Chapter four explores reasons why eBooks have largely failed to date. The most interesting point Lanham explores, and the one that receives the most attention here, is the long cultural emphasis on what he terms C-B-S, clarity-brevity-sincerity. Electronic books often offer "mere ornamentation," bells and whistles, onto the "central matter" of the text. Given our emphasis on C-B-S, ebooks might simply detract or even threaten the truly important. After all, if our "souls" are our pure essence, any trappings or decoration only lead us astray, as any Puritan can tell you. So, as Lanham writes, "We have a theory of communication that is based ona theory of economcis that is based on a theory of morality that is based on a theory of self and society."

This is what makes rhetoric into the villan, eh?

However.  At the same time we recognize that style is integral to communication, even in the briefest of messages. Brevity can be its own stylistic flourish. The task at hand, it would seem, is to understand style, the looking at, as inseparable from the looking through, that in fact there never is any looking "through." We are only ever looking at the text, at the type, at the page, at the screen. Yes, Lanham has a point (and reflects a common understanding of these matters) when he discusses this looking through, this content delivered within the media.

But the point here, is that the content that we often claim to receive by looking through is not "in" the media at all. There is no "in" the media. There is only ever surface there. The meaning "inside" is not "in" the text, nor is it "in" the reader, but rather "in" the event, the material intersection of media technology and body/subject.

I don’t think this point contradicts what Lanham is trying to say. If anything, it might make more clear the moral imperative against rhetoric/writing and the sense that one’s soul is at risk here.

In any case, Lanham moves on to discuss this perception of moral danger in the discourses against technology in education. Lanham writes

We should be clear about the issue here. It is not whether the brains of young children are being formed in one way or the other. It is, by explication as well as implication, about the rationing of attention. That rationing is what a great deal of this media doom-prophesy is all about. The free market of attention, and of the technologies that compete for it, is too dangerous.

The argument against technology has not changed since Socrates warned us about the dangers of writing. It will rot your brain. But as Lanham contines, "the real issue is whether the central self, the rich human interiority … is to be conceived, and sustained, as existing on its own or only in alternation with the social self. If the center lies in vital and vibrant movement from the one to the other, then the real question about computers as a communications technology is whether they enhance this vital oscillation or try to shut it down. I argue they encourage it."

I would also. However, I also see a more integral oscillation here, within the looking through, where the composition of consciousness occurs through oscillation between information, materiality, and cognitive processes, with a corollary oscillation between consciousness, subjectivity, and ideology (which offers a different connection back toward information and materiality).

In any case though, the ebook will languish until can begin to imagine ourselves in ways that will allow us to use it. It is nearly impossible to imagine the cognitive shift that allowed early humans to imagine themselves as writers or even the more recent challenge when people had to adopt the practice of private reading.

I suppose the closest analogy we can have is the struggle some of our students face as they move from home cultures where no one really reads or writes into the literate, professional world college professors expect them to inhabit.

Now all teachers will face the same kind of challenge as they try to imagine themselves as practitioners of new media literacy and composition.