changing writers and readers

To begin, Gitelman references an issue that we discussed during the last class (i.e. cell phone as phone or as a writing tool); Gitelman “locat[es] machines and other textual devices in the instances of invention, in narratives that show each machine, device, or process to have been authored and appropriated out of many different possibilities relevant to the making of meaning” (p. 4). She argues that the invention of new ways of writing or kinds of writing “presupposes a model of what writing and reading are and can be” (p. 4). She maintains that inscription practices and technologies are “not ‘our’ theory of language. Instead, they are modest, local, and often competitive embodiments of the way people wrote, read, and interacted over the perceived characteristics of writing and reading” (p. 4). In addition, Gitelman argues that “changes to writing and reading matter in large measure because they equal changes to writers and readers. New inscriptions signal new subjectivities” (p. 11).

Enough quotations…I just wanted to set down the context before I extrapolate/ramble/technologize my words.

A good illustration of the phenomena occurring throughout the above quotes is that of Edison’s phonograph, the purpose he saw it fulfilling, and the purpose it eventually fulfilled. Business recording device vs. music/audio playback machine. This example, to me at least, really points to Gitelman’s argument (above quote) that these inventions help create new kinds of writing and meaning-making, but also presuppose our theories of writing and reading.

The phonograph was originally intended as a business recording device. Edison thought it would, essentially, be an artificial (cyborg?) phonographer. Yet, it opened up an entire new understanding of what we see as writing (and reading). I think we could look at this phenomenon with many other technologies in mind as well: the cell phone, the computer, clay tablets to paper, etc. In any case, these technologies opened up new locations for writing to take place, and while these new practices are not ‘our theory’ of language (see above quote), they do allow us to see how we work within/outside language (and within/outside our theory of language).

Before the personal computer was en vogue, I never imagined a liquid crystal screen would perform as a writing surface. Gradually, my theories of language and writing changed with my practices and the technologies I used. I am certain that my social interactions and beliefs have also been affected by these practices and technologies, and thus, as Gitelman argues, I am exposed to new subjectivities (see quote above). It is quite telling about a social group/society when a technology is used for a purpose of which it was not originally intended. This really gets at the idea that the meaning does not reside in the technology itself, but is created by the social groups and their interactions with the technology. Not everyone needs a phonograph to record business notes, but many people might want to hear a recording over and over again. The technology becomes meaningful, and its meaning changes when people interact with it and around it.

With Gitelman’s above quotes and Bijker’s work in mind, how we can address writing today? What are the affordances and constraints of the technologies and practices with/in which we engage? How are we, today, changing our theory of writing and language, and how does this affect our use of technologies available? (I’m trying to get some questions down so that I/we can think about these things some more.)

Gitelmania II: "The past didn't go anywhere..."

In my reading of _Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines_ by Gitelman, I also felt a certain
worm-holding" between the way technology was consumed in the late 1800's and now, like Bob--hence the appropriation of the title (property being theft, ghost writers, aLl YoUr BaSe BeLoNg[ING] tO uS and all...). However, I was somewhat more interested in social intention in terms of how technology is used. For example, on page 68 Gitelman writes: "Amusement seemed to contaminate the pragmatic purpose of the phonograph. Participants to the convention wanted the two functions [business and entertainment] to be entirely separate, because they considered amusement wholly secondary to their product and business." When I read this passage, I immediately remember back in 1999 (again, right around the time of this book's publication) when they first started putting computers into use where I worked at the Metro Food Market corporation. Their intention was to use the computers specifically, and singularly, for payroll and store projections. When this happened, I was an office clerk at my store who was known to spend a good deal of time sitting behind a computer when I wasn't at work. So, when the computer arrived at our store, I was asked to learn to do payroll and write store projections because I was one of the few people in the store that had experience with the new technology. When I kept informing them that my "technological frame"---surely I didn't use this term them...but it seems appropriate now--was that of a gamer, more than once I was asked why someone would "waste such a powerful tool playing games." At first, the internet, solitaire, etc. were all blocked on the computer as each store was connected through an internal, closed network. Like the phonographs purchased in the late 1800's, the upper management at MFM inc. "mistook their own interests for the interests of consumers. Accordingly, they assumed that low-paid office staff and good-time Charlies lacked the necessary skill, attention, and incentive to operate the phonograph [or computer] correctly or maintain its still-quirky mechanism." (p. 68)

Yes, this is a singular example of bogus limitations being placed on a technology by a specific group, but it high-lights for me how sometimes "technological frames" erroneously pigeon-hole technologies as they, the technologies, push their way towards mainstream acceptance. Yes, computer is a powerful business tool. Yes, the computer is a powerful research tool. Correct me if I am wrong (someone...give me a verbal slap), but wasn't the concept of the internet developed by the military as a research/archival system? Did they have the foresight to see the way the internet would explode in terms of social networking, media consumption, etc. at or around the time of Gitelman's book being published? I can't imagine that they could, but there are many things in this world--income tax, for example--that I would not dream up on the worst drugs. Gitelman continues, "The inventor of the phonograph, contemporary pundits, novelists, and capitalists had all misconceived the phonograph. They had all been wrong in pronouncing the function and the future of the new technology." (p. 69)

Carrying this train of thought further, could the amalgam of scientists and programmers that initiated the internet (or whatever they called it) forecast the current way millions currently use the internet as social networking and media consumption technology? What would Al Gore have thought of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or YouTube back in the earlier conceptions of the internet(Har har har har--I'm a silly boy, sorry)? Case in point, and somehow in my mind mimicking the late 19th century reaction to hearing a human voice carried out of a machine, is the urban myth of Chuck Palahnuik's readings of his story "Guts".

At the end of his composite novel _Haunted_ (a collection of 24 stories forming a gestalt of horror and depravity), Palahnuik speaks, outside of his text, of the problems he has had giving readings of one particular short story from the collection. At each reading, members of the audience would begin fainting and/or vomiting. In one reported case, a man had a seizure in the middle of the reading. For over a year I searched for some local reading of this story by the author (http://www.seizureandy.com/stuff/guts.htm if you would like to see a text copy of this story). At a point where I was about to give up...I checked somewhere else...YouTube, and found a submission of Palahnuik himself giving a reading. I didn't faint or vomit (of course, I have read the gruesome story probably 10-15 times...), but it was fascinating to hear the story in the author's own mouth.

If you want to check it out, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7oC2ZIQ4JI . But be warned, it is one of the most horrifying, graphic stories I have ever read. But it changed the way I heard/read the story. And I think that is something that Gitelman was trying to point out. Media...technology. Strange bedfellows.

E.

Noises, silences, and blank spaces

One of the most fascinating recurring touch-points of the text was Gitelman’s (1999) descriptions of the breakdown of the divisions between “orality, aurality, and textuality” (p. 185), through her discussion of the noise stretching across these categories. Gitelman gives a brief overview of some of the definitions and workings of noise:

The ‘noises of speech,’ as scientists noted right away about the phonograph, get lost in mechanical reproductions. ‘Noise’ is Jacques Atali’s term for the political economy of music. It is similarly William Paulson’s term for encoded culture, for ‘anything that gets mixed up with messages as they are sent’ (ix).Its very mixed-up quality of inarticulation makes noise difficult to identify
and explain. (p.183)

She nicely sets up this metaphor of noise in several places in the text, which encouraged me to start thinking about the possibility of noise ala Bijker’s model. I see shades of Bijker in Gitelman’s discussion on p. 4 where she brings in the concepts of symmetry and workability. Noise though adds a more nuanced notion of the various possibilities between working and non-working categories. Noise, potentially a nuisance for some, is alternately what is sought by others, i.e. as in the “noises of speech” mentioned above. In her discussion of patents, Gitelman suggests the linguistic difficulties in transferring the noises of the phonograph and the records it played into legal discussions about copyrights. Who owns the noise? The one who makes it, the one who hears it, the one who writes it, the one who produces it, the one who performs it? These issues were new due to the previously assumed ephemeral quality of noise.

She brings the issue of noise to the fore in her discussion of “noiseless” typewriters (p. 216-218). At the end of this section, she notes the creation of “the sound of blank space” (p. 218), which is particularly intriguing. On my initial reading of this, I wanted to disagree with her due to music’s centuries’ old use of silence. One can certainly play silences in music, and also use them in conversations in a highly rhetorical manner. To cite a musical example, Nicholas Cook (1990) examines musical and non-musical listening and describes the effects achieved through John Cage’s entirely silent composition, “4’33.” Cook states, “The effect of this piece in live performance (it hardly makes sense to envisage a recording of it) is to create an expectation of musical sound, which in the event, remains unfulfilled; this results in a distinctly heightened sensitivity on the listener’s part to the environment of the performance” (p. 11).

However, as I re-read Gitelman’s passage, it seemed that she was making a distinction between blank space and silence. I remain uncertain of the possibility of blank space in an aural sense, but I do see her point in terms of the visual, so this provides further means of complicating the movements between these categories which occurs with the introduction of the technologies she describes.

Talking Gravestones

This isn't the article that I was looking for, but it is for the same invention. What are your thoughts on a talking tombstone? I can't remember exactly where it was mentioned in the book, but I know it came up somewhere.

This has to be my favorite comment of the ones on BBC News' site.

"Imagine if all the graves were just looping video. At night, you would just here this continuous distant murmuring sound coming from the church, as all the dead seemingly chat away to each other! Creepy."

Gitelmania

I found something very haunting about a particular excerpt from Gitelman. Why "haunting?" It made me doubt my own humanity. Here's a quote from page 210:

Skilled typists do not look at the keys or at the body of the machine; rather, they experience what William James undeniably would have called a "cultivated motor automatism" or a mild case of posession..."

I replicated that entire quote completely without taking my eyes off of Gitelman's book. I am a cyborg.

But I digress. Gitelman's book interested me primarily because of the similarities of then versus now; I don't think anyone would argue (though you are more than welcome to) that the Internet is our own world-changing turn of the century technology, much as the phonograph, typewriter, motion pictures et. al completely transformed the world during the transition from the 19th century to the 20th. Gitelman does address this in the epilogue of her book, but since the time of this book’s publication, the Internet has grown exponentially—and this doesn’t include the amount of people who can now access this technology. Since 1999, we have seen the integration of movies, television, and music on the Internet in ways that have only been made possible in the last few years. But before I go into this more, I’d like to discuss a few of the interesting similarities about the anxieties caused by technology between then and now.

Of course, we have the initial redefining of “reading” and “writing,” which (I’m pretty sure) is a major theme throughout Gitelman’s work. Reading and writing changed from an activity a human being could fully take part in—i.e., writing/reading letters—to an activity where the human element was a bystander. We saw with the record that, even though the sound itself left physical traces on a disc, no reading of the letter “a” produced the same evidence; so, here we have a version of “reading” and “writing” that can only be inscribed and interpreted by a machine. This is actually something that I talk about in my writing classes, that reading and writing exists in more than just the literal ways we assume exist. For example, I use the work of James Paul Gee to show my students how both “reading” and “writing” exist in the semiotic domain of video games, and I’d like to think that it blows their minds. Either that, or they’re just sleepy.

Back to the Internet: it’s a shame that Gitelman didn’t write this book a few years later, because some of the things she mentions in the epilogue really exploded right around the time of its publication (Is there an updated version anywhere?). Between 1999-2000, the Napster phenomenon exploded, requiring many modifications to copyright law, and redefining the ideas of both “intellectual property” and “theft,” just as we saw with records, piano rolls, etc. And the growth of broadband since the printing of Gitelman’s book—I’m not sure if dial-up even exists anymore—has only complicated matters as it facilitates the copying and transfer of intellectual property. It’s an issue that fascinates me endlessly—probably because I’ll be thrown into prison one day for showing a copyrighted YouTube clip to a room full of students.

Oh, and here’s an interesting article about the battle over Winnie the Pooh. Interesting stuff.

http://iblsjournal.typepad.com/illinois_business_law_soc/2006/03/winnie_the_pooh.html

Democratizing Technologies

I think one of Gitleman’s major points in writing this book is to challenge, once again, the idea of technological determinism—particularly the optimistic idea that new technologies will deterministically pave the way for more democratic societies. In the “Coda,” she criticizes scholars who suggest that digital hypertexts will democratize reading, education, and the social order, and, by the same token, she criticizes scholars who produce “shockingly reductive” histories which suggest technological revolutions which made modern democratizing technologies possible (p. 220).

Gitelman discusses how the phonograph was lauded as a democratizing technology that would bring classical music and excellent ideas to the masses. She then goes on to discuss how, in practice, the technology was used to reinforce racial stereotypes as “coon songs” became all the rage. Similarly, Gitelman discusses how the typewriter seemed to make possible a kind of “automatic writing”; however, in practice, the this “automatic writing” was to be carried out by women—for men—in a economic system that was hierarchically structured along gender lines. As a bit of an aside, I’m reading a very interesting book called A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, in which the author discusses the advent of the airplane. Again the claims about the airplane were optimistic. Airplanes would “democratize” the war—making everyone vulnerable and exposed, thereby decreasing the likelihood of an attack. Moreover, people thought that airplanes would do away with the very causes of national conflict by bringing people closer to one another. The opinion that this technology would be used for bombing, making war more brutal and lethal than it had ever been, was simply preferred less than the vision of a more democratic, more peaceful future.

Now, I’m not saying that it should be assumed that any new technology will bring about the Armageddon. But I do wonder why there seems to be an impulse to crown each new technology as a force for human liberation. Perhaps, Gitelman’s most important point is that technologies must be understood within the social-historical-material-cultural contexts in which they are produced and consumed. It stands to reason that as long as people continue to live in racist, sexist, and militaristic cultures, then racism, sexism and militarism will be written all over new technologies. Or to put it another way, we can expect that technologies will be used in ways that will reinforce existing patterns of injustice. Technologies will not by themselves correct injustice, just like laws will not by themselves correct injustice. What matters is how people make meanings for, and make use of, technologies.

Writing Machines, Authorship, Human Subjectivity

One interesting idea to emerge from Gitleman’s book is the idea that human subjectivity is complicated by machines. I had never really given phonographs much thought before reading this book, and I had certainly not given a lot of thought to the notion that phonographs did something--“reading aloud”--that only human beings had done before. What does the “colonization of the body by the machine” (p. 146) mean for human beings? By the same token, we could also begin to question, as Gitelman does, the idea of authorship—whether it can be located at all, or whether it is located in the machine or the person. (These issues are still with us. A couple of semesters ago, we read an interesting piece by Deborah Brandt about the phenomenon of ghostwriting—and how ghostwriting complicates issues of authorship and plagiarism.)

Anyway, this got me thinking about a conversation I had with a friend (of a friend) of mine who works on the staff of a congressman in Washington. I had always wondered what became of letters, emails, and other correspondence that people send to politicians—recognizing that most politicians never saw the correpsondence that their constituents were sending them. Not surprisingly, these letters/emails are read by staff and immediately classified by the issue that they are addressing. Then, almost always, staff members retrieve from a computer database a stock response letter which is sent back in reply. In fact, the response letters are usually composed by ghostwriters at the beginning of a politician’s term in office. So, the response that a concerned citizen gets from a politician 1) almost certainly was not written by that politician, 2) most likely will not directly address any specific concerns that the citizen wrote about in the original letter, and, in fact, 3) may have been written years before the citizen even thought to correspond.

Of course, sometimes a letter actually makes its way to a politician’s desk. If the letter is a very touching human interest piece, it may make it to the politician. More interesting to me, if you include a line like--“I realize that you are never going to read this, but I thought I’d send it anyway”—you have a better chance of your letter actually making it to a politician’s desk. You may even receive a hand-written letter back from your favorite congressman/congresswoman!

But beware: and this gets me back to Gitelman, any “handwritten” response you receive was more than likely written by a machine which imitates the politician’s handwriting patterns. And once again, the machine is merely spitting out a form letter from a database of stock responses. Politicians realize that we value the time it takes them to write back a handwritten response, so they have a machine write—and sign—such letters for them (and us).

What do these handwriting machines say about human subjectivity? What do they say about authorship? What do they say about democracy and civic participation?