Post-Literacy

Alan Aycock

Department of Anthropology
University of Lethbridge
aycock@hg.uleth.ca

 

Tuman, Myron, ed. Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. 300 pp. + illus/fig. $34.95 (US) cloth, $14.95 paper. (Review copy was an uncorrected proof; please note that quotations below may be inexact).

 

This work comprises a collection of essays originally presented in 1988 at the Sixteenth Annual University of Alabama Symposium on English and American literature. Its intent is to explore (1) the new forms of literacy made available by electronic technology; (2) the opportunities that “literacy online” affords those who teach and study literature; and (3) more broadly, the implications of new literacies for key cultural ideas, such as authorship, the textual canon, and critical thought, that are strongly associated with traditional print technology. The articles are integrated by Myron Tuman’s introductory and closing remarks and by short roundtable discussions that appear at the end of each section.

 

Most of the articles take as their focus the notion of the “hypertext,” a multi-layered congerie of literary works, critical commentaries, and contextualizing materials that render immediately accessible to the online reader the expertise that would otherwise be restricted to a narrow elite of professional scholars. Many hypertext programs have been written over the past decade for pedagogical and other purposes, and there is a substantial technical literature on the topic (for instance, the online catalog of the University of California libraries lists more than thirty recent books with the word “hypertext” in their titles).

 

I shall first consider the range of issues– hypertext, pro and con–that the authors confront in their articles, then attempt to present a somewhat more radically sociological view of these matters, from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu.

 

One apparent advantage of the hypertext is that readers may participate actively in its development by manipulating its databases in diverse ways, and by contributing their own writings to it: George Landow argues that to deploy the hypertext as an “open, changing, expanding system of relationships” permits the contextualization of an otherwise fixed central canon of texts, and encourages interdisciplinary team teaching. This he believes to be a “major strength of hypermedia.” Similarly, Jay David Bolter contends that “[t]he reader’s control of a hypertext can be expressed as the ratio between looking at and looking through the text, between the experience of reading the words and the new experience of choosing the path.” While “open relationships” and “new experience” tend to be disproportionately privileged in North American cultures, this seems to be a promising avenue of approach.

 

Another feature of value is the new nonlinear styles of thought that are putatively encouraged by the hypertext. As Helen Schwartz suggests in her essay, the hypertext may offer both graphic and verbal components, potentially integrating “left-brained” and “right-brained” styles of knowing with the hypertext as “prosthesis.” Pamela McCorduck echoes this: “knowledge of different kinds is best represented in all its complexity for different purposes by different kinds of knowledge representations,” such as those afforded by the computer. Indeed, McCorduck surmises that the new forms of knowledge implied by the hypertext portend a revolution fully as significant, in their own way, as that of the Neolithic. Again, though one may be justifiedly sceptical about the grounding of computer literacy in terms of neurophysiology (a naturalizing gesture that adds little to its understanding), or about the actual, as opposed to the ideal, cognitive effects of secondary orality (pace McLuhan), it cannot be gainsaid that there may be something here worth pursuing.

 

More contentious, however, are the political implications of hypertext. Some argue that hypertext is politically neutral; Victor Raskin, for instance, states that “[a]ll hypertext does is to present a format, a methodology, a tool for recording the already-established links.” Similarly, Richard Lanham suggests that “the computer with its digital display is no technological vis a tergo but the condign medium for expressing how we nowadays think of ourselves and our world.” Yet matters are not so simple.

 

By contrast, in support of the non-neutrality of hypertext, Bolter points to the dissolution of standard author-reader relationships, Landow (citing Barthes’ S/Z) to the new roles that are implied for teachers and students, and Stanley Aronowitz to the effects of the introduction of computer technology upon management-worker relationships. Ted Nelson, along the same lines, wrestles with issues of copyright (“transclusion”), the propertied infrastructure of authorial presence in print-based technology. One cannot really doubt that online literacy may contribute in various ways to such familiar postmodern trends, and indeed as the contributors argue, hypertext may accelerate such movements.

 

A number of the essays also consider the political non-neutrality of critical writing in hypertext mode. Tuman and Schwartz both wonder whether the virtual reality of hypertext is too unstable, too diffuse or multiplex, to sustain the project of literary criticism. And as Ulmer seems to propose, deconstructive techniques such as grammatology may be inherently fostered by the hypertext. Whether the impetus lent new modes of critical thought is desirable is a concern that is initially broached by the volume, though the contributors fail to take this obvious opportunity to examine hypertext in terms of Lyotard’s search for “new presentations . . . to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.” (Curiously, neither Lyotard nor Baudrillard makes an appearance in these essays.)

 

Eugene Provenzo invokes Foucault’s panopticon to drive home more troublesome political issues, however: apparently trivial acts of consumption, such as buying a pizza or renting a video, may install the purchaser in databases managed by anonymous corporations or by government agencies whose autocracy may be thereby intensified. Thus Greg Ulmer, in a rather striking and double-edged metaphor, likens the mastery of a database to “the colonization of a foreign land”: though he does not say so, one is reminded in this context of the claims and counterclaims ferociously debated with regard to the surveillance and offensive technology of Desert Storm, and its wider considerations for “the new world order” unreflectively pronounced by George Bush and his cronies.

 

The politics of hypertext itself aside, I retain some doubts about the manner in which the contributors deal with their own political stances vis-a-vis hypertext. To suggest something of what I think may be at stake here, I will allude briefly to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

 

To begin with, Bourdieu’s “habitus,” a structured, structuring disposition to cognize, evaluate, and practise the logic of lived experience, calls to account the new modes of critical thought, contrived as agencies in specific arenas of struggle, that might be said to devolve from “literacy online.” It is in this vein that one could wish for a more reflexive attention to the roles that the authors themselves enact in witnessing the procreative agonisms of hypertext: are they part of the solution, or part of the problem?

 

Further, the material and social conditions of technoculture represent (“re-present”) an aspect of Bourdieu’s “symbolic capital,” the instrumentalities of domination that constitute “the stakes of the game,” and that manufacture the means for its pursuit. Symbolic capital engages, in this specific instance, the textual labors which influence the production of substances amenable to the realization of yet more texts and hypertexts, and the officiants who produce them. Shall we draw a line of diminishing returns, and if we do or do not, isn’t that part of the political agenda of hypertext?

 

Finally, the authoritarian nature of pedagogy is highlighted by Bourdieu’s discussions of the manner in which educational institutions produce and reproduce the conditions of their dominance, and the relationships of class which sustain them, and are in turn generated by them. Tuman responds to this general issue, indirectly and perhaps too inconclusively, in his closing remarks: “the attitudes collected here constitute a time-capsule–preserving for future students of literacy a record of what the thinkers, so successfully acculturated into print culture (possibly ‘the last [such] generation’), had to say about the profound impact, for better or worse, that nearly everyone agrees computers are about to have on our practice of reading and writing.” Hype aside, what is the value of archivally oriented texts? The construction of tradition is a complex and politically loaded task, yet it passes unexamined, and largely unacknowledged, in the Tuman collection.

 

Beyond this, I can suggest only three criticisms of real substance. First, the frequent references to “preliterate” cultures rely perhaps too heavily on Eric Havelock’s (undoubtedly seminal) work, supplemented by some rather vague generalizations; the extensive West African work of Jack Goody, Sylvia Scribner, and Michael Cole on the oral-literate interface is not cited. Second, the “writing culture” debate of the 1980s (e.g., James Clifford, George Marcus, Clifford Geertz) has no counterpart in Tuman, though it seems quite pertinent to any attempt to discern a post-oral, post-literate cultural milieu. Third, the lapse of four years between the initial presentation of these essays and their publication in this volume is somewhat vexing, since the intervening period has seen at least two works, one by Michael Heim and another by Mark Poster [and a third, Hypertext by George Landow, reviewed in Postmodern Culture 2.3–Ed.] which have somewhat reshaped the relevant field of discussion.

 

On balance, however, this is a fascinating and clearly written collection, and I would not hesitate to use it as an upper-level undergraduate text, or as a scholar’s introduction to hypertext. Those already familiar with the concept of hypertext, however, would do rather better to turn to Mark Poster’s The Mode of Information for an account of the significance of computing in the postmodern age.