Karyna's Response to Hayles

[Robert Greco]

#352

Hayles’ argument against academy’s persistence in holding print media, regardless of its actual social influence and audience outreach, as superior form of knowledge production resonated with me the most. Hayles’ suggestion that “If influence and audience were considered [in tenure decisions and beyond], one might make a strong argument for taking into account well-written, well-researched blogs that have audiences in the thousands or hundreds of thousands, in contrast to print books and articles that have audiences in the dozens or low hundreds if that.” In making this argument, she raises an important value question of scholarship: what is more important: how much we publish or how many people read our publications? A possibility of reaching a much larger and diverse audience than academic journals can ever hope for ,potentially, forces scholars to leave their comfortable ivory tower accommodations and consider real life and, perhaps, immediate implications of their work. Working in new media formats challenges the established closed formats of peer-review and allows both scholars and their audiences to participate in the process of knowledge production, hopefully democratizing it in a long run.

Yet, I can see how such a rapid change poses an ontological crisis for scholars whose intellectual practices are grounded in close readings of texts, hand-written manuscripts, and other, as we may call them traditional, forms of knowledge production and acquisition. Hayles is right in saying that print texts are fundamentally different from their digital counterparts in their structure and implications. Moreover, they are also phenomenologically different for people who produce and consume them. And both phenomenologies, I would argue, are important for our understanding of producing, creating, and composing. Digital media should be perceived as an expansion of our scholastic universe and not as its destroyer. Hence, I feel like cooperative work between print and digital scholars holds more epistemological value than a complete switch from one to another.

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