Writing Technology

Studies on the Materiality of Literacy

Christina Haas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136687549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Academic and practitioner journals in fields from electronics to business to language studies, as well as the popular press, have for over a decade been proclaiming the arrival of the "computer revolution" and making far-reaching claims about the impact of computers on modern western culture. Implicit in many arguments about the revolutionary power of computers is the assumption that communication, language, and words are intimately tied to culture -- that the computer's transformation of communication means a transformation, a revolutionizing, of culture. Moving from a vague sense that writing is profoundly different with different material and technological tools to an understanding of how such tools can and will change writing, writers, written forms, and writing's functions is not a simple matter. Further, the question of whether -- and how -- changes in individual writers' experiences with new technologies translate into large-scale, cultural "revolutions" remains unresolved. This book is about the relationship of writing to its technologies. It uses history, theory and empirical research to argue that the effects of computer technologies on literacy are complex, always incomplete, and far from unitary -- despite a great deal of popular and even scholarly discourse about the inevitability of the computer revolution. The author argues that just as computers impact on discourse, discourse itself impacts technology and explains how technology is used in educational settings and beyond.

PART

I

WRITING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

CHAPTER

1

THE TECHNOLOGY QUESTION

The relationship between writing and the material world is both inextricable and profound. Indeed, writing is language made material. Through writing, the physical, time-and-space world of tools and artifacts is joined to the symbolic world of language. The materiality of writing is both the central fact of literacy and its central puzzle. This materiality is the central fact of literacy because writing gains its power—as a cognitive process, as a cultural practice, and even as a metaphor—by linking these two powerful systems: the material realm of time and space with the quintessentially human act of language. The materiality of literacy is also a central puzzle, and I call this puzzle “The Technology Question:” What does it mean for language to become material? That is, what is the effect of writing and other material literacy technologies on human thinking and human culture? By naming this question one of technology, I underscore what I see as the inexplicable relationship between technology and materiality: Writing is made material through the use of technologies, and writing is technological in the sense and to the extent that it is material. Human beings have used and continue to use technologies (e.g., sticks on sand, pen and ink on parchment, #2 pencil on legal pad, cursor on monitor) to bring language to material life. Writing technologies are material not only in and of themselves, but also because they allow for the creation of the material artifacts that are named by the noun writing.

In this chapter I argue that the materiality of writing, although often overlooked, is actually at the heart of a number of current controversies within literacy studies, and that this materiality must be acknowledged to fully appreciate the nature of literate acts. Further, understanding writing as inextricably based in the material world can provide a theoretical basis from which to argue about the most recent iteration of the Technology Question: What is the nature of computer technologies, and what is their impact on writing?

I am using the term material to mean having mass or matter and occupying physical space. The implements of writing—pens, pencils, keyboards—have mass, as do written products. Even pixeled screen images, although they may not seem material in the same way as do marks chiseled on a clay tablet, depend upon several kinds of material apparatus both for creation and for perception and use (e.g., input devices, monitors, electrical systems, and semiconductor chips). Because this analysis extends beyond what is conventionally seen as the domain of Marxist or neo-Marxist examinations of technology, I have tried to avoid Marxist terminology. However, I do take from Marx and Engels’ historical materialism (1846) the notion that the material world matters; that is, that the materially-based conduct of human activities has profound implications for the development of human culture and the shape of human consciousness. Further, my use of the word material is not meant to invoke conventional binary distinctions like material/immaterial, physical/mental, body/mind. Rather, texts written or read are at once material and immaterial, and writers and readers engage one another in realms that are both physical and mental. Indeed, as I explore in the final chapter of this volume, overcoming the culture–cognition impasse in writing scholarship will require refiguring writing, in all its complexity, as of the body and of the mind.

Writing is situated in the material world in a number of ways. It always occurs in a material setting, employs material tools, and results in material artifacts. Writers sit in well-appointed desks in offices, or they slouch in less well-appointed ones in classrooms. Sometimes writers forego a desk altogether, preferring a kitchen table, or a lap, or the dashboard of a car. Writers use stubby pencils or felt-tip pens, cheap ball-points or lap-top computers; often writers use a number of these material implements in tandem. Writers compose speeches on backs of envelopes, makes lists on scraps of paper, write essays in spiral notebooks, and compose lab reports or love letters on word processors. Indeed, an observer from another culture might be surprised by how much time people in Western society spend typing on keyboards, or—more surprisingly, perhaps—how much personal, intellectual, economic, and even physical work gets done with pen or pencil in hand. In short, such a visitor would be astonished to see how engaged individuals within Western culture are with the material tools of literacy.

But the materiality of writing, or the materiality of language that is writing, also remains a central puzzle within literacy studies. The Technology Question is present in debates about the nature of oral and written language, in controversies over the relationship between speech and writing, and in discourse about the political and educational implications of that relationship. The Technology Question, unresolved, lurks in discussions about the nature of writing, from Plato to Derrida to the pages of contemporary journals, where scholars argue about writing’s relationship to knowledge, to truth, and to power. The Technology Question is evident—indeed, is often begged—in arguments that computer technologies will revolutionize communication, education, and business, or that computers will bring about a wholesale transformation of human thinking and human culture.

In the next sections I review three instances of the Technology Question within literacy studies—one philosophical, one historical, and one sociopsychological. First, the philosophical debate between Plato and Derrida on the nature of writing illustrates the stakes of the Technology Question. That is, both of these philosophers recognized that determining the nature of writing is not an idle or superficial exercise, that at a very real level, questions of writing are questions of truth, knowledge, and power. A second set of scholars who have examined the Technology Question, historians Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, and Jack Goody and Ian Watt, provide empirically-based investigations of the Technology Question, particularly as it concerns the rise of literacy in ancient Greece. Third, the work of Lev Vygotsky and, later, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole provide a corrective to some of the dichotomization of speech and writing, and the confusion of cultural and cognitive effects, that are present in the work of Ong, Havelock, and Goody and Watt.

These three examples of scholarship on the Technology Question also illustrate that it is present in a wide range of issues within literacy studies, although its presence is often latent. While all three of the bodies of work examined here are concerned in an essential way with the Technology Question, each is less than explicit about that concern. Indeed, despite the fact that the material tools and artifacts are inherently bound up in acts of writing, there has been scant explicit and detailed attention focused on this materiality in contemporary discussions of writing. Opening the Technology Question up to detailed and systematic examination would lead to a richer and more complete picture of the complex act of writing. It would also help to adjudicate conflicting claims about computer technologies for writing (i.e., whether computers’ effects will be humanizing or dehumanizing, democratizing or totalizing, etc.). Further, addressing the Technology Question is vital to understanding the nature of computer technologies for literacy, their power in shaping literate acts, and people’s relationship to them.

Finally, the three bodies of work reviewed here illustrate a further dilemma implicit in the Technology Question: Are the changes that writing evokes changes at the level of culture or at the level of individual cognition? If the changes occur at both levels, what is the relationship between them? How can and do technologies, including writing, impact both cognitively and culturally? This returns, of course, to the cognitive/cultural impasse in writing studies more generally: What is the relationship between writing as a cognitive act and writing as a cultural practice? Exploring the Technology Question can provide a way into—and possibly a way out of—this dilemma. This issue is discussed more extensively in chapter 9 (this volume).

THE TECHNOLOGY QUESTION IN PHILOSOPHY

As scholars from Eric Havelock to Jay Bolter have argued, writing is a technology; that is, it is a set of materially embodied symbolic tools that humans use for the goal-directed accomplishment of work—work that is communicative, economic, or intellectual, or, more likely, work that is all of these at once. As a technology, writing extends human beings’ ability to communicate with others across space and through time; writing as a technology makes possible literature and history, law and government as we understand them, and certain kinds of philosophy—although writing also makes possible bureaucracies, tax audits, acts of libel, junk mail, and so on.

Philosophers have understood that the union of the physical world of the body with language—the symbolic system that is the highest act of mind—is profound, but they have not agreed on its implications. Plato (1973) and Derrida (1981), sitting at two ends of a 2500 year span of Western philosophy, provide the most pointed example of the philosophical arguments about the Technology Question. Both Plato and Derrida recognize the stakes of the Technology Question: They reorganize that writing is inherently bound up with issues of truth, knowledge, and ultimately power.

In Plato’s Phaedrus (1973), Socrates denounces writing at length. He argues that writing is a shadow, a derivative of “living and animate speech” and therefore at a further remove from true knowledge than is speech. Note that Plato is primarily concerned with the psychological aspects of writing’s impact: Writing gives the illusion of wisdom while in fact fostering forgetfulness. Further, writing, unlike speech, can neither answer queries put to it nor distinguish between “suitable and unsuitable readers.” Writing is compared to a child who needs its parent (speech) to defend it, and the very best that might be said about writing is that it can provide a pastime for wise men who are past their prime (sect. 275-76).

Clearly, Plato is highly ambivalent about writing. Earlier in this dialog, Socrates calls the manuscript Phaedrus hides under his cloak the “actual speech” of Lysias and entreats Phaedrus to show it to him (sect. 228). And, of course, Plato himself was a writer of many texts. For present purposes, it is not important to establish precisely where Plato stands vis a vis writing; rather, he is provided as an early theorist who recognizes the significance of the Technology Question and devotes considerable attention to it, despite the fact that his approach may not be, in the final analysis, completely consistent.

Through the cumulative power of these multiple indictments of writing, Plato tried to close the book, as it were, on the Technology Question. He failed, of course, because Derrida, twenty-five centuries later, is still arguing with Plato over the nature of writing. Derrida’s larger goal is the critique of Western metaphysics (Johnson, 1981), and in “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1981) he takes on a central part of this project, deconstructing Plato, “the father of logos.” For Derrida, Phadrus is the “inaugural gesture” (p. 128) of Western philosophy, and in his reading of it Derrida turns Plato on his ear. For Derrida, writing is not ancillary or secondary or derived, but is always already there. The dichotomy that Plato sets up¹ between speech and writing already presupposes the technological system that makes it possible—writing. According to Derrida, Plato has to have writing in order to attack writing: He (like Rosseau and Saussure) wants to put writing “out of the question” (p. 158), yet to do so, he must borrow both the medium of writing and its analytical/theoretical system. Further, although Plato sees writing as absence, the “supplement of a supplement” (p. 109), the writing itself gets away from him, “endlessly vanish[ing] through concealed doorways” (p. 128). Because what writing supplements (i.e., speech) turns out to also be a supplement or an absence, Plato can define and defend, speech only through writing. Jasper Neel (1988) paraphrases Derrida: “Whatever is supposed to precede and inform writing, whatever is supposed to escape play or be primary or be present in its own right always turns out to operate just like writing. Writing, in other words, created the West, not the other way around” (p. 118).

Is writing an aid to memory, or is it a dangerous, shadowy illusion of wisdom? Is writing a drug that dulls the memory, or merely a pastime? Is writing the pharmakon (drug/remedy), or is it the pharmakos (scapegoat)? Is writing a supplement to philosophical truth, or does it in fact make philosophy possible? These questions, debated across the centuries by Plato and Derrida, are all variants of the Technology Question: What is the nature of language made material, what is the nature of writing? And what, as a consequence of writing, happens to human thinking and human culture?

For Plato, the effects of writing are most directly psychological: The material implements and artifacts of writing are a psychological crutch, and a tainted one at that, given its remove from true knowledge. Plato’s critique of writing is built on firm distinctions between speech and writing, and this distinction is mirrored in the material/immaterial split in Western philosophy that is often traced to Plato. Derrida’s response to Plato’s psychological concerns, on the other hand, occurs mostly at the level of writing as system. He wants to deconstruct Platonic binaries—particularly here speech and writing, but also body/soul and immaterial/material. To do so he addresses not Plato’s psychological concerns but rather how writing works as a cultural system. The stakes in this debate about the Technology Question are huge for both Plato and Derrida: Maintaining a distinction between speech and writing is absolutely imperative for Plato, both politically and philosophically. If, on the other hand, Derrida can deconstruct Plato’s duality of speech/writing, one of the most powerful of the Platonic binaries, he is well on his way to cracking the Platonic system as a whole.

I use the argument between Plato and Derrida about writing to illustrate that the Technology Question is a long-standing one with profound implications, politically and philosophically, as Plato and Derrida both understood. Further, the dichotomization of speech and writing that Plato insisted upon (and that Derrida attempted to deconstruct) remains a common theme in other discussions of the Technology Question. This is illustrated—again returning to Plato’s Athens—as the historical scholarship on the advent of western literacy is examined.

THE TECHNOLOGY QUESTION IN HISTORIES OF ANCIENT GREECE

A second, quite different body of work concerns the historical analysis of changes wrought by writing on preliterate civilizations. Literary theorist Walter Ong, classicist Eric Havelock, and anthropologist Jack Goody each engage the Technology Question in their comparative historical analyses of ancient Greece pre– and part–literacy. Each of these scholars is interested in exploring the implications of materially supported alphabetic systems on Greek culture and Greek thought. These scholars’ work is vital to examinations of the Technology Question because they take many of the notions, explicit and implicit, in the treatises by Plato and Derrida and explore them through empirical observations of cultural systems and textual artifacts. While these scholars’ methodologies are significantly different from one another, there are important parallels in their claims and conclusions.

Ong’s (1982) book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, is wide ranging and demonstrates an impressive familiarity with work in diverse fields, from ethnographic anthropology to semiotic theory. Using ancient Greece as an exemplar, Ong examines the nature of thinking and being in primary oral cultures, cultures that are so radically different from Western culture, that Ong admitted his success in this venture can only be partial. Ong acknowledged that his comparisons are of extreme cases: contemporary Western cultures that are “hyperliterate” and primary oral cultures that do not exist except in isolated ways today.

For Ong, writing transforms human consciousness by moving language from an aural realm, where it unfolds across time, to a visual realm, where it takes on a primarily spatial quality. According to Ong (1982), the sense of sight isolates individuals outside and at a distance from what is seen; similarly, sight-based language (written or printed texts) fosters contemplation, analysis, and critique. The sound-based temporal world of speech is totalizing; it “pours into” and “envelopes” (p. 72) the listener, and its centralizing and unifying character shape thought culture. Therefore, writing, what Ong calls “the most monumentous of all human technological inventions,” translates sound into space and so “transforms the human life world” (p. 85).

Ong elevates the Greek alphabet above other scripts and syllabaries, claiming that it alone has the simplicity for truly widespread use and widespread effects. For instance, the Chinese system, in contrast to the modern alphabet, is cumbersome and elitist, and Ong claimed that it will “no doubt” soon be obsolete, replaced by the Roman alphabet.² Ong is at his best when he examines the paradoxes of literacy: Writing has been closely associated with death, as in the notion of a lifeless written text, but this lifeless object can also be perpetually “resurrected into limitless living contexts” (p. 81); or the idea that writing, because it is artificial, alienates us from the natural world and therefore heightens our humanity. Writing, which is neither natural nor inevitable, is nonetheless a supreme achievement of humankind because “artificiality is natural to humans” (p. 82).

Ong’s apparent purpose—suggested by key terms like “consciousness” and “ways of thinking”—was to examine the cognitive effects of literacy, and indeed he has been most often read that way (Brandt, 1990; Heim, 1987). Despite this ostensible focus, however, Ong readily moves from cognitive claims to cultural ones and back again. In the most widely read part of the book (i.e., chapter 3, “Some Psychodynamics of Orality”), many of the characteristics Ong outlines describe patterns of thinking—aggregative, additive, copious—but others seem to be used to describe primary oral cultures, such as traditionalist and homeostatic. In any case, Ong is not interested in examining in any detail the actual relationship between individual and cultural changes wrought by writing, or the mechanisms by which one kind of change mediates another.

Classicist Eric Havelock, with his focus on cultural effects, provides a complementary perspective to Ong’s. In a career spanning more than thirty years, Havelock (1986) has attempted to treat what he calls the “oral-literate problem” (p. ix) in the context of Greek philosophy, literature, and politics. Whereas Ong’s book is far-reaching and eclectic, synthesizing a great deal of diverse prior research, Havelock uses more primary source material to make a narrower argument, but one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Writing in the Material World
• 1 The Technology Question
• 2 Technology Studies
• Part II: The Role of Technology in the Cognition of Literacy
• 3 Reading On-Line
• 4 Materiality and Thinking: The Effects of Computer Technology on Writers’ Planning
• 5 Text Sense and Writers’ Materially Based Representations of Text
• Part III: The Social and Cultural Construction of Literacy Tools
• 6 Social Dynamics, or Scientific Truth, or Sheer Human Cussedness: Design Decisions in the Evolution of a User Interface
• 7 Constructing Technology Through Discourse with Ann George
• Part IV: Conclusions and Future Inquiry
• 8 Historicizing Technology
• 9 Theorizing Technology
• References
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Author Index
• Subject Index