An Amazing Lecture

All right, all right, you can call it false advertising, misleading labeling, hyperbole or just plain exaggeration, but hey, I couldn't resist giving this post an amazing title. Of course you know that over a year ago, in spring of 2014, my book, Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited was published by Peter Lang. And of course you already have your copy, but just in case you don't (and remember, it also makes a great gift for the intellectually minded, and also is the perfect choice for course adoptions):

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And last year when I wrote my first post about the book, entitled, appropriately enough, Amazing Ourselves to Death, I explained how, when I was first approached about writing a book that follows up on the classic work by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, I already had the perfect title for it, having used for a public lecture I gave at Medaille College on November 6th, 2007.

Going back to the first nine months of Blog Time Passing, I posted an announcement about the lecture on November 1st, 2007, in an entry called Shuffling Off to Buffalo (which is where Medaille College is located). The lecture was recorded at the time, and I finally got around to uploading the video onto YouTube. You can watch it over there on my own personal channel, the video's called Amazing Ourselves to Death 2007, or right here on my blog of record:





And to give a little more background, I was invited to give the talk by Medaille College's professor of philosophy Gerald Erion. Jerry is a fine media ecology scholar in his own right, and as he explained it to me, Medaille has its incoming first year students all read the same book before beginning their first semester, and that book was Amusing Ourselves to Death. And that was why they wanted me to come up to Buffalo and give a talk about the book and its author. 

 In addition to, and prior to giving the big lecture, I also met with a group of the students for an informal conversation about Neil Postman:

And that's how it all began. An amazing lecture laid the groundwork for an amazing book, and I use amazing here not to make any claims about the quality of either one, but rather to recognize how amazing it all is, doing the lecture back in 2007, never at all really thinking about turning it into a book several years later (I was first contacted by Peter Lang and subsequently contracted by them in 2011). 

Anyway, I think the lecture still stands up on its own, I hope you like it, and if you do, that it motivates you to get a copy of the book, if you haven't got one already!


 

In Memory of Meir Ribalow

My friend and colleague, Meir Ribalow, passed away on August 23rd, and I write this post in his memory (and please find at the end of this post information about the memorial for him that will be held in November, and the fund set up in his name). 

We shared many a delightful conversation about movies and movie stars, about sports and especially baseball (and our team, the New York Mets), about comics, Jewish culture and literature, and so much more.  

As a colleague, it was always a delight when I would see him walking down the hall, dressed impeccably, smiling good-naturedly.  As our Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, he did more than his fair share in service of our students, and was always a voice of reason at faculty meetings.  Semester after semester he taught a class called Movies and the American Experience, which was one of the most popular, and hence one of the hardest to get into, in the entire university (and the only course, aside from our required introductory classes, that we always ran two sections of). He also taught Screenwriting, and in that way helped to nurture young talents at Fordham, as he did elsewhere.  He was involved in so much more, and would use his connections to enrich his courses, for example by having Alec Baldwin drop in on a class.

He was a gifted writer, and I tried to go see his plays as often as I could, which wasn't often enough by far.  But I did bring my son to a few, and there was one dramatic reading at the Players Club, where Meir was an active member, that really inspired and sparked my son's interest in the theater.  

When I first joined the Board of Trustees of Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia, and took over as Adult Education Chair, Meir was kind enough to drive over and give our first ever Havadallah Talk back on April 14, 2007, to talk about Jews in sports, a subject his father had written about and Meir had continued to work on. I wrote a post about that event, back in only the second month of my blogging here, and you if you want to read it, here's the link:  Sports Spiel.

Back about a decade or so, I was contributing a chapter to an anthology on baseball by my old MA program professor at Queens Coolege, Gary Gumpert, and my colleague at Hofstra University, Susan Drucker, entitled Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and I was happy to hook Meir up with them, so he could contribute a chapter on Jews in baseball (mine is on baseball as a medium).  Here's a link, in case you're interested:

And last year, Meir published a baseball novel entitled Peanuts and Crackerjacks:

I was also quite happy to be able to recruit Meir for NeoPoiesis Press, the publishing partnership that I've been involved with, and when he passed away, I wrote the statement for the press, which I'll share with you here:

We join together with Meir Ribalow's family and friends, with so many others whom his life has touched, to express our profound sorrow at his passing. Meir was a man of great talent, of great humor, and of great generosity of spirit. We feel privileged to have played a small role in helping the world to know him a little better through the publication of his writing, and to preserve his words for so many who will never have the chance to know him as the beautiful human being that he indeed was. Meir was one of a kind, we will not see his like again, and he will be dearly missed. May his memory be for a blessing.

Before he passed away, Meir was able to publish another novel, Redheaded Blues, and two books of poetry through NeoPoiesis Press:

That last one, The Time We Have Misspent, is a book of sonnets that are wonderfully humorous and touching.  And interestingly enough, one of the individuals working for Fordham's internal communications recognized the NeoPoiesis statement as my writing, and used it for quotes for their post for Fordham's newsletter and website, Fordham Mourns Artist-in-Residence Meir Ribalow.  Here's the piece:

The Fordham University community mourns artist-in-residence Meir Ribalow of the Department of Communication and Media Studies. Ribalow died Aug. 23. 

A prolific author, Ribalow was widely-published in various media. He wrote 24 plays and numerous books, articles, and poems on a range of topics, including theater, sports, chess, and travel. His award-winning plays have been produced more than 180 times in cities throughout North America and Europe. 

“Meir was a man of great talent, of great humor, and of great generosity of spirit,” said Lance Strate, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies. “Meir was one of a kind, we will not see his like again, and he will be dearly missed.” 

Ribalow was a well-known film scholar as well as playwright. He frequently served as a film historian for documentaries, including a Discovery Channel feature on the portrayal of scientists in film. He also wrote for The Sciences magazine as a film columnist and co-wrote the program for the 1990 World Chess Championship. 

In addition to working hands-on in the industry, Ribalow served in many administrative positions. He was the production associate at the New York Shakespeare Festival for several years, founder of The American Repertory Company of London, and the artistic director of New River Dramatists in North Carolina. 

His administrative duties brought him in contact with an array of personalities. He served alongside Alec Baldwin as vice president of The Creative Coalition, a non-partisan, nonprofit group for members of the entertainment and arts industries who are active in social and political issues. As international arts coordinator for The Global Forum, Ribalow worked with the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other notables. 

Ribalow taught at Fordham for more than 27 years. A devoted teacher, he lectured at more than a dozen secondary schools, colleges, and universities over the years. 

“We feel privileged to have played a small role in helping the world to know him a little better through the publication of his writing, and to preserve his words for so many who will never have the chance to know him as the beautiful human being that he indeed was,” Strate said.

Glen Hirshberg wrote a lovely piece for the Jewish Daily Forward entitled, Remembering Meir Z. Ribalow, which I won't reproduce in its entirety here, but I do want to quote two paragraphs:

I first met Ribalow at a Seder given by my uncle, Rabbi Judah Nadich, during my first semester of college. We turned out to be related, vaguely. We talked baseball, and writing, and the Holocaust, and writing, and early films noir, and writing. I was eighteen, and thought I knew about these things. Meir knew about these things. When I got home to my dorm, the phone was ringing. Meir was calling to continue the conversation. It continued for nearly four decades. Meir didn’t teach me how to write, but he probably taught me how to be a writer. He taught me how to care for and support and teach and learn from other writers. He taught me how to immerse myself in my work without disappearing into myself. Very early in our relationship, I realized Meir was carrying on similar conversations with literally dozens of other artists, activists, and passionate people of all stripes . He awoke us all to ourselves, and to each other. 

A deft satirist and exceptionally witty craftsman of dialogue, Mr. Ribalow’s work blends bleak comedy with bursts of ironic, surprisingly gentle humor and hard-won wisdom. The New York Times hailed his play, “Sundance,” as “A deceptively savvy cultural essay about the mechanics of a beloved American genre wrapped inside a pitch-perfect satire.” His dramas have received over 180 productions worldwide and regionally across the United States and Canada.

I know that Meir was especially proud of being able to publish as well as put on plays from the New River Dramatists group that he led, and two volumes that he edited are available, each one including one of his own plays as well as two others:

And since Glen mentioned it, Amazon also has copies of "Sundance" for sale:

Meir's father, Harold Ribalow, was an editor who dealt with just about every major Jewish-American fiction writer of the mid-20th century, and every year, Hadassah Magazine gives out a prize in his name, as they explain:

Hadassah Magazine's annual literary award for outstanding Jewish fiction was established in 1983 by the friends and family of the late Harold U. Ribalow, an editor and writer known for his passion for Jewish literature and his interest in promoting the work of many now-famous writers. Ribalow was inducted posthumously into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2009 for his contributions to society through Jewish sports writing.

I was very happy to be invited to attend the awards presentation each year, where the author and an invited speaker would be part of the program, and Meir would always give a talk. I remember how he would say that in his family, going into business and making a lot of money was considered a perfectly respectable thing to do...  for those individuals without talent!

Meir was very much his father's son, very much dedicated to helping others, in addition to being very talented in his own right.  His enthusiasm and encyclopedic knowledge of movies, sports, and literature made him a delightful conversationalist, and his good humor and generosity of spirit was a blessing and an inspiration.  I think his New York Times obituary is worth sharing here as well:

RIBALOW--Meir Zvi, Internationally renowned playwright, poet, novelist, critic, and activist, died on August 23rd after battling prostate cancer. He was 63. Mr. Ribalow had 24 of his plays receive some 180 productions worldwide, winning awards in London, New York, and regionally. He won national awards for fiction, his widely published poetry, and musical lyrics; co-wrote ten children's books; and published articles on sports, music, theatre, literature, film, travel and chess. 

He was co-author, with his father, Harold Ribalow, of three books on sports, and was Director of an award-winning sports website. Mr. Ribalow's poems have recently been collected in two volumes, "Chasing Ghosts" and "The Time We Have Misspent" and two novels, "Peanuts and Crackerjacks" and "Redheaded Blues" -- along with a new play, "Masterpiece" -- have all been published in the past eighteen months during a typically furious burst of creativity that his illness did little to slow. 

He wrote articles for publications as diverse as The New York Times, The Sciences, Hadassah, and the program for the 1990 Kasparov-Karpov World Chess Championship, commented on films for the Discovery Channel, and hosted the online radio program "New River Radio" on ARTonAIR.org. His scholarly film commentary appears on a number of special edition classic DVD's, including High Noon and Sergeant York. A popular and widely respected educator, he served for almost three decades as Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. 

Mr. Ribalow was born into a family of writers and scholars -- his grandfather, Menachem Ribalow, edited the only weekly newspaper published in Hebrew in the United States, and his father, Harold, was an internationally renowned author and anthologist of Anglo-American Jewish literature--and was supported and encouraged by his passionately engaged music educator mother, Shoshana, and sister, Reena Ribalow Ben Ephraim (also an award-winning poet and fiction writer). 

Mr. Ribalow graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1966 and was a University Scholar and Class Poet at Princeton, class of 1970. He was a co-founder and Vice President of the Creative Coalition, a group of entertainment professionals devoted to social and environmental advocacy, working alongside fellow board-members Alec Baldwin, Christopher Reeve, Ron Silver, and Stephen Collins. He was also International Arts Coordinator of The Global Forum, where he worked with the Dalai Lama, Robert Redford and Mikhail Gorbachev. 

Mr. Ribalow was the Founding Artistic Director of New River Dramatists, the dream child of indefatigable producer Mark Woods, which offers playwrights week-long residencies in the mountains of North Carolina and has developed some 400 new plays and screenplays, almost half of which have already been produced or optioned worldwide. Mr. Ribalow attracted and mixed established, high profile playwrights such as the late James McLure, Wendy Hammond, Richard Dresser and Lee Blessing, with lesser-known, often young, but always deserving writing talents such as inaugural McLure Fellowship and 2012 O'Neill Residency winner Hilary Bettis. 

Mr. Ribalow directed numerous plays in London and New York, was Joseph Papp's Production Associate at the New York Shakespeare Festival for several years, and founded the American Repertory Company of London. A Broadway Gala Theater Benefit reading of his play Nature of the Universe with Blythe Danner and Brian Dennehy raised funds for The ALS Association of New York. 

Mr. Ribalow is survived by his mother, sister, nephew Shaiel Ben Ephraim and niece Riora Kerr, and by a grateful and still-expanding community of artists, writers, actors, performers, and philanthropists who learned much of craft and even more of care through his vision and by his example.

Yesterday, I received notice from the executor of Meir's estate about the memorial event that will be held in November at the Players Club:

There will be a celebration of the life of

 Meir Z. Ribalow

 Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Actor, Director, Teacher,

Activist, Sage, Son, Brother, Uncle and Friend….

on

Saturday, November 10, 2012 at 7:30pm

at

The Players

16 Gramercy Park

New York, NY 10003

(theplayersnyc.org)

We will have our own memorial at Fordham University at a later date, but also, for anyone interested in honoring his memory, here is additional information about the fund set up in his name:

THE MEIR Z. RIBALOW ’66 PRIZE AND THEATRE FUND By gifts made in memory of Meir Z. Ribalow, Class of 1966, Phillips Exeter Academy will establish a permanent endowment fund titled The Meir Z. Ribalow ’66 Prize and Theatre Fund. In recognition of Meir’s distinguished career as a renowned and award winning playwright, poet, novelist, critic and activist, the Academy’s annual prizes in theatre will be named The Meir Z. Ribalow ’66 Theatre Prizes. In addition to this public acknowledgement, proceeds from the endowment will also be used to support activities of the Theatre Department that will benefit the performances and drama instruction of our students. Among the uses of the Ribalow Fund will be the support for visiting actors, producers, playwrights and other theatre professionals to come to campus to meet with students and faculty. In addition to supporting classroom participation, the Ribalow Fund will encourage instructional opportunities through master classes. Working with students and young artists was a particular passion of Meir and it is believed that he would be pleased with a fund in his name to support Theatre and the Exeter Harkness instruction that he held so dear throughout his lifetime.

Meir moved in so many circles, touched so many different people, and worked with so much talent, of others and his own, and yet he never bragged about all of his accomplishments and connections. He was a modest, humble, and down-to-earth individual who always had a twinkle in his eye, a smile on his face, a good word for everyone he came into contact with, and a helping hand for those who needed one. It was a privilege to know him, and to call him friend.

Noriginality

The topic of remix has come up here on occasion, and it's one I cover in my Introduction to New Media class at Fordham University.  So it seems only right that I include this Ted Talk video that recently came to my attention, entitled Kirby Ferguson: Embracing the Remix. Here's what the blurb over on YouTube says:

Nothing is original, says Kirby Ferguson, creator of Everything is a Remix. From Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs, he says our most celebrated creators both borrow, steal and transform.

And of course, I hasten to add that there is nothing original about the idea that there is nothing original.  As Walter Ong explains in Orality and Literacy, this realization is relatively recent in literary circles, where it is associated with the concept of intertextuality, that no text is a closed system, but that all texts draw on previous writings through quotation, allusion, or simple influence. 

Moreover, what is generally unacknowledged is the fact that the language itself is borrowed, not the invention of the author.  In this sense, all writing is remix.  And all speech as well.

Through most of the modern era, originality was idealized to the point of worship. And as general semantics scholar Wendell Johnson notes, idealization is the first step of the IFD Disease, a result of treating high level abstractions as if they were concrete phenomena, and failing to adequately define our terms, establish procedures, and set measurable goals.  As the IFD disease progresses, idealization leads to frustration, and ends with demoralization. And in some instances, the elusiveness of originality was seen as reason enough for suicide, at least among poetic types in the Romantic era.

And let's not forget the first lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes (the original Hebrew name of the scroll being Kohelet, which means preacher), attributed to King Solomon.  Here's the poetic rendering from the good old King James Version:

1	The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2	Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
3	What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
4	One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
5	The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
6	The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
7	All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
8	All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
9	The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10	Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11	There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

So life is a remix, whether you believe in the Bible, or in those twisty strands of DNA.  Well, anyway, where was I. Oh yes, the video, right, here it is (and special thanks to Maria Popova and Brain Pickings for bringing this to my attention):

As you might have guessed from the fact that I am including the video here, I am generally sympathetic to Kirby's view.  Of course, there was the case of George Harrison being found guilty of plagiarism, however unintended it may have been.  Here's a YouTube video that does a great job of demonstrating how Harrison's 1970 hit song "My Sweet Lord" really did plagiarize "He's So Fine," a song written by Ronald Mack and recorded by The Chiffons in 1962:

And that's the problem, after all. We don't want to do away with intellectual property rights altogether, or at least I don't think we do.  In fact, as a product of the typographic media environment, they are very much undermined by the electronic media, and especially by the fact that digital copying can be done so easily, and without loss of quality. While the extension of copyright to protect corporate interests is absolutely unwarranted, those interests, and those of all intellectual property holders, individual and conglomerate, are threatened as never before by the new technologies, and there is no easy solution. 

I am far from alone in saying that for many years Lawrence Lessig has been a voice of reason in all this, and his fabulous Ted Talk is included in my previous post, Say Amen to Digital Sampling, along with a very interesting YouTube video that relates to it.  And for something a bit more offbeat, another post from a while back on the topic is McLuhan Redux/Remix.

And yeah, I know, this post wasn't very original at all, was it?  Maybe we need a new word, like maybe...

 Noriginality?

On Hypertext

So, I have one more set of remarks to share from the online course I taught for Fordham University this past spring semester, Writing for Online Media.  And as I noted in my last post, these are basic lecture notes in written form for an online class, not original essays.  And at the risk of being redundant, this is the 6th in a series, the previous 5 posts being

1. Orality and Online Writing 
2. Reading, Writing, and Rearranging 
3. Scribes and Scribbles
4. From Print to Screen
5. Electronic Writing and Digital Media  
6. Remediation and the Rearview Mirror

The course is mainly on blogging, and more generally about writing for websites, but we also cover hypertext, a subject that was broached in earlier remarks, and is the focus of this set.

On Hypertext

The concept of hypertext has already been introduced in the readings, so you may want to go back to them to refresh your memory. For a quick overview, read the Wikipedia entry on hypertext. 

The hyper in hypertext is not meant to suggest hyperactivity, but rather a higher dimension. For example, a hypercube is a four-dimensional object in which every "side" is a three-dimensional cube (impossible for us to fully perceive because we only see in three dimensions), in much the same way that a cube is a three-dimensional object in which each side is a two-dimensional square, and a square is a two-dimensional object in which each side is a one-dimensional line. The novella, Flatland, by Edwin Abbott, is an entertaining narrative that illustrates the concept of dimensionality, and if you're interested, there are YouTube videos on string theory in physics, a theory that posits the existence of ten dimensions. In science fiction, hyperspace is the idea of a space above regular space, again, a higher dimension. So if you imagine a line of writing as one-dimensional, a page as two dimensional, and a book as three-dimensional, hypertext takes us up another dimension in textual organization. 

With hypertext, the distinctions between a line, a page, a book, a series, and an entire library become blurred, as they become part of a hypertextual network. In a more basic sense, hypertext automates the function of footnotes and citations, and cross-referencing in an encyclopedia, letting you jump from one article, entry, or text to another,  and it can also be seen in the unique layout and parallel streams of text of the Talmud, and in the mosaic layout of the newspaper front page. 

Simply put, hypertext is a network of texts or textual fragments, each one constituting a node within the network, each node connected via links. The World-Wide Web is an enormous hypertext, which is why web addresses begin with http, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol, and why the basic programming language is html, hypertext markup language. Because hypertext can include audiovisual content, the term hypermedia is sometimes used as well, but it never quite replaced hypertext in popularity. 

Another way to look at hypertext is that it is a database, consisting of texts or parts of texts, which can be drawn upon and arranged in different ways, just as you might specify, from a database of individuals, only those living in a particular region, or only those fitting certain demographic characteristics. The key point here is that these databases have no necessary, preferred, or singular order, but only take form when the user interacts with them (or a program draws upon them automatically according to some preset parameters, whether random or in response to some outside stimuli/feedback); therefore, while a databade could be compared to a written liss in some ways, lists must appear in some particular order—even if they are later rearranged, there is a fixed order at any given point in time. New media theorist Lev Manovich suggests that a new kind of database aesthetics and logic has replaced the aesthetics and logic of traditional narrative. 

Hypertext narratives generally have been attempts to break out of the linearity of traditional storytelling, and provide a kind of branching set of alternatives that depend on the user's choices, kind of like the "create your own adventure" books where at the end of a page it will give you a choice, like leave or stay, and tell you to turn to one page or another depending on that choice. Often overlooked is the fact that hypertext can also insure strict linearity by not allowing you to go to any other page but the next one in the sequence, whereas with a book we can flip back and forth through the pages, and read the ending ahead of time to see how it all turns out.  In this sense, the bound book is more hypertextual than the scroll (the original book format), and hypertext has the potential to be even more strictly restrictive than the scroll.

Before the web, hypertext narratives were sold on floppy disks or CD-ROMs as self-contained items, and some still are distributed in that form, while others are available online. Like the web, there are individual pages linked in various ways, and certain words may contain hyperlinks, and are usually recognized by being a different color or being underlined. 

Hypertexts can follow the traditional single author, read-only format, although with the reader making decisions about which link to follow, it has been suggested that the reader in this sense becomes an author, or at least a co-author. At the very least, it is possible to read the same hypertext repeatedly and get different experiences depending on the links that are followed. 

 Hypertext can also be used collaboratively, with multiple authors not only editing and adding to the work of others, but adding new pages and links to the hypertext. Perhaps the most extensive example of this kind of hypertext is Wikipedia. All of the links in Wikipedia entries lead to other Wikipedia entries, and external links are only included at the end of the entry, if at all. It is possible to navigate through Wikipedia, browse and surf the site, and some people even engage in races to see who can get from one specific starting page to another designated page fastest by clicking on links in each entry. 

Wikipedia is only one example of a wiki, which is a medium much like a blog. While blogs emphasize sequence over time, wikis emphasize spatial connections, which is true also of hypertext more generally. It is perhaps revealing that while there are a great many blogs out there, there is no one primary example of a blog, in the sense that Wikipedia is the only wiki site that most people go to or even know of, one that involves enormous collaboration and accretion of data and written work. But there are in fact many other wikis out there as well. For example, take a look at wikispaces, and also check out the Wikimedia Foundation. Apart from being a hypertext, wikis also keep track of revisions that are made, allow the user to view previous versions of a page, and revert back to a previous version if desired. 

A great place to start exploring hypertext narrative is on the site of the leading publisher of hypertext literature, Eastgate Systems. You can take a look at their site, and their listings for fiction and nonfiction to begin with. Then check out the resources they make freely available. Of particular interest are Eastgate founder Mark Bernstein's writings in the Cutting Edge category. From the On the Web category, you can go to the Reading Room and look at some of the hypertext works available there. I'm particularly fond of Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce, but please feel free to explore whatever seems appealing to you. If you go back to the On the Web page and scroll down a bit, you'll find a list of hypertexts on the web that you can also explore. 

Another site that offers a selection of hypertexts online is this Hypertext and Hypermedia page from cyberartsweb.org. Some of the links don't work, but many do. The Museum is worth a look, and some of the poetry can be interesting. 

Another interesting site to examine is that of the Electronic Literature Organization, both for the organization itself and for the links provided to various forms of e-lit. 

 Of course, you can also do a search for hypertext and see what else you can find. 

 In regard to other possibilities, I recommend taking a look at comic artist and media theorist Scott McCloud's website, and especially his WebComics page, and from that page, particularly take a look at The Right Number, and Zot!. Creative work like this shows how we can break free of the formats that we take for granted, whether narrative or spatial arrangement. 

Coming from the gaming end of the spectrum, text adventure games were introduced in the 1970s, and had a measure of popularity on personal computers during the 1980s, before being displaced by cinematic games, starting with Myst. Most text adventures did not feature especially good writing, but one company, Infocom, went above and beyond the competition, and began to refer to their games as interactive fiction, essentially coming to hypertext from this different direction, and incorporating a touch of artificial intelligence programming to go with it. They experimented with various genres, from science fiction and fantasy to detective stories, comedy, horror, and even romance; humorist Douglas Adams even worked with them on their adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and an original game called Bureaucracy. This site has information about the games, and even allows you to play them online. And here is another site where the games can be played online. In my opinion, interactive fiction was a format that was abandoned prematurely, and still has something to offer—I expect that it will be revived and revised at some point in the future.   And I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but here is a site that says it lets you "Create, play and share text adventure games."

While blogging does not highlight its hypertextual elements, keep in mind that they're still present. A blog can be seen as a database made up of posts, and it's possible to pull up the posts in different ways, in the reverse chronological order that is the basic set up of the blog, beginning with the most recent; or in that same order but based on a particular year and/or month through the archives gadget; or in that same order but including only pages with a given label by clicking on the label at the end of a post or on the labels gadget; or as individual pages in isolation. Also keep in mind that you can include links in a post to one or more previous posts, providing a connection to other parts of the blog (just as Wikipedia does with its entries), deepening the experience, and getting readers to look at older material they might otherwise overlook. I recommend doing this whenever the opportunity arises. 

Remediation and the Rearview Mirror

Back in February, I shared several posts based on lecture notes from my Fordham University online course on Writing for Online Media:

1. Orality and Online Writing 
2. Reading, Writing, and Rearranging 
3. Scribes and Scribbles
4. From Print to Screen
5. Electronic Writing and Digital Media  

So, later on in the semester, I prepared a couple more sets of remarks, and didn't get around to posting them until now, so no time like the present.  Again, let me note that these are basic lecture notes in written form for an online class, not original essays or anything like that, and they incorporate some material that have already been included in other posts on this blog.  So, here goes.

Remediation and the Rearview Mirror 

Marshall McLuhan famously used the metaphor of the rearview mirror to describe our inability to predict the future. We typically depict time in spatial terms, as a road that we travel along, moving into the future, but in reality we do not and cannot know what lies ahead of us, we can only see clearly where we already have been. So in effect we are walking backwards into the future. Having been called a prophet, McLuhan noted that a prophet is someone who can tell you what is going on right now, in the present, because everyone else is fixated on the past.


McLuhan also noted that many of our problems stem from trying to solve present-day problems with yesterday's solutions, or just trying to do today's job with yesterdays tools (or yesterday's job with today's tools).


 And he suggested that the content of a medium is always another medium. This is not to deny the fact that there is plain old content as well. But there is a sense in which the content of writing is speech, writing being a technology developed to record the spoken word. And the content of printing is the handwritten word, the manuscript. In fact, the first printed books, in the early years following Gutenberg's innovation, all were purposefully made to resemble the products of scribal copying. After all, that's all they knew. It took time to develop typefaces that took advantage of the unique capabilities of the printing press, typefaces that vastly improved the legibility of the text, allowing for faster reading speeds. Think of the differences between Gothic fonts, and the clear, clean look of the Roman fonts we commonly use as a default.

Along the same lines, the content of electronic writing is print. It may look like a printed page, but what you see on your screen is not inked marks on a paper surface, it's all a product of electrons and protons. 

Jay David Bolter, a noted media ecology scholar, uses the term remediation to refer to this process (see his Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (second edition), highly recommended for this class; see also Remediation: Understanding New Media by Bolter and Richard Grusin; and Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency by Bolter and Diane Gromala). Using this terminology, writing remediates speech, printing remediates writing, and electronic text remediates print. 

McLuhan is often misquoted as saying that the content of a medium is an older medium, rather than an other medium, and it is true that the examples he uses are of older media becoming the content of newer ones. But Bolter notes that an older medium can remediate a newer one. For example, computer graphics and television images become the content of motion pictures, and screen shots from computers appear in newspapers, magazines, and books. 

The process of remediation need not be confined to one medium. When television was introduced, it was originally referred to as radio television, as radio with pictures, and it was certainly true that television remediated radio programming. But it soon included old motion pictures as its content as well. And television also remediates many types of live performance. 

The computer is a medium that remediates pretty much all other media. Today, we see the computer and computer networks (e.g., the internet) remediating speech, handwritten and hand drawn documents, printing, newspapers, magazines, books, photographs, motion pictures, audio recordings, telephone, radio, television, etc. For this reason, Alan Kay, one of the pioneers in the development of computing, including the graphical user interface or GUI (on which the Mac and Windows interface, and Web browsers are based), stated that the computer is a metamedium, a medium that incorporates all other media. 

Within the process of remediation, Bolter discusses two distinct approaches. One is called transparent immediacy, the approach associated with windows. We try to create an interface that is essentially invisible, giving us the impression of a direct connection with an unmediated reality, the impression we have when looking out of a window. When painting in perspective was introduced during the Renaissance, it was seen as a method for the direct reproduction of reality, creating an impression of transparent immediacy, direct viewing of the subject, letting viewers forget that they were looking at a painting. 

 Of course, photography accomplishes this even more effectively. But photography does not simply remediate reality, it remediates painting in perspective, and its specific formats, like the portrait and the landscape. This continues as photography is remediated by motion pictures, and transparent immediacy is the strategy of most mainstream movies, especially in the tradition of Hollywood realism. New media artist and theorist Lev Manovich (in The Language of New Media) argues that digital media remediate cinema more than any other medium, and this certainly is true of videogames, especially the recent generation of PlayStation, Xbox, Wii, etc., games, as well as various approaches to simulation and virtual reality. 

At first glance, writing may seem quite distant from a transparent window on the world, but if you think about it, it is quite easy to lose yourself when reading, and become absorbed in an alternate reality. Indeed, one of the traditional criteria for evaluating literary works is realism, the semblance and illusion of the real. This seems to be harder to achieve in most forms of online writing, which accounts to some extent for the differences in reading online, and the different requirements for writing online. Tablets like the Kindle, Nook, and iPad may do a better job of remediating the transparent quality of print media than desktop and laptop computers. 

The second approach to remediation is called hypermediacy, and is associated with mirrors. Hypermediacy breaks the illusion of transparency, and therefore involves a certain amount of self-reference, and self-reflexiveness. Whenever content makes reference to itself as content, and therefore to the process of its mediation, it breaks "the willing suspension of disbelief" of the audience, and makes them aware of the process of mediation. This can occur when a narrator makes reference to the process of telling the story, or writing the book, or when the actors in a play break the fourth wall and interact with the audience (e.g., Bertolt Brecht), or when there's a movie within a movie, etc. Hypermediacy also includes situations where the audience is aware of and uses controls (e.g., tutorials that show you how to play a game before the game actually begins, admonitions along the lines of "don't touch that dial," "don't change the channel," etc.). 

As the mirror approach makes us think about our process of reading or listening or viewing or operating a medium, it makes it possible for us to be more active in participating with the medium, to take more control of the medium, and of ourselves. And as a mirror, the hypermediated medium can perhaps show us something of ourselves, help us learn a little bit about ourselves; it may also have the effect of making us more self-conscious, but perhaps more critical and aware as well. 

Hypermediacy also can involve spatial juxtaposition of disparate elements, where the differences in style make us aware of the presence of styles, whereas uniformity of style allows the style fade into the background, to be experienced as normal and natural, and thereby become unnoticed, subliminal, essentially invisible to us as we no longer pay attention. The juxtaposition of different, distinct, often clashing styles is one of the characteristics associated with postmodernism, whereas uniformity of style is a feature of modernism, in art and architecture. 

The newspaper front page, dating back to the mid-19th century, is an example of this, with many different articles slapped together. McLuhan referred to this style as a mosaic, and it is associated with the introduction of electricity via the telegraph, the speeding up of news gathering forcing newspapers to adopt a more fragmented, nonlinear style than their predecessors. The mix of different typefaces and sizes adds to the hypermediacy, as does the addition of illustrations, first drawn by hand, and eventually photographs as well, providing a mixture of two very distinct types of media. The web page of contemporary online media is an excellent example of hypermediacy, as it may combine many different types of text, graphics that include illustrations and photographs, and audiovisual material. 

Manovich makes the point that spatial juxtaposition has replaced montage as a primary form for new media. Montage is the use of film editing, cutting from one shot to another, one scene to another, and making meaning though the sequential juxtapositions (the theory of montage was originated by the pioneering filmmaker and film theorist from the Soviet Union, Sergei Eisenstein). Film does so using a single frame, whereas websites, even one devoted to the moving image like YouTube, makes meaning though the combination of different elements on the same page. 

Blogs are clearly hypermediate, and bloggers need to consider the best ways to take advantage of this kind of interface. What is the best way to position and juxtapose the different elements? What can be done to facilitate usability, allowing users to find what they're looking for, and navigate the site easily? How can we best utilize the new capabilities of the new medium, rather than just try to reproduce what was being done in older media? 

For those trying to translate or recreate older media experiences in the online environment, the problem is much more difficult. How much of the older medium should be remediated? How far do we want to go to remediate older media? Do we want to take the approach of the window, or the mirror? Or better yet, to what extent do we want to create an experience of transparent immediacy, and to what extent do we want to supply the audience with the options of hypermediacy? 

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 For an example of an attempt to remediate print media faithfully, take a look at issuu.com. Is this an example of rearview mirror thinking? What is missing from the magazines, newspapers, catalogs, etc., made available on this website, that you would find on a more typical type of website or blog? Identifying what is missing helps us to understand what is distinctive about online media. What might be the motives for making online versions of print media as similar as possible as the actual print media? What needs does this serve? 

Camille Paglia's essay discusses her experience writing for salon.com, so take a look at that site. As an online magazine, in what ways does it resemble a print magazine? In what ways does it differ from a print magazine? What are the major differences, that really help us to understand what is distinctive about online media? 

Here is an attempt to start an online magazine called PeoplePlanet. There is just one issue so far, and the editor told me that she wants to use the format of separate issues, even though it is not necessary to do that with online media (as you can see from salon.com). The piece on McLuhan is based on an interview with me. What is your assessment of this magazine? 

Take a look at the sites for some print newspapers and magazines that you are familiar with or know of, for example the New York Times, Washington Post, other daily papers, perhaps local papers as well, and Time magazine, Wired magazine, or whatever you care to. How well do they manage the transition to an online format? Do they make the mistake of trying to bring too much of the print format into the online context? 

For a lighthearted, but sobering and revealing bit of comparison, take a look at this Daily Show segment about the New York Times.

In 2004, a Flash movie entitled EPIC 2014 debuted on the web, and gained a great deal of attention. It was set in the future, in the format of a documentary for the fictional Museum of Media History, looking back on how the press and 20th century news organizations ceased to exist, pushed out by news aggregators, blogs, and social media. It begins with a factual account of new media developments from the introduction of Web forward, and fictional elements start to appear from 2004 on. It ends on a pessimistic note with the New York Times going offline. An updated version was released a year later as EPIC 2015, where the fictional elements start in 2005. Although the details are different, predictions like the Google Grid very much anticipate Google+. You can watch both versions, or just the updated one, via the website devoted to them.