This document discusses how technology has changed the way we think and communicate. It explores how early printing presses led to a more literate public that could spread their own ideas, which kings tried to control. It also examines how symbolic thinking and logic emerged from ideographic writing systems. Finally, it discusses how early 20th century authors like Mallarme experimented with print formats to communicate beyond words and expand literature's limits, foreshadowing how digital media would further transform communication.

1. MACHINE LANGUAGE
From Printers to Computers

2. The World Wide Web, as we know it today, is estimated to contain over four billion
individual sites, amounting to over fifty times the sum of content in the Library of
Congress. Such statistics point rather plainly to an open future for literary studies; digital
writing is an emerging interdisciplinary field bringing together a variety of skills and ideas
about technology, culture and its representation.
Although focused on literature, this course is designed to provoke an array of critical
questions regarding the influence of new media technologies on art, academic learning
and even cognition itself. Major themes to be explored will include: writing and/as
technology; the evolution of media from print to screen; the emergence of new electronic
literary genres like hypertext, cyber-text literature, flash-based and video narratives, etc.
As well, important political questions concerning changes in copyright laws and the
growing corporate control of access and content will remain central to our discussions
and study.

3. With the innovations of automated printing,
publishing and distribution technologies there
emerged a much more literate, informed and
demanding public able to argue and dispense
their own views and ideas about the world. So
apprehensive of this evolving class of citizen,
King Henry VIII in Britain quickly declared just
25 years after England acquired its first printing
press that only people with written permission
from the Crown would be allowed to publish
their views.
Henry VIII was right to be nervous

4. Does Technology Change the Way we Think?
• Platonism: 400 B.C.E. - 1600 C.E.
(we tend to think of writing as primarily a mode of expression – it mimics
thought.)
Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716)
• Leibniz outlines an ideographic system of signs that can be manipulated to
produce logical deductions without recourse to natural language.
• Simply put: mediation functions better with an ideographic system
• Symbolic Thinking = Symbolic Logic: Let us calculate (calculemus)
• I want that in writing: What if thought mimics writing?

5. What Happens when Form and Notation Produces Cultural
Meaning: Mallarmé and Gysin
Computers give us a very rational and coherent vision of language as a type of signal
or command. Literature, on the other hand, often emphasizes how ambiguous and
difficult language can be as a communication medium. What happens when literary
authors begin to construct their work using computers? This question will continue to
inform our discussions throughout the course.
The works we’ll look at this week illustrate different ways in which writers have
attempted to explore (and perhaps go beyond) the inherent constraints of print
formats – recognising that new meanings require new forms (usually visual).
At the cusp of the last century, just as the end of 1800s were plunging forward into
20th century (with Mallarmé), new experiments in print emerged that clearly
questioned the medium's capacity to communicate verbally. In other words, long
before the screen emerged as the dominant way to distribute writing, a clear
interest in expanding the limits of the page was already present in literature.