Bound and re:Bound

Fill in the circle completely. 

Don’t make any marks outside the box. 

Use only a No. 2 pencil.

If you went through the American public school system after the dual rise of the standardized test and the Scantron form—as I did—then instructions like those above probably sound very familiar. I’ve always hoped that no kid ever had the makings of a masterpiece in a standardized essay response—for all we know, a brilliant re-examination of the reasons for the War of 1812 has been lost forever, because to write it would have been to mark outside the box.

This, of course, qualifies as an especially extreme example of artificially restrictive boundaries, and even this has its benefits. For one, the many, nameless readers of the thousands of responses to the same generic essay prompt probably appreciate not having to read any more than is necessary. But even when constructed from some perceived need, both literal and metaphorical boundaries to writing can have pervasive consequences. I see this firsthand teaching introductory composition classes here at the university. I’ve constructed assignments that are open by design; especially when it comes to topic choice, the lion’s share of the intellectual work is left up to the student. Some of them thrive, developing interesting and unusual avenues to explore; more often, though, the freedom makes them uncomfortable. Even brainstorming seems to be to be constrained by the mental version of rusty pipes—once you open the tap, it takes a while for things to really get going. And why wouldn’t it? The most ruthlessly efficient way teach writing is with a formula: three supported points equals a conclusion. After twelve years of that, I can’t blame them for looking like deer in the headlights when I introduce them to the concept of a lyric essay or a non-linear argument.

What really resonated with me in Matt Kirschenbuam’s Mechanisms is the same wrestling with boundaries, this time located in new media. He’s constantly evaluating, and then questioning, the barriers that have been established that separate traditional textual studies from digital media analysis, with some fascinating results. Early on, he quotes from a 1991 book by George Landow and Pauel Delany:

So long as the text was married to a physical media, readers and writers took for granted three crucial attributes: that the text was linear, bounded, and fixed. Generations of scholars and authors internalized these qualities as the rules of thought, and they have pervasive social consequences. We can define Hypertext as the use of the computer to transcend the linear, bounded, and fixed qualities of the traditional written text. (42)

To take this view, it’s no longer just the box for the standardized test essay, but the whole expanse of print literature before it that leads to internalized boundaries. Here, new media is the liberator, the breaker of pre-established roles. And in some ways, for some situations, this is true. (I keep trying to imagine how one might translate the “write lines on the chalkboard” punishment into the 21^st century. With CTRL+C, after all, to reproduce a line of text is the work of seconds, not hours.)

But if it was really that simple, if the seemingly ever-expandable Microsoft Word document was all that we needed to reformulate our relationship with text, then my students should already be free. They, even more than me, should have the free and flexible relationship with digitally recorded words that continues to be propagated—electronic composition is flexible! It’s changeable! The freedom is exhilarating, right?

Right. 

Except…

Except when it’s not; except when changeability doesn’t mean transparency, or removability. One of my favorite recurring images in Mechanisms is that of the computer as a ‘black box,’ that seemingly impenetrable record of what has been. The book also spends quite a bit of time with the mechanics of a bitstream; these both add up to the same idea, which is this: like picking up glitter spilled from an elementary school craft table or the removing the smell of sauerkraut from a poorly-ventilated kitchen, removing the traces of computer activity is no small feat. To bring in another, more elegant image of digital resonance, this time from the text itself:

The interactions of modern productivity software and mature physical storage media such as a hard drive may finally resemble something like a quantum pinball machine…files leaving persistent versions of themselves behind at every point they touch—like afterimages that only gradually fade—and the persistent versions themselves creating versions that multiply in like manner through the system. (52)

At some point, our record-keeping became self-perpetuating. This, too, is something that my students know better than almost anyone. Try arguing the impermanence of the internet to someone being chased by an embarrassing photo. We haven’t done away with media boundaries at all; if anything, we’ve just suppressed them into the gears-and-guts layer of the composition apparatus so we don’t have to look at them anymore. 

A composition notebook only has so many pages; a terabyte of memory, though it seems vast, only has room for so many bytes. I keep wondering: will we even know what to do with uncapped storage when we finally get it?