From Page to Screen - WRAP: Warwick Research Archive Portal ...

though distinctly different from each other, do not necessarily represent advantages or
disadvantages on either side, and affect both the writing and the reading process:
Print eText
a) stability flexibility
b) presence absence
c) closure open-endedness
d) instantlygraspable need for mechanical translation
e) individual possession shared ownership
Unlike a print text, which is always physically present in its entirety, the electronic text
resides in the computer memory in a format not accessible to us, and is only temporarily
realised on the screen. It is not transparent, i.e. not immediately understandable, we are
dependent on the computer to translate it into a form accessible to us. This is
symptomatic of the increasingly technological environment and our dependency on
mediating machines in the late zoth century society, which has been described by
Douglas Cooper in his introduction to the programming language Pascal as follows:
Once upon a time, it was possible to figure out what something did by inspecting it.
That's because the final product usually relied on the everyday properties of the
wood, metal, fabric it was build of. A catapult, a 100m, a printing press - it didn't
matter, because there was a visible connection between the parts ofthe machine and
what the machine did. It was, as Kenner puts it, the age of 'transparent technology,
when machines were visual guides to their own workiniI6
The computer "dematerialises" written trace (as opposed to pen, typewriter, print), but
also "depersonalises" it. The author's self, that is constructed in a written text in physical
stability and imagined autonomy, becomes destabilised and dispersed in the electronic
text. Similarly, at the receiving end, the construct ofthe reader becomes less graspable in
a text with unstable boundaries and impermanent status." An electronic text can be
duplicated at nearly no cost an infinite number of times - overturning notions of rarity,
individual possession as well as originality. Mark Poster argues:
Compare a novel written on a computer and stored on a floppy disk with one
composed in a manuscript or even a typescript. Manuscripts have value as originals.
16 Douglas Cooper, Oh!Pascali, 3rd edition (New York and London, W.W.Norton, 1993>, p. XXI
(referring to Hugh Kenner's The Mechanical Muse (Oxford, OUF, 1987».
17 see: Mark Poster, The Mode of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p.o, and
Lanham. The Ekctronic Word, p.lI.
Chapter I - page 6
I