Bolter's Writing Space

In Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Bolter discusses the "late age of print"(2), a time in which print materials, like books, seem to have been supplanted by digital texts.  I'm not sure supplanted is the correct word, though, because it seems as though print materials have been supplemented in many ways by digital technology.  I feel as though I can safely say supplemented, even as the owner of almost 5000 books, as well as a Kindle, a Nook, an iPad, a laptop and desktop computer, and an iPhone.

Anyone who has read a digital text or experienced the Internet has felt the power and surge of the vast information available at their fingertips.  What used to take hours of library research is, in many cases, a few keyboard strokes and mouse clicks away.  I can share resources with students via online text collections that in earlier years might have required a field trip to a special collection at some far away library.  In the classroom, we'll often engage with a print text together, then supplement our reading of that text with digital resources that help students visualize content or understand context more thoroughly.  Likewise, our writing has become influenced by spell-check and cut and paste functionality.  If we make a mistake as we're typing a document, no need to scratch it our or crumple the page to begin anew - just hit backspace.  Yet, I'll often ask students to print out a draft, write comments and make corrections by hand, then go back to the computer screen to make edits.  Thus, the technology supplements what we're already doing with print materials.

For me, it's a case of addition rather than replacement.  I was teaching and working at Borders (to support my obviously out of control book habit) when e-readers were widely introduced.  Customers would often come into the store and comment on the irony of our selling a product that would eventually render bookstores obsolete.  (Note: the fact that Borders did, in fact, become obsolete, does not mean that all bookstores will ultimately follow that same path.)  Often, though, people purchased e-readers for specific purposes, and even as we rang up their e-reader, they also purchased print materials alongside. 

So, what is the future of print?  I'm not sure that's a productive question to ask or even try to answer.  I was at the bookstore today, and there were droves of people, myself included, purchasing print materials.  Is that an indication that print is dead or dying?  I don't think so, but change is definitely in the air (or ether).  Bolter, quoting Swen Birkerts's Gutenberg Elegies, points out that, "a change is upon us -- nothing could be clearer.  The printed word is part of a vestigial order that we are moving away from -- by choice and societal compulsion...This shift is happening throughout our culture, away from patterns and habits of the printed page and toward a new world distinguished by its reliance on electronic communications"(8).

In my opinion, the thing that seems to have changed is how we use printed vs. digital text.  It's about purpose and accessibility.  For example, my iPad or Nook comes with me on an airplane rather than the stack of books I used to stuff in my carry-on.  I can now carry hundreds of texts with me without breaking my back.  However, I always order print copies of texts I teach so that I can annotate by hand, dog-ear pages, attach sticky notes, etc. Similarly, I often use print texts in the classroom when I want students to experience "textual unity" (Bolter 10) to facilitate our work as a group.  Sometimes, though, I give my students agency as readers because "an electronic text can tailor itself to each reader's needs, and the reader can make choices in the very act of reading" (Bolter 11).  Similarly, I will sometimes ask my students to write in a traditional pen-and-paper manner, but I also ask them to word process and collaborate to edit and perfect digital documents (which sometimes do get printed out, too).  Ultimately, "each [reading and] writing space is a material and visual field, whose properties are determined by a [reading and] writing technology and the uses to which that technology is put by a culture of readers and writers" (Bolter 12).