Notes on the Deviance of Textuality

N. K. Hayles has simultaneously opened my eyes and confused me terribly when it comes down to the notion of “media translation.” I look on my past self as one who naively embraced at face value the oversimplification that physical and electronic representations of text are, in a broad sense, two sides of the same coin. While this is true to the extent that these texts carry the same “actual order of words and punctuation,” the method and styles of delivery incorporated into these two domains collectively and fundamentally alter the interpretation and, therefore, the meaning of the text that is read. This is a point that I had never considered, and while I agree with it in some ways, I am stubbornly resistant in others.

As Hayles noted, electronic text is in the nascent stages of what will almost certainly be exponential growth over the next hundred years and beyond. But, at this point in history regarding the interpretation of different forms of text, I am inclined to ask a fundamental question: so what? In my opinion, information is information, regardless of how it follows its strangled path from the mind of an author to that of a reader. Once a person has read something and has theoretically understood the text and subtext, hasn’t the author’s purpose been fulfilled (here, I am assuming that the author’s purpose would be informative, over experiential)? The manner in which the information is presented will enhance, diminish or leave unscathed the reader’s ability to comprehend the text and subtext based on personal experience and preference (i.e. if a reader despises reading on a computer, they may not glean the same pertinent information from an eBook as they would from the physical analog). Obviously, many writers are interested not only in the information or thoughts they convey but in the manner or style in which they are conveyed in. In such contexts I completely agree that there is much style to be lost in any translation that alters the author’s originally form of presentation.

Hayles also remarks how no physical or electronic text can ever be duplicated on pg. 94. I completely agree with this, but would ask whether or not these differences (say, between “identical” copies of the same edition of a physical book) actually manifest in varied informational interpretation by the reader. I would say that such interpretation of text and subtext would more rely on the reader’s mental facilities and nuanced personal contexts to comprehend and form a customized perception of that information. To give a personal example, I just bought a used textbook from the student store. I opened it up and saw that vast portions of it had been highlighted over. To me, reading text that has been highlighted by someone other than myself is distracting and occasionally perplexing. I will (hopefully) absorb the same information from the book that all my classmates will, but the added distraction may end up diminishing my capacity to do so. In such a way, nearly identical copies of the same book (highlighted and not) could have very different effects.

On an unrelated note, I thought that the following Van Lieshout quote on pg. 111 was very interesting “You do not buy software, you rent a first draft...the buyer has turned into an unpaid beta tester...” I had never thought of it that way. I feel like such a tool!