reading feedback

Starting with the focus on digital scholarship and pedagogy that seems to even stand out more after all the chapters on traditional objects of cinema studies (from Early Cinema over Renoir and Herzog to the body of John Wayne), I would like to reflect a little on the significance of technology in terms of change/replacement/innovation. A common agreement in the readings is the development from the linear structure of the book to the “multiperspectival quality” (McPherson, 121) of the computer/internet, from the more isolated and hierarchized act of acquiring and producing knowledge to a collaborative one. And it is exactly this change of knowing that seems to be central to many of the scholars rather than (digital) technology itself. Just as Davidson and Goldberg emphasized the mode of sharing, so does McPherson argue for the “new kinds of social behavior and collaboration” (123) that go along with discovering and expanding digital technology and scholarship. And Fitzpatrick makes clear that she is less interested in “the technical changes” (125), but really in “the institutional and social changes that must precede such technological change in order for it to take root.” (126) The interdependent relation of social structures and potentials on the one hand and the production and distribution of knowledge on the other hand is definitely an insightful if not new aspect, and maybe a way to raise the attention of those scholars and students (not excluding myself) who have neglected digital technology’s significance so far.
At the same time however I question the very innovative, i.e. democratizing potential of the internet for example in comparison with more traditional knowledge technologies like the book. Just as digital technology cannot be separated from the very society that uses and creates this technology, so do I understand the different older and newer media forms to be inseparable (and I had the impressions several authors tried to make a harsh division here): Do we not all skip, advance, go back to parts and pages of a book when we read? Do we not start at the index to search for names or to look up a brief definition? And can a book not provide a “multiple, associative, digressive, even contradictory” (McPherson, 122) structure and argument? And while I do not want to hold onto the medium of the book too conservatively, why don’t we start thinking the book in new ways too and approach it by looking for “new experiential, emotional, and even tactile aspects of argument and expression” (121) here?
What I missed in Santo and Lucas’ evaluation of scholars’ engagement with online scholarly work was a reflection on how we cannot only innovate scholarly work itself, but improve the very classroom structures, lectures, seminars, communications with the students too (or with regard to Borgman and Drucker who I found very enlightening: how to mediate this new knowledge in a more accessible way). In a similar vein, i.e. questioning the repetition, continuation, passage and/or innovation between different media, technologies and modes of behavior and thought (and put polemically): Where is the difference in broadening a peer reviewing process led by a group of academic specialists to a filtering group of scholars?