Bolter – "Critical Theory and the Challenge of New Media," 20-36
In this brief article, the first in Hocks and Kendrick’s Eloquent Images,
Jay Bolter begins with a historical overview of the image-word problem. 
He traces a larger outline of new media by propping up a series of artificial
dichotomies: visual-verbal, theory-practice, critique-production,
ideological-formal (34); the project of new media is to collapse these terms. 
Bolter explains that unlike film and television, which few cultural critics
conceived of as full-scale replacements for print, the web and its hyper-blended
forms of discourse introduce a different kind of contest between old and new media
forms. Yet it would be a mistake to view new media forms and print as strict
teleological trajectories, each edging out the other, competing for a mediative
lead.  This matters differently if you’re the CEO of a Weyerhaeuser, I
suppose, and maybe there’s something to the race track metaphor (one car to
each, one driver, one big-dollar sponsor) that admits or allows for the capital
backing of media forms.  That’s not really Bolter’s point here. He
explains, "It is not that there is some inadequacy in printed media forms that
digital forms can remedy: New digital media obviously have no claim to inherent
superiority" (24). 

Continue reading →