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.

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.

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.