Sunday, November 12, 2006
Bolter, "Theory and Practice of New Media Studies"
Bolter, Jay David. "Theory and Practice of New Media Studies." Eds. Gunnar Liestøl,, Andrew Morrison and Terje Rasmussen. Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovations in Digital Domains. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 15-34.
Bolter considers the place of "new media studies" in the humanities with specific attention to the existing theoretical terrain and the divide between theory and practice. He explains the limitations of early "formal media" theory (Ong and McLuhan) with its ties to poststructuralism (Derrida and De Man) and also looks at ideological critique as a theoretical orientation common in the humanities. The long standing tension between theory and practice isn't easily resolved, but new media studies mixes them in an encouraging complementarity. New media studies has found solid footing in the most practice-oriented fields because people in those disciplines were some of the earliest to experiment with emerging technologies. It's not clear, however, that new media studies (and its affront to the print paradigm) will warm to conservative views toward online publishing of scholarship and the appropriateness of such publications venues for tenure. Bolter ends by calling for refashioning a "new media critic" whose methodology is "a hybrid, a fusion of the critical stance of cultural theory with the constructive attitude of the visual designer" (30).
Key Terms: postindustrial engineering (17), formal media theory (18), technological determinism (18), hypertext critics (18), broadcast model (22), rhetoric of resistance (25), shift from consumption to production (27), new media critic (30).
"The poststructuralists were media theorists who confined themselves mainly to verbal media" (18).
"This linking of hypertext to poststructuralist theory, however, did not have the impact on the critical community that some had anticipated. It did not lead to widespread engagement with or acceptance of hypertext in humanities departments" (19).
"The dominant critical strategies in the humanities today are the many varieties of postmodernism, feminism, and cultural studies, all of which reject the formalist tendencies of poststructuralism" (21).
"When cultural studies critics now approach digital media they often assume that these new media must follow the same pattern [as mass media] of hegemonic production and resistant reception" (22).
"Computer technology has improved the status of teachers of writing and rhetoric, who were in fact among the first faculty members in the humanities to embrace the new technology" (26).
"The success of teachers in defining new forms of writing suggests that cultural theorists may have been premature in lumping electronic media together with mass, audiovisual media such as television and film" (26).
"Popular mass media forms have therefore been suspect on two counts: as promoters of both capitalist ideology and visual representation" (27).
"Will they be willing to redefine scholarship to include the multilinear structures of hypertext or (what may be even more radical) the multiplicity of representational modes afforded by digital multimedia?" (29).
- Related sources:
- Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. Berkeley: U Cal Press, 1993.
- Noble, David. "Digital Diploma Mills. Part 1: The Automation of Higher Education." October (Fall 1998): 107-117.
- Noble, David. "Digital Diploma Mills. Part 2: The Coming Battle over Online Instruction." October (Fall 1998): 118-129.