I enjoyed this week's readings--especially "Seeing and Writing" by Bolter. While I find his discussion of typography in print and in an electronic environment to be interesting, I was more struck by this notion of "technological nostalgia" that he mentions. The editions of Chaucer printed by Morris and Kunth's application of math to typography were made possible with the aid of computers, prompting Bolter's observation that such work "directs our energies away from appreciating the electronic space in its own right--a space in which the subtleties of type size and style may no longer be important to the writer's or the reader's vision of the text" (NMR 682).
I think many people do care about the text they read or write on the web. I know I went through a period where I experimented with all sorts of fonts and incorrectly used the display sort in inappropriate, lengthy pieces. But the electronic spaces I became familiar with led to my appreciation of what I read/wrote looked like. I can't stand to read more than a sentence or two of the cursive fonts in the same way that I feel using ALL CAPS or an excessive use of bold is borderline rude. I think I've become more aware of the presentation of text thanks to the web, not less so.
Perhaps I've missed Bolter's point. I realize that he was writing in '91, when our displays weren't so crisp and capable of elegant, non-pixellated fonts. Maybe I'm just part of a marginal group who cares what text looks like . . .
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With our relatively new typographic power, we need an educational system to establish standards such as we had with the written and typeset words.
Most schools now have computers, word processing, and internet capabilities and teachers should be instilling standards of taste. Many are teaching standards and perhaps following stylebooks such as the Chicago Manual, but when I "googled" "blogs", what I saw did not indicate universal standard usage .
I don't think most schools have the time or personnel to worry about these standards. With the requirements of No Child Left Behind and state mandates there unfortunately is not enough time or manpower to determine and then teach universal usage. The writing just keeps getting worse and worse as more whole language and dependency on the Internet and word processing programs grows.
I agree with Kathy-- schools aren't bothering to teach standards. They are letting Microsoft's templates dictate what documents should look like. This can lead to bizarre ideas about how to conduct communication. Edward Tufte did a fantastic analysis of a Powerpoint slide written by NASA personnel. This slide is possibly the culmination of the misuse of communication technology. (In this case, the miscommunication may have resulted in the Challenger accident.) The essay is a bit lengthy, but I highly recommend checking out the diagrams of the slide itself. This is how children are being taught to use technology--a truly frightening thought.
The idea about "caring what the text looks like" is directly related to what the text IS. As an information delivery system, written laguage is a series of symbols that we translate ideas into or extract them from. In that sense, language itself is a type of technology, and what that language looks like depends upon how it is practically applied.
The printed page has traditionaly been a storage space for writen language, where a certian amount of it is kept for those who want it to retrieve it and find it. However, hypertext redefines that space, and simple web-based innovations such as normal links make it possible to store certian peices of information in more than one place at a single time, and the location and context of that information inevitably changes its meaning.
This non-linear or non-fixed means of storing information changes (or will change) the linear "look" of text and media with which we are familiar. The design or archetecture of information, and the way it looks on the page, will change as the traditional (linear) printed page becomes impractacle for what we want to do with the information it contains.
No, you're not the only one who cares what text looks like on a page or who has become even more cognizant (for a nice big word per my '80s upbringing another blog post chides against) of the way text looks due to the web.
I too experimented with typs, fonts, etc. when I first began working on web pages. I also learned quickly from my own surfing that I generally had difficulty READING pages that were created the same way. Oops. If no one can read it, does it matter? (philisophically a similar question to if a tree falls in the woods)
I think the type faces and the form of text are important considerations. And some standardization seems to be taking place in most business applications -- ariel, verdana and good old times new roman scripts being a standard. Is this because of the influence of the "evil empire's" readily available template creations or because they are actually readable fonts that lend themselves to the electronic age? I'm not sure, but it is an interesting avenue to explore.
In response to the previous response about the limiting nature of the physical page and the eventual discontinuation of use due to lack of access -- I do have a question, how much can you read on a computer screen? I ask this merely because I do know that I physically have limits. I tested them against my law school textbooks. Even with their interactivity, abiltiy to include notes, hyperlinks to other information, etc. it was physically impossible for me to read them. I needed to have the physical text because my human hardware developed a glitch (ie -- my eyes developed a serious tick that I could not control if I read the screen for more than an hour or two at a time, even with taking "eye breaks" I still developed the tick). Given the frailty of human hardware, will hyptertext media really replace the physical, printed page?
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