Lab #6 Prompt
This third week of printing, your experiences likely varied widely. But there was a moment when I handed you a form of type and asked you to feel the weight of it. This wasn’t an especially heavy form, or an especially complex one, but it was weightier than we imagine text to be, when it is primarily composed of light. Scholars often talk of “print culture” in the abstract, but building on your work of the past weeks, how might you describe a culture organized around the medium of print? You might expand your analysis in terms of “affordances” and “costs,” or you might consider how a print-based experience of text might shape an understanding of what texts (can) do, who they are form, and how they work in the world? What habits of mind might print inculcate in its users, and how are those habits of mind still with us, or perhaps shifting? How does a textual system founded in metal, wood, ink, paper, engineering, and human labor understand and organize the world?