The New Literacies: Hypermedia

Similar to Chetna (and Eric, Law, and Amanda), as I progressed through the article I faced the realization that the right side of my brain is 90% of the time isolated from the left in my learning experience. But at the same time I believe that it gets used more often than we might think. If the right side of the brain thrives on the visual and the interactive, maybe throughout our lives we've been feeding it without even knowing we were doing so? After all, from Sesame Street to the computer game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, our generation has grown up surrounded by a learning-based media at the same time as the media that blurs our pupils over and leaves us drooling on the couch like Homer Simpson.

Since the fifth grade I've been able to tell someone about the Hittites and the Palmyrans because of the Age of Empires computer game. I imagine that a fifth grader would have a much harder time attempting to memorize facts about ancient civilizations without the aid of an interactive media. It is no doubt feasible, but the visual interaction within the game familiarized me with specifics much faster than any other method could. Therefore I am reluctant to disavow the new hypermedia as a technique for the expansion of knowledge. Rather, I believe in Gregory Ulmer’s theory that “electronic thinking does not abandon, exclude, or replace analytical thinking; it puts it in its place in a larger system of reasoning” (Bump #3). Furthermore, I am in complete agreement with my fellow students that the old literature has not yet fallen into extinction; Wuthering Heights is just as powerful an instrument for thought as Second Life will certainly prove to be.

The gap between the new learning and old literature is not all that large once one thinks about connections between the two. Even in written classics the most prominent themes are often images burnt into the mind of the reader. The letter “A” in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, for example. Even this timeless “puritan” novel is still not “stripped of almost all the expressivity that graphics, fonts, typography, layout, and color [can] provide” (Bump #6) as some believe. But while even the old literature contains links to the right side of the brain, Professor Bump says, “reading no longer is confined primarily to the left side of the brain.” Our generation is fortunate enough to witness and be a part of a revolution in which learning embraces hypermedia on a much greater scale.