Argomenti trattati: copyright, cyberspace, ipertesti, comunicazione, network
5. Iiving mythically in cyberspace
McLuhan's term for the effects of electronic communication is "retribalization." Under the effects of participatory electronic media, he claims, linear typographic man again learns to "live mythically." The concept of living mythically suggests far more than simply being more interconnected, of being able to send messages to each other more quickly and easily than we could last year. It means living in a form of consciousness in which knowledge does not exist outside the knower, embodied in a physical text, but instead is lived dramatically, communally performed as the myths of oral man were performed. This, I argue, will be--to some extent already is--one of the effects of internalizing the electronic writing space.
These effects are at their peak in hypertext, undoubtedly the most extreme example of text that is both nonlinear and participatory. The constructive processes performed by any reader of any text find a very physical analogue in hypertext as each reader takes a different physical path from node to node and thus metaphorically "rewrites" the text in the process of reading it. Hypertext documents can be constructed as even more open systems, in which each reader is invited to become co-author by adding new nodes or new information within nodes (Slatin 1990). As Moulthrop puts it,
At the kernel of the hypertext concept lie ideas of affiliation, correspondence, and resonance. In this, ... hypertext is nothing more than an extension of what literature has always been (at least since "Tradition and the Individual Talent")--a temporally extended network of relations which successive generations of readers and writers perpetually make and unmake. (1991, par. 19)
Hypertext is still too new and relatively rare to be the object of much close study, although it has created a great deal of interesting informed speculation (see Bolter 1991). It can be seen, as Slatin does, as a very different form of text, the only form of computer mediated communication that is entirely unique to the computer and has no analogue in hard-copy communication whatever. For my purposes, however, I do not think that we need to separate hypertext from other forms of computer mediated communication. Rather, I see it as simply the most extreme extension of a change in communications media that permeates all aspects of the electronic writing space.
6. copyright in the cybernetic tribe
One of the most visible signs of the first transformation of consciousness was, as I have noted, the development of copyright laws to safeguard intellectual property. It is not difficult to speculate on what could happen to these laws if the computer really does change our attitude to knowledge. We can understand this change not by postulating a simple reversal, but by invoking a more complex concept: McLuhan's "break boundary," the point at which anything, pushed to its limit, breaks into a new form that is in many respects its opposite. Mechanical duplication, once so easy that it separated performance from creation and brought about copyright to protect the latter, has now become so very easy that copyright, in the sense of a prohibition on unauthorized copying, is virtually meaningless. Small software companies distribute their products as shareware; large ones have given up on copy-protection schemes and are hoping to make enough money on site licences to corporations to make up for the rampant piracy of individuals. The sense of a single original--an author's draft, a frame of set type, a master copy--becomes increasingly difficult to sustain in an environment in which every copy can spawn another copy at a keystroke, without loss of physical quality. "In magnetic code," Michael Heim points out, "there are no originals" (1987, p. 162). In the intellectual marketplace in particular, copyright in the sense of preventing unauthorized copying is becoming vacuous--hence the bold notice in EJournal, the scholary electronic journal, that "permission is hereby granted to give it away."
Even the sense of owning a document to protect its integrity is becoming difficult to maintain as documents lose the physical markers that hitherto anchore~ their boundaries in time and space. In order to own a document, Hiltz and Turoff (1978)
An author has to be able to own one item, which may appear in many different places which may change dramatically over time, and the author might alter his item after it is already in the system. Delivering copies of the item to the copyright of fice whenever it is changed, or a copy of each and every "publication" of it, is going to lead to chaos. (p. 456)
Thus copyright in the sense of securing the rights to a fixed entity is likely doomed. The only sense in which copyright can continue to have meaning in electronic space is the sense of acknowledging an original creator of an idea. Electronic documents have not done away with the citation network, and even in an evolving hypertext, newly created nodes are typically stamped with date and author (Slatin, "Reading Hypertext," 1991). But these familiar gestures are beginning to mean something different in electronic space. To acknowledge parentage is not the same as to maintain a claim of ownership. Without the sense of master-and-duplicate that the printing press imposed, there is no intellectual ground for present attempts to toughen copyright laws in order to protect "intellectual property." They are like holding a sieve under a breaking dam. When knowledge inhabits a print space, it seems natural to want to own it. When it enters electronic space, it seems equally natural to surrender it.
7. caveats and conclusions
Before announcing a complete reversal of typographicallydominated consciousness, I want to make explicit a few notes of caution hinted at earlier. First, one must realize that analogy is a particularly slippery form of reasoning. Seeing history as merely circular without recognizing key differences is as reductive as it is tempting. By electronic media, McLuhan meant electronic mass media such as film, radio and most importantly television, media largely free of alphabetic text. It is not at all clear that computer mediated communication will have the effects that McLuhan claims for other forms of electronic media. The electronic revolution, despite its often-cited links with orality, may be returning us not to a secondary form of orality so much as to a secondary form of literacy from which earlier forms of audio-visual media had begun to alienate us. Stuart Moulthrop points out that, however much an electronic text may be freed by its electronic form from many of the constraints of print text, it is still text, still visual, still segmented and sequential in its smaller units if not in its larger structure ("You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media," 1991). That secondary literacy is different from primary literacy does not make it equatable to primary orality. As Ong points out, primary orality is characterised not by a different concept of text but by an absence of the very concept of text itself.
In particular, structures of thought in primary orality are pressured by the relentless need to preserve knowledge against the threat of annihilation by the ever-decaying properties of sound. The textual recombinations performed by the oral bard were subtle, driven by the needs of the audience but minute enough to preserve the illusion that each retelling of the story was the same. As electronic text breaks up the fixity of print, knowledge will not return to this endless reperformance of the same patterned phrases, for the elements of the text are preserved in a form that, while infinitely malleable, need never be changed. Unoppressed by the forces of decay that drove tribal symbolizers, the electronic symbolizer is free to remake texts as creatively as desired.
Elements in the electronic writing space are not simply chaotic; they are instead in a perpetual state of reorganization. They perform patterns, constellations, which are in constant danger of breaking down and combining into new patterns. (Bolter, 1991, p. 9)
Here we may recognise the communality of oral knowledge, the close union of the knower and the known, but for all that we cannot recognize primary orality. We can never get all the way back there again.
Moreover, given the economic structure that we have painstakingly built on the back of print-induced linearity and specialization, it will take more than a new attitude toward texts to make us stop wanting to charge for knowledge. In fact, the very technology that has made certain aspects of replication so easy as to make old-fashioned copyright unenforceable has simultaneously brought into existence new possibilities of charging by the byte for using information--a process that Moulthrop calls "information capitalism" (1991, par. 16). For every move in the economic game there is a countermove, and knowledge has been so closely tied to economics for so long that it may never be dislodged. Rather, the relationship between economics and knowledge will be rearranged into new formations, some perhaps more sinister than my rather optimistic portrait of communal knowing has suggested.
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Finally, I do not want to exaggerate the degree or speed with which changes such as I have outlined are likely to penetrate the society as a whole. Eisenstein is careful to point out that the effects of the printing press not only took a long time to diffuse through Europe, but initially only affected a relatively small elite that she dubbed the new "reading public" (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1979). The effects on the larger public were more on the order of secondary effects, though none the less profound for that. We in the academic community tend at times to forget that there actually are people in the world who do not have a desk covered with books, papers, half-done projects, computer disks and banana peels. Computers have penetrated everyone's world to the extent that almost every Western household has dozens of appliances that contain a silicon chip, and nearly every business transaction is in some way or another involved with a computer. But this is not the same as saying that everyone has experienced or is soon likely to experience first-hand the new consciousness of text that I have been describing. As with the printing press, so with the computer, the effects that diffuse beyond the realm of the knowledge workers themselves may be of a highly secondary nature. But again, their secondariness will not mean triviality. I want to be careful, then, to define the limits of the claim I am making here. I am not claiming that electronic text will unilaterally undo almost three millennia of exposure to literacy. I am suggesting, however, that some of its psychological effects can be understood in part by referring to the state of consciousness that existed before writing in general and the printing press in particular made it possible to separate the knower from the known, to see knowledge as a commodity that can be owned, traded, rented, and accumulated. The new awareness of the "polylogic" nature of our knowledge (to borrow Michael Joyce's term), an awareness that has percolated through such diverse disciplines as literary criticism, rhetoric, language philosophy and cognitive science, may well have a technological basis. The sort of surrender of ownership su~gested by Lindsay's proposal may be more thinkable in an electronic form than in a printed form, not just because electronic media speed up the dialogue, but because electronic media make the dialogic aspect of language overt and inescapable. The long standing process of trading texts back and forth becomes transformed into a process of merging texts into new wholes which are inseparable from their makers. The modern researcher will never be metaphorphosed into Homeric bard, but perhaps at least some of her activities can be seen as more bardic now than they could under the linear metaphors imposed by print.
References
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Collier, R. M. (1983). The word processor and revision strategies. College Composition and Communication, 34, 134-35.
Cragg, G. (1991). The technologizing of rhetoric. Paper delivered at the Canadian Communications Association Convention, Kingston, Ontario, May 30, 1991.
Crane, Diana. (1972). Invisible colleges: The diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eisenstein, E. ( 1979) . The printingpress as an agent of change: Communications and cultural transformation in early-modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Havelock, E. (197G). Origins of western literacy. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Heim, M. (1987). F.lectnc language: A philosophical study of word processing. Yale: Yale University Press.
Hiltz, S. R., and ruroff, T. (1978). The network nation. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.
LeFevre, K. B. (1987). Invention as a social act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Lord, A. (I 9G0). The singer of tales. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 24. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Moulthrop, S. ( 1991 ) . "You say you want a revolution? Hypertext and the laws of media." Postmodern Culture, 1, no. 3. (Moulthrop 591; Listserv@NCSUVM.BlTNET) .
Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen.
Patterson, L. R. (1968). Copyright in historical perspective. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Slatin, J. M. (1990). "Reading Hypertext: Order and coherence in a new medium." College English, 52, 870-883.
Doug Brent is on the faculty of general studies at the University of Calgary. This article first appeared in Volume 1,3 of EJournal. Permission is hereby granted to give it away.