Computers, Culture, Books, and English

In an age where the media have come to inhabit numerous conduits for the production of culture, it is difficult to imagine culture without its mediated form. From television and comic books to fashion and postcards, culture comes to us in diverse vehicles shaped by agents distant form our everyday life. The entwining of media and culture is a feature of our age; we need only consider the close linkages between the Olympics and television, the collective memories of Vietnam and cinema, or the appreciation of popular music and MTV.

We experience our cultural life through the media in various ways. Romance novels, televised soap operas, magazines, and fashion shows provide respite from the routines of daily existence, but often so do documentaries and even the local news. The Internet is increasingly recognized as a forum through which culture is relayed and articulated, yet the Internet is a significantly different vehicle of cultural for the elderly, for adolescents, for Holocaust deniers, and for members of militias.

In the convergence of democratization, electronic technology, and rhetorical theory that is creating postmodern culture, technology has been pondered variable. We are coming to the end of culture of the book. Books are still produced and read in prodigious numbers, and they will continue to be as far into future as one can imagine. However, they do not command the center of the cultural stage. Modern culture is taking shapes that are more various and more complicated than the book-centered culture it is succeeding.

So: are we watching the slow death of the book? Is this the difference that computers will make to our profession? Those who argue for “distance education,” as opposed to the campus model, note that increasing energy costs, and the decreasing cost of electronic technology, make it inevitable that in-person education will price itself out of the marketplace. The escalating cost of American postsecondary education seems to support this position. Can we make the same argument for books? That for economic reasons they will be priced out of the marketplace and replaced by on-line text forms? Not now, and perhaps not soon. The book is still wonderfully portable, accessible, and pleasurable. But, as I consider the cost to me of this particular dysfunctional book, the virtues of on-line text become more and more apparent. Computer technology has already made a difference to English. And it has hardly begun.

Posted by Alexander Noguera