From Bards to Blogs

Slide 1: HUIN105, University of Bergen, March 6, 2008 From Bards to Blogs Jill Walke r Re ttbe rg Associate Professor University of Bergen, Norway jill.walker.rettberg@uib.no http://jilltxt.net

Slide 2: Walter Ong, 1982: • Orality (before writing) • Literacy (writing, print) • Secondary Orality (radio and television)

Slide 3: Writing will destroy memory Plato: Phaedrus

Slide 4: Plato: Written texts are unresponsive SOCRATES: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. PHAEDRUS: That again is most true. Plato: Phaedrus

Slide 5: John Durham Peters: two traditions in communication • Dissemination • Dialogue (Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.)

Slide 6: Dis-sem-ination Sem = seed

Slide 7: Dissemination’s primodial spokesperson: Jesus A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop – a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. He who has ears, let him hear. (Matthew 13: 3–9)

Slide 8: This is the model of mass media and mass advertising Most will not hear, or will ignore the message. But the one who received the seed that fell on good soil is the man who hears the word and understands it. He produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. (Matthew 13: 23)

Slide 9: Dialogue’s primordial spokesperson: Plato Would a husbandman, who is a man of sense, take the seeds, which he values and which he wishes to bear fruit, and in sober seriousness plant them during the heat of summer, in some garden of Adonis, that he may rejoice when he sees them in eight days appearing in beauty? At least he would do so, if at all, only for the sake of amusement and pastime. But when he is in earnest he sows in fitting soil, and practises husbandry, and is satisfied if in eight months the seeds which he has sown arrive at perfection. (Plato, Phaedrus)

Slide 10: Do blogs disseminate or engage in dialogue?

Slide 11: 1450s: The printing press http://encarta.msn.com/media_461532797/Early_Printing_Press.html

Slide 12: Qualities of print that led to cultural change: • Dissemination • Standardisation • Reorganisation • Data collection • Preservation • Amplification and Reinforcement

Slide 13: The “Wicked Bible” of 1631 Typo: printers forgot the word “not” “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

Slide 14: Ortelius: Theatrum orbis mundum (1570-1598) Collaboration, revisions, data collection.

Slide 15: 1990s: The Web

Slide 16: The Gutenberg Parenthesis Tom Pettitt, MIT5 conference, May 2007. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/papers/pettitt_plenary_gutenberg.pdf

Slide 17: Technological transitions lead to new literacies Print Literacy (read and write - 70-90% of Europeans by late 18th century) Web Network literacy (create, share and navigate social media - 57% of US teens by 2005) (http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/166/report_display.asp)

Slide 18: New literacies shape our ideas of the relationship between self and world Print Literacy Private/Public divide: self is distinct, separate Web Network Private/Public Literacy collapse: Self is connected to network

Slide 19: Young man reading http://flickr.com/photos/jorgeq82/262569606/ by JorgeQuinteros Creative Commons licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

Slide 20: Silent reading ... the increasingly common practice of silent reading, which fostered a solitary and private relation between the reader and his book, were crucial changes, which redrew the boundary between the inner life and life in the community. Roger Chartier: The Practical Impact of Writing

Slide 21: Silent reading Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as growing numbers of people learned to read, new ways of reading became popular. The most novel of these (..) was private reading in a quiet place away from other people, which allowed the reader to engage in solitary reflection on what he or she read. This privatization of reading is undeniably one of the major cultural developments of the early modern era. Roger Chartier: The Practical Impact of Writing

Slide 22: See Chartier, “The Practical Impact of Writing”, p. 130. The library is a place to retreat to, a place from which the world can be seen - but the reader remains invisible. http://flickr.com/photos/veskul/423099103/

Slide 23: The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write. Marguerite Duras, Writing. http://flickr.com/photos/cherryvega/71484729/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

Slide 24: In composing a text, in “writing” something, the one producing the written utterance is also alone. Writing is a solipsistic operation. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 1983. Page 116. Writing is a solipsistic operation

Slide 25: Writing girls http://flickr.com/photos/hand-nor-glove/179558293/ by http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ “This Year’s Love”

Slide 26: Blogging: social? solitary? http://www.flickr.com/photos/kk/171399267/ - Creative Commons licence - by kk+

Slide 27: Is blogging a different kind of writing to novel-writing? One thing that was immediately clear to me, from the first blog, is that this is not an activity, for me, that can coexist with the writing of a novel. In some way I only dimly apprehend, it requires too much of the same bandwidth (yet never engages anything like the total *available* bandwidth). But, definitely, the ecology of novelization and the ecology of blogging couldn't coexist, for me. It would be like trying to boil water without a lid. Or, more like it, trying to run a steam engine without a lid. (I wonder if that would be the case for a native of the blogosphere -- for whom, as Lou Reed once said of heroin addicts, "the needle is a toothbrush"? Maybe not.) William Gibson in his blog, 13 April, 2003. http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_04_13_a Gibson rchive.asp

Slide 28: Jürgen Habermas developed the theory of the public sphere as founded upon debate in the 1960s. Today, he worries about the internet.

Slide 29: The public sphere (borgerlig offentlighet) An ideal democratic space for rational debate among informed and engaged citizens - and that mediates between state and society (Habermas 1991)

Slide 30: Baoill, Andrew. 2004. Weblogs and the Public Sphere. In Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs, edited by L. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff and J. Reyman. Boeder, Pieter. 2005. Habermas' Heritage: The Future of the Public Sphere in the Network Society. First Monday 10 (9). Blogs are Available from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_9/b oeder/. Notaro, Anna. 2006. The Lo(n)g Revolution: The Blogosphere as an Alternative Publicoften seen as Sphere? Reconstruction 6 (4). Available from a new public http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/notaro.shtml . Poster, Mark. 1997. Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere. In Internet sphere Culture, edited by D. Porter. NY: Routledge. Thompson, Garry. 2003. Weblogs, Warblogs, the Public Sphere, and Bubbles. Transformations (7). Available from http://www.transformationsjournal.org/jou rnal/issue_07/article_02.shtml.

Slide 31: Today, Habermas worries about the Internet “...intellectuals seem to be suffocating from the excess of this vitalising element, as if they were overdosing. The blessing seems to have become a curse. I see the reason for that in the de-formalisation of the public sphere, and in the de-differentiation of the respective roles. (..) In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.” Jürgen Habermas: Acceptance Speech for the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Advancement of Human Rights, March 9, 2006.

Slide 32: Too many people are permitted to speak - a common concern to Plato, Habermas and an 18th century commentator: “the common people talke anything, for every carman and porter is now a statesman; and indeed the coffee houses are good for nothing else” (Sir Thomas Piper, quoted in Knights 2005, 251).

Slide 33: ...the http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Francois_Rabelais_-_Portrait.jpg ferment engendered by access to more books... 'All the world is full of learned men, of most skilled preceptors, of vast libraries...neither in Plato's time nor in Cicero's was there ever (Rabelais) such opportunity for

Slide 34: See Chartier, “The Practical Impact of Writing”, p. 130. The library is a place to retreat to, a place from which the world can be seen - but the reader remains invisible. http://flickr.com/photos/veskul/423099103/

Slide 35: Technology doesn’t determine that we should sit still and listen. Brecht on radio: [R]adio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction. (Bertolt Brecht 1932)

Slide 36: Reading is no longer anonymous. Lurking is becoming impossible.

Slide 37: You’ve got to be silent to be spoken to. (..) Passivity is the “logic” of this technology. (Richard Sennett)

Slide 38: Today, the text reads the reader. Writing is not unresponsive as in Plato’s day.

Slide 39: Participatory media changes the relationship between readers and texts

Slide 40: ...and the relationship between readers and readers

Slide 41: This is a time of transition. Print created the lurker. The web allows us to delurk - easily.