Words on Screens: Secondary Literacy in the Age of Cybertext as a New Hybrid Medium

Here is an introduction to a paper I wrote in 2005 (I will include the rest of it here later on).

“Words on Screens:”

Secondary Literacy in the Age of Cybertext as a New Hybrid Medium

“’We live in each other’s brains, as voices, images, words on screens.’”

-- Turkle, 257

“Computers don’t just do things for us, they do things to us, including our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people.”

-- Turkle, 26

“We construct our technologies, and our technologies constructs us and our times.”

-- Ibid, 46

“What compels me is that the painter has tried to find a visible expression for that which lies in the realm of the intangible. Isn’t this the most elusive and private of all conditions, that of the self suspended in the medium of language, the particles of the identity wavering in the magnetic current of another’s expression? How are we to talk about it?”

-- Italics mine, Birkerts, 78

”Words on Screens:” Secondary Literacy in the age of cybertext as a new hybrid medium

Introduction

The use of communication through the Internet is one of the most fascinating phenomena in the media world of the last decades. It gained public face as a collective network in the 1990’s, and by now has become a pervasive medium of communication impacting the everyday lives of societies and cultures all over the world. Today, people use the Internet for work and leisure, for finding information and for communicating with co-workers, family, friends and complete strangers. While in its first stages of development the Internet relied mostly on text, today it offers its users the multimedia experience of sound, image and video (e.g. webcam, earphones and microphone chats). However, regardless of emerging new possibilities, communication through text online, which I refer to as “cybertext”, is still the most widespread type of communication on the Internet. Cybertext communication includes e-mail, instant messaging, chats, bulletin boards, discussion lists, forums and more.

With the introduction of cybertext to our social world as a prevalent medium for communication, it is important to assess what has changed in our experience of the world and of language as a result. The investigation of this cultural phenomenon through the lens of media theory engenders multiple questions about the nature of this medium and its effects on society, in psychological, sociological, phenomenological and epistemological terms. This paper set out to discover what is unique about cybertext as a medium, what are its unique characteristics that differentiate it from previous prevalent media, and what are some of its current affects on language and society, as well as possible future affects. Particularly, the focus on the textual aspect of this communication connects it with questions about literacy, print and orality. I will compare between the representation of the world and the experience of language in the age of cybertext, with that representation of the age of print and of the age of oral cultures.

Cybertext differs from printed text because the text online is interactive, created by immediate dialogue by several people, often without an editor and a finished product, in contrast to a novel or a magazine, for example. Cybertext, more than print, is a medium of reciprocal communication. It differs from electronic text which is not characterized by immediacy and interactivity, even though it is flexible for editing, such as the type of writing done on electronic word processors which allows to tinker with the text with options like cut and paste. Most importantly, this paper argues, that cybertext communication is a new hybrid form of literacy which combines characteristics of primary orality, literacy (of print age) and secondary orality, with unique characteristics of internet communication. I call this new hybrid form “secondary literacy” because it is a new type of literacy which relies on “primary” literacy of the printed age, but encourages a different type of thought, culture and style. Unlike writing of the print age, cybertext is immediately reciprocal, simultaneous, and easily edited, encouraging a social interaction rather than a solitary act of writing or reading, in other words, encouraging dialogue and flexibility over the fixation of language of the printed work.

The theoretical background of this paper relies on several key media scholars: Walter J. Ong, Sherry Turkle, Sven Birkerts and Barry Wellman. These thinkers have inspired the ideas of this paper. From Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) and The Presence of the Word (1967) I took the key terms of presence and absence, interiority, permanence and evanescence, context, in order to discuss the phenomenon of cybertext in relation to sound and vision, to orality, literacy and print, and to compare some of their major characteristics, such as the unique psychodynamics of oral cultures and the characteristics of the print age. From Birkerts’ Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994), I was inspired to explore the depth of cybertext as a medium, and to compare the process and significance of reading, which Birkerts elaborates on, because his writing about reading as an elevated experience reminded me of textual experience of online communication. I use Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995) to discuss characteristics of postmodernity in online identity, and I rely on her overall theoretical framework which refers to computers as epistemological and discursive “objects-to-think-with” about our world. Finally, I use Wellman’s sociological theoretical and empirical studies of the Internet in The Internet in Everyday Life (2002), to ground some of my ideas in empirical data, as well as to discuss the effect of intimacy and emotional support online. This paper intends to converse in dialogue with these texts and to offer my own point of view about them in relation to cybertextuality.

In addition, I have relied on research online and empirical scholarly studies as well as on my personal experience in the writing of this paper. For the purpose of this study, I visited several chat rooms, read log sessions of chats from different online sources, collected logs of instant messages from online friends, and surveyed my old e-mails archive. I have also read many online articles and Wikipedia entries and visited cyber-poetry websites. One of the most helpful sources for understanding computer mediated communication, particularly in psychological terms, was psychologist John Suler’s online encyclopedia The Psychology of Cyberspace, which compares in-person interactions with online ones, discusses “text-talk” and offers psychological analyses for specific aspects of the computer mediated communication (CMC) phenomenon.

In terms of my experience, I have been an avid Internet user since 1996, when I was sixteen. The Internet as a medium has always mesmerized me, especially as a medium for communication. I have built several personal websites, one of which has a small but intimate communal discussion forum of music fans, in bulletin board form. I have communicated with people I know as well as with strangers, from my country and from different countries, in different ages, and in two languages (Hebrew and English, and sometimes some French), and in different communication program and forms: Internet Relay Chat (IRC), instant messaging (Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, Trillian, AIM), discussion groups, website interaction, e-mails, chats and more. I have also had the opportunity to meet many of the people I interacted with online, from Europe, the United States and Israel.