Incorporating Technology: a Phenomenological Approach to the Study of Artefacts and the Popular Resistance to E-Reading
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Incorporating Technology: A Phenomenological Approach to the Study of Artefacts and the Popular Resistance to E-reading Submitted by Matt Hayler, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, September 2011. This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. (Signature) ........................................................................................ 1 Abstract This thesis considers the phenomenological experience of e-reading (reading on an electronic screen) as a way-in to discussing wider issues of technology and our encounter with objects in our environments. By considering the resistance shown toward reading on iPads and Kindles in popular and academic discourse as a source of valuable “folk phenomenological” report, this thesis hopes to shed light on both the particular engagement of portable e-reading and the general experience of embodied encounters with artefacts. The first chapter will consider the shortcomings of contemporary definitions of technology and aims to provide its own definition commensurate to the task of describing the intimate and very human encounter with equipment, an encounter which will be described as “technological.” In the second chapter an ontology (begun in the background of the first) will be developed which primarily considers our encounter with things that are as embodied as ourselves. This ontology sees evolution as an epistemological concern, with every evolutionary act occurring as a response to environmental pressures and producing a knowledge of that environment. This knowledge, it will be argued, in light of conclusions drawn from an engagement with Object Oriented Ontology, can be tested only via repeatable successful action with that which might be known. Such evolutionary concerns, it will be further argued, are equally applicable to our artefacts. The third chapter will focus on metaphor and critical theory to consider how e- reading in particular might function as a material metaphor, enabling productive thought. It will conclude with readings of three texts which put the language of all three chapters to work. This thesis draws on several fields, including Critical Theory, Cognitive Neuroscience, Evolutionary Epistemology, and Philosophy, the bringing together of which is intended to be of use to the still emerging Digital Humanities and the work's home discipline of English Studies as it gets used to the substantial alterations in the substrate of its object of study. 2 Table of Contents Title Page --- 1 Abstract --- 2 Table of Contents --- 3 Introduction --- 4-24 Chapter 1 - The Tools of Our Nature --- 25-93 Chapter 2 - The Nature of Our Tools --- 94-167 Chapter 3 - Thinking Through Artefacts --- 168-253 Conclusion --- 254-259 Bibliography --- 260-293 3 To take embodiment seriously is simply to embrace a more balanced view of our cognitive (indeed, our human) nature. We are thinking beings whose nature qua thinking beings is not accidentally but profoundly and continuously informed by our existence as physically embodied, and as socially and technologically embedded, organisms. - Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind 217 We are frightened and rejoicing witnesses. We have experienced the transition from the pen to the typewriter, then to the electric typewriter, then to the computer, and all this in thirty years, in a single generation, the only one to have made the whole crossing. But the voyage continues. - Jacque Derrida, Paper Machines 31 This may be the awakening, but it feels curiously like the fantasies that circulate through our sleep. From deep in the heart I hear the voice that says, “Refuse it.” - Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies 229 The Digital Humanities are becoming increasing important to contemporary Humanities research. The field can be traced back at least as far as the 1980s and the emergence of “Humanities Computing,”1 but despite this perhaps surprisingly long history the boundaries of its modern incarnation are still being fought. Mark Sample offered a round-up of the Digital Humanities related talks and workshops at the MLA 2012 conference in Seattle and noted that the “list stands at 58 sessions, up from 44 last year (and 27 the year before). If the trend continues, within the decade it will no longer make sense to compile this list; it’ll be easier to list the sessions that don’t in some way relate in (sic) to the influence and impact of digital materials and tools upon language, literary, textual, and media studies.” But even as interest and, significantly, funding has grown, panels from the MLA 2012 conference, such as “Debates in the Digital Humanities,”2 demonstrate the issue: what exactly are the Digital Humanities? The 2011 Digital Humanities conference held at University College London was organised under the theme “Big Tent Digital Humanities” and, at least in part, sought to address this question. The “big tent” approach calls for a wide variety of digital tools and media 1 Though we might trace the field back further to the cybernetics movement of the 1940s and its earlier inception in the 20s, see Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Mind. 2 A panel which would also become a forthcoming book on the same theme edited by one of the panel participants, Matthew K. Gold. 4 related study to come together under the banner term of DH; the opposition often calls for a greater focus on the use of computing in Humanities research and emphasises the creation and dissemination of digital tools as a hallmark of the field3. In Melissa Terras’ talk at DH2010, “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon,” she raised this issue for scholars who described themselves as digital humanists, that they “must not only understand [their] discipline [them]selves, but be able to communicate it succinctly to others,” and this paper was still frequently being referenced in abstracts and sessions for the MLA and DH conferences of 2011 and 2012. Whilst it is not my task here to answer the question of what should rightfully be considered DH, this thesis aims to be a contribution to this simultaneously emerging and yet wholly established field, and one which subscribes to the big tent approach by pushing at the edges of what should be included under its name, particularly in terms of theory. I want to make a phenomenological argument about how we understand and interact with technology, but the technologies that I will focus on to draw my conclusions, electronic reading devices, raise arguments which are increasingly central to the Humanities, and to English Studies in particular: If we want to stand against it, if we want to grudgingly accept it, if we want to embrace it then we must start to understand what happens when reading moves away from paper and onto a screen. This is a huge issue, and as such my particular interest here is not with any or every screen, but with the portable digital devices of the last four or five years, devices which, as will be argued, are the first real threats to the printed book as the primary carrier of written information. I want to argue that we make a significant mistake if we don't learn the lessons of Book History, bibliographic and textual scholarship, and also of recent theoretical work in the Digital Humanities, by taking into account the impact of the substrate on which our reading materials sit, and as such I believe these new artefacts deserve our attention. But understanding is hard won. This thesis will argue that to understand e- readers, e-books, and readers' reaction to them, we must also better understand how we use technologies and artefacts more generally. E-reading is a special case of this wider phenomena and I hope to show that to understand either the specific instance or its parent group impacts upon our conception of the broader or narrower term. To better understand technology as a class of physical equipment4 we must understand how we 3 For more on these issues refer to Gold (ed.) Debates in the Digital Humanities. 4 We'll also consider, in passing, intangible technologies, ways of extending our abilities which aren't dependent on a physical item, man-made or naturally occurring, but the focus of this thesis is very 5 define it, how we interact with it, how it changes us, and how we make changes to it over time; I will argue that e-reading is the perfect case study for all of these effects. To better understand e-reading in turn we must negotiate the same principles, and we should turn to prior studies of technology to better situate them. As I have already said, this pushes at a basic definition of what the Digital Humanities might be, but it nevertheless sits on a continuum from the theoretical work undertaken, at least retrospectively, in DH's name in the 1990s, work which formed the basis for the contemporary field. In Writing Space (Bolter, 1991), Hypertext (Landow, 1991), and Hyper/Text/Theory (Landow, ed., 1994) Jay David Bolter and George Landow set out theories, and theoretical implications for the new digital literature, databases, and environments that were starting to impact upon English study. These texts were rightly influential, but they were also very enthusiastic about the new forms and sought largely to see how the American academy’s poststructual strategies of the time could be mapped onto digital products; there was little interest shown in the potential downsides of a shift in media from print to pixels, nor what was going on during programming, what effects code and coding might have upon the reader’s reception of a text.