Home | TOCs | The Web | The Visual | Remediation | Works Cited
The Materiality of LiteracyIn chapter 2 of Writing Space second edition (hereafter WS2), the section entitled “Writing technologies and material culture,” Bolter addresses the issue of how we can conceptualize writing technologies in relation to social, economic, and cognitive activity. This focus is a significant explanatory extension and development of his often implicit treatment of “the computer” as agent in the first edition of Writing Space. Bolter was criticized in subsequent years, along with earlier scholars such as Walter Ong and Elizabeth Eisenstein, for thinking of “technology” as an autonomous force impacting culture and individuals, and as such a thing that could be characterized as good or bad in itself. He answers his critics partly by including and endorsing their chief ideas, and partly by carefully explaining the rhetorical base which he has carried on and elaborated from the first edition.
One of the main scholars to draw attention to the material aspects of literacy and technology is Christina Haas, who, in Writing Technology, criticized the approaches of Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, and anthropologist Jack Goody and critic Ian Watt for a deterministic approach to understanding literacy (8-13), and later cited Elizabeth Eisenstein and Bolter for continuing the instrumentalist and deterministic way of thinking about technology (208-212). As Haas and other critics have affirmed in the past decade, literacy, technology, and all generalizable functions of human activity take place in the whole context of that activity, and have to be understood as related. In WS2 (pp. 18 and following), Bolter essentially agrees with Haas, but goes on to qualify and explain his concept of writing technology. “Electronic writing is always involved in material culture and in contemporary economics,” he writes, but it is also virtual as have been all previous writing technologies, “in the sense that they invited writers and readers to participate in an abstract space of signs" (18). This “conceptual writing space” forms a “continuum” with the material writing space, which becomes “a reflection of contemporary materials and techniques and an expression of our culture’s ambitions for its writing" (18). Even though the quality of digital text may seem to remove it from the material world especially when compared with print, electronic writing is still a function of human activity in that people create the hardware and software that maintains the function of writing. Thus “our literate culture is simply using the new tools provided by digital technology to reconfigure the relationship between the material practices or writing and the ideal of writing that these practices express" (18).
In this characterization of the unity of literacy with materiality, Bolter takes pains to agree with Haas and other scholars, and to point out that it is really not so much the fact that literacy is tied to material factors but the nature of the relationship between writing and material techniques that is the more interesting question; in fact it is the “Technology Question” that Haas frames her book around (19).
Finally, Bolter is careful to put his views in a broader context to set out his rhetorical approach in this work as well as justify the approaches taken by him and others in the past. It is most helpful, he says, to understand all technologies as culturally determined, unable to “act” independently on a culture from the outside. Some enthusiasts, mostly in the popular press, have characterized technology, especially the Web, in deterministic terms, and “more substantial writers” such as McLuhan, Ong, and Eisenstein have seemed to fall into the same group (19). But Bolter suggests that to examine one aspect of change need not isolate it from other cultural phenomena, and that any scholarly or ideological approach taken to excess can lead to unhelpful distortion of history. In fact, he says, the material properties of tools and devices do impact culture, and cites the rise of political concern regarding children and erotic content on the Web as a result of the capability of Web technology to deliver erotic content into homes, in conjunction with the social attitudes of openness and constitutional legal protections that allow the content in the first place (20); without the easy Web-access to pornography, these accompanying issues would not have emerged in these ways. The form of the printed book with its strong surface linearity does influence how writers and readers agree to use it; and computer-based writing does allow other, less-linear styles to emerge and be exploited (21).
Bolter insists finally that “when I speak of a technology of writing throughout this book, I will in general mean not just the hard technology, but the sum of the technical and social interactions that constitute a writing system” (20). He is thus careful to lay out what is a subtle and sensible positioning of his work in the whole debate of how we should represent and understand technology in our changing culture, both popular and scholarly.