The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, by Lanham

This collection of essays, most of which have appeared in print before, bears the clear impress of the author's career as a historian of rhetoric who applied his scholarly labors to UCLA's composition program. Lanham, author of The Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (1991), The Motives of Eloquence (1976), and Style: An Anti-Textbook (1974), brings a valuable perspective to questions involving digital technology and culture. In attacking Daniel Boorstin's The Image, or, What Happened to the American Dream (1961) and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), he points out that their pop "arguments against electronic technology" turn out "to be variations on the traditional arguments developed against rhetoric by Platonic philosophy and Christian theology" (p. 197), and he goes on to explain that "the quarrel between the philosophers and rhetoricians constitutes the quarrel in Western culture" (p. 202). According to Lanham, "the deepest debates about TV, about the decline of the book, about the computer as Big Brother or little one" (p. 203) simply repeat this millennia-old debate in which the opponents always speak past each other. Whereas the philosophers assume that all thought (and truth) exist essentially independent of language, media, or information technology, the rhetoricians, who begin with the assumption that the medium colors the message, outrage the philosophers by taking a playful, apparently nonserious, approach to language and learning. The particular relevance of this ancient debate to computing lies in Lanham's claim that "the bit-mapped, graphics-based personal computer is .. . intrinsically a rhetorical device" (p. 105). It is so in at least two ways. First, "in its memory storage and retrieval, in its dynamic interactivity, in the dramatic rehearsal-reality it creates, in the way game and play are built into its motival structure, it expresses the rhetorical tradition just as the codex book embodies the philosophical tradition" (pp. 105-106). Second, "classical rhetoric, and hence all of classical education, was built on a single dominant exercise: modeling . . . . Declamatio, as the modeling of speeches came to be called, stood at the hub of Western education, just as computer modeling is coming to do today. The world of electronic text has reinstated this centrality of modeled reality" (p. 47). Arguing that neither side has the complete answer, The Electronic Word locates the cultural and educational solution in alternating between both poles--though, as we shall see, Lanham does not have nearly enough to say about what such an oscillation might imply for a digital culture.