January 24, 2008 Archives

oral -> manuscript -> print -> digital

• personal (one-to-one; one[-speaker]-to-many[-listeners])
• interactive
  
• memory and improvisation (the agora & the courts)
  
• limitation: the sound of the human voice
  

• private (one-to-one; several-to-several)
• contemplative
• scarcity and fidelity (scriptoria and the church)
  
• limitations: access to writing materials; access to written documents (for study or copying); hundreds of hours of precision labor for each book
  

• public (one-to-many)
• compartmentized
• accuracy and efficiency (standardized manufacture, standardized education, university culture)
  
• limitations: cheap paper only lasts a few centuries; competition favors authors with mass audiences; mistakes harder to correct

• impersonal (many-to-many)
• ephemeral
• immediacy and interactivity (erosion of privacy, erosion of print culture borders)
  
• limitations: spam & crap; competing notions of "ownership" (file-sharing and digital rights)

For every assigned text in the course that gets its own item on the Outline page, including an article, a section from a book, or some other document, I am asking every student to use the RRRR sequence contribute to an online discussion.

First we will start out simply posting a comment to the appropriate page on the course website.

But once everyone has had some time to experiment with the SHU weblog system, I'm asking for everyone to employ the following four-step process, designed to prepare for a productive online discussion.

The book is technology. The book is art. The book is as artificial as a Facebook profile. People have died for books.