A Review of Joy David Bolter's "Ekphrasis, Virtual Reality, and the Future of Writing"

Jay David Bolter is a professor of language, communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology and Acting Director of the Institute’s Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center. He is the author of two internationally recognized books on computers, literacy, and culture: Turning’s Man (1986),and Writing Space (1991), which is published both in print and electronic formats.

In his article "Ekphrasis, Virtual Reality, and the Future of Writing" he brings up the issues of: relationship between word and image; the breakout of the visual; discusses text as a window ("looking at or looking through the text"(266);virtual reality as another technology for looking through.

Bolter divided contributors of "The Future of the Book" into two groups: skeptics and enthusiasts, and compared them with Trithemius (skeptics) and Condorset (enthusiasts).

SKEPTICS

ENTHUSIASTS

 
Trithemius (15th century)

A German abbot, Johannes Trithemius, was a historian and scholar with an immense range of interests and knowledge (Encyclopedia Britannica)

 Condorcet (18th century)

b. Sept. 17, 1743, Ribemont, France--d. March 29, 1794, Bourg-la-Reine), French philosopher of the Enlightenment and advocate of educational reform. He was one of the major Revolutionary formulators of the ideas of progress, or the indefinite perfectibility.
Offered strong opinion about the book-making technology Had a utopian vision of the nature of printing
Was responding to technological change, the invention of the letterpress Was responding to enormous social change and to improvement in print technology
Was skeptical of the changes brought about by print

(Stands for skepticism about the nature or the extent of the electronic revolution

 Was optimistic, hoped that print technology could liberate human (as computer enthusiasts see hypertext or virtual reality as liberating (253)
Skeptics emphasize the materiality of earlier technologies, but not determinists (do not believe that the physical characteristics of a writing technology determine its use.Geoffrey Nunberg suggests that the notion of information itself as defined in the nineteenth century depends in crucial ways upon the material properties of printed documents, dictionaries, and libraries; he concludes ironically that the computer is putting an end to the information age.(253) Argue that the nature of the computer gives electronic writing a unique flexibility, contingency, interactivity, and so on.
Some skeptics argue that computers will be used for technical communication and for home entertainment, but that literature(prose fiction and belletristic nonfiction) will continue to be printed.  
Nunberg, O'Donnel...

 

 Hesse...

 

Bolter emphasizes that "when we talk about the future of the book, we are talking about subtle interactions between changing technological constraints and changing cultural needs. It is unwise to try to predict technological change more than a few years in advance...In any case the mere survival of the printed book is not what matters...What matters is whether the printed book will survive as a cultural ideal." (256)

1. The computer and the future of writing

talks about the conflict between contrasting modes of representation
talks about the computer as a perceptual and symbol manipulator: "As a symbol manipulator, the computer is a writing technology in the tradition of the papyrus roll, the codex, and the printed book. As a perceptual manipulator,the computer extends the tradition of television, film, photography, and even representational painting."(257)

Bolter brings up the issue of replacement of verbal text and print (written text)by multimedia (iconic shift): "In current multimedia...the trend is not to integrate the textual and the perceptual. Instead, perceptual presentation is being used to displace or replace verbal text. Video and animation dominate the screen, while verbal text is marginalized...something similar is happening in print. In fact, print and electronic technology seem to be moving along parallel lines as our culture revises its sense apparent in American newspapers and magazines, particularly ones associated with the new media." (257)

2. The breakout of the visual

To illustrate the pervasiveness of the "breakout of the visual", Bolter is using a good example  of the visual presentation of news in the popular newspaper USA Today. The typical front page of this newspaper looks more and more as a computer screen, with iconographic elements that relates to the stories inside and hypertext table of content.
"Another form of visual rhetoric is common in glossy computer magazines like Byte or MacWorld, particularly in advertisements...In each case the image both reaffirms and dominates the verbal text."(260)

"Each genre of writing is either experiencing a "breakout of the visual" or is reacting against it."(261). Bolton emphasized that "the cultural importance of film and television-- is certainly part of the explanation for the breakout of the visual.

"The breakout of the visual has more scope in computer-controlled multimedia than in print, because computer applications do not feel the weight of the tradition of print. In multimedia graphics dominate the verbal text."

3.The natural sign

One of the arguments of this section is that "the relationship between word and image is becoming as unstable in multimedia as in popular press." (262)
In the age of print the "harmony was based on the subordination of the image to the word." (262) Bolter argues that in the age of multimedia "even when words and perceptual media are brought together in the same space, they seldom achieve the harmony that existed in print."(262) It makes questionable whether "words deserve the cultural  authority they have been given." (262)
Megan Secatore in her paper "Fighting Words: Text, Image and the New Ekphrasis," says that "questioning cultural authority is one thing communications technologies do best. As the ancient scribe questioned the folk wisdom of the oral past, as the printing press challenged the authority of the church, so the computer causes us to look at accepted paradigms in art, communication, and education."
Another issue is "what now counts as information." (262) What do we really consider "information" in the digital era? Do we get much more information than the previous generations?
According to Bolton, the renegotiation of word and image that is taking place in our traditional and new media is leading to a crisis in rhetoric." He argues, that today, "when neither the written nor the spoken word can exert effective control (in ancient rhetoric..the spoken word controlled the image, and in modern rhetoric it has been the written or printed word that controlled the image), the result is an inversion of traditional rhetorical practice."(264) He uses the example of turning a print document into computer screen which can be seen "as an inversion of the classical device of the ekphrasis (description in prose or poetry of an artistic object or striking visual scene; set out to demonstrate the superiority of the rhetorical art in painting and sculpture).(264) Bolter comes up with the statement that "today, as the visual and sensual are emerging out of verbal communication, images are given the task--of explaining words rather than the reverse." (264)
An attempt to "get beyond the words" and to use images was identified as "the desire for the natural sign" (264) in opposition to the logocentric desire ("the desire to see the world in the words")
Bolton states that "in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the desire to see the world in the word has been gradually supplemented by the more easily grafited desire to see the world through technologies of perceptual illusion." (265) "The breakout of the visual in contemporary prose and multimedia is a denial of ekphrasis (since popular prose and multimedia prefer natural sign to verbal expression).

4. Text as a window

Bolton starts this section with the statement: "To read a novel is to run a movie inside one's head and so to visualize each setting, scene, and character. Cinema, movies, and multimedia took this function.  "The invention of film made it much easier to regard a written narrative as a script for visualization." (266) Bolton introduces us to the concepts of "looking at and looking through"

in painting in literature
looking through accepting the illusion that the painting is really a window onto a perceived world. loosing oneself in the story.
when a reader treats a text as a film, she is looking through the text and not at it.
looking at focusing one's attention on the painting as an artifact, a surface covered with paint, a manipulation of color, shape, and texture. when a reader is called back to the text and examines it for its rhetorical and structural properties

"The work of art or literature is supposed to describe an environment that the viewer or reader can inhabit for the time in which she is enjoying the work." (267)

5. Virtual reality and the natural sign

virtual reality provides an illusion rather different from that of photography, film, or video;

virtual reality is  another technology for looking through ("the user is wearing the machine" :-)

"occupying any location in a graphic world, the user "can also inhabit the point of view of any person, animal, or object" (268)

"In film, video, and animation, the shifts in perspective are under the control of the director, editor, or animator. In virtual reality, and in computer environments generally, the shifts are under the user's control." (268)

Bolter emphasized that  "virtual reality can be understood as a paradigm" for the computer graphics. Thus, "computer graphic environments are reinforcing our culture's desire for the natural sign...suggest that the computer-controlled media can provide a kind of representation without words, in which the user inhabits and experiences the worlds through immediate perception.

6. Virtual silence

"Ekphrasis depends upon a written or spoken text. But virtual reality is often, perhaps always, silent; it achieves its mobile point of view without text, almost without voice." (269) "What is absent is any resonance between the human voice as part of the perceived environment and the written sign." (269)

Bolton argues that "although enthusiasts for virtual reality may dream of eliminating writing, they cannot succeed...their virtual reality systems rest on layer after layer of writing, of arbitrary signs in the form of computer programs." (270). The only thing what can happen, according to Bolton, is "the cultural devaluation of writing in comparison with perceptual presentation," that writing will be more"elite" activity.

Conclusive point: "rather than defining a new orality,...electronic technology seems to ...be moving us toward an increasing dependence upon and interest in the visual. The hypertext character of Web documents "defines space in which arbitrary signs can coexist with perceptual presentation. However, it is not a peaceful coexistence."(271)


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