C&W 08: Bolter Keynote
Open Writing Spaces: Inscription and Technology
Bolter began his speech by joking about the number of us (me included) sitting in the back row to access power for laptops.
In sum, it seems that he is tracing a trajectory from what he calls cyberspace, which was preoccupied with VR to what he calls Augmented Reality (AR). Augmented reality, in comparison with VR, isn’t completely immersive. It basically allows a mashup between a real world environment and some digital element, such as bringing a Second Life avatar onto the college campus (in real time, not just doing some photo composition).
From Bolter’s own website:
The AR user typically wears a headset, similar to that used for Virtual Reality. The difference is that with AR the user can see her physical environment; the computer overlays information or graphics in her field of view. Blair MacIntyre and I have been exploring the domains of education and entertainment by blending digital video of actors and sound into the AR view. Examples described in the DART web site include: Alice’s Adventures in New Media and Three Angry Men.
So, why do it though? It might be cool to have a meeting with my friends in Nebraska and Oklahoma where we each are experiencing the same space through AR, but is it really necessary? Are you seeing something here I’m missing?
Some further notes:
- historical context: hypertextual writing–there was a movement of literary hypertext; he is still emphasizing the power of hypertext to have influenced a number of following events. Makes a split between the internet and belles lettres–seems like he’s presenting a bit of a binary.
- Enter Game Studies. New form of digital inscription. Games include procedural rhetoric. Anyone else need to know more about procedural rhetoric? Ian Bogost Persuasive Games is the text Bolter quotes. Seems like Bolter is identifying games that are overtly persuasive, even political. Go to http://newsgaming.com . Are these games a new kind of writing, Bolter asks?
- Comparison of the hypertext movement and the game studies movement. He thinks the literary world successfully beat back the hypertext movement. The response to the game studies movement comes in the form of a binary: either games are dangerous or games are innocuous. The hypertext movement was a formal movement (focusing on form), but the gaming movement is more informal, eclectic.
- Furthermore…cyberspace as the “old” paradigm; cyberspace as an escapist space from the “real” world. Bolter uses the example of VR technologies. VR turning into a new interface…of course the reality of VR is much less impressive than the hypothetical. VR centers on disembodiment: “our identities have no bodies” Barlow “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.
- So, the paradigm shift from this concept of cyberspace to ??? “ubiquitous computer” “tangible computing and media” “wearable computer” “mixed and augmented reality”. Shift that moves from completely immersed (VR) to an integration of technology into real environment.
- Factors in this shift: personal computer, graphics, inter-computer connection
- Bolter’s term is augmented reality (AR): in the 1990s the idea was that a worker could have information from a computer that supports the construction of the real world
- His interest is more in AR experience-based situations than worker modifications.
- He provides examples that use virtual reality technology but that use the actual space as a background for the experience and that allow you to switch identity positions during the game and experience the space from the point of view of all the characters. The third example is “Voices of Oakland [a civil war graveyard]“, that works just like an audio tour of a museum except that it uses GPS tracking to tell where you are and play the appropriate audio at the appropriate time. In the next edition he hopes it will be possible for participants to contribute their own voices to be heard by other participants. Other ideas are being able to deliver users poetry at given subway stops through something like their cell phones when they arrive at a certain stop.
werguy said,
May 25, 2008 at 9:17 am
Gah! I wish I had been there for this panel!
This plays right into my existing and continuing research, and I’ve cited Bolter all over the place.
1) The literary movement didn’t /need/ to beat back the hypertext movement. The hypertext movement hasn’t captured much audience because a) no one knows it exists; and b) when someone does encounter it, the hypertexts themselves are so scattered that they violate all expectations of narrative; and c) it costs too darn much to get the software to view some of the more famous hypertexts; and d) hypertexts share with other PoMo writing experiments an utter contempt for audience. In short, no one has to “beat back” something that no one knows about and that sucks for those few who’ve heard of it.
All of which is just me whining and bitching about the ivory towerness of hypertext literature in the same way I do about PoMo lit at nearly every opportunity. If narrative isn’t for the reader/hearer/viewer, it’s a pointless and tragic waste of creative energy.
2) I agree with your question at the head of the post: why does this matter? I feel the same way about all the VR stuff from the nineties that I’ve read. On the one hand, the more we achieve telepresence and 24/7 sensory connectivity, the less use the average person will have for writing to communicate in their everyday lives. But business, government, and academe aren’t going to stop insisting on written traces, and they’re the ones for whom 99% of writing gets done /now/.
I think what’s hanging up Bolter and a lot of others is the idea of WRITING as something more than a communicative technology. It’s as if we must protect WRITING as some sacred space of which we are high priest(esse)s. With all due respect, bull@^*%.
The really tragic thing about a lot of the VR/AR speculation and theorization is that it misses one niggling little point that I may just have to write a paper on: /humans don’t need sensory immersion to experience affective immersion/!! We have had “VR” since the first MUDs and MOOs. Maybe since the telephone. When humans become engaged in a communicative environment, /that is the reality they’re experiencing/.
werguy said,
May 25, 2008 at 9:20 am
Adding to section (2), para 2:
Forgot to write this part: If we need a rice bowl to protect, it ought to be RHETORIC, which is the whole point behind writing from its very inception millennia ago.