English 583: Digital Rhetoric

There is an article at the front of the 13 Sept, 2010 New Yorker regarding soon-to-be-published hand-written note cards by Roland Barthes mourning his mother's death. In a brief introduction is noted: "Instability--the instability of meaning, in particular--is his constant theme. The fragment was, ultimately, the form most congenial to him."

On-line, there is a different presentation of the article and involves a different author (it includes images of the actual hand-written cards) and includes the author's, Kristina Budelis's, observation:

Reading someone’s handwriting can be incredibly intimate and revealing, perhaps especially in an age of e-mail and texting. The confines of font streamline and depersonalize emotionality, in contrast with the romance of thoughtful script or the tragic desperation of slanted scrawls.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/09/barthess-hand.html#ixzz0zBBFSLHB

I find a connection to Manovich's investigation of Vertov's search for a visual Esperanto in the observation that "the confines of font streamline...emotionality." I take this to mean that emotion becomes less complex and easier to convey through the (traditionally) static mode of type-written words, which allows for a more direct (or "streamlined") connection between writer and reader. To restate: a standardized mode (such as font) "streamlines" the text as a connection between writer and reader in the writer-text-reader construct of rhetorical analysis.