Text on the network

2. Text on the network

Writing has an inevitable temporal structure. There is a coarsely-grained rhythm that describes when we initiate and terminate separate episodes of engagement with the task. Yet there is also a more fine-grained tempo to writing. This involves a pattern of shifting attention as the writer moves in and out of engagement within a single episode or session. The point of the present section is to highlight how the technological context of the activity serves to choreograph this pattern of involvement. We are particularly concerned here with the more fine-grained level of engagement.

Comments above about manipulating screen-based documents remind us that there is often an issue for writers of coordinating between the

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writing task itself and a number of supporting resources – such as reference works and other texts. In the previous section, we considered re- mediations of writing that attended to some of the physicality in this coordination of action. Specifically, we illustrated the significance of physicality by developing a contrast involving writers coordinating attention to exclusively screen-based documentary resources. In the present section, we dwell more on the interactive dimension of the medium, rather than its spatial qualities. The key issue concerns how the involvement of ICT creates new ways of managing this mobility between resources. Of particular interest is the networked status of the technology in use.

For a writer, the existence of parallel documents ready-to-hand is often important. This is especially true for the case here; namely, the well- researched writing of undergraduates. Typically, students position them- selves to optimize such engagements with support material. By focusing on the networked nature of ICT, we raise issues concerned with computers creating richer possibilities for movement between documents. This is not a point about the sheer quantity of support documents that might be rendered to hand by easy network accessing. Rather it is a point, first, about how ICT reconfigures the whole issue of managing document access. Then, secondly, it is about how ICT necessitates changes in the affordances for interacting with the immediate writing environment. This entails changes in the underlying rhythm of writing – understood as

a set of attentional commitments the writer must make to sources. We comment on each of these network features in turn. To say that ICT entails a reworking of the business of document access raises the issue of how writing gets spread across a variety of different locations. Our diary records from undergraduates indicate that a writing project can be exercised in a wide range of places. Most obviously, in libraries and university resource rooms; but also in common rooms, friends’ study bedrooms and, of course, the writer’s own living space. To a significant extent, the motive for distributing activity over locations reflects the need to gain access to physical documents that are themselves all over the place. This applies to books and journals but also to material that might need to be borrowed from staff or fellow students.

On the particular campus we studied, private study bedrooms enjoyed intranet and internet access. This meant that some documents that once required trips to teaching spaces (libraries and so on) might now be obtained online in the student’s own room. Documents borrowed from fellow students might be routed about the campus via email. Resource room documents have migrated to ‘the web’. In short, such networking serves to situate the act of writing more firmly in a single place – the site of one’s networked PC. When we compared the diaries of students with network access in their own rooms to those of students without network access we found a number of differences (Crook and Light 2002). We did

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not find any difference in the absolute amount of private study. However the students with network access were more likely to conduct that study in their private rooms. We assume this applies to their writing assignments – as these represented a large proportion of what private study involved. Campus networking, then, does not precipitate more private study but it reconfigures how that study is done. In particular, it concentrates it more in a single place. Thus the experience of writing becomes more situated in this sense.

This example serves our general purpose. The empirical comparison made possible by partial campus networking allowed us to notice a sig- nificant and general feature of student writing as a form of cultural practice. Namely, through an inevitable distribution across sites of social and study activity, writing involves other people and, thereby, a potentially wide variety of opportunities for exploration and interaction. ICT (in the form of networked study bedrooms) reconfigures the dynamic of writing practices in that sense. It does so by virtue of its disturbance to the socially- distributed nature of the activity.

The second point we wish to make about networked ICT and writing arises from the strong interactive properties of the networked computer. In this case, we use system logs gathered from a broad sample of students with PCs in their own rooms (Crook and Barrowcliff 2001). The most striking message of these records is that students used this technology

a lot. From around mid-day until well into the late evening there was a

50 per cent chance that a study bedroom computer would be active. This hints there are a great many things that can be done with this technology. Indeed, that notion of versatility gets nearer to the main point we wish to make about the finer detail of usage patterns. One distinctive feature of a networked computer is that it makes a large number of resources available at one site for action. Sitting at this technology, the user is able to send electronic mail, have synchronous text conversations, read a news ticker, listen to an MP3 file, watch the television, surf the web – as well as interact with a word processor. All these things may be done in parallel. Perhaps the common image of the PC as a recreational technology is the image of games playing. Yet these students spent rather little time engaged with conventional computer games. Rather, what they did was more about multi-tasking: moving in and out of a wide range of separate applications in a style of working that is best described as ‘animated’.

One analysis we conducted concerned all sessions where a word pro- cessor was opened for at least an hour and where the document title implied a course-related writing project. System logs allowed the pattern of computer activity across that hour to be followed. On average, during such a word processing session a student would attend to another task (shift input focus) once every four minutes. How this more animated style of writing should be judged is not central to the present discussion. Certainly, some of these movements between computer applications

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involved movements between resources that were central to the com- position task – text files, websites and so forth. However, it was also clear that many such movements serviced more recreational interests – changing background music, responding to instant messages and so on. None of which is to suggest that private spaces have not always been rich in such affordances for fragmenting some core study activity – such as using a word processor for composition. However, ICT creates an additional layer of such alternative possibilities. Writing tasks executed at this networked technology are clearly reconfigured: this is a technology that strikingly concentrates at one site a wide range of highly interactive affordances.

A final point regarding this theme is important, as it echoes something we have already noted about the inherent variation in activities implicat- ing such rich technologies. In interviews it became apparent that students managed the potential of ICT for multi-tasking in different ways. Half of them reported genuine concern that they spent too much time in playful use of their computers. Perhaps as a result of such worries, many reported strategies for filtering out certain sorts of competing computer activities that might be accessible during a period of planned writing. Others, how- ever, seem relaxed about this feature of the technology and were more vigorous in responding to interactive options when they arose. This is the point we have stressed before: individual writers shape the inclusion of new technologies in distinctive ways. Accordingly, simple generalizations about singular ‘effects’ are again seen to be inappropriate.