"The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy." (Marshall McLuhan)
This electronic edition of my thesis is an experiment in transferring the American Psychological Association (APA) academic writing format as faithfully as possible into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). I consider this hypertext edition to be the ultimate version of the work.
A major purpose of such academic print formats as APA, Modern Library Association, and Chicago Style seems to have been to make it easier for overworked academics to prepare piles of articles for printing in academic journals. These articles would typically be received typewritten on paper from many different writers in many locations. In that circumstance, having a standardized format prevented an excess of retyping, smoothing the path to the press.
The medium used to handle print has changed. Almost no one uses typewriters anymore, and most of us are adept at exchanging the output of our word processors in electronic form. Desktop publishing has made the printing process much more direct and localized. At the same time the World Wide Web has made everyone with access to it a potential publisher, for better or worse.
While some sort of standardized format is still desirable, perhaps the current ones are not appropriate for the new media environment in which we work. APA seems rigid and particularly awkward to read and create. The system of references, intended to contribute accountability and intellectual integrity to the writing, is so arcane that adhering exactly to it often obscures rather than clarifies. (Some insecure scholars may prefer to hide in this obscurity.)
It is important to remember that HTML and the World Wide Web it spawned is only ten years old, although work with linkable hypertext preceded it. This new format permits a system of references that can be more thorough, detailed, and flexible while at the same time allowing the text to be more readable, and more accessible - both to the community of scholars for peer review, and to the world at large. (I have to acknowledge that I am bypassing issues of intellectual property and plagiarism that this accessibility raises; I'm doing so with faith in our ability to deal with those issues, as we did during the advent of moveable type, lithography, and copy machines.)
Research paper writing develops reasoning skills, the ability to extract relevance from a sea of information, to organize, and to communicate these findings to others. However, print is not the only medium that can be used to cultivate these skills. Academic paper writing in itself is not a skill that is used much in the work world, it's greatest utility is for students who go on to work within academia, and this raises the specter of an academia that is separated from the community at large - the proverbial Ivory Tower.
In addition, an exclusive emphasis on print serves to exclude students who's intelligence type and learning style are outside the range of that single medium.
To stay relevant, academics must work with new media more and more. The truth testing methodologies from the print centuries must be adapted to the new media environment. I can think of three reasons why scholars have been reluctant to do that:
First: audio/video recordings have ironically been more linear than print in their form of delivery, thus more awkward to use. The viewer has to watch or listen to a presentation from beginning to end to get the information from it. However, video and audio have become more browsable now that they are beginning to be delivered in interactive forms through CD-ROM, DVD, and high bandwidth networks.
Second: The vast sea of video that we have been adrift in this last half century has rarely demonstrated the full spectrum of its potential. The sheer dominance of commercial entertainment has left many with the feeling that the medium is inherently vulgar. This has been a byproduct of the expense of video production and delivery. Now that video production hardware has become inexpensive, and new modes of delivery are becoming accessible, one can expect that among the noise of a million amateur producers there will arise innovative demonstrations of the medium's powerful ability to inform that will inspire more academics to attend to adapting standards of intellectual integrity to the new media.
Third: video production is more work. I have quizzed several semesters of students in my community college video production classes on the comparison between writing a research paper and doing a video project, asking "which is more work, and which is more fun." The unanimous conclusion is that video projects are both more fun and more work. A major source of difficulty -- and satisfaction -- that the students cite is the necessity to work with other people and depend upon their reliability. Electronic media work forces some restructuring of campus work patterns and the social organization of research.
Re-purposing
Print is a powerful medium. The intellectual tools that it gave rise to, most notably the scientific method, are too useful to be abandoned. However, the time for its monolithic dominance is well past, and we must be busy investigating the ways of truth that new media reveal. Inevitably, comfortable old understandings of what truth is will be challenged. For many decades to come we will need an ongoing, flexible dialogue to effect this adaptation. It is a difficult, disorienting challenge that favors breadth over depth. Broad knowledge provides the perspective that enables the scholar to identify where and when it is appropriate to drill to depth on a particular topic.
The passions that will arise will require frequent grounding in the principles of respectful dialogue that were practiced by the founders of the American experiment. I think it is time to refresh a fundamental ethic in academia. I have found the assumptions carried by the word "thesis" and the phrase "defending your thesis" to be particularly grating. Perhaps this is because I am an older student, with several decades of thought and work in media behind me. Scholarship that is founded on such life experience can not be a thesis; to call it anything but a synthesis would be dishonest. The university operates on a pervasive assumption that the student is a young, ignorant person receiving training from older, wiser authorities. It may be appropriate for a younger person to engage in a series of fractional searches in the spirit of the scientific method. For that student this could be part of the process of constructing the kind of organic world view which the older student may already be bringing to the academic enterprise.
I flatly reject the word "defense" as inappropriately warlike and competitive for a scholarly environment. This image of an embattled individual defending a piece of intellectual turf is employed without reference to the civilized dialogue which employs dialectical counterpoints to arrive at a thorough, balanced understanding. It is the spectre that Freire describes as a "hostile, polemical argument between those who are committed neither to the naming of the world, nor to the search for truth, but rather to the imposition of their own truth." (1)
The platitudes of diversity found on every campus must be genuinely applied to intellectual practice as well as social issues. A competitive, alienated individual does not fit interdisciplinary learning communities, nor can such a person contribute to the Teledramatic teams that the education community should be cultivating to fit the working environment of the digital age.
Video is an inclusive medium. It has the ability to carry music, rhetoric, drama, visual arts, social and psychological insight, political ideas, history - the full spectrum of human expression. Those who presume to teach others to use the medium in a democratic society must also have an inclusive ethic.