How is a digital text creating a different meaning than print text?
Translating print texts into digital format also alters the ways they transmit meaning and the ways in which they are accessed. -Janet Swenson, Carl A. Young, Ewa McGrail, Robert Rozema, and Phyllis Whitin
This is a really interesting concept for me. As someone who has lived her life ONLINE for the past 11 years, gathering information from the internet is a transparent action for me. What I have never before considered, however, is how these digital texts alter my comprehension and my learning in different ways than the same text in a printed form. As the authors state, hyperlinking, imbedded image and video, and varying graphical arrangements have the ability to completely alter the way I read and make meaning. I am allowed to follow my own “personal, meaning-driven process,” jumping off the lead text midstream, into biographical information or suggested readings. How is reading an AP article online different from reading the same article in my morning newspaper? Reading the article about Rumsfeld stepping down as Secretary of Defense through the “Yahoo Top Story” rank in my email inbox, I have access to an imbedded slide show of his photos. I have direct hyperlinks to the Pentagon’s website and Sen. Carl Levin’s voting record. While this enriched text likely allows for more significant processing, I am fully aware that I am still at the mercy of what pieces of information the web designers and linking editors consider important pieces of information.
These acts call into question the importance of not only the author’s intent, but that of the web designer, graphic artist, web editor…. As ELA teachers, when using these newer internet sources, we must now consider not only the texts we are presenting, but the web contexts in which we situate those texts. This is potentially a whole new area of literary theory, for the meaning we make as readers exists not just in the transaction between the reader, text, and world, but includes the transactions between all the auxiliary texts linked to the prime text.
Ed
Radhika Nataraj