Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era ed. by N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (review)

In Comparative Textual Media, editors N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman have assembled an engaging group of authors to help us take stock of the world of text, writing, reading, and print some twenty years after the global popularization of modern mobile networked media like the World Wide Web and the cell phone. The goal is to “rethink categories, courses, and faculty hiring in ways that take more than a superficial account of digital technologies and their implications for disciplines that have been operating on a print-based model of scholarship” (p. vii). Drawing from the larger field of comparative media studies, the editors call for the study of what they call “comparative textual media (CTM)” (p. vii). Given their own framework, the title of the book, suggesting that such media are “postprint,” is somewhat misleading. As they argue, “A CTM framework does not render print-based skills obsolete; on the contrary, they form an essential component of critical and pedagogical practices. Rather than implicitly assuming that these print-based practices are trans-historical and universal, however, the CTM approach emphasizes their historical and technological specificity” (p. xiii).

The twelve essays are divided into three sections. In the first, Theories, the contributors attempt to go beyond the perpetual marketing buzz of “new media” (since all media were at one point “new”) and instead focus on the study of texts and textual practices within “digital devices with screen interfaces, especially networked and programmable machines” (p. 2), where previous assumptions of infrastructure and interface are now breaking down. We have moved from reductionist, individual processors to networked, cloud-based assemblages, and from screens that mimic the book page to screens that cling to wrists, cover walls, or even float virtually in one’s field of vision. For example, Adriana de Souza e Silva’s essay on “Mobile Narratives” draws on geographical theory to understand the interactions of text, screens, networks, and bodies in an increasingly interface-rich urban space, arguing that “physical location becomes paramount to the way we read and write urban spaces and interact with location-based texts” (p. 35).

The second section, Practices, highlights authors who approach the question of how text is changing through “close exploration of what is actually happening on the ground” (p. 97). Drawing on the literature of science and technology studies, where sites of practice (e.g., laboratories) and agents of practice (e.g., technicians) are the entry points for the study of both the materiality and the embodiment of scientific knowledge, these essays explore situated engagements with texts as diverse as papyrus book-rolls, children’s books, and computer games. The concluding chapter here, by Lisa Gitelman, makes a provocative argument that we might well return “print culture studies” to its roots of actually exploring the practices of printing—“returning print culture to the printing house” (p. 186).

The final section, Recursions, contains essays that exemplify the editors’ theoretical suggestion that scholars move beyond new media studies and their methodological suggestion to engage more closely with practices, histories, and spaces. But while these pieces are each interesting and provocative, taken together they remind us that no matter how the “new” new media studies might be defined, scholars in this area must still grapple with the perennial questions of communication research: how authorial intent, technological form, audience reception, and societal context interact to shape claims about how “meaning” moves from mind to mind across divides of time, space, and culture. As Mark C. Marino points out in his essay on “critical code studies,” this is as true of computer programmers as it is of literary essayists: “What makes the act of writing, code or prose, a compelling performance is witnessing the artist confronting constraints, be they proctors, processors, or prompts, in real time” (p. 308).

Taken together, these essays produce a fascinating volume with much to offer scholars...