“It took a few generations for printers to realize that they could create a new writing space with thinner letters, fewer abbreviations, and less ink.”
This might be my favorite line from Barton; and it would look beautiful next to the quote of Manovich in which he emphasizes the voracious utility of net artists to understand and exploit the paradigms of emergent media. Would the person who can find that please paste it over this sentence?
“Fixed printed texts can be made into a literary canon and can therefore promote cultural unity…This ideal of cultural unity through a shared literary inheritance, which has received so many assaults in the 20th century, must now suffer further by the introduction of new forms of highly individualized writing and reading.”
I greatly wish Barton would expand upon what he sees as the “new forms of highly individualized writing and reading.” Blogs seem like a prime candidate, but, regardless of his intention, there is certainly room to show that cultural unity (through a shared literary inheritance or otherwise) has indeed been assaulted and suffered by the introduction of new forms of [what are the old?] highly individualized writing and reading [and what does that mean?], but that they have, arguably, received greater benefit from their introduction.
If this is the case, then why doesn’t Bolter utilize it? His page is static: a black serifless type on a white background, structured with headings and paragraphs, and not a hyperlink, embedment or other modal utilization for me to click and explore. I might as well be reading about the late age of print on parchment, except for the fact that the mode serves as its own light source so I can read it (for a time) even when the power goes out, and that I can have my computer read the article to me with three key strokes and a wiggle of my finger.
Bolter states that “the “look and feel” of writing and reading” have changed with technology, and I agree that the look and feel have changed in that there is a cultural awareness of fonts—and even a basic literacy as displayed in the diversity in fwd:fwd:fwd emails and the popularity of fontumentaries like Helvetica. But the “look and feel” have less to do with technology’s effects on reader- and writership than the “make- and do-ability.”
In the classroom (and perhaps the boardroom) the typewritten mimeographs and photocopies gave way to dot-matrix then ink/laser-jet print-outs to the free and freely distributable every-copy-is-an-original producing .pdf and (malleable and trackable) .docx we have now.
If I were Manovich I would metaphorically tie this progression of the document (or object as he would italicize) to the emergent development of cinema. Since I am not Manovich, I shall attempt to tie Bolter’s progression of the document to my own understanding of Manovich’s introduction to the parallel progressions of early (Vertov’s) cinema with emergent technologies. I hope to keep this very brief and in a
Vertov was experimenting to create as open a text as he could within his medium: thus the intentional lack of context, yet fleeting focus of situation. A situation exists in itself and Vertov allows us to witness those moments which we can’t describe unless we bring some sort of context to our description: is it a city street full of people crossing and trams streaming past, or trams going through the crowded city streets? Is woman giving birth, or is a child being born? There are multiple situations and we need a context to relate the situations so we can begin to understand them. I don’t think Vertov tries to be grammatical—anti-grammatical, perhaps—but he draws attention in a new way to unseen things that later became apparent because of the experiment: in the way we know, understand, and (especially) recognize minimalism from the avant-garde (Philip Glass from Diamanda Galas): through repetition and subtle variance—everything can be literal except for the (meta) composite shots (of a cameraman mounting a camera with his camera, or the tripod overlooking the city). I think the fact that we, who don’t make films, analyze films with an understanding of what “composite shots” are, speaks to the intersection of Vertov and Manovich: an example in which art and technology have merged with culture to be assumingly apparent: this is how we understand Jurassic Park and Titanic. And this is how we will continue to understand emergent media and new applications of extant media.
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