CompPanels: Images from the annals of composition #30

Telling Book Covers (II): Retromediation

The covers of two early books on computers and the teaching of writing, published within a year of one another: Colette Daiute's Writing and Computers (Addison-Wesley, 1985) and Linda Roehrig Knapp's The Word Processor and the Writing Teacher (Reston Publishing, 1986)

Both illustrations send the same message of media replacement. Computers are ousting the pencil, that old hand-held writing tool—and, in Daiute's cover, also the art pen, the fountain pen, and the crayon. Both covers then participate in the antiquatization of composition instruction discussed in CompPanel 29, since in 1985-6 the up-to-date writing implement was not the pencil or pen but the typewriter. In those years what college writing teacher didn't expect papers to be typed?

At least Daiute's book pictures the new technology, in the form of a parallel printer cable (a ribbon cable whose colors of black, orange, and red are cleverly repeated by the writing tools). Knapp's cover only implies the new technology, as the image of the pencil looks like it was produced by a dot-matrix printer, perhaps a clip-art image. There is an interesting irony here, however. A close look shows that the bit-mapping is only simulated. The cover was drawn by hand (in the process the artist perhaps using the art pen of Daiute's cover) and was reproduced by photo offset, a technology long predating computer printing. A later medium is not remediating* an earlier one, but rather an earlier one is retromediating a later one.

There's a more fundamental displacement, expressed by both covers. If these two books are about the teaching of writing, how come their covers illustrate printing technology? Where are the students with computers, composing?

*"Remediation" is the imitation of features of a previous medium by a subsequent one; see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT Press, 1999).

RH, November 2005 (with thanx to RDR & GB)