The resistance…

Marshall McLuhan, in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, tells us that electric technology will meet with much resistance in American culture because it threatens (to alter) literate thought, which has been instituted (uniformly) in education, government, society, industry, and so on. Additionally, as Walter Ong has told us, in his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, literate thought is total, is unquestioned, and this is the world we encounter within the walls of the academy. Despite the multimedia push occurring across the University, noticeable in the growing multimedia nature of Freshman composition and its related texts (visual readers, companion websites & CDs, etc.) as well as the common practice of cannibalizing lecturer positions so departments and colleges can afford various education technologies (necessities in our current climate), the academy is still overwhelmingly a literacy club (and maybe it should be, to a certain extent, as it was the institution given rise by literacy–i.e., Plato’s Academy). We talk of multimedia, theorize about the effects (and affects) of multimedia, and engage the various emerging new media technologies daily, but yet we don’t necessarily value the multimedia in terms of “acceptable” scholarship: dissertations are still predominantly text-only creations, even with a pdf option, which tends to be a mere digital copies of the would-be print version; or, in terms of tenure-track mobility, multimedia creations may be “appreciated,” may be conversation fodder, even may be considered impressive work, but are significantly less valued compared to the printed article–with the online (printed) article residing somewhere between the two–and all this despite the often immense effort, insight, research, and ability needed to create multimedia scholarship.

This is an issue making its way into various current conversations, creating some buzz about scholarship in the 21st century, and it is the root/rhizomic issue at the base of this blog, which I hope to explore in a variety of posts as I work to complete my own dissertation (regarding this and other related issues).

Work Cited
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1964. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: Technologizing of the Word. New Accents Series. NY: Methuen, 1982.

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http://www.clemson.edu/~hodgson