Labor, Writing Technologies, and the Shaping of Composition in the Academy
The Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition
The University of Louisville
October 5-7, 2000
http://www.louisville.edu/a-s/english/watson.html

  

 

An Historical Perspective on New Literacy Technologies, Academic Values,
Book Development, and Print-Linked Publishing

 

Rebecca Moore Howard
Syracuse University
7 October 2000

  

Abstract: New literacy technologies have always changed academic work, precipitating conflicts about the relative value of competing technologies, and this historical pattern echoes through the work on our book.

 

 

So, as you've heard, our editorial team was faced with a quandary: either we keep the cost of our book low and thus have a wider distribution; or we include all the essays that would make for a rich collection, but have a smaller number of people read them. We found our way out of the binary by inventing a new way of publishing: print-linked publishing. With part of the book published in print and part on CD-ROM, it amounts to a fusion of print publishing and online publishing. We are pleased with this publishing innovation. Many other forms of hardcopy-plus-online publishing have emerged in the past decade; Robert Kaplan, for example, has published the bibliography for his Oxford University Press book online, with the text of the book in print (see Carvajal). But Kaplan's method is typical: the "real stuff" goes into print, and the "ancillary stuff" goes online. Print-linked publishing, in contrast, finds some of the "real stuff" best suited to print, and other "real stuff" best suited to cyberspace. Yet the decision to go with print-linked publishing was a difficult decision requiring ongoing negotiations with our publisher and contributors.

Such publishing struggles are typical of periods in which multiple literacies compete. The invention of writing systems caused the ancient Greeks to debate whether one could discover truth more easily through the new technology than through speech. Plato certainly took sides in this debate--sides, not "a" side--but that's another story. Not only does he suggest, in the Phaedrus, that written documents are "written speech," but he also has the character Phaedrus remarking that "the most influential and important men in our cities are ashamed to write speeches and leave writings behind them, through fear of being called sophists by posterity" (129-30). Speech in the Phaedrus is prior to and more valuable than writing.

Today, print is prior to and more valuable than the digitized environment. When we decided in favor of print-linked publishing, we worried about how our contributors would react to the prospect of their essays' being on the CD-ROM rather than in print. Sure enough, we received complaints. One contributor ƒwas indignant, another disgusted, and a third worried about the diminution of her tenure case. Her worry was not misplaced; not only has CCCC felt compelled to issue guidelines for promotion and tenure when the candidate works with technology, but two of those guidelines are:

It is important that the candidate's work be evaluated in the medium in which it was produced. Printing off web pages, for example, is a poor substitute for evaluating those pages online. (141; my italics)
It is important that the candidate's work be evaluated by persons knowledgeable about the use of computer technology. (141)

Yes, indisputably, print publication is presently regarded as the proper venue for work of academic value; moreover, at present it is clearly acceptable for scholars to be computer illiterate.

In Plato's day it was a competition between written and oral literacy. Today the competition is between print and online literacy. But the ancient Greek competition has not entirely subsided; lest we forget, in Sigmund Freud's analysis of a case of hysteria (a female patient, of course), the doctor concludes that the patient's writing has become a "physiological substitutive function"--a substitute for speech (56). Writing was a substitute for speech. And conference papers such as the one I am reading to you? They acquire real status only if they are subsequently published in print. Putting them on one's own website, as I have done with this paper, is no help. It is print, not speech (the older literacy) or cyberspace (the newer literacy), that conveys academic value.

Literacy competitions, then, endure in subtle ways for centuries. Moreover, new literacy competitions arise from time to time. In the ancient West, the competition was between speech and writing; today it is between print and cyberpace; and in early modern England, it was between manuscripts and print. When the printing press was introduced to early modern England, writers worried about whether print was a less dignified medium than the handwritten manuscript. Feminist print historian Wendy Wall explains that in 1604, Anthony Scoloker equates print publishing with forced entry--with rape. "Breaking into print," Wall observes, "Seemingly inspires the writer to present a highly confused gendered authorial position, paradoxically becoming vulnerable and impressionable while guarding against the effeminacy entailed in such a transformation" (2).

The reluctance to associate oneself with print rather than manuscript publication continued through the early eighteenth century. According to copyright historian Mark Rose, the early copyright and pre-copyright laws in England were chiefly for the benefit of the booksellers. Though these guild members represented themselves as speaking for authors' rights, the authors of the period did not want to dirty themselves with the taint of Commerce that copyright carried; they sold their works outright to the booksellers. An exception was Alexander Pope, who, despite representing himself as a gentleman who wrote for the purpose of entertaining friends, brought charges against Edmund Curll for the publication of his letters (58-9). Authors in 1729 regarded print publication as a demeaning venue; the high status of manuscripts--or, more accurately, the low status of print--lingered even when handwritten codices had all but disappeared. Today we can see traces of the competition: although printed texts are professionally sanctioned--most of us require our college students to submit typewritten papers--now word-processed papers--handwritten letters are still prized in individual communication between friends.

Traces of the speech-versus-writing and manuscripts-versus-print competitions remain, but the new literacy revolution in which we are embroiled is that of print versus digitization. Now that technological literacies (such as television and the Internet) have been introduced, Western culture passionately debates the threat that these new literacies pose to print. And because we have an enormous education industry predicated not just on print-based communications but on print as a measure of social status, a great deal stands to be lost. No one is more associated with the championing of print than Sven Birkerts, who takes for granted that the displacement of print will amount to the displacement of thought. Reading and writing not just as means of learning but as the means of thinking is well established in the discourse of critical thinking; Walter Ong, for example, asserts, "[F]unctionally literate human beings really are . . . beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing." And reading and writing online, as we all know, is different from reading and writing in print. And not just different from, but lesser than. As in the earlier cases of literacy revolutions, the older literacy enjoys higher social esteem, while the newer literacy is regarded as a less valuable venue, one that even diminishes or demeans those who work in it. Historians of intellectual property have identified the rise of individualism with the rise of print in the West, whereas online, as everyone including the CCCC Guidelines knows (140), collaboration prevails. Not only reading and learning but the primacy of the individual are at stake in this revolution.

Where does this position print-linked publishing? Is the dual mode of our book, straddling both digitized and hard-copy literacy, a temporary stopgap in the inevitable march toward the primacy of technology? Very possibly. Internet theorists predict that print will not disappear entirely. A safe bet: neither has speech nor handwritten documents. Many assure us that the two--technology and hardcopy--will share the limelight and will contribute to each other. Well, maybe. But previous literacy revolutions suggest that if the pattern holds, print will lose its dominance. At some point in the future, books like ours may be published entirely online.

For at least the moment, though, print-linked publishing offers a wonderful opportunity for writers to think about the uses that will be made of their work. We editors of Coming of Age recognized that some of the essays in our collection would be read in a contemplative mode, as readers pondered the theories and arguments advanced in some of the more historical and theoretical essays, whereas others would be read in an interactive mode, as readers considered the possible applications and adaptations of the curricular and pedagogical descriptions and recommendations in other essays. Our first impetus was economic: we could not publish all the essays we wanted and still have a book whose price would be low enough for many people to purchase and read it. But as we came up with the idea of print-linked publishing, we realized that the material of our book was ideally suited to such a venue. Late in the process we considered going with the expensive, print-exclusive publication of all the essays--it was a choice open to us--but we rejected it. We were too sold on print-linked publishing, too excited about the ways it combines the advantages of print with those of cyberspace.

Works Cited

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.
Carvajal, Doreen. "The Book's in Print, But Its Bibliography Lives in Cyberspace." The New York Times, 29 May 2000: A1, 12.
CCCC Committee on Computers and Composition. "Promotion and Tenure Guidelines for Work with Technology." College Composition and Communication 51.1 (September 1999): 139-142.
Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. New York: Collier, 1963.
Magner, Denise K. "Seeking a Radical Change in the Role of Publishing." The Chronicle of Higher Education 16 June 2000. http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i41/41a01601.htm 13 June 2000.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.
Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. H.N. Fowler. Loeb Classical Library, 1914. Rpt. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford, 1990. 113-43.
Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.
Stroupe, Craig. "Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web." College English 62.5 (May 2000): 607-632.
Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.