"A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb 'to be,' but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, 'and . . . and . . . and.' This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb 'to be.'"

Index To Study

• Subject and Purpose
• Background
• Research Strategies
• Annotated Links to Theory
• The Hypertext/Hypermedia Essay as Genre
• Index to Discussion
• Appendix A: Argued Differences between Print and E-literacies Print Literacy?
• Appendix B: Glossary
• Appendix C: Examples of On-line Courses
• Appendix D: Examples of Hypertext/Hypermedia Essays and Fiction on the Web
• Appendix E: Writing Resources on the Web
• Appendix F: Western Governors' University
• Appendix G: List of Texas Universities
• Bibliography

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Subject and Purpose

The primary purpose of my study is to begin to investigate the impact digital technologies will have on universities generally and the humanities specifically in the next ten to twenty years. More specifically, I want to examine what might be called a shift away from print literacy to electronic literacy--if, in fact such a Kuhnian shift is underway--and how that shift will affect how we teach, what we teach, and where we teach, and how we publish, what we publish, and where we publish. Integral to my investigation are the following kinds of questions:

1. How will interactive, digital technologies recast the fundamental questions about knowledge and learning? Not only what are its ends, but what are its means? And how might the means be changing the ends?
2. What is the relevance of digital technologies to reading and writing? Are words on a page and words on the screen the same thing? Are we dealing with a change of degree, or a change of kind?
3. Will digital technologies and hypertextual/hypermedia authoring replace the autonomous relationship of writer/reader, a relationship which traditionally stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy? What is the status of "ownership" in a digitalized (cyberspace) community?
4. How will electronic literacy differ from print literacy? Will it mix alphabetic information with information coming from image and sound? If "writing" will come to mean "authoring a hypertextual webbed integration of word-image-sound," will writers (students and faculty) who don't know and feel this find themselves the "clerks of a forgotten mood"?
5. If we decide that the "book" and the "printed page" are our only business, that the book is the natural and only vehicle for a written text and that what we do is read and write about them and teach students to read and write about them, how does that fit into the larger cultural motions toward e-literacies? How do we stay in the business of Reading Books and Writing About Books if that's what we want to do when the "book" is being reinvented/recreated in other mediums?
6. Will our concept of the mind or consciousness be changed by the loss of print literacy? Will our consciousness be changed by the shift to electronic literacy?
7. What will the "virtual university or classroom" of the twenty-first century be like?

Background

In "E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print," Nancy Kaplan hypertextualizes the ideas of Jay David Bolter, Myron Tuman, Neil Postman, and Richard Lanham--all theorists who have addressed the issue of a shift from print to electronic literacy. According to Jay David Bolter, author of Writing Space, we reside in the "late age of print." Other linguists and discourse theorists also contend that print's primacy is or soon will be supplanted by the digitized—some say sanitized—word. In Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age, Myron Tuman analyzes the current post-industrial attack on print literacy, an attack cogently and effectively defending electronic literacy. Tuman claims e-literacy advocates no longer respect "the symbolic, transformative power of the literate text." More grievously, Tuman argues, is what is being rejected: "the status of texts [printed] as higher or more logical expressions of symbolic knowledge, texts as the embodiment of history, philosophy, literature, science, and other ways of understanding the world not immediately supported by traditions, often the prejudices, of the group" (48). Tuman sees our culture endangered by a new or secondary orality (see Walter Ong). Neil Postman anchors this literacy shift to historical inevitability. Postman argues that we risk, in what he calls a technopoly, becoming an ever more individualized, intensive, introspective society of digitally connected ascetics (see Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology). E-literacy advocates such as Richard Lanham, in The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, champion the shift that Truman and Postman dread. Lanham describes the advent of the electronic word as a migration towards communication in "a richer but more complex information sensorium" (97). Bolter concurs.

All four writers claim that we are in the twilight of print's waning. As Bolter argues, we can now discern that the printed text is only one, highly specialized case of writing, not its norm and not its apotheosis. In the coming or arrived age of electronic texts, Bolter writes, "print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge." What will replace the printing press and what Walter Ong calls "the logic of print," is electronic textuality with its own "logic." "The shift to the computer," Bolter predicts, "does not mean the end of literacy. What will be lost is not literacy itself, but the literacy of print."

What is as "clear" as the digitized marks on this screen is that even though the conceptual conflicts of these two representative groups divide them into what might be called the technology-as-ends camp (Tuman and Postman) and technology-as-means camp (Bolter and Lanham), both groups eulogize the age of print. Both groups color in the outlined shapes of a post-print-literate world, and they color it digital. One in greys, the other in bright colors (see Sven Birkert's proposed differences between print and e-literacies in Appendix A). But does either group manage to articulate a culturally-based, politically-centered, socially-connected relationship between technologies and cultures, technologies and literacy, and technologies and education that can tell us the whole story of technological and cultural change? They provide a starting point.