Digital/Print Cultures

Drs. Bill Powers and Dickie Selfe

Book Review Assignment

Maura J Taaffe

February 7, 1999

Book Summary for Class Presentation:

The following quotes fit in well with our class discussions:

In between the nine chapters of James ODonnells Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace, the author has included short sections called "Hyperlinks." In these two- or three-page sections, he is simply thinking aloud, using personal anecdote, observations in a way that is less light a tightly controlled argument and more like personal reflection on the topic of the previous chapter.

Introduction: The Scholar in His Study. Beginning his book with a picture of St. Jerome, sitting alone reading a book in his study, James ODonnell, illustrating ways in which certain anachronistic aspects of the picture were used to create and fabricate an image of Jerome, the scholar. He sets the tone for the book by showing how past and present are interwoven, especially when it comes to the written word. Scholars today like to think that part of themselves can still be seen in St. Jerome, despite some enormous differences in culture--differences were inclined to ignore in managing our own image as scholars. The author describes his book as "historical meditations" about the way that past and present western cultures use the spoken and written word to interpret their worlds (7). He does not despair by proclaiming the book is dead, and neither does he go to a utopian extreme over the future because he is enthusiastic and optimistic about the need to adapt to changes that technology will bring.

He eloquently puts it this way: "My own choice, heart beating in my throat nervously as I make it, is to resist the temptation of the classicists quiet study and to seek to understand the lines that lead from the ancient times I know professionally to my own time, and to try to trace where those lines may go beyond into the future. I study the past, but I plan to live in the future" (10).

Chapter 1. Phaedrus: Hearing Socrates, Reading Plato. ODonnell writes about the Greek view of the written and spoken word, focusing on how we come to know the spoken dialogues of Socrates through the writing of Plato. He begins by showing that we create our image of Socrates through Platos writing, discussing the interaction of writing and speaking and the effect of each on models of memory. Bringing in the complexities of this interaction, ODonnell cautions against Havelocks drawing a sharp line to separate orality and textuality in Greek culture. In addition to discussing how memory models change with the written word, the author also shows how the spread of the Greek language and later Latin spread so that the written word became the means "to extend and maintain cultural hegemony" in the western world (27).

Chapter 2. From the Alexandrian Library to the Virtual Library and Beyond Here ODonnell shows how the dream of a vast and near-instantaneous access library has been a fantasy in western culture ever since the second century. As cultures moved from the legendary Alexandrian library of papyrus collections in pigeonholes to catalogued and indexed codex collections of books, changes in attitude toward the written word followed. Culture became a "textual culture" in which the written word became the authority, in which discourse had to be fixed or static to be valid; monastic exegesis developed, specific rules and regulations were written down so community life no longer depended "on spontaneous choice nor on the orally assimilated customs and wisdom of the past nor again on a charismatic leader"; they depended on a written text with objective truth. All these truths could be collected in a universal library, a fantasy library.

Today, ODonnell claims, the fantasy of a virtual library no longer fits our cultural model; it is an outdated, conservative and obsolete dream. Why? He cites three reasons: (1) We are no longer dependent on only written artifact because in a postmodern world we believe that a more complete representation of the world is found in multiple and conflicting voices--not in a single, fixed source of truth; (2) If the world is seen as being in flux, then no set of fixed written words can describe it; therefore, the value of duration and fixity have decreased; (3) New questions about what we need to teach (if not the previously valued fixed texts) and learn have not been answered yet.

ODonnell sees our view of the Internet as in process and writes that the value of a library, a value that cannot presently be shared with the Internet, is that it is selective and excludes information. As he did in his article in The Future of the Book, he refers to the importance of librarians, whose role is to stave off "infochaos" (43).

An interesting point that he makes in the "Hyperlink" that follows this chapter is that with electronic communication, permanence is next to impossible due to the constantly changing technology of software. If a program or database is no longer commonly used, he claims that the information on the database will be inaccessible. He says that we cant have "both the newest and the best in everything, and the permanence and reliability as well" (49). I believe this may be too pessimistic a view; there are still ways to tape a record onto a cassette and then transfer it to a CD--arent there?

Chapter 3. From the Codex Page to the Homepage. When the written word went from papyrus rolls to codices, the words that survived were those in the new form. Likewise, ODonnell contends that if too much emphasis is put on preserving texts in their current form, rather than digitizing texts, much will be lost. One must adapt to the new textual forms. The discussion in this chapter about the nonlinear nature of books and libraries was really interesting. With codex pages, rather than rolls of papyrus, indices, catalogues, libraries, western culture was, in fact, making knowledge accessible nonlinearly. He is still concerned, in the electronic environment with the notion of quality control, but implies that it will all work out eventually as the technology progresses and our understanding of this new literacy develops.

Using the example of scholarly journals, ODonnell claims that currently articles are grouped within a journal simply because they were published at the same time and with the approval of a group of editors. On the internet, he foresees that it is by similarity in content (not physical placement in the same printed journal) that articles will be accessed. Search strategies will focus on information, not on the source in which the information can be found. Journal titles will not be used to locate information, but to indicate a kind of "seal of approval" within a particular scholarly community. If this were true, he goes on, then multiple publications (or electronic tags) would make perfect sense.

The result of all this is that the stability or fixity of the written word that has been so important to western culture for so many ages "will soon seem vulnerable" and, ODonnell writes, "I have every confidence in our collective neurotic ability to cling to the value of that fixity, but at the same time I look forward eagerly to the flexibility and vitality of a medium that, as it plunges forward to the technical cutting edge, still pursues the enthusiasms and uses the techniques of the medium that it leaves behind" (63).

In the "hyperlink" following this chapter, ODonnell his concern again for quality control, writing that even though libraries are limited by the physical impossibility of finding a particular book in more than one place at a time, they nevertheless are superior to the Internet for organizing and managing knowledge. Libraries can maintain preservation of texts, have organized cataloging, expert support for searching, and the filter of selection on what is included in the collections. But all this may change somehow.

Chapter 4. The Persistence of the Old and the Pragmatics of the New In this chapter that ODonnells energy for filling a gap in the whole conversation about changes in moving from a print to digital culture is refreshing. His answer to the possibility that print culture is in a period of transition is more than saying that print culture will not disappear or saying that print and digital culture will exist for different purposes in different ways. Instead he jumps in and embraces the opportunity to act within this transformation time. Looking to the past resistance to print technology, we can see current resistance to digital technology in a new light. Just like the printing press increased distribution as well as promulgated error and confusion, so does the digital culture. But, as he writes, we can tolerate error; we can live with it. He reminds us that print was only one factor operating over time as cultures changed in many ways and that "the real change was cultural and social" (75).

ODonnell warns readers away from hanging on to the past and fantasizing about the future when he writes "Clinging cautiously to older social institutions is bad for those institutions themselves; bellowing prophecies into the whirlwind persuades few and leads to no concrete advances" (85). Instead, he turns again to Cassiodorus as the model because he was a man of action in a time of transition. He tells us to reject the pragmatics of the old and theoretics of the new, "two forms of behavior that academics in particular are fond of" so that "todays partisans of the book need to master is the pragmatics of the new" (88). He actually sounds kind of courageous in a way that seems a bit unexpected coming from a careful and scholarly academic; this kind of risk taking is difficult. ODonnells enthusiasm echoes throughout the book, however, in passages such as the following: "the genuine spirit of our culture is not in applying small pieces of cellotape to hold together the structure we received, but in pitching in joyously to its ongoing reconstruction...The thought that we come here in a generation surrounded by opportunities to botch the job might be frightening--or might better be exhilarating" (91).

Chapter 5: The Ancients and the Moderns: The Classics and Western Civilizations Here ODonnell discusses the role of the classic Greek and Roman texts in culture as a means of legend-making. He shows how the classics were interpreted as a model for those seeking values different from bourgeois or Christian values in the 18th and 19th centuries. Greek myths as well as the Greek and Latin languages in the education of British children were taught in a way that was particularly British: "the works accounted the classics were subtly modeled on the Britain they illuminated" (103). A kind of syncretism of Greek, Roman, and Biblical values "all supported and justified the Britain of that time" (107). The authors points out how the revival of these texts in the Renaissance as well as in the 18th and 19th centuries helps create a linear narrative of a culture that, in fact, was composed of incredible diversity. He compares this legend-making with personal legend-making when we tell stories of our nations or our own ancestors, selecting and ignoring, condensing and expanding as we create a linear narrative.

He ties all this in with education in talking about the way that classics should be taught, if we look beyond the linear narrative. His ideas about education are that our purpose is to spark the intellects of students, which he feels should be done by disorienting our students into seeing the strange in the familiar and "inculcate in them a taste for the hard disciplines of seeing and thinking" (123).

Chapter 6: Augustine Today: Linear Narratives and Multiple Pathways Using his knowledge about St. Augustine, the author discusses how we come to know historical figures through narratives, almost as caricatures of the real person. He writes that biography is "a genre that reduces a whole life and all its complexity to a single narrative line" (131). We look for a story, for a single narrative line even though we recognize how impossible it would be for someone to write about us in that way because "people are too protean in their relationships to be reduced to a single gestalt" (133). ODonnell compares this complexity with the kinds of humanistic scholarship that he sees developing in an electronic age in many ways--more interaction between primary and second sources on-line (comparing hypertext to a varorium edition), the abundance of information will create new challenges, the way that information that gets privileged will be different. Again using the example of constructing St. Augustine, the author shows that through this new interaction with on-line scholarship of all kinds, it is more likely that one will not come up with a single gestalt but that "an on-line August creates a space that belongs more nearly to Augustine. He links the inclination to play with ideas and information on-line to an ability to de-solemnize or re-humanize Augustine with our playlike behavior in addressing questions about historical figures. In a way it is like the skill of truly listening to others, of being able to suspend our inclination to imagine ourselves into anothers position long enough to listen to what it truly is like for that other person to be in his or her position. He ends the chapter with "To let the past be the past, without making it into an allegory about ourselves, is to learn best from it what we need to know for the present" (143).

Chapter 7: The New Liberal Arts: Teaching in the Postmodern World He looks at the compartmentalized nature of a "shopping mall" aspect to university education today. Warning academics not to let humanism be a way of simply holding on to traditional values, ODonnell draws on Lanhams The Electronic Word to talk about creating knowledge collectively, rather than possessing truth, but he criticizes it for having a single vision or metanarrative for education at the university--"a grand plan for its undergraduates with rhetoric at the center" (149). Instead a master plan, ODonnell advocates using technology "to explore openings, multiply possibilities, and venture down enticing pathways...a time for exuberance" (150). He wants to use cyberspace to cross boundaries set up between quantitative and qualitative research, between disciplines, between the liberal arts and preprofessional schools. He discusses distance learning and reminds us that not all face-to-face learning is personal (huge lecture halls, etc.) Here he really seems to be very critical of teaching quality at the university, seeing GTAs and part-time instructors as an obstacle to good teaching. ODonnell sees the role of teacher as guide to students wading through tons of information and seems to be willing to very easily give up the face-to-face intimacy we see as so important to teaching. The basic message for universities here is adapt or die. He says that public discourse will be a combination of several conflicting discourse and probably no more chaotic than what we have now. ODonnell takes a strong stand that we are in a postmodern culture (citing Lyotard) and that "we are all eclectic hypertexters today" (161) It is the humanities that will give us the tools to enact "a more powerful sense of connectedness to all those with whom we share the planet" (162).

Chapter 8: What Becomes of Universities? (For Professors Only) He comes across very strongly in this chapter telling universities that we are "doing it all wrong" (167). Mistakes he sees universities making include creating a flood of needless publications; the discouraging of horizontal teamwork and fostering of a hierarchical or vertical research team; while multiple centers and diversity are undertaken, only the profitable survive; we despair at students who dont respond to traditional methods; we are not trained as teachers; our respect for privacy prevents teaching evaluation by peers. Universities survive because they have two strengths: (1) they provide certificates allowing students away into the middle class and more or less guarantee they will make more money. And (2) in part the university is a youth camp. He stresses that learning means learning to use tools, not learning information and that a professor is "an organizer, an evaluator, and a processor" (175) He faces the danger of students not needing professors face to face and says we have to "remake ourselves as a larger, virtual presence in society" (177). He stresses that through distance learning, education can reach neglected margins...why should professors be so different from all other workers in our society who cannot pursue a linear career. We have to look around us and see what is going on--people not going to college 4 years straight (taking in between jobs, etc.). He also argues against "marginal faculty" as taking away our jobs while uncredentialed...this is a threat to faculty.

He really kinds of gets up on a soap box in this chapter. He cites purposes of education this way: (1) use classroom rehearse behaviors of use in later life (lab, seminar, discussion) therefore stress collaboration, interaction, student activity (through electronic media), (2) rehearsal of culturally enriched life through real activities (going to galleries, concerts, etc.) so dont separate extracurriculars from classroom life, (3) deal with youth camp aspect by getting them to look at how they live and see themselves as adults in training. (Here, however, he assumes a totally traditional student population). Not as carefully thought through...kind of ranting a bit.

Chapter 9: Cassiodorus: Or, the Life of the Mind in Cyberspace He sees himself as Cassiodorus because he wants to help create a "usable space in the new technological environment in which we could make ourselves a functioning community" (195). He truly does sound courageous when he writes, "Ive been given the chance to live on the edge of exciting cultural upheavals. My greatest confidence is that I have a responsibility to use the privileges I have been given to contribute to the wise navigation of those upheavals, even if they leave me and my kind in the end unemployed and unemployable" (195). When Cassiodorus had his world shot out from under him, he came back to a new world and he responded to it. ODonnell exhorts us to learn from Cassiodorus who "accepted and thrived on the disruption of his life and expectations and [that] he succeeded in using his past and his expectations so resourcefully to help him shape a future" (196).