HU520:
A Review of Patrick Bazin's "Toward Metareading"
In G. Nunberg (Ed.) (1996). The Future of the Book (pp. 153-168),
Berkeley: U. of California Press .
What are the Medium's Multiple Messages?
Reading, not the book, is the ubiquitous order of the day: metareading
is a polytextual experience that includes texts, images, sounds, films,
databanks, mail services, interative networks [that] may mutually resist
of interfere with one another" (154). The mastery of "flows of
knowledge" the current pricipal challenge, (I say) something with
which ES professionals need to be centrally engaged.
text from the latin texere, which means to weave or plait and referes
not to a particular material but to a process of manufacturing and the
proper quallity or texture that results from this technique [quoting McKenzie,
1986, p. 186 for citation). McKenzie includes all "verbal, visual,
oral, and numerical information" here.
Librarians and libraries that were traditionally focussed on the art
of classification [have] to become focussed on the art of passage. (157)???
(on 158 he says "it will be less the appropriation of a text . . .
than the pursuit of a carefully formulated thematic across a compsite "space"
of bodies of knowledge."
CARE system (Computer-assisted reading environment) "translates
a given body of text into ta new work via the user's creativity" (157).
books derive their efficacy "as a node of physical, economic,
and legal forces that differentiate a diffuse the effect of the text"
(158).
good synchronicity quote just above 5. oon p. 160. So is the bottom
of 160-161. Warnings on p. 162: loss of connection to the physical form
that helped form the information online, the nomadic roaming that has lost
its bearings, the loss of the author function--the responsibility of the
author, how cn you exchange cultural experience if it changes every other
second? The "digital empireputs too much enphasis on relation and
circulation per se, rather than on the acquisition of content" (163).
the virtual image is "gaining in termporality, exhibits processes,
and is becoming discourse" (165).
Concerns of a politicocultural nature: "the constitution and appropriation
of a collective memory," believable accounts, reliable information,
the evanescence of stable referents that the book used to provide.
Mentions, one of the FEW, the need to "promote the equal sharing
of the same practices."