[ This article in Volume 1 Issue 3 of _EJournal_ (November, 1991) is (c)
copyright _EJournal_.  Permission is hereby granted to give it away.
_EJournal_ hereby assigns any and all financial interest to Doug Brent.
This note must accompany all copies of this text. ]

Doug Brent
DABrent@UNCAMULT
Faculty of General Studies
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alta, Canada  T2N-1N4


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Oral Knowledge, Typographic Knowledge, Electronic Knowledge:
Speculations on the History of Ownership

by Doug Brent
Faculty of General Studies
University of Calgary

1.  Using Transformation Theory

It has frequently been observed that computers are revolutionizing the
concept of knowledge ownership.  Old standards of copyright and the
ownership of intellectual property simply do not apply to the universe of
knowledge in cyberspace. In this article I wish to examine more closely
the ways in which concepts of intellectual property are changing as the
computer changes our relationship to knowledge.

The main tool I wish to use in this investigation is the cluster of theories
that Michael Heim has dubbed "transformation theory" (_Electric
Language_ 1987).  Marshall McLuhan first called attention to the
transforming powers of media in his insightful and infuriating books,
particularly his masterpiece _Understanding Media_ (1964).  In that book,
he claims that we cannot learn anything of importance about a medium
by looking only at its content:

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are
used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.  For the
"content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the
burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.  (p. 18)

To avoid that numbness, we must refocus our attention on the ways in
which the technological characteristics of the medium itself reshape our
lives not just by giving us new tools to play with but by reshaping our
consciousness on a fundamental and subliminal level.

In _Orality and Literacy_ (1982), Walter Ong builds on McLuhan's general
philosophy, plus anthropological research on the development of oral
societies, in order to explain the dramatic changes in society that came
about with the advent of literacy.  Ong argues that the shift from oral to
literate culture in about the fifth century B.C. did more than change
patterns of art, politics and commerce.  It enabled a profound shift in
human conscious, bringing about the linear, abstract forms of Western
logic that we take for granted today but which were simply unthinkable
without literacy as a means of preserving complicated original thought.

What makes transformation theory a particularly powerful tool for
speculating on the impact of computers is that the information revolution
intuitively feels like a third stage in this process, a revolution as great as
the shift from orality to literacy.  Admittedly, Heim warns severely against
extending the transformation theory developed to deal with the first
revolution and facilely using it to predict the outcome of the second:

Because it is anchored in the difference between orality and literacy, the
transformation theory is unsuited for an investigation of word processing.
Constant reference to the emergence of literacy distorts the phenomenon
by reducing the emergence of word processing to a new kind of literacy.
The use of the metaphor from print culture is understandable when we
are confronted by the profound novelty of digital writing.  But if we lose
sight of the  weakness of the metaphor, we shall pass right by the
phenomenon in our anxiety to treat it easily in a familiar, conventionally
manageable way. (p. 113)

Heim's warning is well taken; the second shift is neither simply an
extension, nor simply a reversal (despite what I am about to argue) of
the first.  Yet if historical study is to be justified on any grounds other
than idle curiosity, it surely must be on the grounds that we can learn
something about the present and future by extrapolating from the past.
The important caveat is that we must not depend only on a metaphor.
To the extent that we see echoes of the first communications revolution
in the second, we must be careful to use the metaphor of the first
transformation only as a means of generating suggestive possibilities.
Before we can rely on these suggestions even provisionally, we must
corroborate them by close examination of changes in personal and social
behaviour that are already sufficiently far along to be susceptible of
examination.

2.  Ownership of Knowledge in Oral Societies

Ong claims that in a primary oral culture--that is, a culture that has never
known literacy--knowledge is not owned; rather it is performed.  Without
print, knowledge must be stored not as a set of abstract ideas or isolated
bits of information, but as a set of concepts embedded deeply in the
language and culture of the people.  Strictly procedural knowledge--how
to build a boat, how to fight a war--is passed on directly from craftsman
to craftsman through the process of apprenticeship. However, the more
abstract knowledge of the tribe--not just their history but also their values,
their concepts of justice and social order--is contained in the epic
formulae, recurrent themes, and mythic patterns, plots and stereotypes
out of which the storytellers of the tribe weave their narratives.  This
knowledge exists as a pre-existing network of knowledge, interconnected
in extraordinarily complex and non-linear ways and all known in at least
its broad outlines to the storyteller's audience before he begins (see
Bolter, _Writing Space_, 1991).

Lord's work with modern illiterate poets underlines the implications of this
means of transmitting knowledge (_The Singer of Tales_, 1960).
Although the storytellers usually insist that they tell their stories exactly
the same way each time, transcriptions of stories told by modern oral
storytellers reveal significant variation.  Rather than memorizing a
verbatim "text," as literate observers assumed, the storytellers fit stock
elements to a rhythmic pattern and a well-known plot to re- produce the
story anew each time it is told. There simply is no "text" apart from each
individual incarnation of each tale.

This has implications for how the creative act is seen.  If oral performers
were simply memorizing and reciting a work that had at one time been
"composed" by a single individual, the process would be no more than
an oral version of literate composition, in which a text is composed once
and reproduced mechanically many times.  But Lord's work reveals that
the performer of a tale is combining an act of creation with an act of
transmission.  His primary work is to transmit the culture of the tribe, and
in this act of transmission he must be conservative.  Changes in oral
knowledge cannot be undone, for there are no old copies to go back to.
The tellers must therefore be able to reproduce the forms and plots in
which their tribe's knowledge is contained as faithfully as possible.  Yet
there is also a gradual drift in the stories.  In a process that Ong calls
"homeostasis," the stories change imperceptibly over time to suit the
needs and values of the culture as that culture changes.  If the values
that are held in high regard by the culture shift to suit changing
circumstances, the heroes in the tales will acquire new characteristics, or
even cease to be heroes.  Individual creativity is profoundly rhetorical, for
it is the subtle interplay between teller and audience that shapes the tales
to match the values of that audience; yet it is also largely invisible (Ong
1982).

This inseparability of creativity and performance meant that there was no
such thing as ownership of knowledge--or, more aptly, there was no
such thing as _private_ ownership of knowledge.  Knowledge was held in
common, entrusted to the tellers of tales who were maintained by the
tribe, not for their individual contributions to the growth of ideas, but for
their ongoing duty to keep knowledge alive by performing it.

3.  Ownership of Knowledge in Literate Societies

With the introduction of writing, all of this changed. According to Ong
and his anthropological school of communications history, writing had a
number of profound effects, including the development of the
self-conscious, rational self, of the power of abstraction, and
consequently of the entire Western system of logic. For my purposes
here, however, the most important result of the invention of writing was a
separation of text and performance, of knowledge and knower.  As
Havelock puts it in _Origins of Western Literacy_ (1976), writing
separates "the knower from the known" by creating a fossilized text that
can achieve a continued existence apart from any knower.  The
knowledge represented by an oral tale is so embedded in mind and
action that it cannot be contemplated as a separate entity; such
knowledge travels as an almost subliminal partner of a performance, as
transmission that the performer does not even think of as "knowledge"
but rather as simply a set of actions.  A manuscript, however, can be
handled, stored, retrieved from a vault and re-performed a millennium
after all previous readers have died.  Therefore, with writing knowledge
comes to be seen as something reified, as existing outside the self.

If knowledge can be separated from the knower, it can be owned by
separate individuals.  In an oral culture, plagiarism is unthinkable, simply
because the survival of the culture depends on plagiarism--that is, on
each performer learning what has gone before and making it his own.
As the manuscript society came into existence, it became more common
to attribute written tales to their sources in prior texts.  Yet, as any
student of early written poetry will know (Chaucer is a well-known
example), prior texts were often so inseparably mingled with new material
that generations of scholars have been kept happily employed in sorting
them out.  During the manuscript age, the painstaking copying and
illustrating of a manuscript was in some respects a personal performance
of knowledge analogous to the performance of an epic poem or folk tale.
It was the printing press that made private ownership of knowledge a
necessity, for it was the printing press that finally severed the connection
between the creation and the transmission of knowledge.  For
transmission was now a mechanical act, performable by a machine.
Originality, once a deadly danger to a society that had to struggle to
maintain its equilibrium, could now be seen as more valuable than
performance.  To claim originality for what was only a re-performance
became a serious breach of the values of the society. Appropriating
another's ideas, once an essential means of keeping them alive, became
the act of a _plagiarius_, a torturer, plunderer, oppressor:

Typography had made the word a commodity.  The old communal oral
world had split up into privately claimed freeholdings.  The drift toward
greater individualism    had been served well by print. (Ong 1982, p. 131)


Copyright laws were soon created as a means of preserving this
intellectual property.  As Patterson points out (_Copyright in Historical
Perspective_ 1968), copyright was originally created more as a means of
breaking the stationers' monopoly on texts than as a means of protecting
authors' rights. Yet the commonsense notion that an author's words
were things of countable value pressed the law of copyright further and
further in the direction of artic-ulating those rights against those of the
stationers who simply reproduced the physical text.  By the eighteenth
century, copyright was firmly established not only as a means to ensure
that an author will be paid for his ideas, but also to ensure that he will be
able to protect their integrity by granting him the sole authority to correct,
amend or retract them.  In the Miller vs. Taylor decision of 1767, a
decision vital to the shaping of English copyright law into its final modern
form, Mr. Justice Aston commented, "I do not know, nor can I
comprehend any property more emphatically a man's own, nay, more
incapable of being mistaken, than his literary works" (Patterson p. 170).

The modern abhorrence of plagiarism, of course, has never meant that
one should not use another's ideas.  The practice of bringing ideas
forward and integrating them into later works is fundamental to the
modern belief that knowledge is cumulative and improvable.  But a
crucial difference between oral and literate diffusion of knowledge is that
as knowledge diffuses through knowledge networks of modern research
disciplines, it leaves behind the tracks of its passage in the form of earlier
texts linked by webs of citations.  Among other functions, these citations
ensure that the producer of a particularly fertile idea is given due credit
for her work, even as that work is being corrected, amended, extended,
and ultimately submerged into the new knowledge that is being built
upon it.  Whereas the oral bard could demonstrate that he was earning
his keep simply by continually re-performing the knowledge of which he
was guardian, the modern researcher must demonstrate that she is
worthy of being maintained by her tribe by creating work worthy of being
explicitly cited by others.  Thus she retains ownership of the ideas at the
same time as she releases them into the world to perform their work--in a
sense leasing rather than transferring them to others.
Thus the effects of printed texts are somewhat paradoxical. On the one
hand, the explicit pointers to earlier texts reinforce the fact that
knowledge is built communally, through the interactions of thousands of
individuals.  On the other hand, the fact that each idea can be labelled
with the name of its maker has created the romantic myth of the
individual creative genius. This myth manifests itself in the arts as the
figure of the brooding artist creating in solitude, and in the sciences as
the individual inventor, the Nobel prize winner who sees what no-one has
seen before.

4.   Ownership of Knowledge in Cyberspace

In this context, then, what might the second shift, from print to the
electronic space afforded by word processing, computer conferencing,
and hypertext, do to our sense of the ownership of knowledge?

One of the most important features of typography, if we believe McLuhan
and his followers, is metaphorical.  Here we are not talking about the
investigator's use of metaphor to extend the past into the future, the
metaphor that Heim is so reluctant to pursue.  We are talking about an
entire culture's metaphorical transfer of characteristics of its
communications medium to other aspects of the culture.  McLuhan
suggests, for instance, that the reproduction of texts from straight rows
of exactly repeatable, individually meaningless units of type is an
amazingly close analogue of, and perhaps the model for, the specialized
industrial society in which an entire economy is assembled out of small
bits of individually owned private property--including intellectual property.
These sorts of speculation can be taken to the giddy heights of
unprovable assertion that McLuhan is justly derided for.  Yet if we accept
provisionally that the medium can sometimes be the metaphor, we can
perhaps learn something about the effects of the second transformation
by looking at the metaphorical ways in which it allows us to
conceptualize knowledge.
One of the most important ways in which the electronic metaphor
operates is not so much to change what writers do when they build
knowledge, but rather to make this process more immediately and more
obviously _visible_ through the types of operations which it allows and
the physical steps which the writer goes through.  It has, after all, been
observed for some time that the myth of the individual discoverer of
knowledge is exactly that--a myth.  Perhaps the best summary of this
literature is Karen Burke LeFevre's _Invention as a Social Act_ (1987), a
work that brings together accounts of collaborative invention from
postmodern literary theory, language philosophy and social psychology
to argue for a new emphasis on collaboration by writing teachers.  One
of the most important of these sources is Michel Foucault:

[Foucault] describes the beginning of a discourse as a re-emergence
into an ongoing, never-ending process:  "At the moment of speaking, I
would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me,
leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it. . . .  There would have been
no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in
its path--a slender gap--the point of its possible disappearance."
Elaborating on this perspective, one may come to regard discourse not
as an isolated event, but rather a constant potentiality that is occasionally
evidenced in speech or writing. . . .

Such perspectives suggest that traditional views of an event or act have
been misleading when they have presumed that the individual unit--a
speech or a written text, an individual hero, a particular battle or
discovery--is clearly separable from a larger, continuing force or stream
of events in which it participates.  For similar reasons Jacques Derrida
has criticized literary theories that attempt to explain the meaning of a
text apart from other texts that precede and follow it. (p. 41-42)

Sociologists of science support this conception of knowledge as
communal rather than individual.  Diana Crane's seminal study _Invisible
Colleges_ (1972), for instance, documents the extent to which ideas are
nourished and developed through networks of interaction among
scientists who may come from many different "official" disciplines but who
form a powerful social group around a common problem.  Yet the print
technology through which this communally-developed knowledge is
typically delivered-- distanced, fossilized, abstracted from the network of
interconnected minds that formed it--continually enforces the opposite
message.  The metaphorical meaning of print technology is isolation, not
communality.  In particular, the ability to claim one's particular share of
the intertextual web and stamp it with one's own name--an ability made
possible by the same printing press that made widespread cumulation of
knowledge possible as well--suggests that knowledge is individually
owned.
I believe that computer mediated communication provides a totally
different metaphorical message, one that can take theories of
collaborative knowledge out of the realm of language philosophy and
stamp them indelibly in the consciousness of the entire society.  Let us
begin by looking at what is now the most mundane aspect of
computer-mediated communication, word processing. Remember that
one of the most important psychological effects of writing in general and
the printing press in particular is the fossilization of text as an exteriorized
object.  However, composing on a word processor divides the
production of the text into two distinct stages. Ultimately the text issues in
a final stage of more or less complete closure, once a "final" draft is
published in a hard codex.  But the word processor greatly extends the
fluid stage of text, abolishing the sense of discrete drafts and smaller
divisible units (pages) and turning the text into a long continuous
document, a scroll examined through a twenty-five line sliding window.
Although this small window can be a problem for students who cannot
always visualize the entire text as a unit (see for instance Richard Collier,
"The Word Processor and Revision Strategies," 1983), expert writers
generally lose their dependence on what they can see on the screen and
internalize the sense of a text that exists in an infinitely mutable state.
Even the printout, apparently hard and immutable, comes to be seen as
purely provisional, for a new one incorporating changes can be
produced at whim.

A key aspect of this form of text is that it can easily be recombined with
other texts.  Skilled writers who use word processors are well aware of
how often they cannibalize their own older texts for quotations,
well-turned paragraphs, ideas cut out of drafts and saved for future
works in which they might be more appropriate.  But this effect does not
become truly significant until the writer's own text begins to interact with
other sources of text available on-line.  The word processor is often seen
as a preliminary stage of conferencing, for posted text is often prepared
initially on some kind of word processor (whether PC or mainframe
editor).  However, this metaphor can be reversed: the word processor is
coming to be fed by on-line information as much as the reverse.  As
other sources of text become available in machine-readable format--texts
received through electronic conferences and on-line publications, texts
downloaded from databases, et cetera--the awareness of intertextuality
that LeFevre speaks of becomes increasingly objectified, its implications
increasingly unmistakable.
As I prepare this article I am conscious of two kinds of sources.  Some
of the sources came to me in hard copy; the labour of typing quotations
in by hand, of leafing through separate texts to identify key passages, for
me emphasises their separateness, the claim of the original author over
the knowledge.  Other sources came to me electronically; these I can cut
and paste into my document much more freely, integrating not just
another's words but ultimately his very keystrokes into my own construct.
A well-trained scholar, I am always careful to acknowledge, always
careful not to place my own stamp of ownership on the words of
another.  But the sliding together of texts in the electronic writing space,
texts no longer available as discrete units but as continuous fields of
ideas and information, is so much easier in electronic space--not just
physically easier but psychologically more natural-- that it is significantly
more effort to keep the ownership of the ideas separate.  Intertextuality,
once a philosophical concept, is becoming a way of life.

When information becomes disseminated electronically, not only pretexts
but also posttexts begin to slide more and more fluidly into the text as
the author integrates the comments of others into the evolving document.
As Hiltz and Turoff put it in _The Network Nation_ (1978),

The distinction between a draft, preprint, publication or reprint now turns
into the same "paper" or set of information, merely modified by the
author as he or she builds on the comments from the readership. (p.
276)

Ultimately the distinctions between authors and documents may break
down completely.  Hiltz and Turoff separate sections of their book _The
Network Nation_ with fanciful excerpts from a future "Boshwash Times";
one of these (from the July 14, 1995 issue) predicts just such a
breakdown of individual authorship under the pressure of computer
mediated collaboration:

A group of 57 social and information scientists today shared the Nobel
Prize in economics, while 43 physicists and scholars in other disciplines
captured the prize in physics. . . .  When the first such collective prize
was announced eight years ago, the committee tried to convince the
group involved to name the two or three of its members who were the
most responsible for the theory developed.  However, the group insisted
that this was impossible.  Dr. Andrea Turoff, spokesperson for the
collective, explained "We were engaged in what we call a 'synologue'--a
process in which the synthesis of the dialogue stimulated by the group
process creates something that would not be possible otherwise."  (pp.
464-65)

In short, with electronic communication the notion of the static and
individually owned text dissolves back into the communally performed
fluidity of the oral culture.  When the materials of which they are
constructed are available in machine- readable form, document
assembly--a very telling neologism-- becomes analogous to the oral poet
boilerplating stock phrases and epithets into familiar plots, reaching into
the previously existing network of epic knowledge to create a new
instantiation of knowledge that has been in the public domain from
before his birth (see Bolter, _Writing Space_, 1991).  In the electronic
world as in the oral, the latent intertextuality of print is raised to
consciousness: it becomes more obvious that originality lies not so much
in the individual creation of elements as in the performance of the whole
composition.

There is boilerplating and boilerplating, of course.  As he weaves his
stories, the oral storyteller is deeply embedded in a rhetorical and cultural
context. His audience is physically before him, and he assembles his
stories in a close engagement with both that audience and his
characters, the tribal ground out of which his figure arises.  "The
individual's reaction is not expressed as simply individual or 'subjective'
but rather as encased in the communal reaction, the communal 'soul'"
(Ong, 1982, p. 46).  On the other hand, certain kinds of machine
boilerplating, augmented by such mnemonic aids as CD-Rom's
containing thousands of form letters and mail-merge programs with
which to distribute them blindly, can become so totally divorced from
rhetorical occasion that they cease to have any connection with human
knowledge whatsoever (Cragg, "The Technologizing of Rhetoric," 1991).
But a process is best defined not by its pathological extremes but by the
central uses to which a society puts it.  When used by skilled writers who
are writing in a rhetorical context, not just recopying formulae in a
vacuum, the relatively easy cut-and-paste embedding of chunks of prose
from various sources can become an important operational metaphor of
intertextual connections.  Language theorists have always assured us
that these connections exist, but we used not to see them so objectively
demonstrated.

5.  Living Mythically in Cyberspace

McLuhan's term for the effects of electronic communication is
"retribalization."  Under the effects of participatory electronic media, he
claims, linear typographic man again learns to "live mythically."  McLuhan
of course never explains precisely what he means by these or any other
of his terms--to do so would spoil the fun of making the reader write her
own meanings into McLuhan's text.  But the concept of living "mythically"
suggests far more than simply being more interconnected, of being able
to send messages to each other more quickly and easily than we could
last year.  It means living in a form of consciousness in which knowledge
does not exist outside the knower, embodied in a physical text, but
instead is lived dramatically, communally performed as the myths of oral
man were performed.  This, I argue, will be--to some extent already
is--one of the effects of internalizing the electronic writing space.

These effects are at their peak in hypertext, undoubtedly the most
extreme example of text that is both nonlinear and participatory.  The
constructive processes performed by any reader of any text find a very
physical analogue in hypertext as each reader takes a different physical
path from node to node and thus metaphorically "rewrites" the text in the
process of reading it. Hypertext documents can be constructed as even
more open systems, in which each reader is invited to become co-author
by adding new nodes or new information within nodes (Slatin 1990). As
Moulthrop puts it,

At the kernel of the hypertext concept lie ideas of affiliation,
correspondence, and resonance. In this, . . . hypertext is nothing more
than an extension of           what literature has always been (at least
since "Tradition and the Individual Talent")--a temporally extended
network of relations which successive generations of readers and writers
perpetually make and unmake. (1991, par. 19)

Hypertext is still too new and relatively rare to be the object of much
close study, although it has created a great deal of interesting informed
speculation (see in particular Bolter 1991).  It can be seen, as Slatin
does, as a very different form of text, the only form of computer mediated
communication that is entirely unique to the computer and has no
analogue in hard-copy communication whatever.  For my purposes,
however, I do not think that we need to separate hypertext from other
forms of computer mediated communication. Rather, I see it as simply
the most extreme extension of a change in communications media that
permeates all aspects of the electronic writing space.

6.   Copyright in the Cybernetic Tribe

One of the most visible signs of the first transformation of consciousness
was, as I have noted, the development of copyright laws to safeguard
intellectual property.  It is not difficult to speculate on what could happen
to these laws if the computer really does change our attitude to
knowledge.  We can understand this change not by postulating a simple
reversal, but by invoking a more complex concept:  McLuhan's "break
boundary," the point at which anything, pushed to its limit, breaks into a
new form that is in many respects its opposite.  Mechanical duplication,
once so easy that it separated performance from creation and brought
about copyright to protect the latter, has now become so very easy that
copyright, in the sense of a prohibition on unauthorized copying, is
virtually meaningless.  Small software companies distribute their products
as shareware; large ones have given up on copy-protection schemes
and are hoping to make enough money on site licences to corporations
to make up for the rampant piracy of individuals.  The sense of a single
original--an author's draft, a frame of set type, a master copy--becomes
increasingly difficult to sustain in an environment in which every copy can
spawn another copy at a keystroke, without loss of physical quality.  "In
magnetic code," Michael Heim points out, "there are no originals" (1987,
p. 162).  In the intellectual marketplace in particular, copyright in the
sense of preventing unauthorized copying is becoming vacuous--hence
the bold statement in the _EJournal_ masthead that "permission is
hereby granted to give it away."

Even the sense of owning a document to protect its integrity is becoming
difficult to maintain as documents lose the physical markers that hitherto
anchored their boundaries in time and space.  In order to own a
document, Hiltz and Turoff (1978) note,  An author has to be able to own
one item, which may appear in many different places which may change
dramatically over time, and the author might alter his           item after it
is already in the system.  Delivering copies of the item to the copyright
office whenever it is changed, or a copy of each and every "publication"
of it, is going to lead to chaos.  (p. 456)

Thus copyright in the sense of securing the rights to a fixed entity is likely
doomed.  The only sense in which copyright can continue to have
meaning in electronic space is the sense of acknowledging an original
creator of an idea. Electronic documents have not done away with the
citation network, and even in an evolving hypertext, newly created nodes
are typically stamped with date and author (Slatin, "Reading Hypertext,"
1991). But these familiar gestures are beginning to _mean_ something
different in electronic space.  To acknowledge parentage is not the same
as to maintain a claim of ownership.  Without the sense of
master-and-duplicate that the printing press imposed, there is no
intellectual ground for present attempts to toughen copyright laws in
order to protect "intellectual property."  They are like holding a sieve
under a breaking dam.

We can see signs of this shift in a number of subtle and not-so-subtle
ways. In a previous issue of this journal, for instance, Robert K. Lindsay
(1991) proposes an electronic journal of proposed research in which
research proposals would be openly critiqued by any readers of the
journal who felt qualified to do so, in the hope of improving them through
the process of open debate ("Electronic Journals of Proposed Research,"
1991).  In a sense this is no more than an extension and formalization of
the oral stage of collaboration, a stage that now occurs in a less formal
way in the halls and coffee rooms of research and educational
institutions, and late at night in the overpriced hotel rooms of rumpled
researchers at conferences.  But Lindsay does not suggest simply that
proposals should be publicly posted for critiquing.  He also proposes
that "These proposals would then be in the public domain: they could be
carried out by anyone with the means and skill, or they could be referred
to in applications to funding agencies."  For the proposer, this means not
simply putting an idea out into the world for a time to see what
improvements could be made to it.  It means surrendering ownership of
the idea forever, possibly letting another person develop and reap the
academic rewards for it.  This is an idea that could just as easily have
been proposed in the context of a print journal of proposals--but I have
never seen it done.  When knowledge inhabits a print space, it seems
natural to want to own it.  When it enters electronic space, it seems
equally natural to surrender it.


7.   Caveats and Conclusions

Before announcing a complete reversal of typographically- dominated
consciousness, I want to make explicit a few notes of caution hinted at
earlier.  First, one must realize that analogy is a particularly slippery form
of reasoning.  Seeing history as merely circular without recognizing key
differences is as reductive as it is tempting.  By electronic media,
McLuhan meant electronic mass media such as film, radio and most
importantly television, media largely free of alphabetic text.  It is not at all
clear that computer mediated communication will have the effects that
McLuhan claims for other forms of electronic media. The electronic
revolution, despite its often-cited links with orality, may be returning us
not to a secondary form of orality so much as to a secondary form of
literacy from which earlier forms of audio-visual media had begun to
alienate us.  Stuart Moulthrop points out that, however much an
electronic text may be freed by its electronic form from many of the
constraints of print text, it is still _text_, still visual, still segmented and
sequential in its smaller units if not in its larger structure ("You Say You
Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media," 1991).  That
secondary literacy is different from primary literacy does not make it
equatable to primary orality.  As Ong points out, primary orality is
characterised not by a different concept of text but by an absence of the
very concept of text itself.

In particular, structures of thought in primary orality are pressured by the
relentless need to preserve knowledge against the threat of annihilation
by the ever-decaying properties of sound.  The textual recombinations
performed by the oral bard were subtle, driven by the needs of the
audience but minute enough to preserve the illusion that each retelling of
the story was the same.  As electronic text breaks up the fixity of print,
knowledge will not return to this endless reperformance of the same
patterned phrases, for the elements of the text are preserved in a form
that, while infinitely malleable, _need_ never be changed.  Unoppressed
by the forces of decay that drove tribal symbolizers, the electronic
symbolizer is free to remake texts as creatively as desired.

         Elements in the electronic writing space are not simply chaotic;
they are instead in a perpetual state of reorganization.  They perform
patterns, constellations,    which are in constant danger of breaking
down and combining into new patterns.  (Bolter, 1991, p. 9)

Here we may recognise the communality of oral knowledge, the close
union of the knower and the known, but for all that we cannot recognize
primary orality.  We can never get all the way back there again.

Moreover, given the economic structure that we have painstakingly built
on the back of print-induced linearity and specialization, it will take more
than a new attitude toward texts to make us stop wanting to charge for
knowledge.  In fact, the very technology that has made certain aspects of
replication so easy as to make old-fashioned copyright unenforceable
has simultaneously brought into existence new possibilities of charging
by the byte for using information--a process that Moulthrop calls
"information capitalism" (1991, par. 16).  For every move in the economic
game there is a countermove, and knowledge has been so closely tied
to economics for so long that it may never be dislodged.  Rather, the
relationship between economics and knowledge will be rearranged into
new formations, some perhaps more sinister than my rather optimistic
portrait of communal knowing has suggested.

Finally, I do not want to exaggerate the degree or speed with which
changes such as I have outlined are likely to penetrate the society as a
whole. Eisenstein is careful to point out that the effects of the printing
press not only took a long time to diffuse through Europe, but initially
only affected a relatively small elite that she dubbed the new "reading
public" (_The Printing Press as an Agent of Change_, 1979).  The effects
on the larger public were more on the order of secondary effects, though
none the less profound for that. We in the academic community tend at
times to forget that there actually are people in the world who do not
have a desk covered with books, papers, half-done projects, computer
disks and banana peels.  Computers have penetrated everyone's world
to the extent that almost every Western household has dozens of
appliances that contain a silicon chip, and nearly every business
transaction is in some way or another involved with a computer.  But this
is not the same as saying that everyone is likely has experienced or is
soon likely to experience first-hand the new consciousness of text that I
have been describing.  As with the printing press, so with the computer,
the effects that diffuse beyond the realm of the knowledge workers
themselves may be of a highly secondary nature. But again, their
secondariness will not mean triviality.  I want to be careful, then, to define
the limits of the claim I am making here. I am not claiming that electronic
text will unilaterally undo almost three millennia of exposure to literacy.  I
am suggesting, however, that some of its psychological effects can be
understood in part by referring to the state of consciousness that existed
before writing in general and the printing press in particular made it
possible to separate the knower from the known, to see knowledge as a
commodity that can be owned, traded, rented, and accumulated. The
new awareness of the "polylogic" nature of our knowledge (to borrow
Michael Joyce's term), an awareness that has percolated through such
diverse disciplines as literary criticism, rhetoric, language philosophy and
cognitive science, may well have a technological basis.  The sort of
surrender of ownership suggested by Lindsay's proposal may be more
thinkable in an electronic form than in a printed form, not just because
electronic media speed up the dialogue, but because electronic media
make the dialogic aspect of language overt and inescapable.  The long
standing process of trading texts back and forth becomes transformed
into a process of merging texts into new wholes which are inseparable
from their makers.  The modern researcher will never be
metaphorphosed into Homeric bard, but perhaps at least some of her
activities can be seen as more bardic now than they could under the
linear metaphors imposed by print.


References

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History of Writing_.  Fairlawn, N.J.: Erlbaum.

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Cragg, G. (1991).  The technologizing of rhetoric.  Paper delivered at the
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Crane, Diana. (1972).  _Invisible colleges: The diffusion of knowledge in
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Eisenstein, E. (1979).  _The printing press as an agent of change:
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_EJournal_  1.1.  (EJournal@ALBNYVMS).

Lord, A. (1960).  _The singer of tales._  Harvard Studies in Comparative
Literature, 24.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard      University Press.

McLuhan, M. (1964).  _Understanding media: The extensions of man_.
New York: McGraw-Hill.

Moulthrop, S. (1991).  "You say you want a revolution? Hypertext and the
laws of media."  _Postmodern Culture_, 1, no. 3. (Moulthrop 591;
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Ong, W. (1982).  _Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word_.
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Patterson, L. R. (1968).  _Copyright in historical perspective._ Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press.

Slatin, J. M. (1990).  "Reading Hypertext: Order and coherence in a new
medium."  _College English_, 52, 870-883.

[ This article in Volume 1 Issue 3 of _EJournal_ (November, 1991) is (c)
copyright _EJournal_.  Permission is hereby granted to give it away.
_EJournal_ hereby assigns any and all financial interest to Doug Brent.
This note must accompany all copies of this text. ]

Doug Brent
DABrent@UNCAMULT
Faculty of General Studies
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alta, Canada  T2N-1N4

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