September 21 2017

Kathaleen McDonald

Dr. Wielgos

Senior Seminar

21 September 2017

Response Seven: Science | Fiction: New codes and old conventions

            Overall, I found that I connected to Hayles’s and Tabbi’s pieces the most influential and relatable to my future career. Hayles’s Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary and Tabbi’s “Locating the Literary in New Media” both offer interesting insights on how technology is being used today, whether it be good or bad, and how it is growing.

            I think I resonated most with the last few sentences of chapter five in Hayles’s Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. She says:

digital technologies do more than mark the surfaces of contemporary print novels. They also put into play dynamics that interrogate and reconfigure the relations between authors and readers, humans and intelligent machines, code and language. Books will not disappear, but neither will they escape the effects of the digital technologies that interpenetrate them (Hayles 186).

She then ends the chapter, and the text, by saying “digitality has become the textual condition of twenty-first century literature” (186). This is so true. Even in today’s secondary classrooms, we are seeing more and more tablets and laptops being given to students to use not online outside the classroom, but inside as well. Students can read their textbooks on a Chromebook, they can do their math homework using programs on Google. Since my field is English, it would be unreasonable for me to think that every single one of my students will want to read a physical book when they have technology at their fingertips. Although I personally prefer a physical book over reading on a screen, many of my students will feel otherwise, and will take kindly to the twenty-first century values that are coming up in classrooms more and more. Not that this is a bad thing, but it is definitely something to be aware of, and make sure that students do not get too caught up in the world of technology.

            Although I found Tabbi’s article a bit more confusing than Hayles’s text, I was able to come away with some worthwhile quotes and ideas. Tabbi says early on in the article that “Innovations in commercial technologies, it seems, have given a Second Life to academic cultural studies, allowing scholarship to continue its exploration of every human, posthuman, and animal (but only occasionally mineral) implication of our ever-changing, ever-diversifying, present and determinedly ‘contemporary’ culture” (Tabbi, 311-312). I think that the evolution of technology has allowed us to be able to learn so much more about the world than ever before. If I wanted to know something about underwater basket weaving, for example, I could research online many articles and resources to help me learn about the topic, whereas before it would be much more difficult—going to the library, finding what I was looking for, and looting through books until I found something worthwhile. Being an English major in 2017 is, I think, a lot better than being an English major ten, twenty, or fifty years ago. We now have so much information at our disposal that researching has become a lot easier (if you know how to use proper databases), and many websites and blogs have contributed to helping students understand difficult texts. Tabbi also notes that “Old technologies don't disappear, and neither do they lose their world-shaping and world-sustaining power, even if they recede to the background” (328). No one uses Windows 99 anymore (at least I hope not), but at the time that technology seemed revolutionary, and not only did it help us become more literate with technology, but helped us create better technologies that allow me to use my tablet to take notes on a pdf.

            I think both Hayles and Tabbi make interesting points to how technology is used today and how we should use it effectively. I think that I will keep Hayles in mind in my own classroom someday, and Tabbi helped me realize that technology has helped us not only as students, but as people to become more knowledgeable about the world.