The Athens Prophet: A Teaching Journal 2012: Dialectical Journal: Lanham

Author/Title:

Richard A. Lanham: What's Next for Text?

Summary:

Lanham explores the changes from printed to digital text.

Personal reflection:

I had a really tough time with this article--I spent HOURS reading it and more creating the dialectical journal that follows. One reason I had a tough time with it was the subject, I am not a competent tech person and a lot of the jargon was out of my depths of knowledge, I stopped and looked up several things, it was as if I had to research the topic as I was reading about it just to understand. Further, the piece is 12 years old, which is not that old for an academic article, except when it concerns digital media. We have advanced so much since this was published that I am not sure how useful the piece is as a stand alone--we really need an updated version to see how things are now, and to also have more familiarity. Basically, what I am saying, is that I hated reading this piece, it was a painful experience I would rather not repeat ever again!

Reflection	Quote

This is such a huge passage—it feels like the author is saying something to effect of electronic displays are the savior of text—text did not reach or even understand its potential until the digital shift. Certainly we are doing a lot of interesting stuff, but is this too big of a statement?	“Fixity stands at the center of Beatrice Warde’s brave declaration: ‘not to perish on waves of sound, not to vary with the writer’s hand, but fixed in time.’ That fixity comes unglued in the diversity of display devices in which text can now become manifest” (16).
I suppose this gestures to our increasing literate population—is it really a problem that library’s don’t know where to put all their books? Logistical, yes, but how wonderful!	“[…] the long-term trends justify our daily feeling that we are threatened by too many books to read, not too few” (16).
This caught me off guard and seemed odd, so I went and looked at the date—yeah, 2001! I wondered why it seemed so out-dated!	“(And the on-line auction, a genuine advance in the market’s price-clearing mechanism, may revolutionize Amazon before it has turned a profit)” (16).
Literature may not die, but the hard copy book? It is slowly going extinct—not too soon, so maybe it’s more “endangered” right now, but yeah…	“[…] books are not going to die, and neither is the literature contained in them” (16).
	“Our first reflection on what’s next for text must, then, be an economic one” (17).
What do we do with all this information? How do we start to organize and make sense of it all? Do we just dump everything into Reddit pages?	“[…] information is not scarce. We are drowning in it. The scarce commodity is the human attention required to make sense of the data tsunami” (17).
	“Text itself is a self-conscious expressive choice as it has never been before” (17).
…another tell-tale sign of the essays age. It’s interesting though, because one of my students is exploring the age of a text as reasons for being credible/not—and I wonder what we would say of this text? Is this credible even though it is 12 years out of date and cannot take into consideration of the vast digital changes??	“The only one known to, or explored by, a significant body of writers in the Internet, and here bandwidth constraints have prohibited asking the Middlesex Question with anything like its full force” (18).
I like this link to the old cliché “what is old is new again.” Like he is saying: “The internet, today’s illuminated manuscripts.”	“[…] a big change occurs when he walks into the margin and starts to wave his arms around and argue with us. A step not into the future, though, but backwards into an oral past” (20).
Given that it is 12 years in the future from this piece, are we now comfortable with this juxtaposition?	“This uneasy juxtaposition of oral and literate rhetorics occurs repeatedly in the alternative means of textual display that digital notations permits” (20).
As in the “interface between oral and literate” (21).	“[…] an unassuming multimedia text like this, which leaves its fixed text fixed and adds only the most familiar kind of academic ‘animation,’ nevertheless positions itself on a crucial fault” (21).
“It is the general question which must be asked in the market place economy of electronic textual display” (21).	“Do the kinds of attention asked for by this textual presentation compete or do they orchestrate?” (21).
I love this idea and think it warrants further examples (to be added at the end of this journal).	“Again and again, medieval manuscript illuminations look like stills from an animation in progress” (21).
	“The whole weight of these alternative display modes recaptures this history instead of, as the media prophets of doom argue, repudiating it” (21).
Out of the common course or limits, extravagant.	Outré
Perception of interaction	“When reading text in three dimensions, the reader’s ‘position’ becomes literalized. The primary stylistic, and social skill, situational awareness, takes on a three-dimensional positional equivalent” (23).
Yeah, I like this a lot—makes me think of the way I build lesson plans, one layer at a time—building them up until they can be modeled in the 3d classroom.	“We want to be able to read in layers, for main arguments, secondary ones, detailed evidence, in ways not linear but, as now we must call them, hypertextual” (25).
Linking back to the example of the illuminated manuscript	“You find them in unexpected places, and they remind us that three-dimensional letter space is not only where we are going but where, on more than one occasion, we have been” (26).
Actually, I would think that they would know this and be using it very consciously for marketing and product placement, etc.	“[…] when they oscillate between two-dimensional and three-dimensional images of a letter, they are—I doubt they intend this or perhaps even know it—re-enacting the act of seeing. They are making us see how we see, and doing this around a core of letters” (27).
Directly contradicts the quote directly above.	“Computer graphics has been intensely self-conscious about the act of seeing from its beginnings, necessarily so if it is to recreate the visual world as it has done” (27).
Class discussion? I need helping visualizing ideas, examples…	“How does spatial awareness work as the fundamental reading skill in this kind of literacy?” (27)
I had to look this up to make sure it was what I thought it was… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_typography	Kinetic typography
What was the text we kept talking about oscillation—Elbow? This reminded me a little bit about that—and just because he uses the word “oscillation,” but because Elbow is also asking us to combine perspectives—it’s unstable.	“our imagination is asked to combine two kinds of perception, two ways to understand the world, words and things, or at least to put them into very rapid oscillation” (31).
Okay…so this is purely personal, but I get so SICK of everyone talking about Christo’s work like it was the first time an artist broke through the object. AND, why doesn’t his poor dead wife, Jean Claude, ever get any credit? They worked on all of those mass works together (not to mention hundreds of volunteers to some of these wrappings in to place…) please people, start to look at something different!!!! End rant.	“Christo’s events, his fences, umbrellas and wrappings, happenings, conceptual art of all sorts, the pop explosion—all moved art from fixed objects to human attention” (34).