Words

 because, words

• Laspina, J. A. (2001). The “Locus” of Language in Digital Space. Language Arts, 78(3), 245–254.

“…by providing a new medium for textual representation, digital technology may ultimately be reshaping not only our culture but also our mode of cognition.”

Laspina crafts a wandering essay in this 2001 NCTE publication, connecting VR (virtual reality) to textbook design, to the foundations and formations of the cognition of language, to semiotics, and back again. Perhaps cutting edge at the time, now Laspina’s essay feels both antiquated and prescient. Much like Orwell’s 1984, Laspina does not attempt to predict the future, but rather to put his finger on the problems of the present and define them. And, much like 1984, there is a lot of rhetoric to dig through and even an invention of language, that highlights many of the issues about which the author is speaking. In a nutshell, Laspina claims:

• VR was supposed to be the wave of the future, but it still isn’t functioning how everyone said it would. It turns out that it is incredibly difficult to create any sort of VR with fidelity.
• We aren’t quite ready for VR yet. Our ambitions got ahead of our capabilities. Also, VR tends to make us uncomfortable and interact in ways that do not feel normal.
• Likewise, Textbooks are also getting ahead of their capabilities, attempting to create visual and language connections and interactions without understanding the cognitive processes that we use to read and comprehend.
• Putting textbooks online (or on CD-ROMS) without extensive teaching in how to access and use the textbooks, both for teachers and for students, is not educationally sound.
• There are interactions and cognitive functions in processing language, and these cognitive functions are different when you add visuals and links, and make the text interactive.
• Reading an interactive text is different than reading words on a page. We process the words differently, our behaviors are different, and our interaction with the text is different.
• When you add other elements to a text (visuals, hyperlinks, symbols, graphics), you fundamentally change both the text and how we interact with it.
• In essence, we are making moves in education because they are cutting edge, but we may not quite understand the impact of these moves and we might not have the foundational understanding of what these moves mean or how best to implement them.

Laspina keeps referencing “the locus of language” (his italics) throughout his essay. Much like Orwell’s newspeak, Laspina doesn’t clearly define his term or the use of it. I cannot tell if he means the actual position of the words on the page, or if he means the position of language acquisition and comprehension in our brains. Perhaps he is being clever and means both. Regardless, his point about semiotics (although he does not use that term) is spot on, if his delivery is somewhat convoluted. We do approach language and comprehend language differently with the inclusion of semiotics; once we make the text non-linear (with hyperlinks), the cognitive processes are effected even more. In essence, we read texts in digital spaces differently than we read texts that are “old school.” And it’s not enough for educators (and textbook publishers) to simply make texts digital; we need to understand how students read these texts differently in order to better design our resources and teach our content and our students.

I was a bit surprised, as I read through this, as to its inclusion into an NCTE publication. It is not particularly well-crafted, and I felt like Laspina could have made his points both more concise and more meaningful, had he been willing to back away from his VR introduction and examples. Other than his talking about how all of the predictions regarding VR hadn’t actually come to fruition yet (because the technology wasn’t there, because it turns out it’s really hard to do with fidelity, and because it turns out people aren’t super comfortable in that environment), he was using VR as a comparison to our uses of digital text. Perhaps his essay was included in this usually incredibly selective publication because it was groundbreaking at the time? As I think back to 2001 (time of publication), I was using the Internet and technology in my classes, but tech was not the primary mode of delivery for the courses I was designing and teaching. When I did my Masters in 2000, I got most of my resources out of a library and my thesis was written on a 3.5 floppy disk. Our integration of technology and specifically digital text is much different today. But, when I look at my own classes now, technology is still not the primary mode of delivery. We still read books, the old-fashioned, smells-like-dusty-corners-and-a-bit-like-worms, torn up, printings-don’t-match-each-other books that are dog-eared, doodled in, and full of sticky notes. I often have to defend this practice to those who believe that e-readers will solve all of our funding and comprehension and engagement problems simultaneously. And I continually have to explain that we approach text differently in different spaces, and that we process language differently and interact with language differently based on the fonts, semiotics, sequencing, and social and cultural uses of the platform itself. Perhaps this reality is what Laspina was attempting to put his finger on.