Hypertextual Analysis

In the video “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” Professort Wesch demonstrates many aspects of the power of hypertext. Its flexibility, its ability to separate form from content, its innumerable effects on things we take for granted, like privacy and free speech. The idea he seems to be getting at by emphasizing the ability hypertext has to link from what one reads to what the person writing it was reading, we are teaching “the Machine” – which is us – about the connections between things. When we link from one document to another, we are saying there is a connection between the two. When we tag a photo on Flickr or a video on YouTube, we are saying that this bit of media is related somehow to all those other bits of media with that tag, if only by sharing a subject.

What is unclear is whether the meaning inherent in all of the linking hypertext contains is being interpreted correctly. An implied link is there, but like all implication, the interpretation of the reader shapes meaning. When I linked to the EFF above, is there an implied assumption that I agree with their mission? What about the “Echelon” Wikipedia page? Do I agree with the “neutral” opinion therein displayed? Have I even read that page? The reader can not know. Maybe I just googled “internet privacy” and copied the first result that looked informative. Maybe not.

The point is that the reader must guess what I mean by any link or tag I place in hypertext. And, even if they guess correctly, there are still uncertainties. For example, assuming I actually read the “Echelon” page I linked, one must continue to remember that Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Maybe when I clicked on that link, there was some spurious misinformation placed there by an anonymous troll. Maybe there wasn’t, but some was added before the reader of this post clicked it. Without reading the edit history, the reader can only hope. Even with the edit history, it’s speculative whether the reader and I actually read the same source.

Even worse, maybe the page I linked isn’t even there anymore. Dead links are increasingly common the further back one reads. While the Wayback Machine and Google Cache help, they only ameliorate the problem; they do not solve it.

One last problem with hypertextual analysis is simply that not everything has been digitized just yet. If I read something new and exciting on Slashdot, I can give the reader a link with reasonable certainty. If I read something interesting in an arbitrary relatively obscure book from the 1980s, the best I can give the reader is a link to the Amazon.com page and hope they can track down a copy to read themselves. Which is a shame, because that is actually a really good book.

These kids today–an opportunity for transformation of consciousness

In his 2009 Wired article on the “New Literacy” Clive Thomson warns us that “As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame.” Indeed, this perennial lament was echoed on January 18th of this year as AP educational writer Eric Gorski wrote that “A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.” The blame for this performance, however, is not lain at the feet of technology. One reason the article cites is that students simply aren’t required to write or read enough.

According to a January 7th The New York Times article, William H. Fitzhugh has published a print journal of selected high school essays for over two decades. He makes the claim that “Most kids don’t know how to write, don’t know any history, and that’s a disgrace,” Further, he says that “Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools.” According to a survey cited by Mr. Fitzhugh, 95 percent of the teachers surveyed “said assigning long research papers was important, but 8 out of 10 said they never did because they had too little time to read and grade them.” Though Mr. Fitzhugh was forced take his journal online this year, while discontinuing the print version, he apparently saw no increased opportunity in this, beyond saving money, such as reaching a wider networked and involved audience.

In his article, Thompson highlights the work of Andrea Lundsford, who in her Stanford Study of Writing found that “Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom…” With web media students have found purpose and audience for their writing that classrooms have not been able to provide. However, as Will Richardson says in his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, “as is often the case, education has been slow to adapt to these new tools and potentials.”

In his article, “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” Walter J. Ong writes that “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.” As well as making interior transformations, networked media is forging transformations of social conceptions of how students learn and build knowledge. If we accept that writing elevates consciousness by holding a mirror to thought process, we can also understand that this close examination of one’s thoughts is often met with anxiety and resistance. But just as the printing press provided a greatly expanded audience for those with a purpose for communicating, students now inhabit a world where increased sense of purpose and audience bring greater enjoyment to writing. And there is an immediacy that brings language back to the realm of conversation and community. This presents great opportunity for teachers to expand upon.

In order to learn, we must think, and we don’t know what we think until we try to express it. We end up having to ask ourselves a lot of questions. This is essentially the aim of educational writing. It is also what transpires in the networked community among its members. In group discussions, blogs, and wikis, others can comment on, or even edit our writing. A little collaborative learning might even take some of the load off the amount of written response that traditionally fell solely to the teacher, and who knows, perhaps a few more “pages” of writing could get assigned.

Technology Blamed for Violent Rhetoric

In the aftermath of last weekend’s senseless shootings in Arizona, many folks have been quick to blame the tragedy on the violent, incendiary political rhetoric of our times. It’s not hard to find examples of such rhetoric: Giffords’s Republican rival last summer appeared in political ads holding an M-16, and apparently he even invited voters at a campaign event to shoot with him. And then there’s Sarah Palin’s poorly-conceived “target map” and Twitter post.

Whether or not the shootings can legitimately be blamed on such rhetoric, I’ll leave to others to debate. Early indications are that the shooter was a demented, unhinged individual, and perhaps didn’t need violent rhetoric to motivate his actions.

What caught my eye today, though, was John McWhorter’s piece in The New Republic blaming the prevalence of violent political rhetoric on technology:

The actual cause of this new national temper is technology and its intersection with how language is used. Language exists in two forms in modern times: speech and writing. Writing is a latterly invention only some thousands of years old, produced and received more slowly than talk. It encourages reflection, extended argument (something almost impossible to convey amidst the overlapping chaos of conversation), and objectivity. Writing is, in the McLuhanesque sense, cool.

According to this theory, the act of writing inherently carries with it a different stance toward language–methodical, deliberate, rational. It is the linguistic equivalent of the slow food movement. Writing provides a kind of firewall against our passions. What technology has done, for McWhorter, is push our use of language back into oral territory, where things are less refined:

It is no accident that the shrillness of political conversation has increased just as broadband and YouTube have become staples of American life. The internet brings us back to the linguistic culture our species arose in—all about speech: live, emotional, unreflective, and punchy. The slogan trumps the argument. Anger, often of hazy provenance but ever cathartic (“I want my country back”) takes fire. All of this is reinforced by the synergy of on line “communities” stoking up passions on a scale that snail mail never could.

As you might have guessed, I have a few problems with McWhorter’s theory here. First is the simplistic distinction between speech and writing that he posits. Not all speech is “emotional, unreflective, and punchy,” nor is all writing reflective, extended, and objective. I wouldn’t even say that these are broad tendencies. Instead, there are genres of writing that do indeed privilege the qualities he outlines–specifically the kind of essayistic writing that academics and authors at The New Republic gravitate toward. But it wouldn’t be hard to find examples of “emotional, unreflective, and punchy” rhetoric in written form. Sarah Palin’s tweet is a prime example.