{"id":5892,"date":"2015-04-11T09:22:24","date_gmt":"2015-04-11T15:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5892"},"modified":"2015-04-12T09:15:06","modified_gmt":"2015-04-12T15:15:06","slug":"comments-on-commentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5892","title":{"rendered":"Write-only"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"woodblock\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Alan Jacobs<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Digital textuality offers us the chance to restore\u00a0commentary\u00a0to\u00a0its pre-modern place as the central scholarly genre.<\/p>\n

Recent technologies enable a renewal of commentary, but struggle to overcome a post-Romantic belief that commentary is belated, derivative. …<\/p>\n

If our textual technologies promote commentary but we resist it, we will achieve a Pyrrhic victory over our technologies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Andrew Piper<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The main difference between our moment and the lost world of pre-modern commentary that Jacobs invokes is of course a material one. In a context of hand-written documents,\u00a0transcription<\/em>\u00a0was the primary activity that consumed most individuals\u2019 time. Transcription preceded, but also informed commentary (as practiced by the medieval Arab translator Joannitius). Who would be flippant when it had just taken weeks\u00a0to copy something out? The submission that Jacobs highlights as a prerequisite of good commentary \u2014 a privileging of someone else\u2019s point of view over our own \u2014 was a product of corporeal labor. Our bodies shaped our minds\u2019 eye.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s interesting\u00a0that Jacobs and Piper offer different explanations for the diminished role of textual commentary in intellectual life. Jacobs\u00a0traces it\u00a0to\u00a0a shift in cultural attitudes, particularly our recent, post-Romantic\u00a0embrace of\u00a0self-expression and originality at the expense of humility and receptiveness. Tacitly, he also implicates the even more recent, post-modern belief that the written word\u00a0is something to be approached with suspicion rather than respect. For Piper, the reason lies in an earlier shift in media technology: when the printing press and other tools for the mechanical reproduction of text removed the need for manual transcription, they also reduced\u00a0the depth of response, and the humbleness, that transcription\u00a0promoted. “Who would be flippant when it had just taken weeks\u00a0to copy something out?” These explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course, and the tension between them seems apt, as both Jacobs and Piper seek to explore the intersection of, on the one hand, reading and writing technologies and, on the other, cultural attitudes toward reading and writing.<\/p>\n

While the presentation of text on shared computer networks does open up a vast territory\u00a0for comment, what Jacobs terms “digital textuality” is hardly promoting the kind of self-effacing commentary he yearns for. The two essential innovations of computerized writing and reading \u2014 the word processor’s cut-and-paste function and the hypertext of the web \u2014 make text malleable and provisional. Presented on a computer, the written work\u00a0is no longer\u00a0an artifact to be contemplated\u00a0and pondered but rather raw material to be worked over\u00a0by\u00a0the creative I <\/em>\u2014 not a sculpture but a gob\u00a0of clay.\u00a0Reading becomes a\u00a0means of\u00a0re-writing. Textual technologies\u00a0make text submissive and subservient to the reader, not\u00a0the other way around. They encourage, toward the text, not the posture of the monk but the posture of the graffiti artist.\u00a0Is it any wonder that most online comments feel as though they were written in spray paint?<\/p>\n

I’m exaggerating, a bit. It’s possible to\u00a0sketch out an alternative history of the net in which thoughtful reading and commentary play a bigger role. In its original form, the blog, or web log, was more a reader’s medium than a writer’s medium. And one can, without too much work, find deeply considered comment threads spinning out from online writings. But the blog turned into a writer’s medium, and readerly\u00a0comments remain the exception, as both Jacobs and Piper agree. One of the dreams for\u00a0the web, expressed through a computer metaphor, was\u00a0that it would be a “read-write” medium rather than a “read-only” medium. In reality, the web is more of\u00a0a write-only medium, with the desire for self-expression largely subsuming the act of reading.\u00a0So I’m doubtful about\u00a0Jacobs’s suggestion that the potential of our\u00a0new textual technologies\u00a0is being frustrated by our\u00a0cultural tendencies. The technologies and the culture seem of a piece. We’re not resisting the tools; we’re using them as they were designed to be used.<\/p>\n

Could this change? Maybe. “Not all is lost today,” writes Piper.\u00a0“While comment threads seethe, there is also a vibrant movement afoot to remake the web as a massive space of commentary. The\u00a0annotated web, as it\u2019s called, has the aim of transforming our writing spaces from linked planes to\u00a0layered marginalia.” But this, too, is an old dream. I remember a lot of excitement (and trepidation) about the “annotated web” at the end of the nineties. Browser plug-ins like Third Voice created an annotation layer on top of all web pages. If you had the plug-in installed, you could write your own comments on any\u00a0page you visited, as well as read the comments written by others. But the attempt to create an annotated web failed. And it wasn’t just because the early adopters were spammers and trolls (though they were). Nor was it because corporate web publishers resisted the attempt to open their properties to outside commentary (though they did). What killed the annotated web was a lack of interest. Few could be bothered to download and install the plug-in. As\u00a0Wired<\/em> noted<\/a> in a 2001 obituary for Third Voice, “with only a couple hundred thousand users at last count, Third Voice was never the killer app it promised to be. But its passage was a silent testament to the early idealism of the Web, and how the ubiquitous ad model killed it.”<\/p>\n

It’s possible that new attempts to build an annotation layer will succeed where the earlier ones failed. Piper points in particular to Hypothes.is<\/a>. And it’s also possible that a narrower application of an annotation layer, one designed specifically for scholarship, will arise. But I’m not holding my breath. I think Piper is correct in arguing that the real challenge is not creating a\u00a0technology for\u00a0annotation but re-creating a culture in which careful reading and commentary are\u00a0as valued as self-expression: “It\u2019s all well and good to say commentary is back. It\u2019s another to truly re-imagine how a second grader or college student learns to write. What if we taught commentary instead of expression, not just for beginning writers, but right on through university and the PhD?”\u00a0Piper may disagree, but that strikes me as a fundamentally anti-digital idea. If “a privileging of someone else\u2019s point of view over our own” requires, as Piper writes, the submissiveness that comes from “corporeal labor,” then what is necessary above all is\u00a0the re-embodiment of text.<\/p>\n

Image of woodblock prepared for printing: Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Jacobs: Digital textuality offers us the chance to restore\u00a0commentary\u00a0to\u00a0its pre-modern place as the central scholarly genre. Recent technologies enable a renewal of commentary, but struggle to overcome a post-Romantic belief that commentary is belated, derivative. … If our textual technologies promote commentary but we resist it, we will achieve a Pyrrhic victory over our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5892"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5924,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5892\/revisions\/5924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}