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.