Computers and Writing

Chapter 13

The World Wide Web has experienced expansive growth creating outlets for personal expression, popular culture and ways for businesses to develop economic plans based on this technological explosion. Hewlett-Packard has done this through its conception of Cooltown where a future is envisioned as a wireless and wired world where human lives are connected with machines, with information technology, making life easier through constant connections to the Internet world.

In Cooltown, mobility is controlled by computer technology made possible through the constant technological developments that make computer chips smaller every year. Smaller computers would be put to work in unusual places such as t-shirts, buttons or other unexpected places. (This reminds me of a news story I heard the other day. There is a new breast implant that is being designed that can play music. Unusual use of technology to say the least! Click the link above to read more about this innovation. I had to read more about it because I had all sorts of questions – where do you plug in your headphones? Do they come with built-in speakers? How do you download music?) The Cooltown concept is to show how technology can be beneficial and improve the standard of living.

The Cooltown model offers a useful conception of cool writing according to Rice. The model takes into account the assumption that everyone would have access to this fantasy place of a technology driven life. But more importantly, the more relevant features of Cooltown that apply to cool writing are mobility and the interlinking of activities. These ideas have a cool background in that representations of cool in the 50’s involved the important role of the automobile in teenager’s lives. Rice uses the example of the movie American Graffiti that was set in the 50’s/60’s and depicts various scenes that are focused around the presence of automobiles. HP takes this movie metaphor and uses it in Cooltown as a metaphor of mobility.

HP sees for Cooltown an interlinking system that can be drawn from media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his book Understanding Media. McLuhan saw media as being either hot or cool, based on the definition of the medium used and the participation required by the audience to make sense of this definition. His interest was primarily based on the degree of participation required by the audience and this definition was developed in the early 1960’s. There have been numerous changes in media technology since then, so his theory doesn’t hold up well. But, Rice claims that McLuhan’s definition can be generalized and still used to view media in a different way than what we are accustomed to.

Hot media, according to McLuhan, requires little participation by the audience in order to understand the content. Examples of hot media are print and film. The participation required for this media involves the audience to use mainly their eyes to view the film or read the text.

Cool media requires extensive audience participation, such as the telephone where one person must speak into the receiver to be heard, and the other person must listen. It requires two people to participate. Cool media also involves interlinking ideas such as writing about a school subject. A student participating in this activity links the subject (example biology) with writing. Rice also mentions using the computer for writing as a cool media form and he also cites the example of CNN news. On CNN, juxtaposition is used to show sports updates, breaking news, weather information etc., while a reporter is simultaneously reporting on another subject. McLuhan’s definition of cool media involves media that is low definition, requires high participation by the audience and interlinks with other media forms.

McLuhan’s definitions of media and cool are relevant in electronic writing in that technology makes possible the interlinking of various activities. For example, English writing classes take place in computer classrooms; people can gain knowledge and information quickly on wars and other topics in foreign nations. Ideas can be juxtaposed such as the CNN Headline News example.

McLuhan’s cool media definition also creates a commercial angle for media that HP uses to portray Cooltown. Cooltown is based on the products that HP sells – computer and computer technology. Cooltown is another way for HP to sell their products by attracting young customers by using the term “cool” and by showing an interlinking society that is connected through businesses and lifestyles. In HP’s Cooltown, people will be cool because they use technology in all aspects of their lives.

Rice then takes the discussion more into commercialism and technology and the marketing technique of tie-ins. Tie-ins use one product to gain attention to other products a company sells. He uses the example of movies, specifically Harry Potter. The film itself is just part of the business. Other commercial aspects of the film involve products such as Harry Potter glasses, capes, costumes, dolls, etc. Other examples of tie-ins could be a feature story in a major newspaper about the movie or even about a new product. The story may actually be a paid advertisement. To become intelligent consumers and not just passive recipients of consumer culture, we need to be aware of the existence of tie-ins.

AOL Time Warner is a prime example of a business that utilizes tie-ins. AOL Time Warner owns CNN, People Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Time Magazine and Netscape. CNN sometimes features stories that have sub-headings for People Magazine, People’s website features a Netscape navigation bar, ads for Time Magazine and Sport Illustrated can be found on CNN’s website. If you did not know that all of these entities were owned by the same company, you would think these organizations were participating in corporate cooperation, or maybe even actually purchasing advertising. This is misleading to the consumer. Reality is AOL Time Warner is using all of its holdings/products to link to other holdings/products in order to establish a common customer base and to promote these products simultaneously.

Another example of a company using tie-ins is Yahoo.com. Using internet tie-ins, Yahoo.com in 2002 listed winners of the Grammy awards and offered a link to their companion site Launch. Short clips of these artists were available and the artist’s CD could be purchased from this site. Rice asks us to pay attention to these links and take note of whether or not these sites are related commercially.

Rice goes on to mention other uses of tie-ins such as PBS’ website that has a “shop” link and tie-ins to various PBS shows. Absolut.com uses flash technology to offer games, allow the user to make their own films and to view the company’s videos, inviting participation by the consumer (McLuhan’s definition of cool media) in order to entice visitors to purchase Absolut Vodka.

Cool writing in these examples is used as an economic activity. Rice says that this activity can be considered relevant to our cool writing as students and can be used as a way to make complex connections to persuade our reader to agree with our viewpoints in our writing.

Chapter 14

Rice discusses cyberculture and how this term has different meanings to different people, just as the term cool does. The World Wide Web links vast amounts of material related and unrelated through web pages, weblogs, chat rooms, games, file sharing, video and animation. The various mediums used in cyberculture have in common the ability to combine technology with other forms of expression that can exist outside of technology. The image of cyberculture can be seen as being strange at first, futuristic, building upon older forms of media and interconnected.

Science fiction author William Gibson defined cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators…..a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.” What is interesting is the fact he wrote this in his 1984 novel Neuromancer eight years before the web was created by Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee got the idea for the web when he worked at CERN. At this organization he saw scientists working independently and as a result, projects were often duplicated. Many times these scientists and their projects could have benefited from other projects, but the knowledge of these other works was not shared. Berners-Lee’s first effort at creating the World Wide Web was the program Enquire. This program would record connections between projects and people at CERN. His vision was to create a way to link all information contained on all computers. His project modeled McLuhan’s work in that unrelated information can be linked in unique, subtle and provocative ways.

Rice continues his discussion of linking information by referencing the website, www.sportsline.com. At this site various writings on sports related issues are posted in a newspaper type format using a pull-down menu for navigation. This site appears to be a single entity authorial site, but in fact numerous individual writers who more than likely work independently and in isolation from each other create it. The site connects these authors and writings together by linking to each other or back to the home page.

Another site Rice refers us to is www.everything2.com. This site links various nodes to different writings with a common word. For example, the word “people” could link to a poem, to lyrics, or to another composition that mentions the word people. However, these compositions would more than likely be created by different people in different contexts, but yet would convey a common idea. This site requires participation from the contributors. This style is known as cooling and has been referred to before by Rice in the beginning of Writing About Cool.

Hypertext can involve various levels of participation by the reader. Some websites involve the process of mainly reading. Other sites invite the visitor to participate more actively by clicking on various links. However, some sites require more provocative participation by offering dense interlinking, juxtapositions and imagery that the visitor must navigate through in order to gain meaning from the site. Examples of this type of site are www.jodi.org,
www.Rhizome.org and www.trashconnection.com. These sites can make the visitor feel uncomfortable, frustrated or confused, creating a contemporary version of pathos. These sites consider discourse as allusive and the meanings are up to the visitor. These sites are considered ambiguous cool writing and can be compared to the writings of William Burroughs. They promote a new type of cool rhetoric and require a different, more involved participation from the audience in that it is up to the visitor to decipher meaning from the site.