Tomato or Chicken Noodle? Choose Your Own Adventure!

So my 9 year-old daughter came to me as I was watching the Big Bang video clip and said “I thought you were doing your homework.”  She was a little skeptical when I said I was doing just that!  

Eisenstein and Zork

I was thrilled with Sheldon’s response to playing Zork, the game as identified by

several of that YouTube posting’s commenters: “good golly, it’s as if it’s actually happening to me…” he muses. 

http://news.nextglass.co/beer/choose-your-own-adventure-books-beer/

When I was in elementary school, there were several choose-your-own-adventure storybook series in the library – I remember feeling the same way – devastated when I “died” or the story ended for me, and elated when I found the path that would take me to the treasure.  No wonder Sheldon wanted “5 more minutes!” He, like me, was taken back to the time he played this as a child.  In a way, these books were the precursor to new media – they facilitated interaction. 

The first thing that sprang to mind when reading Eisenstein was that technology does not create culture – people create culture.  That culture is created through the adoption of norms, and those norms are created through acts that become adopted by the majority of society. Technology is, initially, a means by which to reinforce or modify our culture – sometimes both at the same time.  When that technology becomes normalized within or disseminates throughout our culture, only then will “electronic instruments” become more than technology: each will become a symbol, or as Eisenstein notes, an “ineluctable” element of our cultural story, or history. The codex, scissors, and paste may be considered obsolete in their function – this is because they have become symbols.

Last term while taking Using & Managing Communications Technology with Dr. Wolfe, most of us here (with my apologies to you, Tess – perhaps you’ve taken something similar during your program?) learned about technology in the context of Western history (for the most part), including the evolution of the writing system and, eventually, the book.  We learned that the adoption of the writing system and the book compromised orality, something lamented by both McLuhan and Ong (Norden, 1969; Crowley & Heyer, 2011, Ch 7). However, the book and the writing system provided something greater – literacy among masses.  Had that greater benefit not been realized, the book would have gone the way of the Betamax system. 

When the book is put into the context of normalized technology, it becomes a cultural symbol.  Moreover, our society’s dependence on the written word has changed the context of our culture.  I would like to theorize that a culture that depends highly on the written word is a low-context culture, whereas more oral-tradition cultures are of high context, based on Hall’s hypothesis.  Would you agree? 

The emulator that Sheldon describes in the clip facilitates that which he experienced had as a child with the original Zork. I had a chance to look up the definition of emulator, and I was surprised to discover that, according to Wikipedia, “Emulation is a strategy in digital preservation to combat obsolescence.” It focuses on “recreating an…environment,” which is “valuable because of its ability to maintain a closer connection to the authenticity of the digital object.”  Placed in the context of Eisenstein’s view, modifying or developing a new version of an existing technology - such as a computer-generated text-based version of a choose-your-own-adventure novel - would not mean that the existing technology is obsolete.  Rather, the emulation preserves the original as a timeless symbol of a culture.  This means that, rather than replacing the book, computer-generated text-based adventure games serve to further establish the importance of the book in our society. Thus, the same may be said for new media – they act to preserve, rather than destroy, our cultural norms.

References 

Crowley, D. & Heyer, P. (2011). Communication in history: Technology, culture, society (6th ed.). Boston, USA: Allyn & Bacon.

Norden, E. (1969, March). The Playboy Interview - Marshall McLuhan: A candid conversation with the high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media. Playboy. United States: Playboy Enterprises, Inc.