The Language of Websites
Este es un libro de Mark Boardman (Londres y Nueva York: Routledge, 2005), perteneciente a la serie Intertext, y complementario por tanto del libro "central" de la serie, Working with Texts. En este caso se examina el lenguaje de los sitios web con una perspectiva que está a mitad de camino entre la lingüística y el manual de iniciación a la red - o más bien, salta de una a otra perspectiva sin mucho terreno intermedio. Un terreno intermedio lo podría proporcionar el concepto de género discursivo, pero aquí está un tanto infrautilizado.
Una perspectiva interesante apunta en la voluntad del autor de utilizar el análisis narrativo para aplicarlo a la experiencia de la Web: "the idea of narrative as the driving force behind the Web and how it works as a form of communication" (3), pero el análisis es demasiado somero y la narratología demasiado escasa.
Incluye un breve capítulo introductorio, y otros sobre 1) el contexto físico de los sitios web, 2) los sitios web institucionales, 3) los sitios web personales, 4) sonido y vídeo en la Web, 5) buscadores, 6) elementos de la escritura en red. Todo muy esquemático, y todo desde el punto de vista lingüístico-estilístico, combinado como digo con explicaciones bastante elementales de lo que es la Web a nivel completamente introductorio: así se explican los constituyentes básicos de una página web en términos de prominencia estilística, prioridades, etc.; se comenta sobre el tipo de gráficos y de letra que se utiliza para crear una "imagen" (de modernidad, de seriedad, etc.), en relación al contexto "desregulado" de la Web.
Algunos extractos:
"The brain works by association and connection, and not in the linear way that the post-Gutenberg tradition of literacy requires of the reader. // Hypertext is a way of hard-wiring these associations and connections with other documents... Written text allows us to replay the content of our experience and thought, but the revolutionary assumption behind hypertext is that we are replaying a narrative more like the thought process itself" (10) Etc. Por otra parte, el hipertexto, dice, se parece al zapping, "channel hopping" (15) así que estaríamos hablando de un pensamiento un tanto descentrado...
"When intertextuality consists of hard-wired links and not simply references that the readers have to pursue themselves, it is easy to think of the Web as a wilderness. But it is perhaps more appropriate to think of it as a series of interconnected buildings" (31). Normalmente se nos ofrece un mapa o guía clara para el sitio: "Sometimes, though, there is a deliberate attempt to conceal the overall discourse structure of the site. A prime example of this is the hypertext novel–a form that pre-dates the Web, notably in the form of software tools for teaching children how to construct coherent written narrative. It was thought that the Web would popularise the hypertext novel, to the extent that the web form would rival the printed novel, but this has not happened to date" (33). Recomienda visitar, como novela hipertextual, ésta: www.waltersorrells.com/2.html
Parece escéptico el autor con la posibilidad de literatura en la Web, pero está pensando más en los viejos géneros, trasvasados, que en géneros nuevos. No se plantea por ejemplo la peculiar literariedad que puede surgir de los blogs. De hecho, a la hora de tratar (muy someramente) de los blogs, en el capítulo de los "personal websites", ignora el hecho de la interacción en los blogs, y habla de los receptores sólo en tanto que receptores implícitos - ¡como si no hiciesen su aparición efectiva! Tampoco aporta nada el libro sobre lo que es quizá el fenómeno más llamativo de la interacción a través de Internet: el desarrollo de formas escritas intermedias entre la escritura tradicional y la oralidad, en el correo electrónico, sí, pero también en los websites interactivos. Pero es que de hecho el libro no se ocupa en absoluto del aspecto interactivo de la red, cosa bastante llamativa.
Un aspecto interesante del libro es cómo influyen en nuestras actitudes hacia la Web y nuestros estilos de tratar con ella la consciencia de que es un medio sin responsable ni propietario global, un tanto impredecible, fluido, y accesible con otras máquinas que percibimos como también impredecibles y poco de fiar, los ordenadores.
Una aplicación interesante del esquema narrativo a la web: frente a la trayectoria voluntaria (si bien por enlaces prefijados) del lector, está el hecho de que "new proactive forces on the Web are beginning to encourage a kind of enforced narrative path, where content that we have not chosen may appear on our screens" (63) - popups, basurilla, etc. El origen del término Spam está en un sketch de Monty Python, en el que había un café en el que todos los platos del menú eran Spam (jamón prensado) con algo más.
La discusión de los buscadores es muy poco técnica, y ni siquiera se presta atención a la revolución que supuso el concepto de retroalimentación de enlaces de Google, utilizando la reticularidad de la red como fuente de información y no como obstáculo o medio neutro. Nos habla el libro de Boolean logic, pero no de Googlean logic... Vaya, se me acaba de ocurrir la palabra "Bloogle". A ver cuándo Google empieza a ocuparse del tema de los blogs más en serio, y no sólo con Blogger. Y vamos a los blogs en este libro.
"Personal websites appear to be a curious hybrid of secret diary and public revelation" (41) - una dinámica ésta que se estudia mucho más detalladamente en el libro de Viviane Serfaty The MIrror and the Veil (Rodopi, 2003). Comenta Boardman el morbo que parece producir la revelación a través del anonimato, a la vez confiando en que Internet te oculte y en que te proyecte a la atención global (48). Y el gozo casi mágico de saberte dueño de un "diario mágico" que sólo tú puedes modificar, ocultar o cambiar de sitio - aunque aquí se ignora otra vez la interacción y también la posibilidad de que alguien te "robe" el diario y lo cuelgue en otro sitio. (¿Ha sucedido ya? Seguro que sí).
Boardman comenta sobre la diferencia retórica, estilística y de diseño visual entre páginas institucionales y personales, comparándola con la diferencia entre la decoración de edificios públicos y de viviendas, respectivamente: "Personal pages are constructed more according to the principles of private living space, and so there can be greater experimentation with different types of communication" (47).
Compara los blogs a "discourse gatekeepers", cosa que parece exagerada. Un blog subraya aspectos de Internet, para llamar la atención hacia ellos; sería un highlighter más que un gatekeeper. Sí que me gusta el título de ésta sección: "Doppelgänger: Your web personality" (48). Y sigue a Daniel Chandler al utilizar el concepto de face de Goffman para analizar la autoproyección en la red: reescribimos continuamente viejas versiones de nosotros mismos, aunque otras queden enterradas en el archivo del blog. "Daniel chandler points out that this presupposes a very changeable version of the personality: working against the modernist idea that the personality is stable throughout all experience and that we are just trying to find it and be true to it; and instead reinforcing the post-modernist assumption that the personality is constantly being redefined" (49). OK: aquí hay un concepto utilizable, pero más que oponiendo modernismo y postmodernismo habría que relacionarlo con conceptos fluidos y reificados de personalidad, personalidad en proceso y desarrollo frente a personalidad estable - algo que no data del postmodernismo, sino que por ejemplo puede verse en las reflexiones de Friedrich Schlegel o de Solger sobre la ironía romántica: la trascendencia de uno mismo mediante el autodistanciamiento y la ironía. O en los Monólogos de Schleiermacher, también de la época romántica. Y Goffman, Goffman da mucho más juego para analizar el blogguismo, tanto en Interaction Ritual como en Frame Analysis. Cualquier día me pongo a ello...
El final de The Language of Websites es ominoso: en sección aparte, únicamente esto: "Be careful out there" (94).
4 comentarios
Mark Boardman -
Thank you for your review of my bookwhich appeared on your blog Vanity Fea on 7th September 2005. Forgive my lack of ability to read Spanish. I got a friend to translate it for me. Also, forgive the time delay, but Ive only just seen the post. You raise several issues which I would like to respond to. I've tried to post this as a comment on your blog, but it will not accept it. Pressing the "preview" or "publish" button does nothing. I think it maybe exceeds the maximum length for a comment.
The first general point I would make is that you appear to have reviewed the book as if it was an exercise in pure academic thought. As it says quite prominently on the back and in the section "What the book is not", in the Introduction, it is part of a series designed to help High School and first year undergraduate students respond in productive ways to web text, with worked examples and approaches that they can readily understand and use. It also poses questions which could form the basis of further academic research, but does not claim to be exhaustive in that respect.
That said, I did want to include some of my thinking on websites from a linguistic and cultural perspective, so that it might catch the attention of some members of the academic community. This appears to have worked.
In part, the dual agenda of the book might account for your observation that it jumps from one perspective to another without a great deal of middle ground. But I would also argue that multiple, inter-disciplinary perspectives are a fundamental requirement of analysing any aspect of the web. The absence of middle ground was partly a symptom of the word limit I was working to but then again the web is such a technically and aesthetically eclectic medium that I really don't see a problem with looking at it from several viewpoints simultaneously. Despite David Weinberger's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" being a great read and fascinating in all sorts of ways, a unified theory of the web is something of awhite elephant. You have to be in several theoretical places at the same time in order to understand what it's about, and you won't necessarily have any useful perception of how those places are linked to each other.
In the same vein is your comment implying that my observations about hyperlinks replaying a narrative akin to the thought process are inconsistent with the concept of channel hopping. From this you conclude that my thought process is scattered. Well I would argue that channel hopping is not a random process but a very deliberate one. The precise path you take through the channels, how long you stay at each one and what triggers the change to the next choice all of these externalise a narrative imposed by the viewer but in large part determined by hard-wired opportunities. Remind you of anything?
You wrongly conclude that I am sceptical about web based literature. I was merely stating that the genre of the hypertext novel did not appear to have taken off which it hasn't. I think it's important to reflect on early attempts to transfer literary form to the web, before looking at how Web 2.0 is remaking the whole concept of literacy in ways that early web writers dreamed of but could not accomplish. More on that in my next published writing
Blogs. You describe my coverage of these as brief and superficial. Don't forget that I was discussing them as part of the generic type "personal websites". Blogs have become the most discussed type of personal website, but this has happened since I submitted the final draft to the publisher. The type of interactivity that you speak of did not, as a rule, characterise early blogs and it was early blogs that I was talking about. They were more like online diaries. The very rapid rise of widely used blogging platforms, incorporating mechanisms like RSS for content syndication and aggregation, has happened in the three years since I finished work on the book. Technorati a site that has done a great deal to raise blogs in the public consciousness - started up during Thanksgiving weekend 2002, and was a known phenomenon in the summer of 2003, but too late for my book to be restructured to encompass its significance. Even now, the more advanced features of content syndication and aggregation pingbacks, trackbacks, permalinks, Technorati tags, use of RSS newsreader software to read just the text of a blog posting without visiting the site are still the preserve of the more technically capable, or the more technically willing.
Youre right to say that the book stops short of looking at web interactivity generally, but had I covered this it would have been extremely tokenistic. I wanted to do as established and as firm a take on the beginnings of the web up to and including JavaScript and the start of multimedia streaming as the word limit and genre of the book would allow. XML and interactivity as re-shapers of natural human language warrant their own book and are indeed in large part the subject of a forthcoming paper and planned book.
In your critique of my chapter in search engines, you complain that I deal with Boolean logic but not Googlean logic. Googles natural language interface is a way of allowing searchers to use human syntax rather than Boolean operators, but the end result is the same as far as the search engine software is concerned: the query is still performed using Boolean operators, whether the end user can see it or not. You can see Boolean operators in the URL produced when you get your list of hits from a search. The only use of the phrase Googlean logic that I can recall relates to a story last year suggesting that their stats might actually be wrong: http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/01/30/googlean_logic.html. What you are calling Googlean logic is the PageRank system that they introduced in the late 1990s to rank pages according the number of incoming links that they received, eliminating search engine spam. By 2003, when my book was finalised, all search engines were doing something similar. The chapter on search engines was already the longest in the book, and further (I think unnecessary in this case) complications in the theoretical framework would have meant cuts elsewhere.
My phrase discourse gatekeeper referred only to what Blood has called filter blogs categorised lists of hyperlinks that the author wants to share. Id now argue that the term blog no longer encompasses that kind of site. http://del.icio.us is the best known of these, but Id hardly call it a blog. It has a blog as part of the site, but its raison dêtre is not blogging.
I like your concept of fluid personality in relation to blogs, but I still think there is mileage in the modernism/post-modernism thing. Again, it was something I thought students might be able to use as a familiar hook for thinking about how personal websites could be compared to other more canonical literary genres.
Finally, the last sentence of the book was not meant to be ominous but a joke referencing the TV series Hill Street Blues. I guess Anglo-American humour (or maybe just my brand of it) does not translate that well.
Best wishes,
Mark
Magda -
:)
Jose Angel -
Magda -
Muchos saludos.