2000 MMLA
SCE Session on "New Histories of Writing"

Lisa Maruca
Interdisciplinary Studies Program
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202

Disappearing Technologies:
Lessons from Print Culture for the Digital Classroom

Presentation for the Annual Convention of the
Midwest Modern Language Association,
November 2-4, Kansas City, Missouri

Notes from the 2000 MLA Elections: Candidate Information Booklet:

"How we read, and teach reading, are all the more crucial, even instrumentally crucial, in a society where information exchange is becoming the key global industry"

--Peter Brooks

"Barring concerted efforts by all segments, literary studies may well be heading toward extinction-to be dismissed by administrators as unprofitable and by students as vacuous. The MLA must initiate a fundamental reexamination of the profession and scholarship to build the idea of the planet; literary studies must find a new mission in the context of 'globalization'."

--Masao Miyoshi

"[The MLA] must continue . . . to address realignments in our fields, from the need for institutional structures for interdisciplinary work, to the implications of distance learning, technology gaps, or the problematic questions surrounding 'intellectual property'."

--Mary Louise Pratt

Titles from my bookshelf:
Guide to the Web; Guide to Internet Research; The Internet for Dummies; Internet Culture; Interface Culture; The Electronic Word; Electronic Literacies; Electronic Literacies in the Workplace; Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century; Distance Learning in Higher Education; Information Technologies and the New Competition in Higher Education

The field of humanities is in crisis. Recent technologies are restructuring the way humanists do work, get to work, understand the very idea of work-for themselves and for their students. At the same time, of course, the world around the university is rapidly transforming, as digital communication's alliance with transnational corporations has led to radical shifts in everything from geopolitics to identity politics. Bodies, cultures, texts, and epistemologies fragment, only to be reconstructed into hybrids and aggregates that form new coalitions and create new hierarchies. The change is simultaneously overwhelming and mundane, frighteningly obvious yet difficult to detect. Old familiar terms like "post-modern condition" seem antiquated and ineffective-debris from an age of innocence.

In the face of such chaos, humanists do what they have always done: read, write, teach-never mind that terms such as "read," "write," "teach," are themselves up for grabs. Hence the list of books above, a tiny percentage of even a year's output, all of which struggle to interpret, clarify, organize, and categorize the transfiguration of what used to be such natural daily processes. They vainly seek that always-impossible outside perspective that will allow us the "big picture" frame of reference necessary to make wise choices in unfamiliar terrain. Failing that, they fall back into comfortable dichotomies that see the unknown only in terms of not-known. In most studies-and in many classrooms, committee meetings, and hallway conversations--digital culture and digitized education is contrasted, for better or worse depending on the speaker, with print literacy and traditional brick and mortar classrooms. This is an understandable, and certainly not surprising pairing. What concerns me, however, is that in all but the most sophisticated analyses, the technological perils or pleasures are always described as being an essential element of the new. The familiar becomes ground upon which the alien cyborg is built: print/digital becomes a fixed binary reinscribing nature/technology.

This brings me to the title of my presentation. By "disappearing" technologies I do not mean those that have become or are on their way to becoming obsolete. Instead, I will be discussing the dangers inherent in communication and learning media that are already or are becoming invisible--that is, those that are no longer noticed or claimed as a technology per se. The extent to which this is already happening within out current "digital revolution" was highlighted for me by a recent New Yorker letter to the editor, responding to an article about the writing process, claims, "We now think on screen. . . . [T]he mind and the page are no longer such separate identities" (October 2, 2000). Such statements erase significant distinctions and work to "disappear" the tools that construct the boundary between mind and media, nebulous thought and its concrete form on the page. Nonetheless, for most users, computers are still obviously and obtusely there. The technology makes itself visible with each crashed hard drive, with accidentally deleted files and jammed printers. Stock market reports gleefully herald (or mourn) the latest dot-com, while the local news inevitably broadcasts the latest Internet pornography or child-molester-in-chat-room scandal.

Schools rush to acquire the latest equipment-or sometimes even the most basic-believing that only the electronic path leads to enlightenment. Digital technology is most visible, of course, to those who are excluded from its magical realm and see it as a symbol of yet one more cultural promise denied them. Clearly, the computer is already a mythological creature-but it is still one that walks among us.

For most readers, on the other hand, print books are invisible, a transparent medium through which information or entertainment flows with ease. Similarly, literacy, the process of deciphering the technology of print and books, is a naturalized process. How often is the print on the page ever really looked at, rather than through? Turning a page is not usually a self-conscious act, and the purpose of the title page seems self-evident. Educated readers don't have to think much before glancing at the table of contents or making use of an index.

Invisible technologies such as books and literacy are insidious in that they socialize us in ways in which we may not be completely aware. Methods of communication and thought shaped by the tools become natural, and hence resistant to change. This may be obvious to the cultural studies theorist and followers of Foucault. However, I don't think it is something university administrators often contemplate as they rush to join the online teaching and learning bandwagon. Neither do many of our students, who are understandably eager to acquire twenty-first century skills that will allow them to work "at the speed of business" as one ad perhaps ominously puts it. Amidst the hurry of contemporary culture, it is the humanist's job, of course, to slow down. The ubiquity of computers will lead-indeed, is leading-to their disappearance. We should be working to counteract the current technological erasure and to take advantage of the quickly narrowing window of visibility. Of course, we do not yet know what is at stake in the naturalization of the digital, and perhaps, given the fact that we are embedded in its culture, we never can. We are able, however, to look back at other historical junctures and study the process through which older media became invisible-and what's at stake when they do.

One such historical intervention takes place in a course I teach, which I've simply if vaguely entitled, "Information Technologies and Culture." (We can discuss the specifics of this at the afternoon roundtable discussion.) This course provides an overview of cultural changes wrought by transformations in communication media, starting with the invention of writing, working through early European monastic scribal politics, and spending some time on the ideologies of the printing press and the institutions it supported and was supported by. Students discuss, for example, that across time and cultures, there are significant variations in the ways in which would-be readers learn to adapt themselves to and become regulated by the demands of print. Each different method of literacy instruction, of course, reflects and inscribes its own cultural values: it sets up who is meant to read, the role of various readers and modes of reading within the culture, and the importance of print itself. Only after our grounding in the history of communication technologies do we look at the ways in which digital media have transformed the realms of education, work, and geopolitical social arrangements.

My students have been introspective, honest and enthusiastic in articulating the complicated value-systems and beliefs that they have acquired as a result of their interactions with and relationship to various learning technologies they have encountered. We have together re-envisioned, or made visible again, these textual tools and the cultures that support them. One of the most enlightening moments in the semester, however, came for me when I read a paper that one of my students wrote for an early assignment called "Information Technologies and Me." While many students wrote of their love of books or their frustration with their computers, this student wrote poignantly of her struggle with undiagnosed dyslexia. She described how letters on the page shimmied and danced and jumped around, refusing to stay in the uniform, regular lines of her text. Learning to read, obviously, was a struggle, but so was continuing to learn in every class and grade level, for almost every subject required more books and more reading. Luckily, she did tap into or develop other skills, such as close and careful listening and a prodigious aural memory. She is now, in her early thirties, a high-achieving college student who even reads for pleasure, but literacy is still a vexed issue. For her, print never was and never will be invisible or neutral.

Her story foregrounds for me how completely print-based--despite inroads made by television and film, and recently by computers--our education system still is. I begin thinking of other children who may have problems with print-who aren't developing fine motor or visual skills fast enough, have trouble sitting still, or come from households with few books. The discipline, in both the Foucauldian and everyday sense of the word, imposed upon these young bodies is remarkable. So much cultural effort and energy goes into the molding of children to make them ready to read-to prepare them for print (witness, for example, parents, urged to start this process even before birth, to read to the fetus in utero). Beyond the classroom, forests are clear-cut and, as Sharon Crowley has pointed out, rivers polluted with dioxin in the name of reading. The invisible technology of books has not been without cultural ramifications of all sorts.

Of course, books did not always hold the monopoly position they now do in education. Before print-based knowledge dominated Western culture, people learned through listening, remembering, and doing-working with parts of their bodies other than their eyes. An apt yet ironic symbol of the changeover is Joseph Moxon's handbook, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683), a manual written for the Royal Society and sold to the general public, revealing the mysteries of the print craft, usually only obtained through years of apprenticeship and physical labor. His companion volume, Mechanick Exercises or the Doctrine of Handy-Works, did the same for other trades such as smithing, carpentry and "bricklayery."

As a marker in the history of print, however, Moxon's text is notable because of the way in which it conjoins technology with humans subjectivity. While rendering the mechanistic parts of the press and letter forms in painstaking detail, he never forgets the bodies interacting with them, as many of his illustrations reveal(link to picture). In Moxon labor is never abstract or disembodied; the printed product does not appear magically out of machinery. Moxon's working bodies--almost without exception male bodies--are resolutely physical: they sweat, smell (both actively and passively), eat, drink, grow weary, punish and are punished, and even, in one alarming passage, "Piss Blood, and shortly after dye" (324). He also describes the conventions and guild rules governing the print house. His text thus portrays print as something-in fact, some thing--constructed through a visible, tangible process within a specific context of human activity.

Approximately seventy years later, however, another well-known printer's manual, John Smith's A Printer's Grammar (1755) omits any reference at all to workers. By this point in England, increased literacy, the large market for books, newspapers and other print products, new laws governing intellectual property, and the rise of the publishing as a capital-intensive business all led, ironically, to print's disappearance. Smith's grammar participates in this process by regulating and categorizing print to make it as unobtrusive as possible. The contributions of workers have disappeared. Instead, typeface itself becomes the agent of print, and book-making is reduced to abstract measurements and schematic representations of page layout (link to picture). The disembodied nature of print is highlighted in this headpiece from the opening chapter, which shows a book held aloft by angels, as if containing the transcendent voice of God himself (link to picture).

This last representation, I argue, is still the one most widely accepted today. Contemporary culture, of course, substitutes the author's voice for that of God, but that's what readers listen for when interacting with a text. We look past the print, "disappearing" it with every glance. Much of what we now take for granted, though, was constructed in the two hundred years or so following the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. Historians such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Walter Ong, for example, chart the growing demand for standard, uniform, and reliable texts, which could be authenticated and categorized efficiently. The rise of science, of course, depended on these traits. Within print culture, language became a commodity that could be bought and sold, and even something as nebulous as an idea could be property. The subsequent legalization of traditional "rights to copy" into copyright solidified notions of original authorship and genius. The proliferation of printed maps made national boundaries concrete, and dictionaries reified words. At the same time, increased literacy and the portability of books buttressed emerging notions of privacy and individualism. Together these traits form a value system that is central to Western, and especially American, ways of being. It is no wonder that education and print form such a "natural" partnership.

I hope, however, that the difference between the two printer's manuals I have described graphically illustrates that none of the features I have described is a necessary attribute of print. Indeed, several recent studies in the field of book history, most notably Adrian John's, reveal that many of these characteristics emerged through a series of strategic decisions made by printers, booksellers, writers, natural philosophers, and, of course, politicians. I lack the space here to detail the various ideologies and cultural assumptions behind these choices. My point is only that choices were made that did have ideological effects-but that none of the choices--and therefore none of the effects--were inevitable. The ideologies became naturalized, however, and therefore very difficult to change, when their link to the technology that supported them disappeared.

In our own time, the recent rate of change in digital communication has kept it visible, sometimes, as in the case of those ubiquitous Windows error messages, annoyingly so. However, despite this technology's own self-supporting Information Age rhetoric, and our culture's die-hard belief in scientific progress and the speed of twenty-first century innovation, this rapid turnover is not likely to continue indefinitely. Books have been around in more or less the same form for approximately five hundred years. Likewise, as this recent period of technological innovation begins to slow, digital communication forms will begin to solidify. Icon-supported Graphical User Interfaces, for example, were once one choice among many, but have quickly become standard, and are now virtually naturalized, as any observation of a two-year-old child pointing and clicking reveals. Even in the two years since I first started teaching online, I've seen a marked increase in the computer comfort-level of many-though certainly not all--students of all ages and from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.

Of course, as educators we rely on those high comfort levels, whether we're teaching online "distance ed" courses, using discussion boards to supplement face-to-face discussion, or assigning papers requiring research in our university libraries-most of which are now completely digitized. Students can concentrate much better on the subject matter itself, be it chemistry or English or poli sci, if the technology is invisible. Technology problems and technologically underprepared students disrupt learning environments and can wreck havoc in an online course. Despite the temptation to make things easy, however, I do worry about increasing assumptions about technological-neutrality. That is, as our own and our student's comfort level increases, we are in danger of minimizing or even ignoring the ideological effects of the tools we use.

Of course, the law of unforeseen consequences makes impossible to predict future outcomes, and perhaps foolish to try. Therefore, I will resist the urge to be overly prescient in listing the joys or horrors (the dichotomy that usually structures this sort of discussion) that await us in our technological future. Instead, I'd like to merely outline a few areas of concern to the online or electronically-enhanced educator, and suggest a few ways in which renegotiating the (in)visibility of print can help us better understand what's at stake in our discussions of the "digital dilemma."

What ideologies do we support, for example, when we teach on the Web? The Internet allows information to be linked far beyond the boundaries of a single book. The results so far have been mixed. The fundamental intertextuality of the Web may work to break down barriers between disciplines, erode individual textual ownership, democratize publishing and allow new opportunities for collaboration. Of course, all these possibilities also imply an insidious evil twin: superficial and fragmentary facts rather than deep understanding, plagiarism, information overload, course ownership problems and access issues. Again and again, these problems emerge as concerns in almost any discussion of the digital revolution's effects on education.

At the same time, there are forces working to make the Web seem more like a book, complete with copyright and authentic authors, who validate the information through rhetorics of authority, institutional affiliations, use of print conventions, etc. "Knowledge" is understood to be produced "naturally" through these limitations and regulations; the print-based nature of these is seldom acknowledged (except perhaps implicitly in nostalgic lamentations on the superiority of books and dire warnings about their extinction). Furthermore, working against the hypertextual matrix of webbed links may be the very file system that underlies all our computers. This method of information storage and retrieval is taxonomy with a vengeance, another holdover from print culture's privileging of linear models of categorization, perhaps even its fetishism of the alphabet. Even the most popular search engines are adopting this way of sorting what might otherwise be chaos. Rigid categorization has proven useful for libraries, universities, and many fields of science, but is it surely not the only path to knowledge. And because of the invisible nature of the technology it is grounded in, the human or political contexts for such structures are erased, leading us away from the challenging questions: Who designs the topics that organize our information universe? What hierarchies do they support?

Similarly, icons may soon become as natural as the alphabet. Certainly, GUI's they support have made using computers and new applications fairly simple and convenient. Bradley Dilger has described this emphasis on the user-friendly as constructing a "culture of ease." The operations behind our point-and-click world are concealed, considered unnecessary for the average user. For example, most students and many of their professors can surf the web quite well without ever comprehending that what they see is encoded, digitized bits. With WYSIWYG editors, we can even make our own websites without the slightest knowledge of html, much less java. Many frequent users have no idea where information is stored or how it is retrieved. This limits, in the long run, what students can do with computers, but more importantly, I think it also increases what can be done to them. The fact that many people have been and may still be unaware of the ways in which computer "cookies" have been used to gather information about them perhaps best exemplifies this point. Such erasure of the mechanical also works to conceal issues of information ownership, the source of information, and its context of the transnational movement of capital. Machine becomes Web becomes text becomes brain becomes Truth. The nuts and bolts and plastic of the machine on your desk have disappeared, along with its connection with real human bodies. Who made it? Where?

The lessons from print culture can also help us understand the privacy issues constantly in the news. Print, I pointed out earlier, helped create and support a culture that maintained and valorized individual boundaries. In contrast to the raucous fray of oral culture, grounded in communicating bodies, the press valorized the quiet and solitary bond between one author and one reader. This ignores, of course, the public market for books. In the commodity-culture of print products, the need for the "new" privileged the individualistic originality of the author. The resulting legal idea, that an author owns his unique and intrinsic works, parallels the view that individuals have unalienable (natural) rights to their own personal information. Recent debates over the potential of digital culture to erode privacy rights ignore the historically contingent and technologically constructed nature of these rights. I do not mean to minimize the dangers of ceding what we understand as the private to a corporate domain of publicity, but to insist that a rigorous historical analysis of public/private be inserted into this conversation. This boundary has been used, for example, to simultaneously justify and conceal crimes against bodies committed by those who controlled the definitions.

There are several other issues more complex than can be discussed here. How do we construct (or usefully deconstruct) the difference between the activities of the dot-com and those of the dot-edu? What happens when we teach without bodies, removing even more visceral contact and bodily connections from the disembodied realm of print? Does accessing the world through the screen flatten or distort important cultural differences? How will email structure other uses of language, including the academic essay? How does our increased reliance on iconic representations, graphics, even streaming video, affect alphabetic literacy and the knowledge invisibly rooted in it? Predictions may be futile, but transformation is inevitable. Historical studies relentlessly reveal that each new information technology so far-from the first chisel on a tablet, to the latest node in our hypertext matrix--has resulted in fundamental cultural changes, not just a speeded up version of the old. But this is only obvious when we study forms of communication as technologies, forcing them to re-appear.

The MLA candidates whose words preface my essay are right to worry. Massive restructuring of the humanities is required to fully address these issues, for the disciplines themselves are "disappeared" by-products of print. To re-embody and make visible our own institutions requires a radical interdisciplinarity. Not only must connections between disciplines be forged (and be fully supported), but the ramifications of the disciplinary nature of information production must continue to be explored and acknowledged. Lines must be blurred not only within the humanities (as in the "easy" interdisciplinarity of cultural studies), but between the more distinct categories of knowledge-Education must work with Engineering, English with Chemistry. Furthermore, although literary theory has revealed the solidity of the world to be nothing but text, text-production itself must also be seen as technological and materially constrained. Those who study writing and teach it must look not just at final forms nor only at pedagogical processes, but at sites of production, modes of distribution, and the technologies underlying both.

In such a context, the distinction between composition and literary studies seems not only artificial, but pernicious. Finally, making knowledge and the technologies it is based in visible again requires that we risk transhistoricism. This might seem, on the surface, to defy much of the postmodern injunction against grand narratives of universality. To be sure, learning about the Internet from a seventeenth century printer's manual clearly erases all sorts of important distinctions-but it does, at the same time, recover many important and vitally useful similarities. To make such comparisons critically rigorous, we must begin to construct a post-humanist version of "lessons from history." To conclude, I stress again that we must rethink what it means to read, write and teach in our digital age-but only if we first admit what technologies and cultural conditions have allowed those activities to become such a natural, invisible part of our cultural landscape. This historical self-consciousness is imperative: the new technologies will soon disappear.