Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Among Texts.” Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2010. Print. 33-55.
“” “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004. Print. 199-236.
"We have passed up that view of technology as a tool from classical times, passed up the Enlightenment view of technology as alien and separate from human bodies and human minds, and arrived in a space where people view technology as part and parcel of the body, mediums, and learning” (Marilyn Cooper in “Being Linked to the Matrix” 29).
I was fascinated by this post-industrial version of our interaction with technology, because I can scarcely sense the way that a late-nineteenth century or early-twentieth century worker would view the emergine machines. We have come to view technology as not a time-saver or a crutch but a connective tissue, a lifeline, a bug-out kit. I thought I would write a little bit about the Johnson-Eilola chapters—in Writing New Media “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation,” because that was my chapter to study for last week, and in Rhetorics & Technology “Among Texts,” because I enjoyed that chapter even more.
Eilola makes a straightforward list of emergent forms of writing from pp.213-225, including blogs, databases and search engines which I would put in a single category, and nonlinear media editing and web architectures, both of which we have experimented with a bit already in our class.
The chance for us to teach rhetoric (or speech, design, or literature) through new technologies depends on our ability to get students to work through those texts as neither producers _nor_ consumers, but instead as readers and analysts of a medium for which there is no teaching precedent--Writing New Media offers new theories, whether systems theory or aesthetic theory, but also gives teachers of new readers exploratory tools of pedagogy, so that we can all come to the experiment with competence.
Eilola surmises that postmodernism allows any object or idea to be treated as pages of a book; He then quotes Geoffery Rockwell's idea: "What if we treat pages as matter?" (AT 34 ). People can write books about anything, but not every object can be a book. Films are regarded as texts, and the definitions of literacy have expanded beyond reasonable bounds but with solid justifications. Everything I can think of on the Web falls pretty easily into both modern and traditional definitions of texts. Proposing that pages can be treated as matter sounds asinine, and Eilola knows it. Pages obviously are matter, but they are also ideally transparent, with the text representing both with its medium and beyond it. New Media, we were told last week, is a text which does not discount its own materiality—and this is where Eilola is heading. If pages are physical matter, and technology is a physical medium, then what we produce on-screen has the ability to make itself as invisible as any written text—to give meaning without materiality, but with a conscious design of the way that window is framed.
Discussing informatics and explaining the potential for spimes, Eilola takes stock to say, “Books are wondrous things, but ultimately they do not do what we want them to do” (AT 34). I responded to his earlier reference to postmodernism and this about books, in terms of my classroom experience,
Books matter
All by themselves,They leave no child behind
And every child has to have a computer
And access to a library, but every child does not have to have a book.
Books are what political organizations pass out for propaganda.
They are full of dogma, and handing them to children makes an action committee look better.
So we don’t need computers in books or books in technology, but we do need ideas dispersed.
Because matter is books, we think.
We all need access, and our children need access, but
Children don’t have to learn to love a book
And books we can safely leave behind
How would I make this sound if I were spinning records?
First line a cappella but not just spoken, then
Harmony the whole way.Bass arpeggio will carry the rhythm
(I'm imagining 1-3b-5, 7-2-4, 1-3b-5, 5-7-1 %)
(In C that's roughly Am G Am G(E) arpeggios)
All major scale (some 7ths)
I imagine beats falling synchronously with the last words of lines.
Music drops out in the last line, but harmonies stay.
I have more to say about “The Database and the Essay,” and Eilola's interesting way of addressing search engines as texts, if we have a chance to talk about it in class.
Tutorial:
I was interested in this tutorial, because I often have my students with cell-phone cameras take a picture of the blackboard or whiteboard, which usually contain lists or charts of what my students think of the lesson—which I could type up, but which I also think the students will remember better with the original graphics intact. I have been considering using video for a similar purpose, but without setting up a tripod, I suspect any text would be entirely too hard to read.
This video explains how Youtube's built-in editor can un-shake such videos for us.
http://lifehacker.com/#!5786091/stabilize-your-handheld-videos-with-youtube
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