Bradley Dilger
Western Illinois University
© Copyright 2004 Bradley Dilger
Technology’s presence in everyday life has increased steadily over the past two centuries. This evolution has been documented in academic and popular writing, with almost as many perspectives on technological change as there are texts. Many writers explicitly suggest, or otherwise indicate, that ease, or “making it easy,” can successfully help us understand technology, learn to use technological systems, and confront the development of electronic technology—even the changing nature of technology itself. [1] Contemporary American culture provides numerous examples of ease functioning in this role. It figures prominently in the marketing of products and services as different as DVD players, car insurance, hair dye, and appliances. Ease has incredibly profound effects on the development of electronic communication, especially computing and the Internet.
In the familiar context of personal computing and consumer electronics—what many people might name when asked for examples of “technology”—ease is defined by rapid learning, comfort in use, and high usability. Ease often means refusing to see the code: preferring a simple, pragmatic approach which doesn’t involve the complication of complete understanding. But ease has a very complex definition which has evolved over hundreds of years, and its connection to technology is by no means limited to computers and electronics. Demands for ease support a powerful system of representation which defines and shapes our experiences with, and understanding of, technology and technological systems. In ongoing research into the history of ease, I have observed a complexity of definition, a deeply paradoxical nature, and a history of gradually broadening power and influence which began hundreds of years ago and continues to this day. Ease supports disturbing patterns in the cultural role of technology discussed by Langdon Winner, Cynthia Selfe, and other scholars. However, perhaps most importantly, I have also learned that as early as the eighteenth century, ease was motivated to teach children the technology of writing—as today it teaches the technology of networked computing. Ease and writing are very closely connected, and any history of one needs to recognize the important role of the other. [2]
All kinds of writing, in and beyond the discipline of rhetoric and composition, involve learning new technologies and questioning one’s relationship with technology. If, as I believe, ease shapes the way we understand the concept of technology, then composition instructors—who have always been “teaching with technology”—should understand ease. Whether or not one is considering “new media,” computing and ease influence writing at all levels, profoundly shaping its study and production.
In this essay, I focus on the role ease plays in composition pedagogy which involves the production of new media. [3] After outlining the history of ease, and its connection to rhetoric and composition, I will discuss the implications of ease for new media. My essay concludes with the outline of four concepts which can be explored as the apparatus of electracy takes shape—either as pedagogical alternatives to ease or redefinitions more adapted to the technology of new media.
The history of ease can be considered as two interrelated strands—the connection of ease and writing, and the role of ease in the consumer economy—both building on a common original meaning.
In its oldest sense, ease was primarily economic, meaning the “[o]pportunity, means or ability to do something” (“Ease” 31). Though ease still connotes financial well-being (as in the phrase “easy street”), the second historical sense, “[c]omfort [or] absence of pain or trouble” (32), is the most common meaning, from the earliest definitions until today. With comfort, the first widespread concept of ease relied on two other qualities: effortlessness, the reduction or elimination of physical labor and intensive activity; and perhaps the most important, transparency, or freedom from concern with complications or unnecessary attention to details and procedures. [4]
Early definitions of ease were often quite ambivalent. It could indicate detachment, an aloofness or sublime state of mind made possible by disconnection from the rigors of daily life—sometimes possible because of privileged economic status, sometimes the result of behavior seen as idleness and sloth. As the economic and technological changes of industrialization reduced the amount of manual labor necessary for sustenance, ease was less often seen negatively, and even became a desirable goal. However, ambivalence still often surrounds ease, whether in the economic sense (for example, in concepts like Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption”) or perpetuation of the belief that reliance on ease indicates laziness or unwillingness to learn something comprehensible with a little hard work.
The connection of ease and writing forms the first historical strand I consider here. As ease was motivated to understand the technology of writing, its definition became more complex, and a complicated relationship between the two developed. Two new meanings of ease emerged as writing and composition pedagogies were developed in the early eighteenth century: simplicity, the apparent absence of complexity or difficulty; and pragmatism, disengagement from general understanding which fails to produce immediate reward.
The OED shows that in 1711, writing “showing no trace of effort; smooth, flowing” was considered easy. To be sure, an easy style of communication was venerated long before that time, as in I Corinthians 14:9, “So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? For ye shall speak into the air.” Joseph M. Williams, discussing the development of modern English prose (6–7), points to Thomas Sprat, who called for “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness” as possible (Sprat 111). Sprat saw complex prose as a willfully bloated form of language, which was naturally pure and clear, and attacked writers whose prose was “swollen” or “extravagant.” Other British writers such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele are often credited with creating modern techniques of essay writing, such as “equitone prose” (McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy 273). However, as Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner observe, style is not a mere matter of surface-level features (26–8), and the shift to easy style in English reflected the larger epistemological changes which occurred in the early Enlightenment.
Around the turn of the seventeenth century, more philosophers and rhetoricians believed language could transparently and accurately represent an individual’s knowledge or observations of the environment. Clarity, distinction, and ease—named as such and appearing in other forms—played an increasingly important role in Enlightenment philosophy. Sharon Crowley shows that as modern epistemology developed, knowledge production was increasingly seen as an individual phenomenon, and was no longer “enshrined in authoritative books and commentaries or in God’s law made manifest in the nature of things” (5). Arguments could be without reference to divine texts or law: “an orderly completed text, which reproduced the history of the thinker’s investigation, was assumed to constitute sufficient testimony to the authenticity of its findings” (8). Writers who chose an orderly, transparent, and enjoyable style—an easy style—created authoritativeness through their easy manner of presentation.
These ideas were quickly applied to teaching writing. As Crowley and other scholars have demonstrated, the English schoolmasters Isaac Watts and John Holmes adapted Enlightenment philosophy to pedagogical use by using ease to teach reading and writing—or, to cast the work of Watts and Holmes in technological terms, for consumption and production of the technology of writing. Watts, while better known today for his Christian hymns, was instrumental in making Cartesian method workable for composition pedagogy (Crowley 40–2, 177). An avid follower of John Locke, Watts championed Locke’s ideas, and attempted to enact his vision of gentler educational practices which “shared a concern for tailoring education to coincide with the child’s developmental level” (Schultz 63). Like Watts, Holmes embraced educational change, presenting an increasingly pragmatic curriculum and new techniques for improving the efficacy of writing instruction (Howell 125).
In his 1725 Logick, Watts transformed the four basic rules of Cartesian method—accept no unclear judgments, divide difficulties into parts, think in order from simple to complex, and be complete, leaving nothing from consideration—into learning strategies. His work combined Cartesian method and Locke’s proposals for atomization—dividing a complex or difficult subject into smaller chunks so that it could be taught—and gradation—using atomization to slow the presentation of difficulty over time—key strategies still used in writing pedagogy to this day. Watts’s second rule of method stands out: “Let your Method be plain and easy, so that your Hearers or Readers, as well as your self, may run thro’ it without Embarrassment, and may take a clear and comprehensive View of the whole Scheme” (351). He argued that both teachers and students should move “by regular and easy steps” from simple matters to more difficult ideas, keeping sentence structure simple, and arguments as brief as possible (352, 356).
Like Watts, in the preface to The Art of Rhetoric Made Easy, Holmes argued that his new approach was well-suited to the character of contemporary students. Transferring the ambivalence of ease to the classroom, Holmes built a pedagogy of ease, but simultaneously regretted the need to do so. Stating the relevance of his book, he remarked:
[I]n this Day, [. . .] School-boys are expected to be led, sooth’d, and entic’d to their studies by the Easiness and Pleasure of the Practice, rather than by Force or harsh Discipline drove, as in days of Yore. For while some of them are too Copious in Things not so immediately the Concern of Boys at School, most are too Brief in Things really necessary for Youth to be inform’d of, and none at all so happy or methodical as to distinguish between One and T’Other. (xiii) [5]
This slightly pejorative cast was well-represented in contemporary senses of ease as an immaturity or naïvete, “[m]oved without difficulty to action or belief” (“Easy” 33). Holmes engages the language of method here and in numerous other places, calling for students to be “methodical” and to “distinguish” between unities—an ability critical in Cartesian schema. Following Watts, Holmes makes writing easy through content and in presentation: he prints critical sections in larger type, annotating them with large capital letters, and ensures that chief tropes and figures are shortly stated, “for the more easy attaining and the longer retaining them in Memory” (xvi). American proto-compositionists such as John Frost and John Walker selectively embraced and extended the work of Watts and Holmes. Later writers like Barrett Wendell would be even more pragmatic, simplifying composition by completely jettisoning the classical rhetoric at the core of this early work (Connors 273–5).
As American composition matured, the reductive approach to writing often called “current-traditional rhetoric” developed. [6] Important histories such as Alfred Kitzhaber’s pioneering study Rhetoric in American Colleges: 1850–1900, Crowley’s The Methodical Memory, and Robert Connors’s Composition-Rhetoric all provide evidence for considering ease the fundamental quality which organizes current-traditional rhetoric and pedagogy. My comparison of the work of Kitzhaber, Crowley, Connors, and others shows that four trends involving ease characterize this approach to writing:
Ease was even applied recursively, guiding the subdivision of composition into separate entities, and legitimizing application of single concepts at multiple levels—such as the use of the “unity-mass-coherence” triad to guide the structure of sentences, paragraphs, and entire compositions. This universal application of ease is the ultimate realization of the “microcosmic to macrocosmic” structure Crowley calls “a nest of Chinese boxes” (132). [7]
But making composition easy for teachers didn’t necessarily make it easy for students. The assumption of close correspondence of thought and language allowed open questioning of the intelligence and work ethic of those who wrote poorly. As was true for Sprat years earlier, producing “good writing” was seen as a matter of refusing complication and ornament, and allowing the natural clarity, brevity, and simplicity of expression to assert itself. The push for mechanical correctness—well-documented by Connors (112–70)—simplified grading, but raised the bar of “good writing” far above the ability of most writers. Since teaching writing was (allegedly) easy, it was impossible for students to question the quality of their instruction based on a lack of teacher preparation. And few acknowledged the paradoxical nature of ease, such as the difficulty of writing brief, clear, easy prose—well-summarized by Thoreau, who quipped, “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short” (320).
Ease was embraced ambivalently, seen as a necessary evil, a technique composition teachers were forced to use because of the illiteracy of their students. And though critics of current-traditional methods have offered successful alternatives to many of its questionable practices—acknowledging the complexity and difficulty of writing, and raising questions about the institution of English—ease still enjoys tremendous goodwill in composition and writing. Ease sells handbooks, with titles such as Easy Writer (Lunsford) and Easy Access (Keene and Adams), and marketing slogans like “the easiest textbook for students to use.” Numerous popular forms correlate good writing and easy reading, from Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style to Jakob Nielsen’s prescriptions for writing for web sites (“How Users Read”), with little or no mention of the effort often required to write clear, brief, simple prose. Finally, despite years of research which points elsewhere, there is tremendous pressure to model writing, and also composition programs, on the transactional models of the marketplace and the consumer economy—which, notably, are driven by ease.
Since the turn of the twentieth century, ease has been widely employed to understand many technologies, especially those involved with consumer goods and services. The definition of ease became even more complex as ease became more attainable and as the penetration of technology in everyday life deepened. These changes would alter ease in three ways: highlighting the correspondence of ease with femininity; a demand for expediency, which supplemented pragmatism’s filter of relevance with a demand for speed; and finally pictorialism, a mutation of transparency which recognized the rising importance of the visual.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the advertising techniques, branding, centralized distribution, mass production, and widespread consumption which characterizes today’s economy were being developed (Strasser 17). But Americans used to making their own bread, soap, and other sundries had to be convinced store-bought goods were worth the expense. Much of the argument was made using ease. As the consultant and author Christine Frederick repeatedly argued in Household Engineering, store-bought products were easier to use—why not buy the ready-to-use name brands, and save the trouble of making one’s own? Marketing for labor-saving devices such as washing machines followed suit, highlighting the comfort and increased leisure time they made possible. Interestingly, these products were not easy to use by today’s standards. For example, washing clothes required manual operation of multiple valves and switches. There were no automatically controlled wash, rinse, and spin cycles. Additionally, poorly insulated electrical components and unshielded moving parts made these machines extremely dangerous (Maxwell). Regardless, washing via electricity was much easier than by hand—and manufacturers made sure Americans repeatedly saw household technology and consumer goods portrayed as a means for making life easy.
Before World War Two, consumer deployment of ease was largely divided among gender lines: it was suitable for family matters, for women and children, at home and school. Men at work had little need for ease (except perhaps if they wrote). The identification of ease with femininity continues today, often in a demeaning fashion: women allegedly need ease because they can’t handle difficulty. [8] However, as rapid mechanization, electrification, and electronification transformed America in the 1930s and 1940s, demands for ease began to ignore gender lines. Since there were numerous new technologies to learn and use, speed and simplicity became critical. The war effort hammered this point home, as scientists realized weapons and other war machines which were easy to operate were often more lethal—for example, an easily controlled mortar could be fired more quickly. Military-sponsored “knob and dial studies” led to the growth of new disciplines. Lessons learned with munitions and communications technology were soon applied to automobiles and other consumer goods, as demonstrated by the appearance of the journals Human Factors and Ergonomics soon after the war. Ease of use quickly became a requirement for technology, on the battlefield and at home as well. The washing machine model—hard-to-use, but acceptable for its labor saving properties—began to disappear, and was replaced with the automatic, drive-in, just-add-water model—technology not only created a sense of ease (comfort, effortlessness, etc.) but was easy to use as well.
But ease was not applied consistently—computers and other very “high-tech” systems remained arcane, hard to use, the realm of expertise. Apple famously attacked this assertion head on after introducing its Macintosh in 1984, presenting it as “the computer for the rest of us” (Turkle 41). And if the computer, which represented the pinnacle of technological advancement and development, could be made easy, couldn’t anything be made easy? Donald Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things embodies this attitude, calling for ease in the design of nearly all technological systems. However, though the function and scope of applicability of ease had changed considerably since its first application to the technology of writing more than 250 years before, it remained paradoxical and ambivalent. Macintosh critics argued it was a toy, a pretty little curiosity, not a serious computer for real work. Some derided the Mac OS along gender lines; John C. Dvorak called its rival, the IBM PC, a “man’s computer designed by men for men” (Levy 197). [9] Similarly, America Online (AOL) users were often attacked for “cluelessness” and stupidity. While the popular “For Dummies” series of self-help books has undercut the negativity associated with preferring technologies considered easy, regardless, it is often considered pejoratively.
Unfortunately, the paradoxical character of ease is still inconsistently acknowledged. “Overwhelmed by Tech,” a January 2001 cover story from U. S. News & World Report, admits that “It takes enormous computer power and programming know-how to make something complicated look simple,” but envisions the movement toward ease as a mere matter of time: “Continuing leaps in processing power and computer storage promise more horsepower to make complex products easier to use [. . .] as effortless as breathing” (Lardner et al. 33, 34). The Western view of technology seldom admits the challenge “making it easy” poses—one of the central reasons I am carefully investigating the role of ease in learning and understanding technology.
For teachers and theorists of hypertext, digital cinema, weblogs, and other new media, I believe ease creates two related clusters of difficulty: the first associated with the conceptualization of technology encouraged by ease; the second related to the differences between the print-oriented heritage of ease and the electronic apparatus of new media.
Generally speaking, ease encourages a paradoxical technological determinism which, while venerating technology, downplays human involvement in its creation and control, and encourages adopting a lackadaisical, even cynical attitude towards it. In the easy view, technology is a natural force, like weather, which we embrace if pleasant, but grudgingly tolerate otherwise. Ease supports five assumptions about technology (all present in the influential application of ease to writing):
New media are produced and displayed using computers and other electronics. Compared to writing—which has been made easy and thus appears natural and transparent—new media appear highly technological, disassociated from the tradition of the humanities, an intrusive and misguided attempt to replace poets and artists with programmers and algorithms. Overzealous hypertext advocates like Mark Bernstein perpetuate this belief by portraying established textual forms as inadequate relics, providing fodder for classifying new media an “extremely complicated” or “bad/failure” technology in the five-part schema above. Hypertext proponents who sneer at literate forms help perpetuate the belief that emergent technologies (and media) replace and destroy their predecessors—the oversimplified “supersession” model which remains powerful though frequently debunked by Marshall McLuhan, Paul Duguid, and others. Combined with the easy view of technology, this perspective reinforces the belief that the best response to new media is no response at all—better to wait for the next emergent technology, or for new media made easy.
The high profile of transparency in this view of technology can create additional repercussions. Marcel O’Gorman illustrates that valorizing transparency dissolves most conscious confrontation with the workings of technology, following the assumption that the best communication and technology appears without mediation. But unlike most writing, new media often calls attention to its mediation, through components such as scroll bars and download progress indicators. Interface control elements are sometimes even presented as part of the “content” itself, as is the case with many video games, which display the inventory, health, or game completion conspicuously (Manovich 210). Some games allow shifts quick shifts between topographic and cinematic points of view—a direct manipulation of the cinematic language which mediates game play (Manovich 83–4). This heavily interactive relationship flies in the face of “easy” norms.
O’Gorman and others have also argued that consistent demands for transparent, easy technology can lead to dependency on ease which discourages learning generalized approaches to tasks, or understanding the conceptual model behind a certain form of technology. Practical knowledge, if developed, is highly contextualized; for example, instead of learning how hypertext links function, one learns how to make links with a certain program. Robert R. Johnson has shown that for users of such systems, the lack of generalized practical knowledge can can cause serious difficulty if trouble arises:
[User-friendly interfaces] can mask the complexities of the system to such an extent that if there is a system breakdown, such as when you receive a cryptic error message that explains the problem in virtually encrypted language [. . .] you are left helpless, unable to solve the problem, and continue with your work because you are dependent on external expertise not available to you in any useful form. (28)
This has certainly been the case with new media. Consider the web-based course support software BlackBoard, widely used because it makes web site production easy—with it, creating a sophisticated course web site requires minimal technical knowledge of hypertext. To the instructor using it, the complex hypertext file structure is transparent. However, in Fall 2001, when BlackBoard began charging some users for courseware server access which had previously been free, composition instructors had to download their course materials, lose their work, or pay for continued use. At the time, to move content from BlackBoard elsewhere, hundreds of files of different types had to be transferred individually (Harris). The sudden suspension of transparency turned “a course web site” into “a collection of hierarchically organized files,” pushing many into the helplessness Johnson notes above. [11]
Johnson’s advocacy of a user-centered model of technology includes a critique of the forced novice/expert separation created by system-centered technology. Ease supports this distinction in the process of simplification, in which experts render complexity and difficulty palatable for novices (for example, in composition, classical rhetorical theory and the essay were simplified into static abstractions and the five-paragraph theme). For most users of technology, expertise remains reserved for the system and its creators:
[T]he system is powerfully hegemonic: the system is the source and ultimately the determiner of all. System-centered technology [. . .] locates the technological system or artifact in a primary position. There is no need for the user to be involved with system or artifact development, this perspective suggests, because the system is too complex and therefore should be designed and developed by experts who know what is most appropriate in the system design. (26)
Ease even encourages novices to cultivate their “inability” to comprehend the complex and instead defer to expertise (both human and computer agency—for example, by considering that programming is impossible without a sophisticated “helper” application). Perhaps acknowledging the self-deprecating yet very popular “For Dummies” book series, Johnson calls acceptance of the disenfranchising the system-centered model “technological idiocy”:
Users reside on the weak side of the idiot/genius binary. We have embedded the notion of technological idiocy so strongly in our culture that we actually begin to think of ourselves as idiots when we encounter technological breakdowns. Experts are the ones who “know,” so we let them have the power, which of course means we accept whatever is given to us. (45)
Due to the emergent character of new media, expertise should be less powerful, since to some extent, everyone using new media is a novice. However, the novice/expert binary is well-established. Software for producing digital films, hypertext, and other new media is separated into “consumer” and “professional” markets (such as Apple’s film editing applications iMovie, Final Cut Express, and Final Cut Pro). The resistance to seeing code typical of ease backs reduced support or exclusion of scripting or programming languages from consumer-level applications, since programming is presumably for experts only. Generally speaking, the assumption that new media are too complex for most folks to fully understand, let alone produce, allows the spread of the novice/expert system to new media. While students might be asked to build hypertexts or make simple new media objects, classroom use more often encourages consumption through web-based research or viewing and analysis, further enforcing the novice/expert division.
The pragmatic and expedient character of ease, and its associated portrayal of technological systems as foreign and potentially hazardous, discourages novelty and experimentation. Physical and systemic constraints often present in easy technologies enforce this restriction. The “information appliance” model Norman advocates in The Invisible Computer replaces general-purpose technology (like the personal computer) with highly specialized systems. Instead of a PC, one would have a document making computer, a music computer, a cooking computer, etc. Certainly, there are advantages to this framework (consider electronic organizers like the PDA), but these machines make experimentation less possible by restricting their function. Similarly, in the U. S. News article mentioned earlier, human-computer interaction expert Ben Shneiderman suggested making computers work like automobiles: put the working parts under the hood, out of the reach and concern of most. However, the hood is often welded shut, literally or metaphorically, excluding both would-be experimenters and those looking to repair technology on their own. [12] In writing and in new media, the use of “easy” forms discourages divergence from the norm. For example, using the templates or “wizards” in PowerPoint encourages creation of a series of slides which each have three or four bullet points, colorful charts and graphs, and an “inspirational” conclusion (Parker 76–7). Creating unconventional presentations is not supported by the software “wizards”—those in the application, in Redmond, or in Cupertino.
Given that new media arenew, it’s reasonable to expect some freedom to experiment with form, and a little less pressure to be conventional. But at least with web-based hypertext, constraints and demands for standardization have appeared rapidly. Influential writers like Jakob Nielsen have actively discouraged experimentation and deviation from the norm, even if conventional principles are questionable from a designer’s perspective:
If 80% or more of the big sites do things in a single way, then this is the de-facto standard and you have to comply. [. . .] I recommend following the conventions even in those cases where a different design would be better if seen in isolation. (“When Bad Design”)
In this model, templates and wizards become the logical method for production of new media. Given the problems Parker has observed with templates in PowerPoint, this seems extremely problematic—would a template- or wizard-created argumentative essay be acceptable in a first-year composition course? Perhaps more importantly, discouragement of experimentation also reinforces the pragmatic, vocational, even transactional character of education. Nielsen actively discourages use of the web which doesn’t fit the “e-commerce” model: “While I acknowledge that there is a need for art, fun, and a general good time on the web, I believe that the main goal of most web projects should be to make it easy for customers to perform useful tasks” (Designing Web Usability 11). [13]
What happens when we try to make the technology of computing easy?
When pedagogical strategies developed using ease entered widespread use in the eighteenth century, there was strong correspondence between the epistemological foundation that backed ease (the modern world-view of the Enlightenment) and its dominant technology of expression (writing). As shown above, the bond of ease and literacy strengthened dramatically in the nineteenth century. Ease and literacy grew up together, affecting each other in a complex relationship with huge ramifications for technology and culture as a whole. For this reason, I see three possibilities: (1) ease will change to adapt to embrace the epistemology, subjectivity, and technology of electracy; (2) the application of ease to electronic communication technology will result in the reproduction of literate-oriented forms which use electronic means of delivery; (3) ease is simply irrelevant, and attempts to make new media easy will be ineffective. Since some evidence exists for each of these conclusions, I will consider each of them in turn.
I have already outlined changes in the definition of ease, many responses to the increased ubiquity and changing nature of technological systems. It is reasonable to expect more changes in ease, both the introduction of new meanings and changes in the relative importance of specific denotations. Recently ease has embraced pictorialism, an awareness of the visual which reflects the ongoing shift in thinking W. J. T. Mitchell calls “the pictorial turn.” As Mitchell defines it, this change is a recognition of the rising importance of the visual in many forms—icons, images, film, video, and more (3, 8–12). Like Mitchell’s pictorial turn itself, the alliance of ease and the pictorial is deeply ambivalent; as shown above, the usefulness of images in graphical user interfaces is recognized, but simultaneously derided as “pretty pictures.”
However, this development could be a manifestation of the second possibility: does the pictorialism of ease domesticate the visual, making it comprehensible with the tools of literacy? Patterns of making pictures easy often imply a specific approach, such as Edward Tufte’s “chartjunk” and “data ink” (91–133)—visualization concepts which have much in common with the brevity, clarity and simplicity triumvirate often motivated to make writing easy. The use of literate forms to organize new media is not surprising; after all, at least at first, “the content of any medium is always another medium” (McLuhan, Understanding Media 8). Walter Ong has also shown that electronic communication produces a “secondary orality,” a self-conscious return to qualities of speech in electronic form (11). However, is the current situation hybridization, or just wrapping literacy in an electric shell? Development of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for web encoding, which first addressed expanding functionality and capability, has shifted to the establishment of technologies which promise to achieve the separation of form and content—that is, the transparency of perfect communication (Brooke). Web-based hypertext has developed features much more closely allied to traditional printing and publishing than the patterns of “trailblazing” proposed by Vannevar Bush, or the complex interconnections of the Xanadu hypertext system envisioned by Ted Nelson.
To be sure, the presence of literate features in hypertext, such a top-to-bottom, left-to-right organization, doesn’t mean that its development will remain tied to print literacy. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to create print versions of specialized forms like concurrent versioning system (CVS) browsers, which allow collaborative development and distribution of computer program code, and weblogs, which do move the web’s hypertext structure in the direction of Bush and Nelson. These and other forms represent significant departures from literate patterns of organizing and displaying information. But it’s difficult to understand what limits will be placed on the creation of expression with computers if we expect web technology “to function like the technology of printed words” (Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola 349). Is the dominance of the web by literate forms the result of attempts to make computing easy—from the original conception of the graphical user interface as a metaphorical paper filing system, to usability standards which rely on literate-oriented methodologies like alphabetization, gradation, and simplification? Are demands for literate models like ease keeping the web and computing tied to print oriented epistemology?
The promise of fantastic 3D interfaces notwithstanding, serious questions about computer technology still remain, and articles similar to “Overwhelmed by Tech” regularly complain that technology has not yet been made easy enough, and manufacturers need to redouble efforts to make it easy. This brings me to the third possibility presented above: what if ease is ineffective outside of the context of literacy? In Heuretics, Gregory Ulmer, building on Crowley’s argument about the epistemological shift behind the methodical memory, argues that the problems faced by those creating communication using computer technology are radically different than those confronting writers in the nineteenth century. Given the movement toward postmodern epistemology, subjectivity, and electronic technology, we should question the use of atomizing and simplifying technologies designed for Cartesian method and the technology of writing.
Gradation and simplification assume that breaking things down into steps presented over time leads to understanding. But that assumes a linear, sequential approach is the best method. I believe many people prefer experimental “learning by doing” to linear tutorials and manuals because graphical user interfaces organize information using a variety of patterns, with many paths to the same goal (such as keyboard shortcuts, application menus, and mouse interactions). Sometimes it’s better to consider the “difficult” whole, not the “simple” parts. Applying literate values and methods to computing may be as ludicrous as insisting that computer program code be written using rhymed iambic pentameter so that it will be easy to memorize.
If the strategies which defined classroom use ease are irrelevant, might ease be irrelevant too? In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich repeatedly notes that computers make some processes considered difficult for writing quite easy. For example, the question of invention, deeply affected by the shift to a modern epistemology (Crowley passim), is once again radically altered. For new media, creating material from scratch is unneeded thanks to the ready-mades available in “media databases” of various kinds. Invention involves “modification of an already existing signal [. . .] one does not have to add any original writing; it is enough to select from what already exists” (126, 127):
The practice of putting together a media object from already existing commercially distributed media elements existed with old media, but new media technology further standardized it and made it much easier to perform. What before involved scissors and glue now involves simply clicking on “cut” and “paste.” [. . .] Pulling elements from databases and libraries becomes the default; creating the from scratch becomes the exception. (Manovich 130)
As Ulmer points out, and Manovich recognizes, it’s not that new media are the first to engage this “logic of selection”; obviously, academic citation and quotation practices, the tradition of commonplaces in rhetoric, and the study of intertextuality all engage this logic in various forms. Making writing easy called for disposal of the canon of invention and the logic of selection, since both were considered too difficult, and too much borrowing was disgraceful. But this is no longer the case. Making writing easy was a monumental breakthrough. Making new media easy? It’s no big deal, at least when the question of invention is considered.
If we assume the nature of the orality and literacy relationship applies to literacy and electracy, of the three possibilities for ease in electracy, the second and third possibilities discussed here will be critical; we’ll need to consider the establishment of new techniques which redefine “ease.” In the early eighteenth century, economic meanings of ease dominated; in the twentieth century, the most powerful meanings shifted to transparency. Though predicting the character of “ease” for the twenty-first century is difficult, if not impossible, I believe we can examine alternatives to the narrow noetic field of ease. I have four ideas in mind.
The technological model associated with ease ignores the hybridity often associated with technology, bifurcating its character into inferior and superior, new and old, natural and technological, as well as novice and expert. Though this logic of binary oppositions has been thoroughly discredited, it remains powerful. For computer technology, escaping these oversimplifications is necessary for a variety of reasons, the first related to the hybrid character of technological change. The “user-centered rhetorical complex of technology” envisioned by Johnson (34–40) offers a viable alternative to this model with added benefit of design tailored to reducing negative effects of ease discussed above.
Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola argue that Western culture’s current obsession with literacy is restrictive. I’ve already noted that overcorrection—rejection of the nature of literacy out hand—is just as regrettable. Instead, we need to understand that literacy has developed, and electracy will be developed, not only through the production of new concepts, but by finding new ways to use old concepts, and by finding value in concepts which once seemed irrelevant. The ideas bracketed by Ramus, Descartes, and their contemporaries might be quite useful in the apparatus of electracy. Ulmer’s attempt to develop a poetics for electracy in his textbook Internet Invention follows this model. Considering the usefulness of Roland Barthes’s concept of the obtuse meaning for working with images, he writes:
It is important to remember that the obtuse or “third” meaning has been at work all along, but that the literate apparatus was not suited to exploit it fully. We are speaking of an imaging technology, and the arts never left off making images throughout the epoch of literacy, even if images were rarely granted cognitive, let alone scientific, status. (Internet Invention 45)
In some ways, all of Ulmer’s research focuses on reassessment of practices made transparent by the conventions of the academic essay and the application of ease to the technology of writing. This explains his interdisciplinary approach—valuable ideas may appear outside of “English” structures, and will be missed unless we keep an open mind. It’s not surprising, then, that the exercises in Ulmer’s textbook involve decidedly non-literate, non-composition activities—which may seem as strange to our literate-minded students as the pragmatic exercises of Watts and Holmes appeared to eighteenth century students used to the declamations and recitations of classical rhetoric.
The highly visual nature of new media, and Mitchell’s concepts of “pictorial turn” and “imagetext,” suggest the concept of “image” will be at issue in electracy in numerous ways. In Internet Invention, Ulmer shows that “image” is not only a matter of the pictorial and visual, but a component of numerous artistic forms, alternately expressed as atmosphere, voice, or mood, with established methodologies in literacy (many associated with the development of poetic or figurative language). His assignments confront the development of image-oriented forms, based on the assertion that the strong visual component of electronic media will reinvigorate “image reason”—a conductive method of inference which complements the deduction and induction of literacy (9–10). Manovich provides strong technological support for this assertion, pointing that computers represent new media objects which seem heterogeneous—a research paper, the score of a symphony, a clip from a film, an algorithm for reducing the red-eye in amateur photography—using the same representational code:
All new media objects, whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations [. . .] For although from one point of view new media is another type of media, from another it is simply a particular type of computer data, something stored in files and databases, retrieved and sorted, run through algorithms and written to the output device. That the data represent pixels and that this device happens to be an output screen is beside the point. (27, 46–7)
Therefore, hybridizing “text” and “image” (or, really, any two forms of computer expression) is not only quite easy, but normal. Systems for creating and editing such mixtures appear in new media software—compositing, morphing, blending, layering—making media programmable, manipulable by human- and machine-operated processes. Manovich points out that computer science has developed concepts like “transcoding” to describe the the ability of computers to perform these operations, and broadens its definition to include exchange between forms which exist on computers—bits, bytes, packets, and pixels—but between human-oriented forms as well—both the words, sentences, and paragraphs of literacy, and the visual components excluded from it (46). If Ulmer and Mitchell are right, developments in ease will have to address images and text, and the connection of ease and the pictorial will have to be more sophisticated than the common-sense notion that visualizing words makes them easy. Mitchell’s insistence that the pictorial turn indicates a problem, not merely the “rise of images,” is one step towards recognizing the need for new thinking in this arena.
New media pedagogy needs to develop concepts which will enable learners to confront the representational code of new media and in fact the very nature of encoding and mediation made invisible by ease-oriented models of communication, such as George Orwell’s characterization of good writing as a windowpane. I believe that pedagogical use of translucence, rather than transparency, would motivate some of the framework of ease, but with critical differences which acknowledge the technological nature of new media and the conductive logic native to electracy. Of course, the new media notions of “filters” aren’t strictly a visual construction, nor is translucence, and we should imagine it in many possible ways. As we work with new media and translucence more often, it should be possible to consider both without assuming a visual character.
Manovich points out that the relationship between the different parts of new media objects is fundamentally different than that of writing. New media objects are modular: they can be stored independently of each other, as well as combined into other objects, while retaining both independent and coexistent properties. A new media object “consists of independent parts, each of which consists of independent parts, and so on, down to the level of the smallest ‘atoms’—pixels, 3-D points, or text characters” (31). This modular character affects the structure of metaforms of new media, like the Web, as well as the logic and practice of computer programming and new media creation: “the modular structure of new media makes such deletion and substitution of parts particularly easy” (31). In turn, this gives rise to a second critical property, variability:
Old media involved a human creator who manually assembled textual, visual, and/or audio elements into a particular composition or sequence. This sequence was stored in some material, its order determined once and for all. [. . .] New media, in contrast, is characterized by variability. [. . .] Instead of identical copies, a new media object typically gives rise to many different versions. (36)
From a pedagogical perspective, these fundamental differences have several important consequences, all of which call into question concealing the code of new media, or erasing the borders of the objects of which it is composed. Generally speaking, making the modular structure or variable character of new media transparent would cripple our ability to deal with it. Better to make it translucent, that is, to hide the code only partially. First, if the relationship between the parts of a new media object can be easily altered, it might be less difficult to determine the desired arrangement through trial and error (or other creative processes). In writing, arrangement of compositions was made easy by the imposition of a recursive hierarchical structure of word, sentence, paragraph, and essay. This allowed readers to avoid the difficulty of developing a mental representation of a complicated linear argument, and the trouble caused by rearranging or rewriting prose. Such strict forms are unnecessary for new media. Because it’s possible to alter arrangement quickly—and to use computer-controlled processes to do so—there’s no need to restrict arrangement to hierarchical, linear forms, or to invent strategies for their domestication.
Second, new media won’t necessarily involve the production of a single end product, with a simple author, which is duplicated and shared by all readers or viewers, but variations on a theme customized according to individual preferences—some controlled by the producer, some by the consumer (Manovich 36–7, 125). Therefore, new media producers would need to understand the relationships between the various parts of new media compositions under construction, as well as the ways those parts might be articulated into wholes. It might also be desirable for producers and consumers to more regularly communicate about new media objects they share, as opposed to current practices, where authors often write for an unseen “General Reader.” Indeed, Manovich points out that strict separation of producer and consumer is a view of communication typical of high literacy not supported by contemporary literary theory (119). [14]
Third, the form-content relationship is fundamentally altered if form is mutable and if it’s possible to quickly alter the content associated with a form, or vice-versa. As Manovich puts it, “A number of different interfaces can be created from the same data” (37). Producers of new media will need to understand ways that “media databases” harness modularity and variability to create different sorts of texts, images, and other creative forms which haven’t yet been invented. The pattern encouraged to make composition easy—selection of an established form optimized for the desired message—is not likely to be workable.
The concept of translucence could help answer these pedagogical needs by allowing the appearance of codes and the boundaries of objects—which I believe will be necessary in order to teach the production of new media. The largest difference, however, would be degree; unlike the dichotomies of literacy and ease, which enforce the belief that “it’s transparent or it’s not,” translucence would allow variations in the foregrounded technological character of an object, system, or practice. From a pedagogical standpoint, this makes much more sense than all-or-nothing transparency. While students are learning the function of a new media object or creation tool, its borders and algorithms would be only as translucent as necessary. As learning proceeded, translucence could be increased, if so desired, or the visibility of encoding retained. In some ways, this strategy would be an update to the literate idea of “gradation;” an new media object or practice would be presented in its entirety, with the visibility of its encoding presented in whole or part for pedagogical purposes. Translucence is also better suited to acknowledgment of hybridity, which, as noted above, didn’t fit well with the highly dichotomized perspective of literacy. The choice between transparent and opaque forbids the interaction of multiple objects or practices, whereas translucence would permit much more complex relationships—the programmability of new media Manovich proposes.
The final practice I wish to propose confronts the pragmatism and expediency which often characterizes ease. Complementing translucence, which I see as a property to be cultivated in new media objects and technological systems under production, iteration is an approach to creating new media (the analogue to “writing process”). If, as Manovich argues, the fundamental difference between new and old media is that the former are “programmable,” those who wish to produce new media might employ methods of programming, which is heavily reliant on loops of various kinds. In fact, many of the computer systems we imagine as the most sophisticated (IBM’s chess-playing Deep Blue, weather simulators, and encryption-breaking tools) operate by repetitively performing the same tasks on slightly different sets of relevant data.
Manovich considers the loop extensively, in both programming and as a narrative device important in literature, in new media, and the moving pictures which preceded cinema (314–22). Repetition—simply performing a task over and over—and iteration—repeating the same task with slight differences each time—both harness the modularity and variability principles of new media, in conjunction with another property, automation, which shifts tasks from human control to computer-regulated processes. Iteration is more relevant for new media, since its production with variation more closely follows the post-industrial logic of customization than repetition’s industrial logic of exact duplication.
Internet Invention suggests students use an iterative loop to construct the central project of a new media course. Students perform the same function (documentation) on a set of variables (the four areas of Ulmer’s “Popcycle”: Career, Family, Entertainment, and Community) in order to produce data (the central project, the “widesite”) intended to support the production of the “image of wide scope” which is the ultimate goal. [15] I believe the method Ulmer has selected is not particular to the production of the wide image, but a reasonable method of invention suitable for any new media project. A pedagogy that actively sought to teach students how to displace repetitive tasks to computers which could perform them more quickly and effectively, and to use iteration as an process for both invention and analysis, would take the place of similar movements in ease (atomization, alliteration, and alphabetization, which shifted some decisions to Cartesian method or the form of the essay).
I don’t mean to turn students into programmers, but rather, as Johnson argued, to disrupt two assumptions: (1) some people are programmers, and some people are not; (2) programming is an advanced form of computer usage exclusive to experts. The parallel to writing is obvious: some are writers, some aren’t; literature is the advanced, elite form. I hope that as computers develop, what’s considered “programming” will change. To continue thinking analogically, this has already occurred in document production. Everyday word processors allow writers to make decisions about page numbers, font selection, and other book encodings previously restricted to expert designers or printers. Similarly, as the programmable nature of new media becomes less esoteric, and more tools for programming are invented, methodologies which support programming should affect the formation of new practices of writing.
Writing process pedagogy offers a relay for bringing iteration into the classroom. However, the practice of iteration I envision differs from the step-by-step mode of research, prewriting, drafting, and revising essays because it does not necessarily shape the final artifact, but produces material and methodologies which support it. Whereas from the “drafting” stage forward, writers work on their final utterance in some form, iterative development often focuses developing procedures for computer-generated final products based on human-designed scripting, or systems for processing data and displaying incremental results. The programming language Perl began this way, and grew from a tool for processing text in certain situations to a widely used general-purpose language (Wall et al. 645–7). Iterative thinking and creating offer ways to leverage the processing power of computing and the characteristics of new media to construct the “different interfaces for the same data” Manovich envisions; in addition to “writing processes,” the creators of new media can “process writing.”
Iteration would also provoke student interest in the creation of technologies by offering direct contact with creative processes, and showing direct connections between technologies and human agents. In this way, the simplistic view of technology typical of ease would be disrupted; it would be difficult for students to claim technologies they shaped were natural forces completely beyond their control. Once again, the change would follow process pedagogy’s attempts to suggest students have control over their own writing and language.
I offer iteration and the other ideas for teaching new presented here knowing that a lot more study is necessary to develop my work into an comprehensive pedagogy. Though my research is incomplete, I believe it shows the merit of considering the role of ease in composition and new media pedagogy. On the one hand, ease helped make widespread literacy possible. But on the other hand, ease shapes the understanding of technology in a manner which needs to be carefully considered by composition instructors teaching the production of new media.