As much as I want an answer to the debate between the fates of print and digital media, I don't think there is one definitive answer available. Too many variables -- dwindling resources, fixed technology versus rapidly changing technology, and the all-powerful force of money -- are in play. So what I most appreciated about the Manovich and Bolter texts is that, while they acknowledged the debate and offered arguments from both sides, what they most focused on is what does/can digital media mean for us now, today? Ironic that the information from one source comes to use from print nearly ten years old, which may as well be an eon as far as digital technology is concerned, but there you go. Just fuel for the debate, if you choose to engage.
What I got out of the reading is that one of the enormous benefits of digital media is that users of digital media are active users of the interface; as stated in the prologue to Manovich: in contrast to cinema, where most "users" are able to "understand" cinematic language but not "speak" it (i.e., make films), all computer users can "speak" the language of the interface. (xv)
Instead of worrying about some hazy future of no books or no computers or an undetermined ratio of print to digital, it is more useful to ask, what about today? How can we communicate? What can we create? What do we have to say?
And because I can't resist chiming in on the debate, useless as it might be, here's an article by John Green, from the School Library Journal, on the future of reading. Particularly interesting to this debate is the section on This is Not Tom, a wholly online novella that Green created as an experiment in digital storytelling.
"What I got out of the reading is that one of the enormous benefits of digital media is that users of digital media are active users of the interface; as stated in the prologue to Manovich: in contrast to cinema, where most "users" are able to "understand" cinematic language but not "speak" it (i.e., make films), all computer users can "speak" the language of the interface. (xv)"--
ReplyDeleteThis quote from Manovich actually interested me quite a bit. While I agree that most people who watch films can't technically produce them, I nonetheless wonder if the actual interpretation of film could be considered a form of speaking. Considering cinema-goers as passive viewers ignores an important point-- that people view films through their subjectivities and actively interpret what they see. I'm not sure if users of old media-- film, books, etc-- are quite as passive as they're made out to be.
Another dimension of this could be the innate human need to tell stories -- we may not literally produce films, but we actively interact with books and films as stories, regardless of the medium in which we receive the stories. The passivity may exist with regards to the technology used to produce the stories, but at the core, the stories are what matters.
ReplyDeleteI've been interested in folklore and myth for a long time, and I kind of want to look at how technology either aids or detracts from the transmission of myth and folklore. If I wanted to be in school forever. :)