Writing Machines is the course website for English 170L at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
reading machines
Submitted by thisismycheese on 5 October 2006 - 10:41am.
The design of "Writing Machines" is clearly important--the designer is credited a lot more thoroughly than usual, and in the preface Hayles refers to the work as collaboration. Yet 50 pages in, the design hasn't enhanced my experience of reading the book. Its main purpose, as far as I can tell, is to lead me toward the meanings that Hayles wants me to make.
What I mean is--almost all the other texts I have read have left it up to me to underline, dog-ear, highlight--they've left a lot of that user-end meaning creation up to me.
Am I misinterpreting what she's doing with the enlarged text/underlined words? I feel like she's trying to direct my reading in a really unsubtle way--it's like buying a used book at Huntley and finding that the person before you highlighted a bunch of things that you don't necessarily think should be highlighted. (Especially since the glossy pages of "Writing Machines" resist highlighting--I can't even add my own emphases.)
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Writing Machines' design
Maybe I'm just lazier than you, but I don't have as much of an aversion to the magnified text. It makes me pay attention more closely, and authors do that with italics and introductions and all kinds of other technologies, so I feel like the magnified text is fair game.
Also, I do like what she does on pages 72 and 73-- it reminds me of the maps I sometimes make when I'm trying to figure out how to structure a paper.
And I think it's cool how she not only quotes other texts, but actually shows what they look like; it makes it seem as if she really is committed to how important materiality is-- and I think it is pretty important to see the original pages of the texts she's analyzing.
But the words that are supposed to look like links seem pretty superficial and useless to me-- she seems to be imitating a computer just for the hell of it.