Saturday, September 25, 2010

Free Form Poetry's .... Form

In the Drucker and McGann article, a take-home point of theirs' was that "The presentational form of texts and images usually masques their logical operations in a surface rhetoric that dominates and controls our conscious attention." I take this to mean that when we read a text- say a book, article, etc., the way our writing-conscious brains work is that we try our best to absorb the content or message the author is getting at. In this process we almost completely ignore the form, composition, arrangement, and graphical nature of the text. I don't believe this to be entirely true, at least in the all-inclusive sense. Yes, generally, when reading a book or paper or article we will absorb the information and throw the concept of form away. However, we use several elements that are included in the graphical nature, or the logical arrangement of text to enhance some elements. Some minor examples- manicules, engorged first letters, color, certain typefaces, the ability to turn on "invisibles" in Office Word programs, and skewed lettering. All of these are examples of the "logical operations in a surface rhetoric" that actually aren't masked by their presentational form, and we very much use it to enhance their noticeability, even.

My primary example and the subject of this entry is free form poetry. The very title itself refutes the idea that we abandon form in texts. Free Form Poetry is the antithesis to that notion. The form of free-form poetry, while not always contrary to the normal form of written language, definitely differs from the ordinary line-after-line of normal text we see. Its presentational form opens up the way we see it, and not only doesn't mask its logical operation but enhances it. For example, the use of space in free form poetry could (not always) completely change the way we read something and give it new meaning- part of its logical operation. Normally, we just take the idea of space for granted as that little invisible (not always so if you have an Office Word Program!) divider between words that does nothing but prevent our beautiful text from being an alphabetic jumble. When you incorporate





BIG






spaces between your words it emphasizes them and thus draws attention to the form of the text.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Conscious Assessment of Print

Tim Carmody describes the Print Revolution in his article "10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books." He discusses how print changed the way we interact with a text fundamentally, and I think this is very true.

Walter Ong claims in chapter 3 of his book "Orality and Literacy" that writing restructures consciousness. This is very relevant to the print revolution of the Renaissance that Carmody was talking about- print changed the way we consciously experience a text.

Oral speech, as Ong discusses in the chapter, is a social act that takes place in a specific location at a specific time, and is challengeable. For the longest time people, even those exposed to writing, would hold oral communication much more reliable than written word. When interacting with print, everybody interacts with an exact copy of the same print, so a print that was distributed could reach many individuals and offer a sense of community- after all somebody else somewhere was experiencing this same exact text. Further more, like all writing, it's experienced away from its creator and at a different date, so there is that disconnectedness. So instead of interacting with a person, they're interacting more directly with the text itself. The author is writing it for a large audience and therefore has to cater it to the people. "The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves..." (Ong 100). That is where the community aspect is built, several, perhaps hundreds or thousands of people reading, interacting with the same text. Also, as Carmody argues, this helped to change readers' expectations of texts in the future.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Reading as Conversion

In the Week two assigned readings, Walter Ong discusses Primary Orality, that is orality in cultures who have no written language, and literacy. A key moment Ong discussed was the time aroudn 700 BC when the Greeks were developing an alphabet, and thus the majority of their culture over the next three hundred years transferred from an oral culture to a literate culture.

In chapter two Ong was discussing how before the widespread use of literacy in the Greek culture, there was a heavy dependence on cliches and repetitive, formulaic structures. This was a product of the lack of writing system. When Ong says that "words are residue" (chapter 1, p. 11), it means that words are left over from the creation of a work. "When all that exists of [an oral story] is the potential for human beings to tell it" (11). So without any residue, or left over writings to use, a poet has to memorize his works. Memorizing in verbatim every single work one makes is extremely difficult, so repetitive structures and cliches were used as mnemonics to help keep their works in circulation in their oral culture.

In later millenia, this use of cliches and formulaic structures was heavily criticized and forsaken. In chapter 2 Ong cites several examples of literary critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century detesting Homeric poetry for its use of cliches and predictable metrical structure. Their whole language system was different as it included a well-established literary system. I see the advent of literacy and written language as remediation over primary oral cultures. The way written language restructures our thought and the function of our speech, the way we have moved away from formulaic and cliched thinking into a much larger and more diverse way of speaking, that is remediation.

One thing that interested me intensely in chapter one was the idea of reading. What reading is is to take this remediated form of language- writing, and convert it into sound- or oral language. This new, literate way we use language still has to be converted back to our primary modeling system. It's still remediation because writing language instead of composing it orally restructures the way we think and changes the messages we are trying to communicate, and is a secondary modeling system. What we ultimately convert back into sound- the carrier of our primary modeling system, is a different message than if the secondary modeling system never existed.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Cell Phone Remediation

Over the past decade, an explosive increase in the use of personal digital devices among first-world country citizens has occurred.There's no point in finding statistics or referencing data figures. We're all (as in any individual who might possibly be reading this text) part of the demographic and it's blatantly obvious no matter where you go. Cell phones and iPods and various little electronic gadgets were once not so common and pretty unheard of. Now days every other person has one or several of them.

Firstly, what I mean by personal digital devices are any kind of electronic digital device that we automatically take with us wherever we go without much thought. I won't make a comprehensive list but the things I'm talking about include portable music players, cell phones, PDAs, pagers, etc. Especially cellular telephones- no actual physical object that people choose to leave their place of residence with every single day has exploded in the past decade more than cell phones. I personally have not met a human over the age of 10 years (some even younger) who does not own a cell phone in the past ten years.

If you live in a first-world country and do not believe that the increase in cell phone or personal digital devices has actually happened, you can go ahead and leave a comment here with statistics or evidence that proves so, otherwise I will continue under the assumption that the overwhelming (80% or higher) majority of people in first world countries owns a cell phone.

These little things, in my opinion, are the epitome of a remediated object. In accordance with my observations, the purpose and application of a cell phone has changed in many ways since their inception in the daily lives of all of us. They used to be very large and scarcely "portable." While they very much were portable, the definition of portability in and of itself has been redefined by modern standards- at least in the realm of cell phones. They were bulky (think: several times larger than any cell phone you can purchase today) and designed for making calls. Yep, that was it. You dialed a number and placed your call.

Today, a cell phone offers endless amounts of features that no simple text-entry like this one can list in their entirety. They come in a plethora of different configurations- touch screens, clamshell folding (flip-phones), full-qwerty keyboards with track balls, and any combination thereof. They're a fraction of the size they used to be and communicate in far more ways than just placing calls. Text messaging between cell phones has almost replaced calling as the primary means of communication between cell phones.

This makes their implication much different. Ten years ago cell phone coverage was, I hate to use the expression yet again, but a fraction of what it is now. When you look at the advertised coverage network of say Verizon or AT&T, the two major cell phone service companies that come to mind, more square miles are covered on the map of America than not. Few places in this country don't have cell phone service, in other words. Therefore, having a cell phone ten years ago was a pretty unnecessary luxury, I mean even if you decided to put up the money to buy into it, you still didn't have that much coverage! You could sometimes make a call while out and about, and that offered a convenience.

Today, when just about anywhere you can think of going in this country provides cell phone service, it's almost unheard of to not own one. Seeing as how most people have one, the common assumption is that people have cell phones and it's totally transformed from a luxury to almost something of necessity. It's simply assumed in America that a common adult who has a salary or parents who have a salary owns a cell phone.

As for their remediation- their entire purpose in society has changed. The transformation from a luxury to a necessity is a part of it, but so too is the opportunity owning a cell phone allows you. No longer can you merely place calls, and only in certain areas, but now you can send quick text messages and digital files to just about anyone in the country (or on the continent!) and have them receive it nearly instantly. Now you can browse the internet in its full glory at the touch of a button anywhere. Now you can download and install any of millions of portable device applications on your cell phone that do anything from allowing you to use your cell phone as a compass to gaming to video-cam chatting with someone on the opposite coast from you. This is all part of the way we see cell phones, as a device that allows us to plug into a greater network of people that reaches far beyond ourselves- and do it effortlessly, on the go, cost effectively, and instantly. It's much different than the ways of old where we could sometimes be able to call someone if we were outside of the house.

That is the very definition of remediation- improving media in leaps and bounds to the point where old media is left as an afterthought, improving it by the implications of what it can do versus what the old media can't. Cell phones and what they mean for us has been reformed entirely in the past decade.