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The Breakout of the VisualIn chapter 13 of Writing Space first edition (hereafter WS1), Bolter begins to explore the differences between perception and semiosis (WS1 224) – between the literate use of signs and the attempt to directly perceive reality without the mediation of signs. He sees television as the major effective entity drawing people toward an empathic experience of the outside world rather than one channeled more indirectly through the semiosis of literacy (226-227). In the realm of computer technology, virtual reality was beginning to become more common in 1991, and Bolter theorizes on the nature of and uses for virtual perceptive experiences (230-231).
This dichotomy has become a central emphasis in Bolter’s work since the first edition (an unpublished mid-90s draft text entitled Degrees of Freedom, still available on the Web, puts the hypertext-virtual reality opposition in starkest terms). At times, Bolter sounds an almost shrill warning against the anti-literate forces at work in our culture, with the foremost concern that the hypermediating potential for digital textuality may be stunted or bypassed altogether by our collective lust for the “natural sign” (57) – to see and perceive, and to interact. Such an emphasis would reduce – is reducing – the cultural role of text, elevating the graphic and visual to the highest level of importance in communication.
In chapter 4 of Writing Space second edition (47; hereafter WS2), Bolter has put the perception/semiosis issue into the larger context of the remediation of print through digital technology. He sees a broad interplay between print formats and electronic capabilities for various representations (49).
Interestingly, he uses the introductory discussion of graphic impact on print forms as a springboard for a theoretical and historical exploration of the visual elements of writing, beginning with picture writing. As in WS1, we again find the pictogrammatic narrative of the skirmish in 1858 between the Native American chiefs Shahash’king and Shakopi (WS2 60), and again we encounter the “shaving man” as visual metaphor from USA Today (WS2 53). Bolter again stresses the functioning of the graphical user interface as picture writing, with the windowing environment as “the visual expression of a particular reader’s journey through the text” (68).
In WS2, the Web looms large as the chief site of cultural picture writing and major remediator of graphic print formats (69). Referring to work by the Web design theorist David Siegel, Bolter traces in detail interrelationships between print conventions and Web writing, and the strategies adopted by Web designers to exploit graphic design features – “striking visual metaphors, display fonts, drop-shadowed texts, color gradients, and the pixel-by-pixel construction of gridded spaces” (WS2 69). Bolter concludes this discussion with a consideration of “Text in cyberspace” (72). Text is undoubtedly present on the Internet, but in ways clearly subordinate to graphic impact and which change our traditional cultural orientation to alphabetic writing. He even sees text-based forms such as email and MOOs heavily influenced by the desire for the natural sign. As evidence, he cites the use of emoticons in email and the creation of perceptual worlds in MOOs; and indeed, the increasing number of graphical Web-based MOOs, where hitherto textually-based objects like rooms and pathways have become icons and even cartoons, seems to Bolter to point to the triumph of the visual over the semiotic. “The verbal MOO is an heroic attempt to recreate in prose what many, perhaps most, of its users would already prefer to be a sensory experience. For most users, it is probably true that the words only get in the way” (WS2 75). Thus email and MOOs move away from literacy and toward a reliance on empathic forms and graphic elements “designed to fix authorial intent” (73).
Although Bolter has both in the first and second editions offered many excellent and subtle insights into the relationship between the textual/semiotic and the visual/perceptive dimensions of communication, this last discussion of asynchronous and synchronous textual interchange perhaps stops somewhat short of being useful, at least for teachers. Networked synchronous conversations have become increasingly common in composition instruction, for example, where scores of articles in recent years (see, for example, Newbold and English) have reported on experience and research indicating that both MOOs and general synchronous conferencing facilities offer a rich, textual, interactive, and transactional teaching-learning environment, and one that supports metacognitive reflection, a function acknowledged to flourish with high literacy. Surely we are in a visual dispensation, as Bolter argues, but it seems that the nature of Web textual forms, at least as far as teachers and students are concerned, are still emerging. Clearly the visual has “broken out” forcefully and creatively. The discussion for us now needs to focus on the theory and processes whereby new visual media can be usefully fused with older text-based literacy. Crucial in this debate is the nature of core literacies to be taught in writing programs nation wide. Strategies for retaining the strength of alphabetic literacy must coincide with practice that allows for iconic and graphic expression in hypermediated writing systems. Bolter’s immense scholarly achievement will help with this project, but we as literacy teachers must take it home to our students.