Portfolio

Preface

The multimedia/electronic medium along with traditional forms of learning will help the students of “today” be successful in the classroom and comfortable with their intellectuality by giving them a wide variety of ways to learn. 

In this revision, I attempted to take my argument from writing assignment one and merge it with evidence from writing assignment three. I also changed my argument and made it more specific with the introduction of schools and youth specifically. I kept many of the anecdotes in my first project and brought them over into the new paper. Though I kept a lot of these anecdotes, I did a lot of revision and editing to match the development of my writing skills over the course of this semester. I introduced new language, and sentence structure to make my personal experiences more compelling to the reader, and overall more effective. I believe that with my writing, I have professionally added to the conversation that surrounds my topic in an educated and intellectual manner, and I will enjoy seeing where this conversation goes. I think it is cool to take such a looked up to person (in some cases) such as Birkerts and argue against them with strong evidence. In my revision, the most work I did was adding new evidence from the writers we studied throughout the rest of this semester. Writers like Graff and Birkerts were looked at early on in the course, but I was able to come across people that helped my argument such as Janet Murray and Marshall McLuhan. Throughout this course, I was able to see my writing develop substantially, as I got more and more confident after turning in my major writing assignments, and got good, honest feedback from my peers. I think that when I came here, I had good short-term writing skills as well as strong diction, but I struggled with keeping my papers concise and to the point, without leaving the reader with questions to ask. As I developed, I saw my ability to get to the point and have a strong, blunt argument increase more and more after each assignment. As a reader, I became much more open minded as I read a lot of different points of view on the same subjects, and I saw how you can really argue for anything. I took this into consideration and had a little fun writing my assignment three, because it is almost the exact opposite of what I am arguing in this new revised paper. I challenged myself to write against what I thought, and it turned out to be the best paper I had written thus far. Though there was a substantial amount of evidence for the last paper I wrote, I like to give myself credit for attempting something that many others would back away from because of how challenging it could be. 

Learning in the Electronic Age: A Continued Discussion

For decades, there has been a lively conversation surrounding the education of young people, and the best ways for them to learn all sorts of new information across many different subjects. In recent history, we have seen a shift in the power of literary devices used in schools. Educators are beginning to move away from traditional learning devices and are becoming more and more intrigued by the vibrant colors and simplicity of electronic learning and multimedia literature. Critics such as Sven Birkerts believe that electronic and multimedia learning is slowly doing more harm than good; not only to those still in school, but to all of those who are exposed. Other critics such as Marshall McLuhan and Gerald Graff believe that the multimedia and electronic medium in literature and learning serve as enhancements and offer an alternative way to interpret information. The question that has arose: Which type of learning is better? Similar to Janet Murray, I believe that the electronic medium, in conjunction with traditional forms of learning can help students by giving them options to cater to their intellectual strengths and weaknesses. Whether it be electronic learning devices such as Google and YouTube, or traditional forms such as books and encyclopedias, every student learns differently, and we should not limit them to one or another. 

In high school, there were many people that I had close personal relationships with that weren’t always up to par when it came to the classroom. These people were held back by the strict guidelines of the public-school educational system and were not able to explore the many different aspects of their minds that had not yet been unlocked. School was like a prison for the intellectuality of these kinds of people; Constantly being told how to do things the rightway, when all they wanted to do was do it their way; A way at which they can perform best. At times, these students were penalized for thinking and interpreting information differently than the common core curriculum that is so heavily enforced to this day. Upon graduation and the next step of these people’s lives, they finally were allowed to do what they want, in their own best interest, instead of everyone else’s. Some of these people have done amazing things with their no longer suppressed talents; Starting businesses, trading stocks, producing music, getting involved in the community or their post-secondary institution, and really getting out and doing something that they can be proud of, without trying to please a high school teacher breathing down their neck. These kinds of people may not have been the best at reading or writing, but they learn in their own unique way that they can understand, and ultimately have an impact on the world. Having this opportunity can be a life changer to someone who was told that they would have trouble making out in the “real world,” when the real world is all they ever needed to succeed. 

This phenomenon is widely represented in Gerald Graffs article Hidden Intellectualsm. Graff’sbelieves that students should be able to think freely, in ways that interest them the most, rather than forcing them to read books and historical literature that is usually uninteresting to the young reader. Graff effectively uses an anecdote of his own to relay this message to the reader. He speaks about his childhood struggle with reading and writing and how he had trouble enjoying books and learning from them. On top of that, he was classified as a “jock” in school and was not typically seen as the biggest intellectual when it came to the eyes of his peers. Graff had a different kind of intellect most commonly referred to as “street smarts.” This kind of informal education was learned outside of school and in today’s society can be seen as some of the most important and vital pieces of knowledge any person can ever have. He found out later in his life that he was interested most by articles in Sports Illustrated Magazine. Sports Illustrated ended up being Graff’s gateway to really understanding, and enjoying reading and writing, or his “hidden intellectualism” as he calls it. He found his passion of writing through this unorthodox, non-educational texts as many of his teachers would have called it. Lots of youth nowadays find their lifelong passions in similar ways that Graff did. The ability to intellectually venture beyond the walls of a school can help create some of the most powerful, interesting, and unique ways of thinking that the young mind can develop. 

On the other hand, there was a realm of kids looked at as the test takers, the studiers, and members of the infamous “Straight A-Club.” These students performed best with the highly structured, “fill-in-the-blank” teaching methods of public-school educators and worked well with the countless of pounds of textbooks, study packets, and sleep deprived mornings after a long night of studying. These students are the students that Birkerts can relate to, in his book-oriented world of knowledge. Though they are academically successful in the eyes of educators and administration, what they lacked was the ability to think freely, on their own, without a frame or something to build off of. They lacked those streetsmartsGraff mentioned countless times that are ever so important to be successful outside of the classroom. These are the kids that had a hard time outside of school, in their “unstructured” time, and are having trouble getting used to the uncanny freedom of a college campus. Public school may have properly prepared them for the SAT but did not prepare them for the rigorous lifestyle that the common college student must endure. 

As a college student, the act of learning is seen very differently from the eyes of a student than the professors that teach it. Students go to college to learn, to interpret, and to find exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives. They have to take the information they receive and interpret it in their own way; The way that they can best make use of their intellectual strengths and weaknesses. Here is a hypothetical: If three different students are thrown into the same college level philosophy class, they can have three very different interpretations of the course by the end of the semester. One student can take the philosophical teachings and be moved to further become a professional writer, using the techniques modeled in class as well as the inspiration from historical and modern philosophers to create writing of their own. Another student can take the philosophical teachings and relate them to religion and further become a religious figure or have an important role in a specific religious establishment or discipline. The last student can take the material, ask questions, and make connections to the complex world of science, and later pursue a career in science. Situations like these can happen in any institution, with any class, and with all kinds of students as different minds interpret the same material in very different ways. Does this mean that one of the students is wrong? Of course not. All of the students are neither right nor wrong as their interests are specific to them and what they have a passion for.

My personal experience came in junction with a small amount of freedom that I was given in my 11^thgrade English course. My teacher had given us a surprise assignment, and it was to write a poem, no longer than a page, about anything we wanted. Around the large, dark cinderblock room, students’ eyes lit up, jaws dropping at the unprecedented freedom to write that knelt before us. After only a few minutes of thinking, my fingers, along with the rest of the room, began to hit the keys faster than ever before, minds spilling out onto the small computer screens that made our faces glow. I wrote a poem about baseball, which has been my passion for as long as I can remember. By the end of the class, I had filled out the page to its maximum capacity, smiling at my screen in awe at the magnificent work I had thought up so quickly. In all the excitement, I forgot to turn in the assignment, receiving a zero out of 20. Nevertheless, after this realization of my own “hidden intellectualism” and literacy, I have been writing poetry since, and still do nowadays. Poetry is my way to read, write, and interpret in my own unique way, and this is just a small model of literacy upon the near limitless different learning experiences that students can endure. 

Marshall McLuhan probes the concept of multimedia literature with his book, The Medium is the Massage. In this book, text is accompanied by images of all sorts that allow the reader to derive a message from the conjunction of the two. In the book, McLuhan writes, “The ear favors no particular ‘point of view.” We are enveloped by sound.” This is an analogy to interpretation, the ear being us and the way we learn, and the ‘point of view’ being the numerous learning devices we can encounter. In relation to what I had mentioned before, multiple people can hear the same music and pay attention to different components, the same way people can be presented with the same information and learn different things. Any medium is open to interpretation and inference by anybody who may cross its path, so we should not limit what is presented. 

Although I corroborate the idea of multimedia literature, I think that McLuhan takes it to an extreme, and does not include other types of literature as effective. He says, “The thing of it is, we must live with the living.” By saying this, he infers that we must live with the new, and not so much the old. McLuhan does present a good argument with this statement along with the rest of his book, the failure to consider other forms of literature is hypocritical. He has to understand that multimedia may be some people’s bread and butter, but for others, it might not be very effective. 

Sven Birkerts in his book The Gutenberg Elegiesargues the importance of books and handwritten literature because of its ability to make reading and learning “personal” and “private.” While some people learn best by themselves, in the comfort of their own home, office, or place of study, this may not be the case for everyone. What about the people that enjoy group discussions or book clubs to elaborate on their reading experiences? Additionally, Birkerts argues heavily against technological advances in literature and schools because of its complexity and ability to make us lazy. He believes that we are not ready for change, and we do not know the long-term effects of technological literature because of how new it is. Although Birkerts made these statements many years ago, before Google and YouTube, etc., youth like me have grown up using these technologies and are very used to it. Just because something was working for so long, doesn’t mean that we can’t improve. 

I find Janet Murray’s argument to be much more wholesome in addressing both new and old forms of literature, unlike the previous critics above. In one of the opening lines in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, she writes that “technology…dramatically extends our capabilities…and the book extend our memory. The idea of technology benefiting us, not only in the classroom, but in all aspects of our lives in conjunction with traditional forms of writing serves as a happy medium for people to pick and choose what works for them best. The transition between forms of literature has been progressing for thousands of years. From oral to written, and from written to the screen, change is inevitable, but we still see all forms to this day. Stories told from our parents and writings engraved on hundred-year-old monuments and statues are all examples of past literature still prevalent today. In a hundred years, who is to say we won’t still be looking back on blogs and articles on the internet, once we develop into new forms of literature?

You can see that in a society where everything is moving so fast, there can be a lot of commotion surrounding what works best. Critics like McLuhan and Graff are up for the “new age” of learning, and allowing students to express themselves uniquely, while critics like Birkerts argue that the book has been the key to success for years and should stay that way. 

In the end, it is up to the person taking in the information, learning the material to decide what is best to help them reach their potential as an intellectual. 

Works Cited

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Faber and Faber, 2006.

“Gerald Graff’s Hidden Intellectualism Essay.” Bartleby, http://www.bartleby.com/essay/Gerald-Graffs-Hidden-Intellectualism-FKCT6SGYTC.

McLuhan, Marshall, et al. The Medium Is the Massage. Penguin, 2008.

Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. The MIT Press, 2017.

I pledge my word of honor that I have abided by the Washington College Honor Code while completing this assignment.

ORIGINAL

Abstract 

In the last 20 years there has been an exponential skyrocket of all sorts of electronic and multimedia literature, whether it be online encyclopedias, blogs, social media, articles, magazines, and even multimedia books. People of all ages are exposed to different types of multimedia and electronic literature for a variety of reasons. Electronic literature and multimedia texts have taught our society to become lazy, shallow, and inattentive, through the lack of understanding of allpeople. 

            “Out with the old, in with the new,” is what they are saying when it comes to revolutionary technology and learning techniques, but is this really the best possible outcome for our society? In the last 20 years there has been an exponential skyrocket of all sorts of electronic and multimedia literature, whether it be online encyclopedias, blogs, social media, online articles, magazines, and even multimedia books. People of all ages are exposed to different types of multimedia and electronic literature for a variety of reasons. If you want to learn a quick summary of a country’s culture, use Wikipedia. If you want to learn how to change your car’s oil, use YouTube. Or maybe you just want to sit back and enjoy a nice article online through your local news website, or as a child/teenager, play a video game. We see it every single day and it only seems to be getting more and more prevalent as the years go on. This all may sound dandy on paper, but it seems to have taught today’s society to become lazy, shallow, inattentive, and impatient with traditional forms of literature and learning that have proven to work for hundreds of years. Electronic literature and multimedia texts such as Luminous Airplanes, Wikipedia (and furthermore Google), Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, and violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto are just a few examples of literature that people seem to have trouble understanding. These kinds of literature have no good purpose in our society and are only pushing us backwards. Known scholars and famed writers such as Sven Birkerts and Nicholas Carr can help corroborate this stance. 

            Before we get too far into things, let’s start at the root of the argument: What is literature? Maybe it is a book, online newspaper, movie, and some may even argue for video games. The list goes on and on, without one singular definition set in stone. Before written language, the only types of literature were oral and picture. Mouth to mouth interactions spread knowledge through villages and were passed down from parent to child. Pictures and hieroglyphs drawn on walls of caves and dwellings told stories, and passed down knowledge of the land to the people that came after them. Fast forward hundreds of years later to paper and pen, and this now adds to the literary world as people that learned language could read, interpret and ultimately learn from these written texts. Further down the road, people began to tell their stories in movies, documentaries, games, and other multimedia platforms to broadcast to the world. You can see that literature is not defined as one singular “thing,” but one thing that isdefinite about alltypes literature is the ability to understand and interpret the media being presented, whether it is in text form, or not. The age we are in now has so many different types of literature, but not all carry the component of understanding, interpreting, and learning, which is why there is such a large commotion around this topic in the first place. 

            Although Sven Birkerts has been dubbed as controversial in some of his takes on the electronic age, his take on the way that many of us get information nowadays is perfect. Search engines, Google being the most common, has allowed us to pick up our phones, or open up our laptops and find the answer to nearly every possible question anybody could ever ask in short summarized form. The problem with this is we now know little bits of information, instead of understanding it as a whole, and realizing exactly where it is coming from. Birkerts describes this as knowledge having “nothing to do with the gathering or organizing of facts,” but “seeing through facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns.” This “wisdom” he speaks of essentially is just the ability to understand and interpret, and overall learn from the root of 

whatever information you were presented with. There is nothing special with remembering and reciting information off of the top of your head, other than having an above average memory. 

            Additionally, Nicholas Carr furthermore addresses Google and its problems in his essay Is Google Making us Stupid?Many times, when we have a question of which we do not know the answer to, there is a little voice in the back of our heads urging us to “just Google it,” and often times, that is exactly what we do. Google, Wikipedia, SparkNotes and other websites alike allow us to get summarized facts and literature in a matter of seconds. Long gone are the days of shuffling through the pages of an encyclopedia or dictionary trying to figure out the answer; Long gone are the days of educating yourself to get to the finish line. Instead, we let the answer bounce around in our head for a minute or two, just to be forgotten in the same amount of time we spent finding it. All of these summaries and lack of extensive reading in order to learn has been affecting our abilities to stay focused when it does matter. For example, trying to enjoy a book, a reading for a class, or scrolling through a lengthy article on your computer has come to a point, whereas Carr says, “my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages” (Carr). We’ve been so used to having summarized information so ready at our fingertips that we have trained ourselves to turn our heads the other way when it is not presented so easily, or when we have to dig deeper than the surface to find what we need. Personally, I have noticed this as well. Rarely do I find an extended piece of literature where I am fully engaged for an extended period of time, even if the reading is for a grade, or just my own enjoyment. In high school, my peers and I seldom read assigned books (and other extended texts) all the way through without frustration and reluctance. SparkNotes and Shmoop became many of our go-to sources for quicksummaries of chapters, analysis of characters and vocabulary our teachers expected us to know. Though we all knew it was wrong, why spend the hours upon hours reading the actual book when you can get the same basic info in as little as 10 minutes? It seemed great in the shallow 

academic environment of high school English, but many of us had a rude awakening once we entered the rigors of a college level English course, such as this one. I (as well as many others) found it hard to read the hundreds of pages expected of us, along with much deeper analysis without contemplating putting the text down for good and finding a way around doing the actual work at hand. 

            Next, we have hypertexts such as Paul La Farge’s Luminous Airplanes. Though this text is a little extreme in comparison to my argument, it is an excellent example of the overall problem with lack of understanding of electronic literature and multimedia presentation. In short, Luminous Airplanesis essentially a life story about a boy living in Upstate New York. If you ever came across this electronic text, you may or may not be able to figure out the overall plot of the story because of how confusing it is to navigate. Lucky for us, the plot of the story is not in our concern as we are concerned rather about the presentation. The story is a series of pages, each with certain words linked via hypertext to another page, containing other hypertexts, and so forth for another three hundred plus pages. The options are endless and you can click one different way than before and be brought upon with a completely new story. You can read it backwards, you can start in the middle, and you can jump around. Although this adds a new “exciting” component to the story, and introduces an alternate way to read it, this does not mean that you shouldread it this way. It is way too confusing, hard to follow and understand, and all of the portals, storylines, and distractions take away from the overall plot of the story. Hypertext driven literature and others alike are littered across the internet for anybody to come across. One of the world’s biggest websites, Wikipedia is a prime example, and its hyperlinks are much more extensive than Luminous Airplanes, so far as to say they are infinite. 

Lastly, let’s look at a very untraditional and new type of literature: video games. Specifically, I am going to look into the third-best setting game of all time, Grand Theft Auto 5. 

In this game, you can do whatever you want, from driving exotic sports cars and playing rounds of golf, to flying military fighter jets and robbing banks. I, along with the majority of the other owners of the 100 million copies of this game sold, found themselves intrigued with the real-life scenarios and open-ended tasks at hand and continued to dig deeper into the game and its characters. Over countless hours of gameplay I found my young self not even batting an eye towards some of the horrendous actions that a character can carry out in this game such as murder, torture, and extreme reckless driving. I found myself not only desensitized, but slightly intrigued at the actions; Maybe because I could not actually do any of this in real life, or maybe because this is what the game taught me. Now, I doubt that the creator of the game’s master plan was to desensitize kids from blood and gore, but nevertheless, it happened. Whether it was a simple misunderstanding or a complete out of control spiral of the game itself, this “literature,” as we say, taught many people, young people, a lot of very bad things. 

I understand that this argument is very widespread and overall debatable in many different ways. For example, some people may not see video games as literature, and that is perfectly fine. Others may say that books are still extremely prominent as we continue to read them in our schools, and hundreds of thousands of books are still being published every single year. The argument contrary to mine that stumps me the most though, is the noteworthy literary attribute of “the medium.” In terms of literature, the medium can be anything that takes a message or information and pushes it for others to interpret. A medium can be a frame of a movie, a post on someone’s wall, a page of a book, or the words coming out of someone’s mouth; they are all the same. Marshall McLuhan probes this concept with his multimedia book The Medium is the Massage. In this book the pages are littered with black and white photos of seemingly random images that may (or may not) have to do with the little pieces of text that are accompanied by it. Many quotes describing literature and interpretation of mediums in your own way are also found throughout the book. Since this medium can essentially be anything, who am I to say that these alternate forms of literature don’t convey their message? After all, any medium is open to interpretation and inference by anybody who may cross its path. On the contrary, I come in and say that this is utter nonsense. I do agree with the fact that ten different people can look and the same piece of literature and have ten different interpretations, but how is this possible if the text or movie or picture is incompressible to start with? You can read The Medium is the Massageand think highly of the multimedia presentation and how inspiring and changing the pictures were, but in the end, you would get the same out of the book if the pictures were not there, and it were all text. Even if I did see the medium that McLuhan is portraying as significant, multimedia and electronic literature has been moving too fast for us to fully grasp what it is capable of any way. The transition between oral and written literature took over a thousand years for the world to adapt, and from written literature to moving plays, acting, and eventually movies took hundreds. And do think that we can extraordinarily “upgrade” from that in just a few short decades? It’s no wonder we cannot fully understand many of the things that are being filtered in and out of our brains every day, from the glow of our computer screens. 

We are all so optimistic and in a hurry when it comes to the future of technology, but we need to step back and really see what we are getting ourselves into before we move forward. Examples like The Medium is the Massageand Luminous Airplanesas well as video games and other multimedia texts, online or not, clearly present why we need to take a different route. People cannot understand texts like these, and they are overall teaching us negative habits. The future may be ready for us, but we are definitely not ready for it. While we wait, sit down, read a book, and learn a thing or two before we get too far ahead of ourselves.