>get book

There're a thousand variations on the old "the more things change" saying. I've been racking my brain trying to remember where my favorite came from -- that the width of Roman chariot ruts in ancient roads determined the eventual width of common horse-drawn carts, and that those carts would see little change through the industrial revolution, and that the appropriate width of train tracks was deemed to also be the width of carriages, and that, eventually, these specs found their way into car designs. (It was also said more eloquently in the original source, but I think I butchered it enough here for it not to qualify as plagiarism.)

Normally, I'd put a picture of my brain on a rack here. But I left that computer at the office.

Use your imaginations.

The point here (there is one) is that times, empires and technological eras may change, but we're comfortable with what we've got. So, when I read Lanham's thoughts in "The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution" (ca. 1989), I chuckle, like Aminah. Two decades of hindsight does make him look a little over-excited about this whole computer and interblog thing. His opening alone is yet another way of saying "The more things change, the more they stay the same; but..."

Page 265. Synonymous with "first"in digi-speak.

The question is whether students will read at all. But they've got TV and they still read. Computers are just going to change the way we think about text. OK. But, we must remember that few things in the 80s were worth watching with as much gusto as we watch TV today. (Thanks for making me so productive, Netflix.) Kids had twenty-three hours before the next TMNT episode came on, and you can get through at least a couple of pages in that time. I'll cut Lanham some slack because this article came out in the age of Zork and Oregon Trail. I'm wary of any claims about how awesome new technology can be for writing, though. Mark Bauerlein notes in The Dumbest Generation that

Page 85. There are better pages, though.

When I read Cooper and Selfe lauding discussion forums for providing students with "freedom from interruption" ("Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse" 853), as encouraging positive "'disruptive' behavior" (Ibid), and giving students a place to "[set] their own agenda" (857), I can't help but see those olde tyme pictures of kids getting fitted for shoes using a fluoroscope. Discussion forums did help left the iron fist of the notebook that had oppressed students for so long, but do they help us now?

Seriously. Those of you teaching, take a moment to check those discussion boards you put on Angel. Then tell me the technology still "exist[s] on the intellectual margins of most traditional academic discourse communities" (858).

Ultimately, my beef is with some things raised by Lanham and Slatin (no spoilers here -- you'll hear my rage tomorrow). Hypertext is awesome. Hypertext narratives are amazingly powerful. Hypertext discussions (you know, a Facebook message with 9 people where everyone keeps posting videos and links in response to something said three lines ago) are utterly insane and usually worthwhile. The times are a-changin', but the digital revolution, like the memes it spawned, was old news the day it occurred. If we're going to take these lessons to heart, we can't embrace what worked twenty years ago (I almost said "when our students were in diapers," but that would have been a falsity).

What medium exists now that isn't a part of accepted academic discourse?