Wysocki, Anne Francis, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, & Geoffrey Sirc. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004.
Wysocki addresses the book as one which pulls the rug out from under the physique of the document (opening). Her introduction suggests that we have not explored the potential of visual writing, and that we should call new media any work which is designed with its own materiality in mind. This any the many examples of assignments in the book lead me to question the materiality of printed matter in its usual linear prose. Have we really not been given most of these same choices by printing presses? Jenkins’ use of sidebars was more innovative than the publishing choices used in this text, but the creative and enveloping use of images in ch. 5 of Writing New Media and the choices for emboldening some phrases did improve my reading experience.
The benchmark she uses for new media is this: “...any text that has been designed so that its materiality is not effaced.” I believe essentially that the accepted linear form of printed prose achieves a feat that new media is not achieving today: linear writing is so simple a form that the reader can easily separate the ideas from the work exactly because the text does efface its own medium. Much of the pleasure of reading and research, for me anyway, comes from the mission of sifting through linear text to reproduce its outline and its principal points. The texture of the writing is my second joy. New media benefits from those same traits, but even well-designed new forms lead the reader and diffuse one’s attention.
Wysocki et al are interested in design not because it translates written words into more engaging forms, but because new forms are available for writing which beg new creative impulses. Selfe and Eilola’s assignments do not assume that students will begin with a written text and superimpose a structure on it, rather that available tricks, tools, and structures will lead writers to encode their ideas in a format other than straight prose.
In an assignment, Wysocki tells her students, “There are not (yet?) fixed definitions of what constitutes a visual argument” (38). I wonder what will happen once standards for visual arguments are established, should that ever be possible. If there were, would this be a dis/regard of a text’s materiality? I mean, will stipulating conditions for visual media change its present degree of flexibility? It looks that the reason studying these writing conditions comes from not knowing a set form. I wish we knew the set form for linear writing to properly teach a class, with all the accompanying devices and tropes for teaching that writing.
We might lose the thrill of the chase when we no longer have to sit through, or riffle through, linear texts, and that day is upon us. It seems a fair estimate, based on library database searches, that three times as many articles are available in full-text form online as were ready for our consumption three years ago. The authors offer, and Wysocki particularly suggests several times, that we are “bounded by the alphabetic” (54). I’d like to know what others in our class think—how bounded are we by it, and how much do we enjoy being fettered to whichever kind of written word restrains us? A musician might say that music is her art, but that the instrument is her boundary to explore, and for dedicated writers, the alphabetic is the instrument. These four authors, and especially Eilola, encourage teachers to learn a new instrument, even if just to complement our established (hoped-for?) skill.
Eilola’s chapter, “The Database & the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” (199-236) opens with assertions that remind me of Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality. Quotations from Stuart Hall offers tasty food for thought. The legal citations of cases of Basic Books and University Presses versus Kinko’s and local document services show that conflict between copyright holders and copying businesses, with the teachers who wanted cheaper course texts and the student-consumers notable absent from that court. His comparisons of audio-engineering via ProTools and envisioning ProNoun really rings in my ears. His use of search engine ordering looks like it could benefit from Google Trends—that service cannot compare many of the small-time websites I would spend time reading, but it does allow for cataloging searches over time, like those Mimi Nguyen’s chapter referenced in searching for Asian women’s presence online.
My favorite resource in this collection is the assignments—it makes a great thread to connect the authors to each other and the teacher-student-reader to the text. Many of these assignments are worth making notes over and saving. I can’t wait to hear others’ interpretations of the Box Artist chapter.
One overarching question:
Are traditional texts quite linear, and whether they are or not, have readers always taken in those texts in a linear fashion?
Reference:
These books are both Jerome McGann’s. The first is an explanation of the connectedness of written texts, and writing as a productive community rather than producing in isolation for mass consumption. The latter explains how scholars can use technology to connect texts and images for both archival and critical work.
The Textual Condition. (Princeton Studies in Power/Culture/History.) Princeton UP, 1991.
Radiant Textuality. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
Tutorial:
A quick six-minute introduction to Google Docs & revisions for teachers. I have every intention of using this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXQmbj3EpCg
Four-minute newscast on the ways teachers are using Google Docs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYPjJK6LZdM&feature=related
A one-minute newscast on using Google’s VoiceThread in the classroom.
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