Research 2

Jacob Welch
HUMN 4460
Prof. Lucas
March 1, 2007


Throughout E-Crit, Macel O’Gorman is attacking what he calls “The Republic of Scholars” which is the educational system or more specifically, the academic institution of higher learning. O’Gorman seems to be criticizing the academy for being short sighted in regards to new media. The stodginess of the “Republic” seems to grate upon O’Gorman enough to drive him to examine what it is within the discourse of new media that may be the potential jumping off point (and up-hill battle) towards critical assimilation of new media into academics. What he found is that most of new media currently falls into what he calls hypericonomy. Hypericonomy is “what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has termed ‘the remainder’ of language. Puns, anagrams, false etymologies macaronics and metaphor of all breeds fall into this repressed category, this ‘other of language’” (O’Gorman 4).

The scholars seem to hold that if it is not written in text then it is not permissible within the academy. Digital technology so far within the academy seems to only be a new way of transmitting old information. Books are permissible in a digital format, so long as it is still a published text. It is ironic that the new and more capable medium is made to backpedal because of the old medium and tradition. It is similar to a person getting into a car to drive to a gym just to do some aerobic walking. Or like a person who works as a video editor to make money that helps pay for college tuition so that he can get a degree in video editing which would help him find a job.

The forth chapter of the book is the digital application of hypericonomy or “what hypericonomy might look like as a digital media practice” (O’Gorman 69). The chapter could be divided into three distinct sections. Within the first O’Gorman is explaining how it is possible the remainder and not the academy that is on the forefront of increasing intelligence. The next section shifts its analysis of the “modes of cognition for pedagogical purposes” (76) from within a psychological context to a more familiar humanities context, the fine arts.

I am constantly reminded of Marshall McLuhan and his work The Medium is the Message throughout this chapter. McLuhans message of understanding a given medium or suffer the potential of having the medium being in control, seems that it should be at the forefront of all critical approaches to new media. It seems that the ‘McLuhan Lens’ should be the first critical diagnostic that should be performed on a new medium, and it should certainly be applied before any Marxist, Feminist or Anarchist critical framework mounted to it. It certainly seems feasible that a initial interpretation of the role of video games, television, cinema and any other highly pictorial based medium might have been misread by the academy and thus relegated to ‘the remainder.’ But the “pedagogic avant-garde, from the U.S. Army to the Baby Einstein Company” (O’Gorman 73) have found promise in many non-scholarly approaches to learning, intelligence and education. And if O’Gorman’s comments and provided commentary from other authors regarding the way imagery and other hypericonomies coincide with the Flynn Effect are indeed true, than the Republic of Scholars may indeed have a “face-to-face encounter with the…monstrous ‘other’ of the conventional academic discourse” (4).


Works Cited

O’Gorman, Marcel. “E-Crit Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Message.” Media Studies. Ed. Paul Marris and Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 38-43