review of barber/grigar book

By Jill Walker

[jill.walker@uib.no]

This essay is published as part of jill/txt and is written by Jill Walker.

ISSN: 1502-8003

Last modified
14 Nov 2001 11:26

Written and published with Tinderbox.

written for American Book Review, August 2001

New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Parthways for Writing about and in Electronic Environments

John F. Barber and Dene Grigar (eds.)

Hampton Press, 200

Reviewed by Jill Walker

Dene Grigar and John Barber asked 19 teachers and researchers a question: What will writing have become? The result is a collection of essays or dispatches, as the editors call them that are experiments, explorations and speculations. Always the answers return to the digital: what will have become of us, living, writing, teaching, researching in a networked, electronic environment?

Asking about the future is an act of daring. Its easy to speculate, but hard to break away from the obvious or the clichd: computers will be important; therell be flying cars in the streets by the year 2000. Sometimes speculations (often the most creative and outrageous) become visiNeuromancer. These utopias and dystopias can profoundly influence the future that they have imagined. Perhaps the question (what will have become?) is all the more daring for being asked of academics, in an academic publication, rather than in science fiction.

The editors have chosen to call this a collection of dispatches rather than of essays. The speculations are experimental in form as well as in their ideas, and as such they are close to the spirit of the original essais: attempts, tests, experiments. In their Comments between Chapters Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe note that the word dispatch implies haste: a speedy commentary on unsettled or troubled times. (187) Time is important in this anthology: it is written in a time of change and speaking of the future. That future is already (in part) our past. The timelessness and permanency that many (most?) academic publications assume is constantly refuted here.

Print is shipped, whereas the web awaits ones arrival. (234) These are Nick Carbones words in one of the dispatches. His dispatch, as the others, is shipped from a community of writers to us individual readers. This book is a collection of one-way dispatches describing what such a electronic writing community might be like, but not providing one for us readers to enter. We read them alone, in silence, separated from other readers who are in their offices or their homes, not in ours, not with us. (234)

The final dispatch is a MOO-log (a transcript of a real-time discussion in an online environment called a MOO) of a discussion between all the authors, lined with margin notes emailed after the participants and others had read the MOO-log. Publishing a MOO-log in print is unusual, though they are commonly archived on the Web and in MOOs. A discussion between all the participants in an anthology is equally unusual, and intriguing. But this is a canned version of a MOO. I love MOOs because I can act in them, because I can meet people and share ideas and be a part of a community and a world. Reading this MOO-log merely made me feel envious of the writers closeness to one another (in time, in the electronic space of the MOO). I read them speaking (typing) to one another, never to me. I see them very much from outside, whereas in the electronic discursive spaces they write about (MOOs, collaborative journals, mailing lists) my response and my experiences would (could) become part of the text and I might be part of the community just by being there. A MOO-log doesnt speak to the reader. There is no addressee (no you or me) as there always is when you really visit a MOO.

Dene Grigars dispatch is also written as a MOO-log. Writing about Platos dialogues and his ideas of writing, Grigar has constructed a MOO-log where she discusses her ideas with eminents such as Plato himself and several digital theorists, letting them say their words as though in a MOO (Dene says, Plato says) instead of quoting their written words traditionally. This MOO-log creates a role for me, welcoming me (Dene turns and waves you toward her. Dene says, Welcome.) rather than excluding me as the more authentic MOO-log does. This constructed MOO-log simulates a real MOO experience more successfully than a direct transcript can.

Other dispatches also attempt to incorporate the collaboration and polyvocality of electronic discourse in their form. Myka Vielstimmig is the composite author of one dispatch, created by Kathleen Yancey and Michael Spooner. Vielstimmig (German for many-voiced) uses different fonts and visual placement on the page to differentiate between her voices. Dickie Selfe collaborates with five of his students to portray the discussions in a class they participated in together, blending his own writing with transcripts of class discussions and lengthy excerpts from students emails. Nick Carbone longs for a future that welcomes Selfe and his students polyvocal writing. His speculation about the future (what studying will have become) is inspired by the hackers concept of copyleft: a web journal for students where writing can be appropriated, changed and played with and then republished, but with a documentation of what changes have been made. Carbone ultimately defends the current American anxiety around plagarism, but argues that while correct citation and referencing make sense to academics who wish to build and solidify a community, this system is incomprehensible to students until they have become part of a community. Michael Day also discusses notions of ownership, describing his experiences teaching in Japan and relating them to the current American tenure system and capitalism to explain our zealously protective systems of copyright today. Yet as he points out, If nothing is original, why should we be so concerned with being original or attempting to own the ideas we think are ours? (256)

Concerns that electronic scholarship be recognised as equally valid as print publications are central in many of the dispatches. The final MOO-log circles around the question of whether participation in a MOO discussion is a publication. The real question, I suspect, is whether this kind of activity counts at a tenure review in an American university. In his dispatch, Mick Doherty furthers this discussion by noting the importance of the names we give to new electronic writing and scholarship practices for their (lack of) acceptance in academia.

The contributors to this volume are all active in electronic environments. They have created MOOs, invented teaching methods and founded pioneering electronic journals. I wonder, reading this volume, why it is published in print. Arent the wonderful new worlds these authors have participated in creating enough? Why print? To get another publication for your tenure review, a publication no one can contest (its in print after all)? To reach new audiences? But this volume looks more inward than out; perhaps reinforcing an community but not often welcoming a new audience that is not already using networked technologies in writing.

This volume is valuable for its timeliness, being in time, being in a time of change and a time of anxiety and showing our anxiety about change. These writers push print to its limits, trying to show us the community of a MOO despite the solitude of print, attempting to capture the fast and furious back and forwards of an email discussion on unmoving paper. Ultimately, though, these are things we must experience for ourselves. Is online writing publication? is a question that will have become meaningless in the future. For me, Victor Vitanza epitomises what we will have become in his dispatch: I sense intermittently myself as a writer, or myself-writing, disappearing, as words cascade down all around my words, in the middle of my typed words and all around and in the middle interval of them, cascading all over me, and I lose a sense again, intermittently of who I am writing in that third interval. (89).