Rhetoric, Technology, Culture Spring 2011

Amber,

I really enjoyed your podcast, particularly your latter section in which you question Blackmon’s conflation of correlation with causation. I do, however, have a few questions about some of your assertions in the section on Bernhardt. It cannot be denied that much of the content in his article is antiquated. Some of the screen shots made my head spin back to my first encounters with computers as a child. Also long gone is the validity of his assertion that “A real virtue of paper text is its detachment from the physical world. We can pick up a book or magazine or a newspaper and read in every imaginable situation” (152). Bernhardt could not have anticipated that the screens that text inhabits would situational unshackle themselves. In fact, I am currently more contextually diverse and mobile (pun intended…zing!) with my internet than I am with my printed books. However, it is well within our the practice of our discipline to return to texts written decades, if not centuries ago. When you argue that you “can’t quite trust the author because this document is antiquated,” I am wondering if this has something to do with the problem of writing about a system in constant flux (technium and specific technologies), rather than reading an article with outdated research. In other words, I think what is more important that the specific claims Berhardt makes about print vs. screen text, is the theoretical framework he generates for situating these things. Our relationship to text and the technologies they inhabit is always changing; however, we can still appreciate a vocabulary that calls on us to understand these relationships. Hence, the usefulness of not only this article, but Johnson’s “Refiguring the End of Technology” that we read a few weeks ago. Both work to theorize the user’s relationship to text / technology, while Johnson’s article works to create a shift in that relationship.

Thanks for sharing your podcast and giving us food for thought!
-Madeline