is a meeting of
minds possible on the net, in which we can build individuality and
identity. Whether he is right or not
about it being a place, Howard Rheingold calls some networked discussion groups
a kind of "third place," a place outside of work and the home where
we can relax and share ideas freely.(Rheingold 25-26, Oldenberg 42)
It
is the relaxed sharing of ideas and the self-publishing capabilities offered by
the World Wide Web that offersthe most promise for
the future of research. The Internet
allows a new kind of collaboration, in which participants can engage from the
comfort of home or local office. More
and more researchers these days are using computer mediated communication to
combine their expertise on projects, and to make their shared findings known.
For
example, for the last eight years, I have been part of an ongoing community of
computers and writing teacher-researchers who are busy re-inventing the ways we
conceive of and teach communication with computers and the Internet. I was relatively isolated at a large research
institution where almost no-one was interested in my field, but found that I
gained a sense of grounding, community, and purpose when I joined the online
discussions in the computers and writing field.
Soon
I was moving from casual e-mail exploration of ideas to collaborating on print
publications and conference presentations using the ideas we had explored on
line. These publications and
presentations were necessarily collaborative and multi-authored because of the
method of their genesis. This method of
developing ideas is largely, conversational, not at all like the
"individual investigator" model we tend to think of in conjunction
with publishing research. Indeed, the
online collaborative research in which a participate
differs greatly from the traditional model, in which one must carefully build
an argument through page after page, and wait months for a response.
The
sort of collaborative research experience I describe above may never supercede
the individual research model, but it certainly offers a new way of generating
and processing ideas in text on a computer network. This method is close to a form of dialectic;
it is inherently dialogic and at times even polylogic,
when many voices join to discuss a topic.
Or, in more simple terms, it is like a ping-pong or tennis game, with a
rhythm of hours or days for e-mail and of seconds of minutes for synchronous
environments.
Hundreds
of us in the computers and writing field meet and collaborate weekly or even
more often, and we gain a great deal in terms of sharing ideas for our research
and teaching. And we are not alone;
researchers in many other fields have similar interactions. But we can't really call it publication, when
we go up for tenure and promotion. Yet
it is a valuable form of idea-generation which gives us intellectual
stimulation, and is indeed more fruitful for many of us than some of the
tedious writing we feel obligated to do for publication.
Many
academics say that they would not be able to receive credit for their networked
discussion in tenure and promotion decisions. However, many groups, such as the
Modern Language Association, and the Conference on College Composition and
Communication, have put together guidelines for those who perform electronic
scholarship, and those who employ these networked scholars (see URLs in the
Works Cited list below). An issue of Computers and Composition has
been devoted to a discussion of these matters.
Indeed,
in answer to a question about using e-mail discussion for “formal” research
requirements, Nick Carbone says:
I
don't want to use this stuff for anything other than kicking around ideas; this
is low-stakes, high energy writing, and raising the stakes would lower the
energy. I couldn't go with one draft, typos be damned. Though there are messages I reread where I
sure wish I had looked back. But I like
my email oral. (see appendix A)
He
likes his e-mail oral? What? Can e-mail be oral? What Nick said just a
year or so ago made me remember Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, and then think back to
another conversation I took part in, in 1993, on an Internet e-mail discussion
called Ortrad-L.
We were discussing Ong’s notion that, after
the rise of the age of print media, TV and radio, because they bring the human
voice back into communication, could be called “secondary orality.”
The
members of the list struggled with the terminology; some wanted to call the
speedy e-mail exchanges and synchronous discussions “tertiary orality” because they are so much like conversation, and
often as informal.
Oddly
enough, this generated fascinating discussion, within the medium (see appendix
B). Some wanted to know whether we could
call it oral if it made no sound; properly it does not. But it does
have a strong “voice,” a voice that only good writers can produce -- a
friendly, engaging, non-threatening voice. In the end, we concluded that it
might just be some sort of hybrid, not oral, not literate in the conventional
sense.
However,
the interchange reminded me of the “oral” traits of e-mail and synchronous
discussions that set them apart from printed research findings. The synchronous discussion groups are
decidedly on the “oral” side, since they are fast and furiously typed by
discussants in something of a hurry to get ideas out. Writers in this medium are not too worried
about spelling, punctuation, and mechanics, since the pressure to produce outweighs
the pressure to be correct. They use the
additive style, which Ong notes as a feature of oral
discourse. (37-38) E-mail
discussion groups, especially those for teachers of writing, generally aren’t
such a free-for all. And yet, for busy
professionals, who probably WOULD NOT post had they to
laboriously proofread and edit every submission, a fair amount of rambling and
mechanical incorrectness is tolerated.
It’s OK, in many groups which share research, to sacrifice some
correctness for the sake of speedy and copious exploration of ideas. Like any rhetorical act, the degree of
correctness required depends upon audience expectations, purpose, and how
permanent the e-mail message is expected to be.
In
one post on Ortrad-L, I saw the words “epistolary”
and “renaissance” used together in the same paragraph. (See Appendix B, message
1) These words reminded me of the age of Sam Johnson, in which letters were a
primary form of idea exchange, a sign of literate culture. Such letter exchanges waned with the coming
of secondary orality, such as telephone, radio and
TV. Information overload from a variety
of media meant that fewer people were willing to pick up a pen, or sit down at
a typewriter and compose a written missive.
But
lately, we’re seeing an "epistolary renaissance" in the explosion of
letter writing made possible by the popularization of e-mail. College students
now routinely get accounts at school, and suddenly begin to keep in touch with
their parents like never before. More
and more families and old friends rekindle correspondences and share
thoughts. One might argue that this form
of epistolarianism is just information exchange,
certainly not a form of high literacy, or in any way related to research. But now more and more scholars are sharing
ideas via e-mail, discussion groups and the web.
Scholars
are thinking, and then writing to others to explore their thoughts, and
sometimes writing to others in order to develop and organize thoughts; this is
a kind of heuristic in which the presence of a known audience helps to
crystallize thought as it comes into being.
These scholars get help from others, and the collaborative development
of ideas into theories, debates, and concrete plans is a kind of synergistic
force, seemingly with its own logic.
The
speed of e-mail can make this research process faster than conventional mail,
and synchronous discussions make it even faster. We don't have to go through
the laborious process of submission, acceptance, editing, and publishing, in
which it often takes years to get ideas out.
Further,
many of the new electronic scholars are willing to share ideas freely, so
ownership is not so important. This tendency to share might be a corollary of
the hacker’s motto: “Information wants to be free,” but it may also be a kind
of altruism which has risen from the frustrations of lengthy publication
processes, as well as the difficulty of using good ideas covered by
copyright. Electronic media are going to
force a change in the notions of originality, ownership of ideas, and copyright
soon, because of the sheer impossibility of preventing ideas and texts from
spreading, from being reproduced infinitely and effortlessly, like
viruses. Infinite reproduction and fast
electronic transmission make it impossible not to share; one has only to look
at the way the Web has made all kinds of texts available, texts which are good,
bad, legal and illegal by the present laws.
Where
we might we be going?
What could research have become in the future?
The
new trend in research seems to be toward acknowledging the process of
collaborative thought, of thought DOING as opposed to thought BEING. A published text, once crystallized in print
is immutable, but Internet discussion, and even web
pages can be changed again and again. We
are moving toward the recognition that every published thought is only a
way-station, a particular instantiation of what the context seemed to dictate;
a publication is merely a still photo of a more complicated process. These
still photos are calcified; they serve as major records of thought, but are
monolithic. It can take years to chisel
them down, to change and grow them.
Or,
from calculus, we might think of CMC research as more like incremental pictures
of the thought process coming into being.
These closely-spaced increments are closer to a motion picture than
still photos. In the process of CMC
research, we can see thought becoming organized in increments, increasingly
smaller increments, somewhat like the way Thomas Pynchon
theorized the process of representation in Gravity’s
Rainbow as a kind of calculus of
thought. In this new model of research,
the asynchronous posts or synchronous conversations are but steps on the
pathway, the moving toward, but never arriving.
Discussants are involved in getting under and around complicated ideas,
pulling them, stretching them, tweaking them, but never considering them
finished.
In
the voice of the medicine man Betonie in her novel Ceremony, Leslie Silko
wrote that “Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things” (126). It has occurred to me more than once that
printed texts cannot shift and grow, and may be dead, in one way of thinking,
and that the more frequent instantiations of computer mediated texts could be
seen as shifting and growing. Thought
must move and grow and shift; many of us get thought to move through writing,
by trying out ideas, often by writing to and with others. Formal print publication hides this process,
but perhaps for a good reason. Anyone
who has graded student papers or who has been assailed by too much bad poetry will
understand why we don’t all need to read every draft of every written
work. Reading work in progress might be
a waste of time to some researchers; the more traditional scholars might become
impatient at work that needs polishing. Further, it may be wise to ask whether,
simply because we can turn our souls inside out and report on every step of our
search for meaning, should we?
For
some audiences, for faster dissemination of ideas, networked discussion is an
excellent medium for collaborative research.
Those who don’t want to watch the thought forming need not bother. But
if thought is a movement and never really stops growing, why shouldn’t we let
more of its development go public, for people who are interested in the
discussions? And why should we not value
this “publication” on some scale that would get the discussants the kind of
credit they need for personnel reviews, hiring, tenure
and promotion decisions? We need to be
proactive, to take a strong position on what kind of writing “counts” and what
kinds of discursive research communities are of value to us, and to make strong
arguments to those we work for and with about why these networked exchanges are
valuable.
No
one is arguing that we need to replace print publications altogether. They have their place, like monuments at the
great intersections of the pathways of thought.
But with new technologies proliferating, the Internet becoming as common
as TV and the telephone, and megabytes becoming cheaper by the millisecond,
what could be wrong with giving credit to the milestones along the way? It might be good to think of a future in
which we will see a complementarity between print and
online texts, with each serving different purposes. We savor books and journals because of the
portability, the smell and feel of the medium, and the knowledge that the text
will never change on us. However, we
also revel in online texts because they represent the fast changing meeting of
minds, a doing and not a being.
They are infinitely reproducible, and travel effortlessly at close
to the speed of light into our homes, schools, and offices. Having more choices – books, journals,
newspapers, letters, videos, e-mail discussions and online chats – can only
provide a richer soil in which the researcher can dig.
Researchers
may lament the situation if many books and journals stop being published
because of economics, but simple economics may be enough to stop much print
publication. Low readership and high
production costs make it impossible for some publications to stay in print. We
love the library as a place to revel in the shadow of great books, and to
finger along the spines in the stacks for a chance find, a serendipitous
discovery which will give us just the information we need. The tragedy of our era
is that the funding for libraries is in danger of dying out with the move
toward “efficiency”, and libraries full of books could become a rarity.
Post
script: In the next millennium, what will researchers call literacy? What language will students learn?
Will
students be required to use a new dialect, a kind of Standard Internet English,
the unwitting result of so many people writing to each other on computer
networks and falling unconsciously into new patterns, new discursive
conventions introduced like viruses?
Will the sheer force of the kind of vocabulary chronicled in JargonWatch in WIRED magazine and collected in Gareth Branwyn’s Jargon
Watch: A Pocket Dictionary for the Jitterati
cause a shift in the English idiom?
We
may see more of the Microsoftening and Wordperfecting of the language, the use only of spellings
and grammatical constructions approved by the dictionaries and style sheets of
the most current text editors? How much
should researchers allow the software to dictate what’s acceptable? As I write now, my words are interrupted by
red and green squiggles, supposedly to help me improve my spelling and
grammar. But do these squiggles know
what I want to say? Are we in danger of
letting the oversimplified rules of the programs determine how we can utter
ideas? I hear Sam Johnson grumbling in
his grave, and I see a generation of students dutifully unsquiggling
their prose -- and in so doing voiding it of artistry and originality.
Ultimately,
many researchers expect that notions of literacy will change as technologies of
communication and representation change.
What we come to call literacy may move beyond print and text literacy to
encompass computer, Internet, and media literacy. Media literacy will most likely become more
valuable as technologies to transmit graphics, video, and sound become cheaper
and ubiquitous, not only through one-way TV and radio, but also through the two
and multi-way channels of computer networks.
To the researcher, and especially to the budding researchers in the K-12
classroom, media literacy will become increasingly important. That includes not only knowing how to develop
ideas in all media, including hypertext, the web, and video, but also knowing
how to be critics of all media forms.
In
fact, in1996 the National Council of Teachers of English passed a Visual
Literacy resolution, which suggested the need for media literacy beyond text
and print forms. By voting to pass this
resolution (see URL in Works Cited list below), NCTE members agreed that
students should know about how to use and critique visual media.
But
those of us who research the teaching of writing still appreciate the many uses
of text, and feel secure about requiring text literacy in our classes. Most of us agree that there are features of
text that can describe our world of ideas, and the depth of human experience
and emotion better than any other media.
Text can communicate with audiences in a way no other media can. The creative imagination engages with text,
so that readers create their own mental pictures.
Many
of us computer-based researchers are having to deal
with information overload: how many web pages and e-mail messages should we
have to look at? The speed and ease of
information transmission are a double-edged
sword. Researchers who use e-mail and
have their addresses on web pages know how much e-mail can pile up in a day,
and they are nearly overwhelmed by the volume of pure junk e-mail they get. If everyone has access to us through e-mail,
we need to be swift and exact executors of the delete key.
Further,
for many, utterances in e-mail and synchronous chat tend to be very brief,
bare-bones communications. If we are in such a hurry, is sustained, considered
written thought possible? How do we pass on to our students the value of
sustained argument if everything comes to them in five second video clips and
sound bytes, and screen-sized e-mail and web pages? Do we risk shortening the expected attention
span? It is at this critical juncture
that reminding students of the value of books and journals for sustained
inquiry could be very important for researchers like me, who are also teachers.
Like
many of today’s researchers, I spend far too much time sitting in front of a
glass and silicon machine. It hurts me,
and if I don’t get up and stretch frequently enough, it causes physical
problems like repetitive stress injury, not to mention general inactivity. As a teacher, I want to be up to date, and
use the technologies I research with my students. And yet, to what degree should I be willing
to subject my body to pain and injury? I
hope that the future will bring ergonomic developments to make working with
computers easier on the body. Otherwise,
it will be hard to justify putting the human body through such agony.
Further,
many will agree that we have to put up with too much mediation when we research
and communicate with computers. For
input, you have a keyboard, and have to type and correct your mistakes, or you
have to read a screen, which gives you eyestrain and a headache. Even with
videoconferencing like CU See Me, you can't really be with others. However, all
communication is mediated to some degree; even in face to face situations, our
bodies, voices, eyes, and brain mediate what we put forth and understand.
For
some of the reasons above, not only do I believe that oral and printed words
will survive long into the next millennium, I believe that we'll be better off
if they do. We need that crucial balance
between and among media, but above all, we need to be together and use our
voices to share ideas from time to time.
It does not have to be either complete acceptance or rejection of
technology.
Cynthia
Haynes has coined a new set of terms (she calls them organic metaphors) which I
believe help to explain some of the attitudes toward technology currently held
by researchers. Those who cheerlead
wholeheartedly for an uncritical embrace of technology she calls vivogenic; those who take the doom and gloom position, and
equate the new technologies with the death of humanity and the individual she
calls pathogenic; and those who move beyond the simple dichotomy of either/or
she calls transgenic. Haynes says that
“the transgenic (non)model thrives in the matrix of rhetorical and textual
writing technologies” and “includes new genres (like hypertext), new tropes
(like speed) and new morphings of identity (like
software agents, or emissaries)” (12). It is finally to the balanced and
forward-thinking transgenic viewpoint that the researcher of the future must
move. Researchers need to make use of
the newest tools, like hypertext, and the most helpful prosthetics, such as
intelligent software agents, along with Internet discussions, books, and
journals to find and assemble information to share with others.
Copyleft:
the future of copyright?
As
online research becomes more widespread, publishers and writers alike will
recognize the futility of attempting to protect all online works from
appropriation and dissemination by others, especially the casual online
discussions through which more and more research now advances. We can expect to see further extensions of
the notion of "fair use" to include almost any use of an online work
that a) acknowledges the originator and b) does not result in financial gain for the user.
Because the cost of production and dissemination associated with print
publication virtually vanishes for online works, many works should be available
for free, without restrictions aside from acknowledgement.
For
an example, we might look to the notion of "copyleft,"
a software licensing agreement dreamed up by Free Software Foundation founder
Richard Stallman to protect his free software programs such as GNU EMACS from
appropriation and sale by profit-greedy companies. The copyleft
licensing agreement "lets people do anything they want with the software
except restrict others' right to copy it" (Garfinkle
135). According to Michael Stutz,
Copyleft contains the normal copyright statement,
asserting ownership and identification of the author. However, it then gives
away some of the other rights implicit in the normal copyright: it says that
not only are you free to redistribute this work, but you are also free to
change the work. However, you cannot claim to have written the original work,
nor can you claim that these
changes were created by someone else. Finally, all derivative
works must also be placed under these terms.
Building
upon Stallman's work, Stutz also recommends the application of copyleft principles to non-software works, such as the
online research and writing common to academic discourse in"cyberia." Stutz says that copyleft
is crucial to the survival of community and free information sharing in the
digital age:
With
computers, perfect copies of a digital work can easily be made -- and even
modified, or further distributed -- by others, with no loss of the original
work. As individuals interact in cyberia, sharing
information -- then reacting and building upon it -- is not only natural, but
this is the only way for individual beings to thrive in a community. In
essence, the idea of copyleft is basic to the natural
propagation of digital information among humans in a society. This is why the
regular notion of copyright does not make sense in the context of cyberia.
As we saw earlier, the incremental free
sharing and building of information in Internet collaborations is becoming the
model of a new form of research. But
according to Stutz, in cyberia, the idea of simply
placing works in the public domain won't work because of the profit motive:
Simple
`public domain' publication will not work, because some will try to abuse this
for profit by depriving others of freedom; as long as we live in a world with a
legal system where legal abstractions such as copyright are necessary, as
responsible artists or scientists we will need the formal legal abstractions of
copyleft that ensure our freedom and the freedom of
others.
It
would be no great stretch to add the word "researchers" to the
artists and scientists mentioned above.
Just as ownership and exclusive rights to profit were protected under
copyright, so would the freedom to distribute but not to profit be protected
under copyleft.
The Free Software Foundation offers guidelines and sample text for copylefting work at
http://gnu.april.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html.
Although
copyleft might not be precisely what copyright will
have become, the principle and rationale of copyleft
clearly favor the unobstructed sharing of information for cyber-researchers of
the future. Clearly, the needs of the
many to collaborate and advance knowledge outweigh the needs of the few to
profit from ideas generated incrementally by the living database of grassroots groupminds.
Collaborative rights;
collective recognition: We are the Borg!
Somewhat
in jest, I have recently taken to repeating a slogan any Star Trek fan will
recognize: "We are the Borg; resistance is few-tile!" Although I have not been brainwashed (I
hope!), for the last ten years I have been consumed by a dream of thought that
is seamless among individuals, that is produced by a hive-mind in which
interdependence is the key to generating new ideas. My work online with others in the computers
and writing field has convinced me that we are a kind of hive mind, and that
our contribution to the growth of teachers in electronic environments has been
greater since we act and think somewhat like a single organism. We don't always agree (indeed, "dissensus" is often more valuable for spurring us on
than consensus); but challenge each other to clarify and explain; sometimes we
even explain what each other mean. It's
a strange and wonderful experience to have someone else explain what you mean
better than you can.
But
within this hive mind, building upon the principle of copyleft,
protecting the rights of individual authors does not make sense if the work is
produced collaboratively. Copyleft insures that works can be shared freely, but that
credit is given all those who had a hand in their production. However, as I stated earlier, university and
college hiring, tenure and promotion requirements will have to change so that
collaborative scholarly endeavors can receive the credit they deserve. The well-wrought single-authored academic
article or book should not be the only way that scholars can prove their worth;
institutions should also recognize the value of Internet discussion groups,
online conferences, and multiple-authored works as evidence of engagement in
and contribution to a field or discipline.
We
new online researchers must strive to explain the importance of collaborative
online research to evaluators and administrators so that they have a rationale
to give us the recognition we deserve. Better yet, some of us who understand
the changing nature of online research need to become the administrators and
join the committees making decisions about what constitutes valuable scholarly
activity.
Branwyn, Gareth. Jargon Watch: A Pocket Dictionary for the Jitterati.
Carbone, Nick. “Re: research imperatives.” acw-l@ttacs6.ttu.edu (
Conference on College
Composition and Communication Committee on Computers in Composition and
Communication. "CCCC Promotion and Tenure Guidelines for work with
Technology." http://www.ncte.org/positions/4c-tp-tech.html. 1998.
Crump, Eric. “the tertiarization of orality”
ORTRAD-L%MIZZOU1.BitNet (
Doi, Takeo. The Anatomy of Dependence.
Garfinkle, Simson L.
"Programs to the People." Computers in Society, Fifth Edition. Katherine Schellenberg, ed.
Haynes, Cynthia. prosthetic_rhetorics@writing.loss.technology. Literacy Theory After
the Internet. Todd Taylor and Irene
Ward, eds.
Index of cold fusion
Usenet group. http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/physics/Cold-fusion/fd89. 1989.
Modern Language
Association Committee on Emerging Technologies. "Guidelines for
Evaluating Computer-Related Work in the Modern Languages"
http://www.mla.org/reports/ccet/ccet_guidelines.htm. 1998.
Momaday, N, Scott. House Made of Dawn.
Murphy, James. The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing.
National Council of
Teachers of English. "On Viewing and Visually Representing as Forms of
Literacy." http://www.ncte.org/resolutions/visually961996.html.
1996.
Ong Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.
Powell, Kathryn. “Re: ORAL TRADITION AND LITERACY”
ORTRAD-L%MIZZOU1.BitNet (
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow.
Schoenstein, Ralph. “Grammatically
Incorrect.” New
York Times.
Silko, Leslie. Ceremony.
Skrip, Theresa. “ORALITY AND LITERACY” ORTRAD-L%MIZZOU1.BitNet
(
Stutz, Michael. "Applying Copyleft to Non-Software Information."
http://gnu.april.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html. 1997.
From
acw-l@ttacs6.ttu.edu Tue Sep 30
Date:
From:
Nick Carbone <nickc@english.umass.edu>
To:
Multiple recipients of list <acw-l@ttacs6.ttu.edu>
Subject:
Re: research imperatives
On
Ø
Which
of course means it can't be used for it either. If it *is* used
Ø
for it, that bastardizes its original purpose,
doesn't it?
Xactly. It's
a personal thing with me, but I don't want to use this stuff for anything other
than kicking around ideas; this is low-stakes, high energy writing, and raising
the stakes would lower the energy. I couldn't go with one draft, typos be
damned. Though there are messages I
reread where I sure wish I had looked back.
But I like my email oral.
Nick
Carbone, Writing Instructor
nickc@marlboro.edu,
but coming to you via nickc@english.umass.edu
Date:
Sender:
"Comparative Oral Traditions Discussion List"
<ORTRAD-L%MIZZOU1.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
From:
"Kathryn Powell" <KPOWELL%IRISHVMA.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
Subject: Re:
ORAL TRADITION AND LITERACY
To:
Multiple recipients of list ORTRAD-L <ORTRAD-L%MIZZOU1.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
In-Reply-To: Message of
Status:
RO
Eric
--
In re:
a term for computer-aided communication which reflects its dual
oral/literate nature -- I've taken to talking about orality,
literacy, and telecommunications (thus, the oral word, the
written/chirographic/typographic word, and the telecommunicated word). I'm hesitant to use the term "tertiary orality" (although it has occurred to me) because
"secondary orality" refers to a return to
the spoken word, a sort of renaissance of orality
through literacy. It doesn't seem to me
that electronic communication is orality
twice-removed, which is what the term "tertiary" sounds like. Of course, my use of
"telecommunications" merely avoids the whole issue by lumping e-comm w/t.v., radio, etc., where
I'm not at all certain it belongs.
Mediated orality? Nah, not quite. I've also thought, at times, that perhaps
there's a whole genre of epistolary orality of which
e-mail is one form. But now I'm
reaching. I'msure
others have more knowledge of and facility with such matters. It's been a long monday; I'm going home now.
Kathryn
Powell
kpowell@irishvma
Date:
Sender:
"Comparative Oral Traditions Discussion List"
<ORTRAD-L%MIZZOU1.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
From:
SKRIP@SASK.USASK.CA
Subject: ORALITY AND LITERACYY
To:
Multiple recipients of list ORTRAD-L
<ORTRAD-L%MIZZOU1.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
I'm
thinking of the term tertiary orality, and I rather
like how it suitsthe workings of e-mail. Secondary orality,
if I'm thinking of it correctly, presents the *illusion* of orality
-- illusion, because it looks and sounds like spontaneous, orally produced
ideas, but it is really pre-scripted, fully directed, and in many ways static
rather than dynamic communication.
Although a target audience watches, for example, the news, there is no
audience interaction or participation, even though the audience is being wooed
into believing that this is dynamic, personally oriented communication.
TV
evangelism and, to a lesser extent, broadcast masses are forms of secondary orality. Both of
these productions give the illusion of oral performance in much the same way as
the news does but even more strongly because with TV evangelism and broadcast
masses the audience at home is encouraged to be part of the group. Some even have telephone numbers which a
person can call, solidifying the illusion of group participation where there
really is only minimal, long-distance, electronic participation at best.
This
brings me around to the point about tertiary orality. E-mail is even one more step removed from TV
evangelism, the news, and broadcast masses. With e-mail, there is the
suggestion of an audience because people respond to each other and refer to
each other's comments as if they were part of one long conversation that was
presently ongoing around a person.
However, the physical appearance of the speaker, the rest of the
audience, the speaking conditions and surroundings *are all missing* and are
left strictly to mental conjecture and abstraction on the part of the list
member. In this way, e-mail must be
considered one step removed beyond secondary orality
in the sense that it is one step more abstract.
E-mail shares features of oral communication, no doubt, but it is a
level of linear, abstract thought that no other form of communication has
previously achieved. The one exception
to this that I am thinking of are telephones, but even
then you have voice inflection, pauses, and other forms of paralanguage which
are simply not available on e-mail.
In
many ways, then, e-mail is both oral discourse and autonomous discourse: it is
oral in that participants share a common communication environment that has a
sense of immediacy and relies on a fairly local inter-textual encyclopedia
given the similarity in interest of the list members; it is autonomous in that
it is in many ways removed from the writer, but not so autonomous as a
physically published text. Since e-mail
writers are usually involved in ongoing discussions, they have the chance to
defend or rebut in a way that regular writers may not, given that the audience
is so immediate with e-mail. On the
other hand, defenses and rebuttals have a way of becoming separated from the
original texts, and this can occur, even with e-mail records (hence my
desire to see e-mail writings as having status of autonomous discourse).
What
I see all this meaning is that e-mail is, indeed, once removed from those
communications that we would categorize as secondary orality.
a result, tertiary orality
has a nice ring to it, for me, and it stands as an appropriate extension of
Walter Ong's work.
Bravo
Theresa
Skrip
Clinical
Psychology
Department
of Psychology
Date:
Sender:
"Comparative Oral Traditions Discussion List"
<ORTRAD-L%MIZZOU1.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>