In Liberal Education, Vol. 83 #3, Summer 1997, pp. 34-39.

SHAKESPEARE IN CYBERSPACE, JOYCE IN HYPERMEDIA
By Robert H. Bell

Yeats said, "Rhetoric is the quarrel one has with others; poetry, with oneself." William James conceived philosophy as "the habit of always seeing an alternative." In a modestly Yeatsian and Jamesian sense, here is a dialogue with myself about technology, its implications for undergraduate teaching and learning, and its effects on the ways we perceive—spiritually, intellectually, aesthetically.

Prophets of cyberspace foresee not merely technological developments but a new consciousness, redefining our awareness of reality, transforming our experience of time and space. As the hyper text hype and entrepreneurial hum become deafening, educators are constantly pressured to get real, to be cutting edge, to go hightech, to join the global network. Many humanists, vaguely associating Cyberspace with NeverLand, remain skeptical that real teaching and learning occur on the electronic superhighway. Some fear that the liberal arts may be imperiled, not redeemed, by computers.

Everyone acknowledges that technology benefits practical instruction: computer models train pilots, 911 operators, and surgeons, so that learning takes place in virtual reality rather than on your gall bladder. Initiatives in the humanities have lagged but are coming fast. Today you can view CD-ROMs—combining text, moving images, still images, and sound—of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Stephen Jay Gould's "On Evolution," and the Beatles's "A Hard Day's Night," in which Ringo Starr proclaims prophetically, "You can't learn everything in books, you know."

A multimedia, interactive Macbeth encourages you to follow the arc of curiosity—into the history behind Shakespeare's drama, visual representations of scenes, portraits of Shakespeare, or imagery in Macbeth and throughout all of Shakespeare's works. You can view the Royal Shakespeare Company production and pick up the action anywhere you click. There are sequences from Polanski's Macbeth, Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and Orson Welles's Macbeth. There is even a "Macbeth Karaoke." Go into a scene, select a role, and play Lady Macbeth. If psychologists are right that the more senses involved in decoding a message, the greater its cognitive richness, the multimedia Macbeth could be a preview of Shakespeare at the millennium. The computer displays all the scenes in which Banquo appears or the reiterations of any word. All this, fast: "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly."

Digital information, easily and quickly accessible, is ideal for reference works like concordances, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Columbia Encyclopedia, the collection of the National Gallery of London, film encyclopedias, baseball stats, and atlases mapping everything from Peru to Peoria. Geographers are mapping New York City on a grid fine enough to show every manhole. A CD-ROM can hold one thousand video stills, two thousand diagrams, six hours of high-quality sound, and ten thousand pages of text—and have enough space left over to make it all work together. No wonder the OED sells four times as many CD-ROMs as traditional twenty-volume sets, and the printed version is effectively remaindered. Fusing videodisc and microcomputer capability ties enables storage, access, retrieval, and de livery not only of words and numbers but maps, illustrations, graphics, sound, and film. Classics majors boot up and search all Greek and Roman literature—repeat, all—almost instantly. A student may see on her computer every work mentioned in her art history course and can view the gorgeous Book of Kells from more angles and more comprehensively than she could scrutinize the illuminated manuscript itself at the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

Another educational opportunity is hypertext, or expanded books, a technological inno' vation with old and familiar antecedents. We might think of hypertext as footnotes to footnotes. A hypertext system links materials; the reader pursues the link to another text highlighted by bullet or note, according to interest or preference. Rather than merely see a footnoted reference ("Shakespeare draws upon Holinshead's Chronicles"), the user may explore Holinshead's text. Notes, annotations, interpretations, definitions, cross-references are at one's finger tips. Everything is potentially connected but only provisionally centered by the more active, or interactive, reader. Hypertext lets everybody read the way teachers read, connecting materials, facilitating links, making the sea of contexts easier to navigate.

In electronic expression, text is enhanced, contextualized, or regarded in a network of hypothetical perspectives. Hypertext can open difficult works, such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy or Joyce's Ulysses, by layering information and interpretations. To each according to his needs: Readers pursue whatever puzzles or engages them, for as long as they wish or need. Hypertext encourages critical thinking by demonstrating the multiple ways of comprehending phenomena or details.

Liberal arts learning becomes more streamlined and maybe more exciting. Common to all these hypertext toolkits is a strong element of reader participation: The user controls what happens next. With hypertext you get multiplicity, movement, variety, freedom, and the challenge of a crossword puzzle on a Rubik's Cube. Certain kinds of canonical classics, such as those strange, wonderful books by Sterne and Joyce, which exploit and explode their own textuality, may become even more prominent. Antic masterpieces like Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, Tristram Shandy will, I predict, be conceived and cherished as Ur-HyperText. Like the computer world, these books overflow with the spirit of game, play, and fun. What today seems baffling or perverse may appear less bizarre, more like hypertext.

But is "user creativity" always a good thing? The multimedia blitz multiplies mediocrity and overloads the circuits. Five hundred channels and nothing to watch! Absorbing this massive, undifferentiated flow of information is like drinking from a firehose. We're inundated by material that hasn't necessarily been thoughtfully selected, arranged, and presented. Possibilities for links proliferate almost infinitely, until that butterfly meandering in Malaysia is connected to the wind in Wyoming.

The new technology discourages close attention to language generally, and scants many things an English professor wants to encourage: coherent argument, causation, sequence, correlation, subordination, and development of ideas. Computerese places less premium upon rationality, creativity, and elegance. One can have an experience but miss the meanings. Technology delivers zappy MTV pyrotechnics, instead of traditional, linear sequence of thought. The hypertext does not fit into, or value, organic structure as conventionally defined. In techie talk, linear is a bad word. Instead of being led somewhere by a writer or a teacher, you choose where you want to go. Users may rearrange or rewrite Hamlet's soliloquies, or add musical accompaniment to Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene.

Even the highest quality programs now available have substantial limitations. A CD-ROM can squeeze only about 150 minutes of video onto a disk, and the film you see on your monitor is the size of a matchbox. To save space they reproduce every other frame, a technique called QuickTime with results less fluid than film. And the producer—not the teacher nor the user, but somebody at the company—decides which scenes to include for Karaoke, and which snippets to display from Orson Welles, Polanski, and Kurosawa. Since a DVD's capacity for words is almost infinite, there are lots of critical commentaries. Yes, access is easy— but all that material is available in libraries, and no one, not even at Wired, argues that gazing into a screen is more pleasant or convenient than reading a book.

"Edutainment" computer programs are disappointingly meagre and often droningly unimaginative—slapdash responses to market research. Some ballyhooed "interactive Media" are merely sugarcoated books on a screen. "We are in great haste," Thoreau said famously, "to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." The computer industry needs material and rarely produces quality. It reminds me of early television, full of recycled radio shows and old onereeler Westerns like Hopalong Cassidy and Tex Ritter. So far, genuinely provocative materials are rare. The CD-ROM of Dante's Commedia reproduces a nineteenth-century English rendition, a lousy translation in the public domain. Truly, there's lots of trash in cyberspace, roadkill on the information highway.

But we're only beginning to create and apply this technology. Soon, DVDs will present high-quality motion pictures. A Shakespearean at MIT is developing laser disc and DVD technology for all the versions of Shakespeare on film. Already Shakespeare students can compare the reunion of King Lear and Cordelia in the versions by Olivier, Kosintsev, and Peter Brook, at the touch of a keyboard in our "smart classrooms."

Arguably, electronic mail has already wrought a sea change in education, and it has been a terrific boon. I can participate in discussion groups, exchange e-mail with a student, or download files with Shakespeareans anywhere. It's like an electronic congregation of rabbis, arguing over Talmud. High-speed search and nearly instantaneous transmission extend and expedite writing, communication, and retrieval of information. No one doubts the advantages of technology such as e-mail or global searches for scholars.

Students benefit not merely as researchers. My Shakespeare students are online, via listserv, so we communicate collectively and individually, at the touch of a key. Students key in weekly journal entries, to which I respond, and other students add comments and queries. We exchange problems for discussion in upcoming classes. Class morale and zeal, I believe, are enhanced; the listserv promotes comradeship, collegiality, and shared purpose. Some verbally reticent students write more fluently than they speak, and contribute enthusiastically to the listserv. Others seem enabled by the relative informality of the process; I stress that though I read everything they send, I can't annotate individual messages as meticulpusly I would a formal essay. I urge them to speculate, probe, query—and not to worry about typos and modifiers, dangling loosely.

I want to see them thinking, playing with ideas, and arguing with each other. Often I peruse the listserv just before class, so I can refer to students' ideas or direct questions to particular people. My Shakespeare listservers engage in uncommonly rich, ongoing conversation outside of the classroom and have more opportunity to explore and articulate ideas. Though it is efficacious and fun, it is also demanding, and I cannot respond thoughtfully to the cascading communications on my e-mail.

But, if time is an issue, so is money. In the1990s, America spent well over two billion dollars on educational technology. And that was before the milillenium bug bonanza! Such an expenditure of resources raises a rude question: Are we getting enough bang for the buck? We're not just paying for fancy hardware— but whole systems, training and retraining, support staff, wiring and rewiring. Whatever goes into fiber optic cables and PowerPCs is not available for teachers, scholarships, and new programs.

More important are hidden costs which never appear on a spreadsheet. Technology aggravates our fetish of ephemerality, encourages—sanctions—a myth that the golden age is tomorrow. Computers confuse newness with progress; they encourage a disposable, consumer culture. Computer hardware and software seem to have the shelf life of yogurt. We are constantly exhorted, or warned, that today's cutting edge is tomorrow's butter knife. Here is an actual consumer warning from a book about computers (I am not making this up): "Any book more than two years old is of questionable value. Books more than four or five years old are a menace. OUT OF DATE = DANGEROUS."

Teachers should challenge the assumption, already far too prevalent, that we live on some higher realm than the deprived souls of yesteryear. From this fallacious and arrogant perspective, the past was dull, benighted, wrong, and cheesy, while the brave new world, thanks to the commodification of culture and the wonders of technology, is stimulating, enlightened, correct, and cool. On Wall Street or Madison Avenue, you're in the fast lane—or you're in the gutter. A lone voice crying out in the wilderness ask, Why is everybody in such a hurry? Is it an eternal verity that time is of the essence—or is it a PR pitch? We already have too much speed and power, especially for the uses made of it. For some people, having a Power Macintosh is like launching heat-guided missiles to shoo flies, or hiring Einstein to balance a checkbook. Maybe we should all slow down and reflect.

In the liberal arts, especially in the humanities, it is difficult to measure productivity; in a sense the purpose of humanities is less to discover than to inquire. Told by one cyberprophet that information is "the basic ingredient of social organization," I naturally pose alternatives: Is information more basic than hope, love, faith, reason, curiosity, imagination? Computers process information and manipulate images—but they can't differentiate and evaluate. To a computer, there is no difference between words and things, between a simple formula and "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact!" Computer technology neither conveys nor values the joy, ardor, fascination, beauty, fecundity, and mystery of words.

Computer techies speak ardently of a new day, of less hierarchy and more democratization, of education without teachers or "controllers of information." No doubt, at some not-very-deep level, I fear becoming obsolete. But I am also affirming an old, time-honored idea of teaching: not through a glass darkly, but face to face. "Multimedia capabilities" via computer screens cannot provide the most substantial kinds of presence. Why else are demonstrations of new programs always presented at conferences by some engaging person? Occasionally a brochure or advertisement blazons the features of children's books on DVD, with a voice-over reading the text. We should be reading to our kids. And not just because it's good for the kids. Some of my peak moments of being have been reading The Chronicles of Narnia or The Secret Garden to my daughters.

Keyboard communication, with a disembodied voice from cyberspace, is not the be-all and the end-all. Does or will anyone read a computer screen any longer than necessary? Most books gain little in a CD format. At my most cur-mudgeonly moments I sometimes think that multimedia remains a solution in search of a problem, doing what books do better and more conveniently. If it's true, as gurus of in-teraction stress, that we learn best by doing, let's also emphasize that reading is a particularly imaginative and demanding kind of doing.

As a teacher, I want to be there to prime the pump. In my small but insistent way, to bear witness to the mysterious power and permanent pertinence of literature. Imaginative forms of language may not guarantee, but they surely enable, meaning and value. For me teaching requires special attention to Shakespeare's extraordinary uses of language. My richest discoveries come when I get closest to qualities of expression. So, in the double spirit of teaching andlearning, I unashamedly employ tactics common long before Shakespeare entered cyberspace, and which I hope we’ll be using long the millennium. My students memorize and dramatize passages, which we explore and discuss. Shakespeare calls for vivid reading, prompting us to act it out as if taking part in the play. On tests, students must identify passages by speaker and context, and explain their significance. I share with Shakespeareans through the ages the belief—the joyous conviction—that the true hero of every Shakespeare play is language. Above all I want to help students feel, dramatize, analyze, and cherish Shakespeare's glorious, rich words.

As a humanist I'm not ready, even at the millennium, to forsake teaching and reading books. To that end, teaching, for me, is an older way of "interfacing." Ancient Greeks spoke of prosopon, to look upon a face. The timeless value of face-to-face encounters has never been more necessary—or timely. Students should be not merely informed but awakened, not passive spectators but active participants. Only thus can readers develop creative capacities, vigorous voices, individual styles, and significant inquiries.