Announcements
- “English Usability Test” with Claire Palermo–email her with “English Usability Test” in the subject
- The Narcissistic Wound of Language and the Jargons of the Third Reich (opens on Facebook)
- Talk from Florida State’s English Department
- Thursday, April 22nd at 4-5:30 PM (In two days!!!)
- Zoom: https://fsu.zoom.us/j/98321715074
Let’s go to last week’s page and focus on the last bit of Ch. 12 from Barker & Jane. I think there’s a way to link that discussion to today’s new media/digital discussion. Then again, that’s just an interpretation…
Prologue
You’re probably wondering how these readings fit into a course that privileges cultural studies over a narrow commitment to a field’s agenda. Well, the articles help us see that there isn’t a consensus on “new media,” but there definitely appears to be an agreed-upon origin for its relevance in rhetoric/composition: computers & writing. In the early 1980s, composition scholars Cindy Selfe, Gail Hawisher, and Anne Wysocki started writing about what computers meant to the composition classroom and how the computer mediates writing. As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, computers started to enter more and more homes–no longer were they for publishing and office jobs requiring large amounts of data entry. In 1994, Jennifer Bay taught her first composition class and had her students go to a computer lab once a week for a variety of activities: synchronous chat, peer-reviewing, accessing the Purdue OWL, and, of course, writing. As you’re aware, many scholars had high hopes at the end of the 1990s that the I/internet was going to be a force of liberation and access for the world.
I have no doubt others would refute this claim, but new media is a relatively consistent phrase with ephemeral characteristics and connotations. Using digital technologies to communicate is and has been at the core of New Media Studies. What connects most of the history of new media in composition (or Writing Studies) is the field’s 50-year commitment to Freirean pedagogy that asks teachers to scrutinize their pedagogy and aim for liberatory–not regulatory or confirmatory–practices, making education a way to throw off the oppression of subaltern groups. This commitment comes from Antonio Gramsci but certainly isn’t from a single theorist. Gramsci, a Marxist, had an affinity for the Russian Revolution but would have quickly fallen out of favor with Stalin had he lived to emigrate from Italy. Education is an entrenched institution in American culture, an institution quite regulated by government, beholden to educational theorists and legislatures–not all of whom have the best pedagogical practices in mind.
While I’ve spent decades (three and counting) writing on a computer–as a student, non-academic worker, and professor–the computer is essential to my labor. With the risk of reductionism hanging over this next statement, I have watched the fields of rhetoric/composition and technical writing eschew theory for vocational and consumerist goals. And I think most aren’t aware of it.
If ideology influences our texts, technologies, and teaching, why wouldn’t we want to interpret these texts and practices as products mediated by culture? Ask me in 5-10 years…I might have an answer.
What is New Media?
This was your original Weekly Discussion Prompt, but, sometime on Sunday, I scrapped it for a much clearer one. You’re welcome. As our readings demonstrate, nailing down a definition of “new media” isn’t possible, but the discussion is valuable. How about you reflect on the first time you heard the term “new media” and what you often associate with it.
Try to make connections to Barker & Jane’s chapter 11 as well as Curran, Fenton, & Freedman’s Misunderstanding the Internet.
Jennifer Bay’s “Writing With” (2008)
Full disclosure: Jennifer Bay is rather important for my eventually entering this profession. You’ll probably notice some differences, but rhetoric/composition is our common background. Her 2008 article is a review of two interesting rhetoric/composition books on New Media. Of course, a ten-page review can’t capture everything about these works, but Bay highlights important foundations for each work and how they signal what’s important for writing instruction. Before we get into the major points of the article, how about some definitions:
- rhetorics: with an ‘s’, rhetorics-plural refers to the ways language persuades audiences and organizes knowledge.
- poetics: creativity and aesthetics of a text or author.
- heuretics: Ulmer’s term for the branch of logic that treats the art of discovery or invention.
- hermeneutics: practice of interpretation, usually a formal interpretive approach; exegesis is hermeneutics related to sacred texts.
- remediation: texts and communication already have traces of older media and the new medium absorbs these, making them indistinguishable. (Consider PDFs remediating printed documents.)
- topos/topoi: commonplaces or topics (of a speech or text).
- chora: communicating with all possible meanings of words; often written as chorography.
- Plato’s khôra, which the theorists below are no doubt referencing, is an intermediary space between supposed perfect forms or between the intelligible and sensible–what is known and what is felt.
- hypericonomy: hyper-icon(omy)–icons are graphic symbols and new media allows for an immense amount of possible symbols and modalities; hypertext is too passé a term to capture the “economy” of meaning this term can.
- However, in information design, we often define icons as signs that represent the thing’s physical characteristics (e.g. the house on older browsers signaled the “home” page); whereas, indexes are defined as signs that clearly indicate what they represent (a picture of smoke represents fire).
- Finally, symbols are signs with an arbitrary relationship (but intersubjective agreement most likely) to whatever they signify. Some laundry symbols are arbitrary…
- Also, what do you call the graphic symbols on your computer’s desktops?
- If only we had a way of thinking through the multiplicity of meanings…
Here are some quotes to discuss from Bay’s article:
- p. 759: “Graduate programs…having uniquely defined theoretical or pedagogical orientation.”
- Ah, yes. There is a long-standing tradition of locating particular “schools” of thought. While there’s truth to this, Bay is right that these perceptions aren’t canonized by the programs.
- Sometimes a critical mass of faculty provide a flavor for a program.
- Often, when a major figure leaves, that flavor changes.
- As an aside, if you’re interested in learning more about the particular dispositions of programs, review their recent dissertations. Here’s UofL’s list.
- p. 760: “O’Gorman offers a poetics of new media in the form of a scholarly study.”
- “Rice uses the concept of cool to delineate the various rhetorical moves that are indigenous to digital environments. He demonstrates that from its official beginnings, composition has relied on–and continues to rely on–mostly non-media specific methods to teach writing.”
- “What cool offers writing instruction is not so much its content (popularity or slang) but instead its rhetoric (Rice 7).”
- “A writer is cool, Rice tells us, ‘for the ways she uses specific rhetorical practices to make meaning in electronic environments’ (6).”
- What writing doesn’t happen outside of technology/ies?
- p. 761: “Chora….functions as the linchpin that allows him to make meaningful connections among the various cultural events and influences of 1963.”
- Here’s Rice’s approach: “Cool as cultural studies, cool as technology, and cool as visual writing all individually operate from different topos-based positions. My usage of all these positions at once is associative, not categorical or permanent, as the Aristotelian method demands.” (Rhetoric of Cool, p. 33)
- Rice’s mentor Gregory Ulmer states, “choral writing organizes any manner of information by means of the writer’s specific position in the time and space of a culture” (Heuretics, p. 33).
It’s probably obvious what I’m going to say, so I’ll hold back for now, but feel free to comment on these assumptions of printed words having fixed, immutable meanings. Ulmer and Rice use Derridean philosophy but seem to believe rhetorical theory–specifically related the multiplicity of meanings–didn’t evolve for 2500 years…We’ll return to Bay’s article:
- p. 761: “juxtaposition operates in contemporary new media, relying on the DJ remix as an important example, then concludes with an assignment asking students to apply juxtaposition rhetorically.”
- “Rice opens up the possibility for ways to look outside of the academy–and outside of composition’s formal history–for innovative approaches to writing instruction.”
- Writing About vs Writing With
- p. 762: “conventional scholarly writing, meant to produce more and more criticism about texts, risks becoming utterly meaningless and primarily profits only those who are invested in the bloated production of discourse.”
- “Rice asks, ‘How can writing generate ideas without representation or referentiality?’ (36). He answers with the choral method and rhetorical principles of new media, all of which produce multiple meanings and connections without an originary or singular meaning.”
- p. 763: “cell phones are ubiquitous among students, much more so than laptops, and yet by and large neither rhetoric and composition nor literature has attempted to incorporate this kind of media in our class rooms.”
- “Find out what students and instructors have in terms of media and let them determine the media-specific practices to enact.”
- p. 764: “than just incorporating new media in the classroom; it requires that we adopt the logic and rhetoric of that media, which may require substantial transformations in pedagogy and curriculum.”
- What if planned obsolescence is the logic of new media? Consider the amount of ejunk this approach could create.
- p. 764: Even Film Studies–“reliance on the interpretation of these forms in fact perpetuates a logic and a scholarly writing that flies in the face of our image-oriented culture.”
- p. 765: “O’Gorman pursues invention over interpretation, production over reception…”
- “assignments he uses in his literature classes that encourage students to invent rather than interpret images and texts.”
- p. 766: “such discourse does not circulate only among academics or students; student productions are shared on the web and with others in class. Thus, student writing has a wider audience than merely the teacher and a wider purpose other than as a graded assignment.”
- If you have no follows on social media, do you really have that much wider of an audience?
- Anyone want to talk about medium-sized social media influencers?
- p. 767: “This structure gives O’Gorman’s text the feel of a poetics….But perhaps this is what makes Ulmer’s work so relevant for both scholars of rhetoric and for literature: it confounds traditional distinctions between rhetoric and poetics.”
- p. 768: “We need to continue to move away from mere interpretation of new media pieces and the translation of new media into pedagogy towards new media production as a scholarly mode.”
But does this mean we should abandon interpretation? Can’t production and interpretation coexists in the same field? Also, if you don’t know how to interpret, what really do you have to say? {This is a purposely provocative statement: without understanding how to begin to recognize the layers of meaning extant and possible, very few inventors will cogently create rhetorically meaningful work.}
Courtney L. Werner’s “How Rhetoric and Composition Described and Defined New Media…”
While we’re certainly reading this to understand the definition(s) of new media, pay attention to the way Werner writes this article. It is a very different style than our other readings. Specifically, notice how much time she spends on justifying her methodology. Also, because this is a field-specific study of journals in the field…what boundaries does the author impose? How might we critique the focus?
This is a very good overview of how rhetoric/composition scholars think about new media. Let’s check out some key places:
- p. 714: “new media is a logical pursuit for rhetoricians once the field’s stakeholders recognize new media as writing.”
- “…composition occurring in contemporary society (both within and outside of academic settings) depends on the production of and interaction with new media texts.”
- p. 715: Quoting Alexander and Rhodes, “‘our students’ increasing personal engagement with multimedia technologies, as well as the steady adoption of multimedia in the classroom, challenges the primacy of alphabetic writing in how we communicate’ (Alexander and Rhodes 7).”
- Jonathan Alexander was editor of College Composition and Communication (CCC) from 2015-2020, making his argument very important because he was/is a scholarly gatekeeper. (I met him once, and he was fascinating and very nice.)
- p. 716: “New media is a way for composition scholars to engage their students, their academic communities, and popular society, securing the field’s relevancy in technology-saturated societies.”
- p. 717: Key Terms that must be distinguished…because meaning is stable, right?
- multimodality: “the emphasis on the word mode suggests the process of design…the term media has more to do with the product of design”
- “multimodal writing…isn’t always digital…”
- “Multimodality is linked with multiliteracies, and theories of multiliteracies suggest that literacy is semiotic and not limited to print-linguistic modes of social meaning making.”
- Hull et al. define “multiple literacies–bodies of knowledge, skills, and social practices with which we understand, interpret, and use the symbol systems of our culture.”
- p. 718: “New media is the typical digital outcome of multimodal composition: writers use various modes to craft an argument; the final product is usually a media text (composed of other discrete media) and disseminated in digital media form.”
- “For [Werner’s] purposes, new media refers to social semiotic iterations crafted, distributed, exhibited, and accessed via digital means.”
- p. 719: “As Edward Schiappa notes, definitions are always rhetorical, always contextualized, always evoked for the needs of a particular audience (3).”
- Why Werner decides to focus on journal articles:
- p. 721: “Goggin argues that the discipline’s journals are its gatekeepers by virtue of what they publish (222–25).”
- “Peer-reviewed journals are integral to the development of disciplines; therefore, important journals in the field are logical starting points to answer the research questions.”
- Grounded Theory: a research methodology where one poses a question and gathers data; then, as the researcher analyzes the data, they code (categorize) the themes that emerge
- There is much criticism of this theory, and that’s beyond the scope of this class. I will point out that the criticism boils down to the fact that grounded theory feigns the scientific method, fetishizing numbers and statistics, yet it provides the researcher a justification for why they select what they choose to observe. Otherwise, one’s research would just seem random, haphazard, and un-generalizable.
- Imagine a researcher allowing decades of education to bias their approach to analyzing texts…unthinkable.
- p, 724: Privileging empiricism, “Rebecca Moore Howard…writes: ‘Whatever value close reading may have in the study of literature […] it is interpretive, individualistic, and not replicable’ (76).”
- Question: If textual meaning is multiple and based on the reader, why would its not being replicable matter?
- p. 729: “two overarching conversations framing issues of new media: composing in contemporary society and composing in academia.”
- Consider the different goals these contexts have. Why do academicians communicate?
- p. 730: “Scholars’ new media [sanctioned] definitions help construct the roles new media plays in the field.”
- p. 731: “Practice-driven definitions are most prevalent in discussions of how new media is created, used, and practiced in the field. The discipline relies heavily on practice-driven definitions.”
- p. 734: “this study suggests new media is a crucial term, but it is a term with few common definitions: the definition of new media cannot be taken for granted.”
- p. 735: “The results of this study suggest no stable definition of new media exists within the discipline.”
- “Definitions are integral to how we understand our work and our fields, which is why scholars cannot take definitions for granted.”
- I guess it’s good she had a theory to ground her conclusion…the field continues to produce research on new media while not stabilizing the subject’s definition.
- p. 737: “With writing’s increased connection to digital media, studying and teaching new media is crucial to the field’s sustainability.”
In the end, we learn the overall goal of the article: make sure college education leads to productive workers in capitalism. Even though it’s printed, the pull quote speaks volumes:
If curricula fail to meet students’ needs, the field will suffer, and our
students may miss out on valuable opportunities to implement the
necessary writing skills for a technology-saturated workforce. (p. 737)
Of course, that’s just my individualistic, un-replicable close reading.
Next Week
We’ll be finishing Barker & Jane, so read Ch. 13 & 14. We’ll also talk more about your final project…let’s review that if we have time. The following week (5/4), is our last day of class, and the readings are for you to pick something related to what your project will argue. Unlike Werner’s suggestion on interpretation, you will present an argument and interpret a new media text from an infinite possibility of methodologies that may or may not conform to the scientific method.