Dr. Harrington’s Blog

I don’t know much about the Journal of Electronic Publishing. It’s an online journal addressing ways electronic publishing affects the industry, the academy, the workplace. They say that they are both magazine and journal–I’m not sure what that means. We’ll see what we think.

Ferris opens her piece with an overview of the effects of computers on writing–much of what she says here might be contested by other historians. Generally, read what she says looking for arguments. She makes a lot of assertions.

In the overview, she looks at the ways oral communication is distinctively human; the way written language meant that “human society could really expand and grow” (not sure Scribner would buy that assertion). Ferris here shows you the “great divide” approach to literacy, with that paragraph outlining the cognitive changes written literacy makes possible.

She loks at the ways written and oral language differ; she looks at the effects of written language on the world (print made possible research, the scientific method, the standardization of language, and modern schooling, she says, among other things).

So what of electronic writing? She says, in the Literacy to Orality section, that electronic writing brings “oral characteristics” back into writing (”temporal immediacy, phatic communion, use of formula devices, presence of extra textual content, and development of community”). Ferris offers a number of quite provocative claims in this section, like the claim that “roles of writers and readers…become unclear.” You might look through this section and make a list of the different claims she makes, and see whether you can validate the ones that interest you the most. Do you see evidence of that around you?

As I said in class, Ferris’ style is densely academic, and she assumes knowledge of a good bit of literacy history and scholarship on oral culture that we’ve not read. So I imagine that some of this may be tough going for some of you. But in the second half of this piece, every paragraph is chock full of claims about the effects of electronic writing. Pick any subsection and look for those claims, and see what you think. There’s lots of talk about here, since all of her claims can be turned into questions:

Do readers treat electronic communication as oral? (and if the answer is sometimes, what governs the choice?)

Hypertext organizes information diferently: what difference does the connectivity make?

What difference does the fluidity of writing make?

How interactive is electronic writing?  What kinds of interactions are fostered?

What standards are emerging for judging quality of content?

Each of those bold-headed subsections has many assertions within.  Look for them.