Ed Barrett is Senior
Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies,
General Editor of the MIT Press Series on Digital
Communication, and Associate Editor of the new Media In
Transition Series at MIT Press. His books of poetry include
"Theory of Transportation" (Groundwater Press 1990),"Common
Preludes" (Groundwater Press 1994)), "Practical Lulabies for
Joe" (Quale Press, 1998) and "Sheepshead Bay" (Zoland Books,
forthcoming). His books on digital communication and new
media include "Text, Context, and Hypertext (MIT Press
1987), "The Society of Text: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the
Social Construction of Information" (MIT Press 1989),
"Sociomedia" (MIT Press 1992), "Contextual Media: Multimedia
and Interpretation" (co-editor, MIT Press 1995), and "The
Poetics of Cyberspace" (MIT Press, forthcoming). Ed Barrett
gives courses on Interactive Fiction and works on the
aesthetics of hypertext. Roberto Simanowski talked with him
about digital media and education.
dd:
Ed, you published your first book on digital communication
in 1989. Since then we have seen more than 10 years of rapid
technological development. The Internet jumped into our
life, or, rather, it drags us into its life. What are the
most important changes that have taken place in this period
with respect to digital media and education?
EB: The biggest
change was the liberation of the Web from the academy and
its purist theoretical pronouncements. Early hypertext
appeared to fit with modish postmodernism. So did everything
else. It was too tight a fit--clearly something one should
have questioned. Luckily the mind of popular culture, the
living imagination of people, was too fertile to be
constricted by a priestly class. The other big change was in
bandwidth--the technological determinism which always ought
to be viewed with both derision and fear. The big story is
the human one, not the machined one. It';s like V. Bush
asking "what is the scientist to do now"--who cares? This is
an Oedipal question and an Oedipal fate, at leats as Bush
and engineers formulate it. Pop culture stands outside that
machinery although it has its own limitations as
well.
dd:
When Bill Clinton visited MIT in June 1998 he claimed:
"Until every child has a computer in the classroom and a
teacher well-trained to help, America will miss the full
promise of the Information Age." In the conference
proceedings that you edited ("Sociomedia") you wrote:
"Information is necessary but not sufficient to education".
What needs to be taken into account when bringing computer,
internet, and education together?
EB: That question of
Oedipus: where am I going? But asked earlier, as an
intervention, by feeling and talented people, some of whom
may be teachers who are willing to accept the social
derision such a question entails. A computer box in a
classroom is not a bad thing, but it is not enough of a good
thing to be accepted without question. In earliest designs
by my colleagues in the Writing Program for an electronic
classroom that made full use of the wonderful communicative
powers of computation we demanded chairs on rollers so that
we could physically turn away from the magnetic presence of
the monitor screen. One must have teachers--humans of great
mind and heart and experience. Wihtout them there is merely
the reconfiguration of data, the Lucretian bitstream without
an anarchic movement to the side.
dd:
You are giving the course "Communicating in Cyberspace" that
is being tought for the eighth time in the fall of 1999. The
class has become quite popular at MIT and is regularly
oversubscribed. It is reported that 
student
projects
have consistently pushed the envelope of Web technology and
have received wide acclaim both within and outside the MIT
community. What do you do in this course? Do you think that
this approach could be used in other educational
settings?
EB: The major focus
in this class is on the human element in digital
communication--in the design and in the audience reception
of digital forms of communication. As such it is an
enlargement of traditional rhetoric and rhetorical spaces
rather than a 'pushing' of the envelope of Web technology.
Technology is a wonderful thing, like indoor plumbing.
Rhetoric, art, culture (however defined) are bigger than
technology, far more lasting--closer to what human memory
and fear are all about. The Web currently suffers from
terminal graphic design disease and back-end, programming
hypertension. My students maybe learn what simplicity can
accomplish, or at least how simplicity of purpose can
dictate programmatic objectives. I'd rather see a student
learn humility than hubris, even if the latter has certain
IPO advantages--although the most lucrative Web sites are
mere replications of your local grocery and newstand, or the
doorstep gossip.
dd:
You are a member of the "Comparative Media Studies" Program
at MIT. This program aims to develop an understanding of the
historical, cultural and artistic significance of film and
other modern media. To what extent do you consider digital
media? And what artistic significance do digital media have,
in your estimation?
EB: I'm not sure
anything is supposed to have significance, at least if you
are talking about art. We may view digital media in an
historical context but not to find some moral or significant
sense of an evolution or progression. Relationships,
dependencies, borrowings, appropriations,
contradictions...all of these to be sure: digital media are
so close to parental sources (the book, for example) that
people who should know better have really lost it by
asserting either the death of the book (Coover, Birkerts) or
some new way of "being" (you know who). Such elegies and
encomia are propaganda. Who needs more propaganda.
Individuals should figure it out for themselves: they should
read a lot, look at movies and TV, listen to radio, study
graffiti and hacks, they should adore Carravaggio and
fanzines. The very air we breathe is heavy with poetry. Why
exclude anything?
dd:
There is a nice image on the website of the "Online Writing
and Communication Center" (http://web.mit.edu/writing). A
pen draws ink from an inkpot that looks like the main
entrance of MIT. What do you think about the relationship
between technology and literature in digital literature?
Will the writer of the future not only use words, but also
images, video clips, and sound?
EB: In my course on
interactive and non-linear marrative--a horrible title which
I inherited: I have changed it to "Workshop in Potential
Narrative" in homage to the OuLiPo movement--my students
first create hypertext fictions, then films and
performances, then games. But right from the start they mix
these categories to create powerful fictional, artistic
worlds accessible only via a computer--they work with and
within the constraints of digital media and prove again and
again that human imagination is bigger than media although
incranated by media. It is all the bitstream I suppose, but
we do not yet have a machine architecture that is supple
enough to respnd to the syntax of our imaginings.
dd:
You are giving the course "Theory and Practice of Non-Linear
and Interactive Narrative", that focuses on the aesthetics
of the emerging art form of digital narration. Segmentation
and multiple points of view are sometimes considered not as
an advantage but disadvantage of hypertext since it gives up
a well considered treath trough the story for the doubtful
freedom of the readers. What is you experience?
EB: My experience is
filtered through that of my students and they seem to want
both freedom and restriction. I seem to be much more open to
fragmentation and segmentation, to loopy narrative
techniques--but only because I am older than they and have a
tiny bit more experience--by which I think I mean more
humility--in being thrown into complicated situations as a
normal state: I mean, I really know I am ignorant of most
things and therefore I am less willing to bar my door to
intrusive guests and stray bits of information than someone
who still expects to figure it out. I've also studied more
kinds of "traditional" art than they have and if you do that
you quickly discover that most stories are really open and
closed at the same time--all systems leak. Oedipus at Thebes
is not the same man at Colonus. Life is bigger than
environment.
dd:
These words are well worth pondering. Thank you very
much for the interview.
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