Push Pop Press and Facebook

In the above TEDTalk, Mike Matas gives a demonstration of the e-book Our Choice, written by Al Gore as a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth and brought to iPads and iPhones everywhere by Matas’s company, Push Pop Press.  From what Matas shows in the demonstration, the book (or app – he uses the terms interchangeably in his presentation), the interactive version of Gore’s book looks strikingly similar (though perhaps a bit more image-reliant) to the Penguin Amplified Editions I’ve mentioned in a couple of other posts.  Using touch-screen technology, readers are encouraged to manipulate elements of the text, resizing images and scrolling through pages, listening to Al Gore’s voice read and explain the text, and even blowing on the device in order to set small digital windmills going, producing virtual energy for digital houses.  In a strictly non-academic sort of way, I’d just like to say that this is very neat.

On the Interactive Reader

The title of this post has a kind of tongue-in-cheek meaning for me because when I think of the Interactive Reader, I automatically think of the consumable versions of the English textbooks I use in my classroom.  Though I’ve been ostensibly using these for years (mostly as bookshelf dust catchers), I’ve never really considered the title proclamation of interactivity.  What makes the Interactive Reader interactive?  After taking a cursory glance inside one of them, I come up with the following reasons the textbook company might consider it appropriate to call the reader interactive:  1)  the kids are allowed to (gasp!) write in it; 2) the text encourages note-taking by providing carefully-structured questions along the margins, along with nice little spaces for answers; 3) it has Critical Thinking Activities at the end of each story/article, encouraging students to connect the texts with one another and with their own experiences.

I think that, in the context of reader interactivity and a reader’s ability to manipulate the text itself, the only thing notable in those three features is the students’ ability to write on the pages of the book without incurring the wrath of their teachers.  They are not given room to influence the text; they have no ability to manipulate it within the confines of the prescribed interactive features.  What the Interactive Reader strives to do, in other words, is to encourage students to engage with and think about the text.  I don’t necessarily object to this (ahem), though I prefer other methods of teaching reading skills.  Clearly, though, to call these texts interactive is not precisely correct.

Obsolescence and Nostalgia

In The Anxiety of Obsolescence (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), Kathleen Fitzpatrick makes several arguments concerning the latest call of the “death of the novel” due to new media.  After pointing out that the introduction of a new technology always heralds the death of some form or another of literary expression, The Anxiety of Obsolescence argues from the very beginning that “the ways we speak and write about new media – and particularly the means by which we express our concerns about the world that new media forms are eroding or leaving behind – may reveal more about our own entrenched cultural ideologies than they do about the media themselves” (9).

As I look around at my own culture, it seems to me that we spend a lot of time and energy looking back at the greatness of what was, rather than looking forward to the possibilities of the new.  This does not just apply to digital media and technology; I’ve noticed the phenomenon in attitudes towards family, education, gender roles, child-raising, and government, just to name a few.  In short – it’s pervasive and not limited to any one field. 

Tradition, the Reader, and the Digital Author

As the title implies, my focus today is upon the implications of digital media with regards to how digital authors and narratives interact with the past as well as adapt to a new medium.  As a continuation of my response to the essays in Seán Burke’s Authorship, I again refer to my reading list for a complete list of the essays and introductory statements I have read thus far.

This focus moves me into stickier theoretical ground than I have yet covered in this blog. Referring specifically to Seán Burke’s section introduction, “The Twentieth Century Controversy”, T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, and Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author”, my intent is to ponder ways in which the digital medium influences our perceptions of subjectivity in writing as well as the role of the reader.  Though I wrote in my previous post that I didn’t intend to handle it this way, this time I am going to examine the three essays individually, using Burke’s section introduction as a springboard.

Autobiography and Digital Temporality

This week, I journeyed through a few centuries worth of authorship theory courtesy of Seán Burke’s Authorship (Edinburgh University Press, 1995).  My reading list has been updated with the selections I chose to read.  I chose my essays with care; it goes without saying (at least to me) that I should read them all, and I intend to.  For the purposes of my independent study, however, I chose what I thought would best help me gain an understanding of authorship as it has been discussed to this point.

It is not my intention in this or any subsequent entries to give a summary of what I read (if you want more information, check out the reading list; all of the material I’ve read is readily available and highly anthologized), but instead to discuss the implications on the various theories of authorship to digital culture as I see them so far.  Since it would make this and subsequent entries absurdly long (and I haven’t figured out what the WP equivalent to LJ-cuts is yet), I’m not going to go theorist-by-theorist.  Rather, I’m going to consider my responses with respect to the three main positions with respect to authorship:  author-as-subject, author-as-dead, and attempts at finding the happy medium between those two.

Digital Collaboration

This entry is written primarily in response to Andrew Bennett’s chapter “Collaboration” in The Author (Routledge, 2005).

After pointing out that the Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first use of the word “collaborator” in 1802, Andrew Bennett surmises that the idea of authorial collaboration only became significant  within “what Jack Stillinger calls the Romantic ‘myth of the solitary genius'” (Stillinger 201, qtd. in Bennett 94).  Because authors were arguably not considered to be autonomous nor their works original before this time, the need to use a word like collaboration to describe situations in which more than one author (or authority) had a claim on the content of a text was simply not present.  In this chapter, Bennett explores the different ways in which the idea of multiple authorship has been theorized, criticized, and presented throughout the history of literary criticism since the seventeenth century.  Though he mentions several versions of collaboration including co-authorship, editing, plagiarism, and even reliance on social and psychological context, Bennett comes to the conclusion that attribution theory, though its focus is ostensibly on the various “voices” found within a given text, actually gives more importance to the idea of authorial intent than it perhaps intends.  For the moment, I agree.

Initial Thoughts

As I mentioned on my About page, this blog primarily exists as the fulfillment of a course requirement.  Having said that, however, and knowing that digital humanities in general and, more specifically, digital authorship are going to be my major scholarly focus in the foreseeable future, I anticipate that I will continue blogging here even after my course requirements are met.  First things first, though: my first posts will primarily be responses and thoughts to the numerous tomes and articles on my summer reading list.  After that, who knows?