Before we start with these reviews of different ‘ecosystems’ we need to explain our approach. First of all, we have chosen to use a ‘container’ metaphor popularized by Mumford (1934) and further described by Sofia (2000): Namely, space is not merely an unintelligent container or ‘dumb space’ but one whose cybernetic epistemology stresses the interdependence and ‘co-evolution’ of entities (the inhabitant and organism) that, like an infant emerges based in a facilitated environment. In other words, while such an entity can exist, it is not a tabula rasa. Like an archetype in a story or a character in a role playing game, there are characteristics that limit and enhance its development (i.e., allowable actions). Bateson (1972) referred to this as ‘smart contexts’ or an entity cannot survive without an environment. This is the pervasive approach that will be utilized throughout this course. As we begin to build out notebooks we will have you attempt to describe their inter dependencies and to develop a ‘profile’ that describes them with the expressed goal of helping you, as an instructional designer make good decisions s to which form of mediation to utilize in your designs. Our overall intent for this program is to help you become independent in your selections and not to simply give in to the easiest course for interventions as offered by the omnipresence of ‘big box’ software providers (i.e., Google and Amazon, among others). This is what we will continue to refer to as the mutual shaping of technology and society.
We also need to note that one of the perspectives/considerations that need to be included in your profiles is the affect that these ecologies have on cognitive load and portability. While the latter used to be an issue with digital technologies it is important to recognize that the differences among them is certainly becoming minimized. Still noting whatever characteristics may still exist is important.
Lastly, do not confuse the technology (in this case viewed as the delivery mechanism) with the medium (text itself). Certainly emerging technologies make the use of text more convenient and add value to it as a communication vehicle. When exploring/considering the newest technologies as they relate to text delivery you might find some hints as to the limitations/characteristics of texts by investigating what the newer technologies are in fact adding… perhaps you will discover some of its innate shortcomings to add to your chart/profile.
Communication Models
Before we begin analyzing the various ecosystems it behooves us to view these entities in terms of meaning making and the negotiation of same between the specific environments/ecosystems and the user (or in our case, the learner). So first let us take a brief look at various communication models. Studying these models will be quite useful to our look at media ecology primarily as a means to help us organize our observations.
There are almost a dozen different communications models found in the literature (probably more, actually). We will keep our list to three for purposes of this dialog: Shannon & Weaver, Berlo, and Schramm. These are the most widely cited and provide us ample understanding to preface the discussion that follow.
- The Shannon–Weaver model mirrors the functioning of analog communication technologies (i.e., radio and telephone). The initial concept included the sender, channel, and receiver. The sender was the person who spoke, the channel was the device used, and the receiver was the other person. This channel also included the possibility of noise/distortion and other forms of interference. The simple view also referred to it as the transmission model or standard view of communication, information or content (e.g. a message in natural language) is sent in some form (as spoken language) from an emitter/sender/encoder to a destination/receiver/decoder.
- David Berlo in 1960 expanded Shannon and Weaver’s model of communication and created the Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver (SMCR) Model of Communication. While the Shannon-Weaver looked at communications as a single entity, the SMCR Model separates the Shannon model into clear parts and has been expanded upon by other scholars.
- Wilbur Schramm (1954) added that we should also examine the impact that a message has (both desired and undesired) on the target of the message. Between parties, communication includes acts that confer knowledge and experiences, give advice and commands, and ask questions. According to Schramm communication can be seen as processes of information transmission governed by three levels of semiotic rules: Syntactic (formal properties of signs and symbols), Pragmatic (concerned with the relations between signs/expressions and their users) and Semantic (study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent). Therefore, communication is social interaction where at least two interacting agents share a common set of signs and a common set of semiotic rule
It is this latter extended view of communication that adds the most value to the profile elements that we build for our notebooks.
Written vs Spoken Words
Which of the following is not a form of text-based media?
A. Blogs
B. Diaries
C. Speeches
D. News programs
If you said “C” technically you are correct. While one could make the case for including the spoken word in our review of text-based media we are going to take a purist view and only deal with the written word. We will have the opportunity to study the spoken word as a part of our discussions of still and time-based media in which we will include speech as well as music.
New Media’s Effect on Text-based studies
Increasingly, the artifacts discussed as a part of text based studies are encoded in digital form. Furthermore, new media make information available in such quantities that traditional information-handling methods have to change in order to cope. Computational methods are seen often as being much more powerful than traditional research with pencil and paper.
We already have already agreed that the medium does affect the message. Multimedia and hypermedia represent a convergence of several media in the textual environment. We will have to keep this in mind as we study text-based creative and cultural expressions. The automation of some the processes of text creation raises problems of our being able to formalize our review of text-based data and their treatment, which are different from the problems discovered when we look at traditional approaches to text creation. Moreover, the construction of text-based databases will pose some methodological problems because they cut across the disciplinary boundaries. We will attempt to single these out or at least make reference to them as we go. As you build your profile, these need to be added to your definitions and reviews.
To help you know what to read for in the sections that follow, you may first wish to look at the “Do This” box at the end of this lesson before begin reading.
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Text-based media existed well before the invention of the printing press. As we know well, Catholic monks were charged with making hand copies of previous classic works as the labored in their monasteries. Chief among the issues of this pre-Gutenberg period were those dealing with transportability and literacy of the masses. Those who could read were mostly the scholarly and the religious. The ecosystem of writing in that period is entirely different from what was to follow.
Johannes Gutenberg is probably one of the most celebrated inventors in history, because his printing press spread literature to the masses for the first time in an efficient, durable way, shoving Europe headlong into the original information age – the Renaissance.
Gutenberg often gets credit as the father of printing, but the Chinese had him beat, in fact, by a full thousand years. Around A.D. 600, the Chinese invented a printing technique using wooden blocks with multiple words to press or rub texts onto paper. A few hundred years later they also developed movable type – with letters rearranged for each new page – but, with over 10,000 common characters in their language, the process was cumbersome and didn’t catch on. A similar situation arose in Korea, where metal typesetting was invented.The English language, minuscule by comparison, was the perfect candidate for movable type.
Johannes Gutenberg recognized the moneymaking potential of mass produced books and set about experimenting with printing methods. Using a design based on the olive and grape screw-type presses used by farmers across Europe, Gutenberg developed his famous printing press. The most important, original contribution was Gutenberg’s letter molds, which he concocted from a metal alloy and which were very durable.
Gutenberg’s first printed a set of 200 illustrated Latin Bible, which rolled off the presses in 1455. Every copy had been pre-sold before he had even set the last page. Literacy levels, still low among the general population in Europe, crept upwards as the cost of books steadily dropped and book fairs became yearly occurrences in most major cities during the early years of the Renaissance. The printing press was one of the key factors in the explosion of the Renaissance movement. Access to standard works of science, especially, stimulated and spread new ideas quicker than ever. Gutenberg’s machine was so capable that it remained virtually unchanged until the 19th-century and the advent of steam-powered presses.
The printing press set up the container/ the medium for an extraordinary evolution of the text-based ecosystem.
Text-based education and thinking evolved over the next several hundred years and has been ingrained into the scholarly view of what it means to be ‘literate’ because for one, it became the main means for mass communication. Postman’s later ideas on text were based on a sense of intellectualism and in a sense nostalgia he thought was evoked by text. He was an early fighter of the ‘text=literacy’ wars. As we will see in later lessons, the thinking was that the rise of the use of images and television in particular brought on the ‘dumbing down’ of America. Newton Minnow, the head of the FCC in the 1950s called television a ‘vast wasteland’. (He may have been influenced by the poor content, maybe? was it the message or the messenger?)
Neil Postman’s ideas on language education clearly favored the communication (i.e., language) process (the medium) over content (the message). But Charles Weingartner (1966) countered that language is not merely a vehicle of expression it is the driver… what we perceive and learn is a function of our language processes.
Later (1979) Postman appears to have changed his ideas and in his books Crazy Talk Stupid Talk and more explicitly in Teaching as a Conserving Activity he began to elevate (text-based) language due to the importance of it being the basis of interpersonal communications. His argument was that schools needed to counter the (invasive) effects of television and electronic media by preserving the values and methods associated with print-based literacy. In short electronic media (television in particular) and print were competing.
Language and Symbolic Form
Postman extended his views about print culture to include a view that the concept of extending one’s childhood has a direct correlation with the print culture. The advent of television has destroyed it. In Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman argued that the ‘image culture trivializes’ serious discourse (i.e., news politics religion and education, etc.), likening text/language to a form of ‘media epistemology’… using it a a metaphor for enlightenment.
Within the field of linguistics, Chomsky is largely responsible for establishing the field as a formal, natural science, moving it away from the procedural form of structural linguistics (that which Postman appears to subscribe) that was dominant during the mid-20th century.
The basis to Chomsky’s linguistic theory holds that the principles underlying the structure of language are biologically determined in the human mind and therefore genetically transmitted. He argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. Chomsky rejected the behaviorist psychology of B.F. Skinner that viewed the mind as a “blank slate” and thus treats all language development as learned behavior. Accordingly, he argued that language is unique to humans and is unlike modes of communication used by animals
Chomsky’s approach towards linguistics viewed grammar as an innate body of knowledge possessed by language users: often termed a Universal Grammar. Chomsky based his argument on observations about human language acquisition, noting that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain. For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and scattered subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire on their own a highly organized and systematic ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered.
Chomsky reasoned that linguistic development must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity. Furthermore, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to determine what the this is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages and the universal grammar (i.e, for our purposes this equals the language or text-based ecosystem).
Rhetoric can be defined as:
- the art of speaking or writing effectively: as a : the study of principles and rules of composition formulated by critics of ancient times
- the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion.
- a skill in the effective use of speech b : a type or mode of language or speech
Digital rhetoric is the art of informing, persuading, and inspiring action in an audience through media, and it is an advancing form of communication composed, created, and distributed through multimedia.
In this case the medium becomes the container. But what effect does it have on the message itself?
Digging Deeper
- Wikipedia view
- Digital Rhetoric Collaborative
- Defining and Locating (UMich)
- Text and Technology at UCF
We cannot leave our discussions on digital rhetoric and language without looking at Twitter. We use the term ‘twitterverse’ on purpose, as it is hard to argue that the Twitter phenomenon has not created a unique ecosystem subset within the language universe. Ed Catmull, one of its founders describes the backdrop as to the reasons why Twitter was originally limited to 144 characters. Since those technical character limits/restrictions were lifted, Twitter has often felt pressure to extend the scale of the amount of allowable characters but has resisted because of the unique creative communication system that has evolved. According to Catmull, pressures/restriction (time and space) bring on the creative skills of individuals.
Once we cross over into the digital domain we need to also think about Universal Design and its effect/limitations on using the text world as a primary mediated intervention. Consider the following:
In order to make text-based communications universal one needs to consider making audio visual material available to individuals whose vision is too poor to reliably read captions and whose hearing is too poor to reliably hear dialogue and audio description. This is done by providing an alternative for time-based media, an approach that involves providing all of the information in the synchronized media (both visual and auditory) in text form.
Best practices include a running description of all that is going on in the synchronized media content. Full descriptions are provided of all visual information, including visual context, actions and expressions of actors, and any other visual material. In addition, non-speech sounds (laughter, off-screen voices, etc.) are described, and transcripts of all dialogue are included. The sequence of descriptions and dialogue transcripts is the same as the sequence in the synchronized media itself. As a result, it can provide a much more complete representation of the synchronized media content than audio description alone. If there is any interaction as part of the synchronized media presentation (e.g., “press now to answer the question”) then the alternative for time-based media would provide hyperlinks or whatever is needed to provide parallel functionality.
Individuals whose vision is too poor to read reliably captions and whose hearing is too poor to reliably hear dialogue can access the alternative for time-based media by using a braille display.
One last thought…
…to help stimulate some thinking on your part… one of the signs that text is at the heart of its own ecosystem is the fact that calligraphy remains a predominant avocation. Its roots date back the Roman times when first written languages evolved and remains of interest today. You may wish to dig into this art form to see how you can relate it back to helping you answer some of the questions you are formulating for your text-based ecosystem profile in your notebook.
Another cultural paradigm surrounding text is how some cultures view personal signatures (as well as handwriting in general and how some are bemoaning the loss of cursive in schools. What is lost by its disappearance? The following video is one we have used in other classes. It tells the story about how Juan learned to sign his name. In it he describes the importance of signatures in Hispanic cultures. Again the ‘how part’ of handwriting in general should give you some clues.
The following authors/scholars have made a significant contribution to the field of text-based media. You should browse through their publications to help round out your table entries.
- Jay David Bolter
- James Carey
- Jack Goody
- Dorothy Lee
- Walter Ong
- Milman Parry
The Book of Learning and Forgetting
In this book Smith presents a concrete look at how children naturally learn things (without formal education and training) and why it is so important to how we develop as individuals. What is interesting to this discussion are certain passages related directly to the importance of reading:
no one speaks the grammar that is formally taught in schools. That is the grammar for autopsies, for dissection of dead language on a mortuary slab of paper. (p. 20)
How is it that a child will learn on his or her own (without forgetting approximately 27 new words a day but a teacher has trouble teaching five new words of her selected word list? (p. 22)
The prime value of reading and writing is the experience they provide through which we may constantly and unobtrusively learn... everyone recognizes that print is potent --it's the classic view of learning. (p. 24)
One last one:
...the ironic situation is that some misguided parents or teachers may take a book away form a child because they thing it is too easy or that the child knows the story already. his is a supreme example of the tragedy of the official theory that people believe that learning is taking place only there is difficulty. (p. 27)
This should give you plenty of food for thought when trying to organize your ideas about text and reading.
Start your media profile as explained in the Assignments Tab in Canvas: Reflection #3-Text Media Profile
You are encouraged to add other columns as we move through the semester (Compare/Contrast to other Media Types, for example). In your final notebook submission you can add additional commentary based on what you learn as the other media are covered during subsequent cycles.
References
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballantine/Random House.
Mumford, L. (1934). Technics and civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Sofia, Z. (2000). Container technologies. Hypatia, 15(2). Blackwell.