Volume 1, Number 1<1> In Writing Space: the Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Jay David Bolter traces the development of writing over time and suggests that "today we are living in the late age of print"(2). Bolter places us in a transitional period, one which is moving print based media toward the margin of what we consider as texts. Bolter's perception complicates some of the points raised by Marcia Peoples Halio in "Student Writing: Can the Machine Maim the Message?" Halio suggests that a shift in focus away from typographic writing is dangerous and should be challenged.
<2> Bolter draws an analogy between the way the mechanization of printing changed the production of texts and the impact of emerging technologies and suggests that the institution of electronic texts will drive a similar fundamental change in the way we write and in what we consider composition to be. If this is so, then Halio's stance demands interrogation. For example, Halio complains that the use of graphics in student compositions damages the production of words. For Bolter, "in the [emerging] electronic writing space, however, picture writing moves back toward the center of literacy"(55). Bolter's work suggests that the danger of the shifting emphasis toward graphics that troubles Halio may be an inevitable part of the emerging trend toward electronic texts. If so, the danger lies, then, in not acknowledging this shift and in failing to develop and encourage careful rhetoric to use in the deployment of graphics in our compositions. Moulthrop and Kaplan's advice for considering new forms of writing makes this point as well.
<3> We mustn't miss the bus, when it comes to emerging forms of writing. However, we must also be careful not to take the wrong bus, or in our enthusiasm for the vehicle to forget to get off at our stop. Bolter complicates Halio, I think, in useful ways, yet Halio still has some insight to offer this discussion. For Bolter, the new electronic writing eventually erases the distinctions between words and pictures: "On the screen, as in medieval parchment, verbal text and image interpenetrate to such a degree that the writer and reader can no longer say where the pictorial space ends and the verbal space begins"(74). Whoa. In theoretical terms, what Bolter says may be true--the bold view of the new writing does merge image and word into a new definition of text, but in pedagogical terms, eliding the difference between images and words makes no sense. Perhaps a dose of Halio's cautionary tone should be brought into the discussion of a new rhetoric.
<4> A blending of Bolter's enthusiasm and Halio's worry will provide, to my mind, the most useful outlook for considering emerging writing forms. We cannot blind ourselves to the value of including images in the way we write, but neither should we pretend that a very real focus on the words which accompany those images is no longer necessary. In the mixture of pictures and text, much of the work of the writer or reader will take place at the edges where the two elements come together. Some of the samples of student hypertexts included in this project work at these edges, particularly the sample showing the use of textual commentary to discuss pictures, and the sample detailing the pitfalls of combining images with text. The final point is that it is not a matter of choosing between texts or images or of eliding distinctions between them; rather, it is the tension between image and text which creates a space for a new rhetoric to be considered.
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