the literacy net

Derek's post on Network Captives, which in turn references an exchange between Jeff and Will, dives into that big question of where new media is leading, and specifically if it is indeed leading us away from what we consider "literacy."

As is raised in these places, the concepts of the "open" text (a la Umberto Eco) or a Barthes-esque writerly text are both good places to start this issue. However ludologists and others who study interactive fiction (IF) might want to suggest that games move beyond these theories in that even the most writerly text remains static: that is, the readers interpretation of page one will not alter the text that on page two. The inclusion of the idea of collaboration is useful in making this move.

However, I also find that collaboration once again catches us in the literacy net.

How so? Put simply, the concept of collaboration rests upon the notion of authorship, which in turn relies on concepts of intellectual property and presence: the very foundations of a phono/logocentric literate culture. To think otherwise? See the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus:

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.Here we have made us of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render impreceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.

We can say collaboration if we wish, as long as we know it is simply a manner of speaking, but perhaps it would be better to speak of distributed cognition, and thus to recognize that even "I" am multiple, always more/less/other than my "self." Indeed, it is new media that makes this visible, just as the movie camera introduced us to "unconscious optics" in Benjamin's essay on mechanical reproduction. If as Kittler and others have contended, film presents us with our Freudian uncanny doppelganger and the tinges of paranoia seeing our double can produce, new media presents us with our rhizomatic simulacrum and a schizophrenic disorientation.

But I digress...

My point is that new media "opens" the concepts of text, reader, and author to the point where they cannot be distinguished. In its place are physical machines, both organic and inorganic, whose symbolic behaviors and interactions produce, among other things, cognition and consciousness.

To the extent that literacy as a concept relies on the interiorization of thought and a logocentric concept of text (see Derrida or Ulmer taking up Derrida), it simply cannot function to explain new media.

Now I realize that anyone might object by saying "but that's not how web pages/games/blogs/wikis/etc really work b/c X." That's true. And as others might explain, "maybe in theory that might work out, but ideology/capitalism/etc won't allow it to turn out that way." Maybe, maybe not. This isn't a prediction.

However, I will make one prediction. What we are examining now are only the incunabula of new media. I doubt someone living in the 15th century could imagine what printed books would become. While I have much at stake in studying the technology that does exist, with the rate of technological growth, we need to develop a theory of new media literacy that tries to account for what might come.