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But more centrally, the claim that Music Mouse can liberate my "musicality" from the defects or limits of my physical skill makes me wonder if one couldn't say the same for an EA Sports computer simulation of professional football or baseball: those tacklers I could never escape in the real world, those curve balls I always swung ten inches above, pose little challenge to my skills with a mouse or joystick. The only problem is that when I'm sitting at the computer I'm not playing a sport; I'm playing a computer game that offers a shrunken and two-dimensional visual representation of a sport. And similarly, when I use Music Mouse I am not making music—or at least that's how it feels to me: rather, I'm offering the computer some extremely simple prompts which allow it to make music, and only the kind of music it knows how to make. The computer sports game actually demands much more skill from me than does Music Mouse, which for Laurie Spiegel is the beauty of her program; but that's not the only way to think about the matter.
In his essay, Lanham acknowledges this point in passing: imagining a series of further developments of computerized musical technology, he exclaims, "All these permutations are available to performers without formal musical training. (The computer training required is something else.)" There's a deeper significance hidden in Lanham's parenthetical comment. What about the computer training—and musical training!—required to write a program like Music Mouse? I am able to use the application so readily because so much of Laurie Spiegel's expertise in both fields has been employed so thoroughly in its making. Indeed, Spiegel has done almost all the work; all that's left for me is to twiddle the mouse. Am I "emancipated" by this situation? Or am I merely reduced to the level of a very junior partner in the music-making enterprise?
Computer technology seems to have this curious effect on many people: it makes at least some of us feel that we are doing things that, in point of fact, the computer itself is doing, and doing according to the instructions of people who have certain highly developed skills that most of us do not have. When this happens to me—or, more precisely, when I realize that it has happened to me—I feel as though I had temporarily convinced myself that I am the Wizard of Oz; I've forgotten that I'm just a little man hiding behind an enormous shield of technology that, in this case, I didn't even make myself.
Lanham's book is actually a brilliant one, and his exploration of how electronic text changes our orientation to writing and reading is compelling and provocative. The same is true of another humanist's foray into the world of computer-based critical literacy, George P. Landow's Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. If Lanham's emphasis falls on the infinite revisability of electronic text, Landow, a professor of English at Brown University and an eminent scholar of the Victorian period, is greatly fascinated (as are most theorists of hypertext) by the concept of the link. He describes in some detail the way that links perceptually work, how they break the linear flow that we are accustomed to from our long acquaintance with the discourses generated by print technology. For Landow, these traits of hyperlinks are liberating and empowering because "the linear habits of thought associated with print technology often force us to think in particular ways that require narrowness, decontextualization, and intellectual attenuation, if not downright impoverishment."
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