Reading, online. What wonder—and, danger, too—there is in that concept. A double reflex of wonder and risk that is profoundly part of the history of reading from the beginning.
Here is Plato expressing that double sense of wonder and risk in his story about the invention of reading—of writing and literacy. In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story:
1. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt. . . . To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them. . . .
But when they came to letters, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.”
Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
To bring the story up to date through the succeeding history of media, let me just play a few variants on Plato’s fable as follows:
2. But when they came to novel, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for entertainment.”
Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of the novel, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness and salaciousness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
3. But when they came to TV, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for entertainment.”
Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of TV, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness and immorality in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external media and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
4. But when they came to WWW, “This,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for productivity and entertainment.”
Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of browsing, searching, blogging, IM, social-networking, massive online gaming, etc., from a love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness and immorality in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the network and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
The base story and its variants through the rise of print and of analogue electric media we now know something about.
- orality –> writing: (20’s-60’s: Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong)
- print (Elizabeth Eisenstein, Adrian Johns, Roger Chartier)
- electronic media (collision of print with photography, film, radio, telegraphy/phony in the early 20th century: avant-garde typography and design arts) (60’s: Marshall McLuhan)
- Even digital or hypertextual media we now know something about (Vannevar Bush –> Ted Nelson –> George Landow)
What happens, then, when we throw “online” into the mix? Far from diminishing in the digital, networked “new media,” it seems, textual experience is proliferating as part of the networked new media. “Reading” is adapting to email, WWW, IM, Blogs, rich-media, indexes, search engines, etc. even as, reciprocally, the new technologies actively remember older habits of reading. (Using a browser, search engine, or blog site, for instance, subtly inflects reading; but, equally, familiarity with historical reading technologies—with “documents,” “pages,” or “indexes”—shapes the use of new technologies.)
We know much less about online reading than its predecessors. And, in particular, we don’t yet know exactly what to do with the “unknowledge” that online reading produces. (Each of the predecessor domains of reading produced a standing wave of “unknowledge”–of “forgetfulness,” etc.–that could not be theorized at the time or appreciated for what later turned out to be hidden, lurking intelligences. Each, in other words, produced a vast, emergent theater of mental and other activity that could only be conceived as low-cognitive or no-cognitive.
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So we’re starting a project to study, and act on, the possible hidden intelligences at work in something we don’t presently know much about: the practices of online reading.
Currently, “we” are a group of Univ. of California faculty from seven of the UC campuses (though the group is extensible and will hook up with scholars and programs elsewhere as it develops). We’re humanists, artists, social scientists, and computer scientists whose disciplines each have equal contributions to make to the problem of online reading.
The project we’re starting is at present drafted in the following form:
Transliteracies Project
Research in the Technological, Social, and
Cultural Practices of Online Reading
- Three working groups to study online reading from humanistic, social science, and computational perspectives (with cross-membership among groups).
- Convergence on the development of a demonstration technology to enhance online reading. (A good guess—given the current state of the Internet and the interests of many of the Transliteracies participants—is that the initiative will focus on a demonstration technology that both augments the ability of readers to be part of a community of readers (in ways that online technologies are uniquely able to foster) and accommodates different experiences of the same collection of texts based on varying ages, literacy levels, backgrounds, and so on. Balancing flexibly between public and private perspectives, indeed, may be the problem that online technologies—including the new media of reading—were born to address. ) There are many other possible technology projects that Transliteracies could settle upon. The ultimate goal of such a demonstration technology is not the technology itself but the demonstration of “how to make a technology” in the most meaningful way—through the collaboration of humanities, arts, social sciences, and computer science.
- Clustered publications of articles, technical papers, software, etc. in Transliteracies online “casebook? series.
To launch the project, we have invited a remarkable cast of well-known technologists, humanists, social scientists, artists, education researchers, industry people, and others to consult with us on the topic of online reading.
Participants:
Kevin C. Almeroth * Anne Balsamo * Walter Bender * Bruce Bimber * John Seely Brown * Nicholas Dames * Judith Green * N. Katherine Hayles * Yunte Huang * Adrian Johns * George Legrady * Cynthia Lewis * Alan Liu * Peter Lyman * Jerome J. McGann * Tara McPherson * J. Hillis Miller * John Mohr * Christopher Newfield * Robert Nideffer * Lisa Parks * Carol Braun Pasternack * Christiane Paul * Leah Price * Rita Raley * Ronald E. Rice * Warren Sack * Schoenerwissen/OfCD (Anne Pascual & Marcus Hauer) * Bob Stein * Brigitte Steinheider * Matthew Turk * William B. Warner * Curtis Wong
Format
- Three keynote presentations to mark out the diversity of disciplines and approaches needed to address online reading (Adrian Johns, Anne Balsamo, Walter Bender)
- Three conversation roundtables (1. Reading, Past and Present) (2. Reading and Media) (3. Reading as a Social Practice)
- A presentation session on “The Art of Online Reading? (Christiane Paul, George Legrady, Anne Pascual and Marcus Hauer of Schoenerwissen, and Robert Nideffer)
- Planning Workshop for the Transliteracies project.
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