Summer-Fall 2001
From cold type to digital images: CLA scholars on communicating
Barely 15 years ago, I became a bona fide "user" of digital technology--no longer a mere writer-editor but a processor of words and images. I had received my first "personal computer."
The closest I had ever come to a computer was a class entry permit, a data-encoded punch card that verified my University course registration. And so I was mystified, especially by the mouse. This device, I quickly discovered, had a mind of its own as it sent the cursor skittering across the screen.
What my colleagues and I didn't realize was that this was just the beginning of a revolution in the way we would do our jobs as writers and editors. We would one day not only replace typing with "keyboarding," but become part of an evolving "electronic publishing" industry that would put typesetters and layout artists out of business.
No more t-squares or rubber cement. No more carbon paper, erasers, or white-out. In this new world, everything would happen electronically, with binary logic. Paper was "hard copy." Words were digital ciphers that could disappear into cyberspace with a click-and-delete.
It was sometimes a struggle--we had to develop not only a whole new set of cyberskills but also a new world view, not to mention a new vocabulary. But the revolution doesn't even feel like a revolution any more, because we're in it. Computers are us.
Today's students know intimately the virtual world first brought to our desktops such a relatively short time ago. E-words pepper the vernacular. We commune in cozy chat rooms, drop purchases into virtual shopping carts, and observe rules of e-mail "netiquette."
We have at our fingertips a cyber-world of "information," its content heavily commercial and governed piecemeal by an emerging body of ad hoc cyber-laws.
Meanwhile, faculty across the college are taking a close look at the culture the revolution has wrought, where and how it began, and where it is going. They are looking through new lenses at how we communicate.
Viva la revolution.--
Haidee Wasson, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, an unapologetic consumer of popular culture
Dan Kersten, Psychology, renowned vision researcher
Patricia Crain, English, sends her students on "literacy walks"
Kirt Wilson, Speech-communication, cracks communication codes
Nora Paul, New Media Studies, connects research and industry
Thomas Wolfe, History and Anthropology, chronicles power and the media