Networks Are Taking Over!

For last Tuesday we read a very confusing few chapters by Katherine Hayles called “Writing Machines”. Though it was a confusing text, after discussing it I feel that I agree more with her than with McLuhan’s idea. In my mind, it does not seem like she is willing to bracket content or a message completely separate of the medium, like McLuhan does. Yet she does state “the physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean” (Hayles 25). Though it is definitely insinuating that the medium, probably a book in this case, affects the message, it is not going as far as to say that the medium is the only thing of significance. I agree that the way material is presented absolutely shapes the message it gives; such as if a book has a certain font, it can contribute to making some rhetorical argument. Therefore, it is shaping the message, but it does not necessarily mean the text is unimportant either.

Hayles text also analyzes Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, which is a controlled chaos of an online adventure. I think the most important point from it is that it is made to intentionally be confusing and not make sense to a viewer. I believe that if each person in our class tried to define some of the things in it, we’d get 18 different answers, which speaks to the fact that there are multiple interpretations. The variety of meanings that can be made out of it helps to argue a point that there may not be one single meaning to most texts. All too often in high school English classes, we were essentially coached into one interpretation of a book passage or a poem. Memmott uses new technology to showcase a view that it is not always the case, and furthermore show how new media like the internet allows for even more interpretations. This really sets up arguments for those like Jeff Rice and how not only new media needs to become important in college English, but that there may be a whole new level of analysis that needs to be applied to much of it.

The other reading we read was from Mark Taylor’s book “The Moment of Complexity”, and highlighted an introduction to chaos and complexity. I think Taylor made an argument that technology brings about more information to networks and that we are now living in a web environment. An example from the text is the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which marked a “decisive juncture in the formation of network culture...” (Taylor 20). Prior to that event, the world was stuck largely in the Cold War attitudes that were rigidly fixed, and in many ways represented a grid. After the event, globalization took off to a new level and has allowed for the networks and webs that now dominate the global culture.

In Thursday’s class, we didn’t quite get to talking about the 6^th discussion question, about what writing is, but I think it’s a fantastic discussion topic. In relation to Taylor’s text, I feel that most writing is representative of a grid and not a network. Without a doubt, the typical print type of writing follows an assembly line format of writing, editing, revising, and so forth. It is very structured and does not typically allow for much collaboration, which is one of the main characteristics of a network. Other types of writing such as a blog or Wikipedia give more gray area to writing. In some ways blogs create a very structured way to put down content, and in the same way so does Wikipedia. If you look at a Wikipedia entry about Boston, and you look at one about Madison, you’ll notice they are structured nearly the exact same. Yet, on the other hand there are a huge variety of types of things one could put into a blog such as video, photos, text, or music. Also, you can link to millions of other people through these types of media, which is practically the definition of a network. So I think that one could say a lot of writing is grid-like, but there are certainly network aspects to writing, mostly of the new media type.

A key point though across all of these texts is the clear presence of the new media in our society, and the growing network culture, which we currently inhabit. In many ways, this is all very new and we have to learn a lot about how networks work to better understand them and much of the new types of writing.