I really wanted to like E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities by Marcel O'Gorman. I really did. The jacket tempts with promises of a path toward reforming the liberal arts education, armed with the tools of critical theory and digital media. This is a promise that some of my particular intersecting interests would have some grand, noble purpose. Perhaps it was my inflated expectations but I found that several significant weaknesses make it over all, an underwhelming read.

My first major criticism lies in the first chapter in which O'Gorman itemizes and responds to the criticism he received on a paper that was not accepted for publication in an unnamed academic journal. His essential premise - that we should question the underlying structure of academic writing and the cultural norms and institutions it supports - is a fine one, but by placing it in the framework of criticizing the critics who rejected his piece forces the reader to interpret the writing as bitter and vengeful. As he addresses each specific comment made on the non-traditional essay he submitted to what can be assumed is a more traditional journal, the over-arching sentiment is that the editors were clouded by an out-dated academic apparatus and could not value his innovation as such. O'Gorman undermines his own point about the structure of academic writing through the structure of his own writing. This is not the result of innovation on his part, but a lingering aura of bitterness surrounding the section.

As the reader moves beyond the first chapter, s/he is confronted with a broad discussion of "imagetexts" and visual theory that should be quite familiar to most anyone who has read any television/video studies material. Yet instead of this being presented as foreground for further analysis, O'Gorman is satisfied to re-cover the basics applying new "punceptual" terms to familiar concepts. (The "puncepts" were clever for a little while, and I was willing to go along for the ride, but by the end they seemed superfluous.) Much of what he covered was not even particularly exclusive to digital media - that is, much of his analysis did not address the networked aspects that have become critical to deal with in digital media. Needless to say I was disappointed.

Thirdly, I disagree with his dismissal of the archival aspects of new media as a significant, institutional molding force. He claims that the potential for archivization that new/digital media have brought has been over-hyped in that it merely reinforces the existing academic structure. Yet he fails to consider that significant use does not imply useful significance. We have to consider that it is more than scholarly work that has become increasingly archival and that to say something is "archival" does not mean that it is in any way static. Archivization as we see it emerging in both academic and non-academic spheres has become increasingly tied with subjectivity and and interaction. We must tie it more to the concept of Foucault's archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge than with the concept of the traditional library. This view allows a broader and more dynamic process of archivization, but also one of greater cultural importance through which exist and express.

Despite my complaints, the penultimate section of the text reframed the entire piece. In this section, O'Gorman provides sample lesson plans for educators interested in expanding academic exercise into new media. Perhaps this should have been billed as the focus of E-Crit: It frames the book not as a study of digital media, critical theory, and their coming influence in the academic apparatus, but as a pedagogical tool aimed at influencing practicing educators not versed in these fields. In this light, the criticisms that it lacks a depth of analysis and that it does not properly address the significance of the archive in new media, both become insignificant.

Perhaps then I do not take issue with the text itself but merely the cultural apparatus through which I have experienced it. As a book with all the metatexts surrounding it proclaiming it to be something it is not, it falls short. As a long essay suggesting incremental change in pedagogical practice, it serves its purpose. But then again, as the first chapter demonstrates, I think O'Gorman might enjoy taking his readers out of their comfort zone by placing his writing in unexpecting environments.