The second answered, only slightly more calmly, “Ed-uh-pus.”
I watched the pair go back-and-forth, back-and-forth until, finally, they decided to get a third person’s opinion to settle the dispute. So they turned to me, neither one knowing that I, in fact, have a Bachelor of Arts in English.
Patrick* turns to me, “Rachel, how to do you pronounce O-di-pus? Theodore says Ed-uh-pus, but I say O-di-pus. Isn’t that right?”
“Ah, no. Theodore is quite right; it’s Ed-uh-pus.”
At this point, Patrick turns slightly red at having “lost,” and being a sore loser, retorts, “How would you know? Who made you the Expert?”
In the most smug and pedantic voice I can muster, “Well, it’s this little thing called a degree, Patrick. I just happen to have one, and it’s a Bachelor of English. So, yeah, I know.” At that moment in time, I suddenly became the authority. I had the degree which immediately established me as the expert, and neither Patrick nor Theodore could justifiably question it. Neither questioned it because having a degree meant (1) time and money and (2) establishment and reputation.
So how does this short narrative relate to multimedia writing? Mainly, it prefaces my thoughts of authority and how and why print text is commonly held as the “authority” over digital text.
Pulling from my short narrative, one arena in which print text towers over digital text is time and money. First, let us explore the time element.
Indubitably, print has been around for a long time, much longer than digital text. First hallmarked in 1455 with “the ‘Gutenberg Revolution’…which marked the emergence of modernity,” print text has been maturing for over 500 years (Rhodes and Sawday 1). Like a fine wine, it seems to have improved with age, evolving from obscure religious texts into monuments for “instruction, pleasure, information, delight, devotion or distraction” (Rhodes and Sawday 1). Print text, given this time to ripen, has produced both a tested legacy and an amazing bulk of timeless works respected by generations and generations of scholarly and popular readers.
In addition to the time over which it has grown, print text also has money on its side. The costs of ink and paper, printing presses, labor, distribution, and many other constituents add up. Print text costs money to produce and to purchase, thus it has to have undeniable worth. In a capitalist economy such as ours, printing is a market like almost everything else. First, a publisher reads a text and determines that it will sell, that a demand can be created among consumers, that the text is worth spending money on. After printing, the text must be marketed, advertised, and distributed. Book signings are arranged across the nation or even the world, and interviews on Oprah, Larry King, and radio stations are scheduled. The demand for the printed text grows, and people, hungry for what the suppliers tell them they must have, buy the printed text. They view that printed material as something worth spending money on and worth spending time reading. And while these consumers are paying for the paper, the ink, the binding, etc. of that book, they pay more for the words and how those words come together to create a new world for the reader to explore; this is where the true worth of the text lies.
Words Cited
Rhodes, Neil and Jonathan Sawday. “Introduction: Paperworlds: Imagining the Renaissance Computer.” The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. Ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. New York: Routledge, 2000.
*Names have been changed to protect the stupid.
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