Introduction
To many readers, a specialized academic vocabulary provides an easy excuse to
say that a reading is "too complicated," "too difficult," or "not relevant."
But we all use specialized vocabularies every day, in classes, in our professions,
in our pay-the-rent jobs, in the communities of interest to which we belong.
A specialized vocabulary is simply the way in which a group discusses complex ideas: the NCC language of learning communities, competencies, life-long learning, etc. is foreign, for example, to most faculty and students at George Mason. But if you can learn the specialized vocabulary of NCC, or that of your profession or job, you can learn the specialized vocabularies of academic writing, whether they are of computer science or of literary theory.
Yes, it's hard at first. But the pay-off comes in your command of more subtle understandings, an ability to "decode" many different styles of writing and speaking, the acquisition of a vocabulary that precisely expresses ideas you may have harbored and worked on for a long time, and so on. The reading guide that follows outlines the structure of the argument the author is developing, and indicates the main points you should consider in your thinking about the substance of the readings.
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The Text
1) The author first investigates the meaning of the word virtual, in order to
establish how our contemporary uses of the word emerged She discovers two divergent
meanings: one negative (the fake) and the other positive (the potential, with
its associations with openness, productivity, creativity). (pp. 88 - 89)
2) She then assesses the validity of the association of the virtual with the fake. She introduces an important, but unspoken, assumption of "virtual as fake" theorists: the idea that some ill-defined "reality" is authentic. She then discusses the reactions this opposition between fake and authentic has provoked. (pp. 89 - 92)
3) The next section tackles the definition of the virtual as the potential, something that holds the power to be realized in many way and will never run out. The classical scholar, Richard Lanham, calls the "virtual as potential" the ability to have your cake, and eat it, and still have as much cake left as you started out with. She summarizes the theories of French philosopher Pierre levy in support of her argument that the virtual represents the potential. She then looks at the possible objections "skeptics" (p. 93) might have to this definition of the virtual, and then justifies her adoption of the "virtual as potential" definition.
4) On p. 95 she itemizes the increasing virtualization of textual production (the creation of spoken and written texts, at this particular point, although you could extend her ideas to text-as-image, as moving images, etc.) and identifies a key concept, actualization. You should make sure you understand exactly what she means by actualization, as it is an important concept for the rest of the article.
5) Thinking of actualization in terms or writing and reading is an excellent way to approach this concept. Another good way to think of actualization is in terms of a musical score: the sounds of the soloists, the different parts of the orchestra, the actions of the conductor's baton are all potentially there in the score on the page or the screen. Each performance is an actualization of that score. But, as the author remarks on p. 96:
The virtuality of texts and musical scores stems from the complexity of the mediation between what is there, physically, and what is made out of it…sound is not inherent to musical scores, nor are thoughts, ideas and mental representations inherent to the graphic or phonic marks of texts.
6) On pp. 96 - 98, she discusses the different interactions which constitute the mediation she mentions above, and stretches her analysis to the changes our use of the computer as a reading and writing machine has triggered. Remember that when she discusses hypertext, although she may refer to literary hypertexts by authors you may not have read, you do read hypertext every single time you surf the web. So you have plenty of references for the points she is making here.
7) She also argues that each text contains many texts, each one "created" by a single reader and his/her experiences, choices, etc. This concept should be familiar to you from close reading in 200-level English classes. She uses this concept of "many different texts in one text" to support her concept of the virtual as potential. (p. 98)
8) She further argues that the malleability of electronic text (our ability to change multiple aspects of an electronic text - from basic layout changes to wholesale rewriting and annotation) supports idea of the virtual as potential. (Pp. 99 - 100) She concludes this section by throwing in a bit of French which, as the linguist among you will appreciate, makes a very important distinction. She concludes (p. 100) that in the future (always remembering that the future is always now) authors may, instead of creating a single, linear, logical text designed to be read in a fixed format, simply assemble text and offer it to the reader as a "freely usable resource."
9) Read pp. 100 - 104 in detail if you are interested in literary theory. If
you're not interested in literary theory, just study the table that begins at
the bottom of p. 101 and continues to p. 102. In it, the author itemizes the
differences she sees between printed texts (on the left) and electronic texts
(on the right). By extension, think of ways you might apply the characteristics
on the right to other digitized artifacts.
*Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Cyberspace, Virtuality and the Text." Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 78 - 107.