I've been reading N. Katherine Hayles' "Writing Machines" for the past two days, and she has a lot of really thought-provoking insights about various kinds of electronic literature. (She also has many jargony sentences that make my head spin, but that's a different story.) Her analysis of Talan Memmott's "Lexia to Perplexia" enabled me to think about that work with a kind of intellectual depth that I never would have been able to access without her guidance. But I guess that's why we read criticism and theory, huh?

I found Hayles’ discussion of how Memmott creates a "creole" of English and programming code particularly fascinating. She says that this creole "forms the medium trought which the origin of subjectivity can be re-described as coextensive with technology. Just as these hybrid articulations do not exist apart from their penetration by code, so the subject does not exist apart from the technology that produces the creole describing/creating the techno-subject (53).

This post has been festering for a while, and the germ of it came out of Pimm's conclusion to a post on Ong: "I hope these thoughts and questions made as much sense in my writing as they do in my head!" My thoughts usually don't, or at least they don't make nearly the same sort of "sense" as the one they had before I translated them into writing. My thoughts are generally not scripted--rarely do they occur as a linear stream of words, ready to be spoken or written down. Instead, they tend to take shape as a simultaneous barrage of images and sensory impressions that I then have to sift, order, and translate into sound-images that are renderable in speech or text. Apparently, this classifies me as a "visual spatial learner". What this means for my reading of Ong is twofold. On the one hand, I think that he couldn't be more right when he tells his reader that "technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior tranformations of conscious, and never more than when they affect the word" (81). Words absolutely transform my consciousness, and that's part of why I'm an English major; they have a texture, an artifactual thingness that is fascinating to play with. On the other hand, I find that Ong's presumed internality of language and script bear out in disturbing ways.

Much of what English compositions promote is what Ong identifies with the culture of literacy (think about what kind of thinking and production your comp instructors insisted that you do and compare that with the characteristics Ong lays out).

Since academia must (or does) spend such energy promoting this, it follows that its receipt is not automatic. That is, within the nominally literate society, there are more and less literate elements, that is, people who not only can read but habitually refer to alphanumerically coded information to decide make decisions.

Perhaps one might revise this to say that the technological vehicles/artifacts of literacy provide extra or alternative modes of operation, and that older functions are partially lost by those who adopt newer ones.

Like Bird, I was struck by a sense of wonder reading Ong. He made me reevaluate writing. I became fascinated by the possibilities of what blogs and the internet will do to language. He traces how symbols and pictures were simplified and turned into written languages. In some cases more than others. In 1716 Chinese had 40.545 characters (86)and "to become significantly learned in the Chinese writing system normally takes some 20 years" (86). Wow! How different this is from English.

So I asked a friend how Chinese computers work. He told me the keyboard keys represent sounds, you type the sound that the word you want begins with and a list of the most common words with that sound pop up onscreen. You choose the word you were looking for. This just seems like such a different experience of interacting with writing and a computer than what we English speakers have. I have trouble even conceptualizing it.

"The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe describes how in an Ibo village the one man who knew how to read hoarded in his house every bit of printed material that came his way - newspapers, cartons, receipts (Achebe 1961, pp. 120-1). It all seemed too remarkable to throw away."
Ong, p. 92

Did this passage strike anyone else the same way it did me? I read these two lines over and over again, picturing this man who revered the written word as something incredible, and I thought to myself, "Have I been taking this all for granted?"
I'm an English major, like most of you, and of course I love books and I love to write. But have I been missing out on what this man is experiencing in his true appreciation for text? I mean, I know he was just collecting milk cartons and things, but to him they were beautiful, because they immortalized a living word.