Heather Urbanski (ed.): Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric (2010)

“Is it true that, in this era of digitization and mass media, reading and writing are on the decline? In a thought-provoking collection of essays and profiles, 30 contributors explore what may instead be a rise in rhetorical activity, an upsurge due in part to the sudden blurring of the traditional roles of creator and audience in participatory media. This collection explores topics too often overlooked by traditional academic scholarship, though critical to an exploration of rhetoric and popular culture, including fan fiction, reality television, blogging, online role-playing games, and Fantasy Football. Both scholarly and engaging, this text draws rhetorical studies into the digital age.”

Publisher McFarland & Co Inc Pub, 2010
ISBN 0786437200, 9780786437207
268 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2018-7-2)

N. Katherine Hayles: My Mother Was a Computer. Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005)

We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles’s latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices.

My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: las anguage and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age.

We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2005
ISBN 0226321479, 9780226321479
290 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Naomi S. Baron: Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading (2001)

In Alphabet to Email Naomi Baron takes us on a fascinating and often entertaining journey through the history of the English language, showing how technology – especially email – is gradually stripping language of its formality.

Drawing together strands of thinking about writing, speech, pedagogy, technology, and globalization, Naomi Baron explores the ever-changing relationship between speech and writing and considers the implications of current language trends on the future of written English.

Alphabet to Email will appeal to anyone who is curious about how the English language has changed over the centuries and where it might be going.

Publisher Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415186862, 9780415186865
Length 316 pages

publisher
google books

PDF