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Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition
Anne Frances Wysocki
Johndan Johnson-Eilola
Cynthia L. Self
Geoffrey Sirc
Alison Bennett
Eng 516
I suppose that there are scholars and critics that are already jaded enough to view the theoretical portions of Writing New Media as a rehash of some of the authors’ previous publications. I will concede that this could be true, particularly in the case of Selfe. What makes this book worthwhile for me is not new theoretical perspectives; in fact the authors don’t promise any. What they do promise in their preface is to “provide rationales for opening a writing classroom to new media in particular ways”. And so they do. This book lives up to the promise its title makes to offer methods as well as theory, reflecting the authors believe that “theory and practice should clasp like hands”. This hybrid approach is what makes this book a useful reference, from a pedagogical viewpoint.
The reader can identify basically three types of questions which Wysocki et.al. investigate in Writing New Media. Two of these, theoretical in nature, are: What exactly defines the term “new media”, and secondly, why should we pay it any attention in an academic sense? The third question, dealing with application and practice, asks: How can teachers deal actively and responsibly with new media composition, encouraging their students to follow suit? The duties of addressing these questions are divided up among the four authors, all of whom bring university level teaching experience, as well as extensive scholarly research to the project. I will look at each of these questions separately, summarizing the viewpoints projected by the particular author(s) who addressed it.
WHAT EXACTLY IS INCLUDED IN THE TERM “NEW MEDIA?
In her opening chapter, Anne Wysocki defines “new media” texts as those “made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight that materiality”(15). This definition, as Wysocki observes, extends the concept of “new media” beyond that of digitally produced forms only. In fact, this definition divorces the concept from exclusive associations with processes, and opens it up to reader evaluation of product. In other words, new media compositions can appear on paper, compact discs, or screens. What makes writing fall into the new media category is how its author demonstrates awareness of the ways in which its material aspects (such as use of image, background color, arrangement of text, etc.) contribute to meaning. New media texts marry form to content, according to Wysocki, regardless of how they are actually produced.
Selfe, by contrast, offers a narrower definition of new media texts, confining her view of them as those “created primarily in digital environments.....designed for presentation and exchange in digital venues” (45). She supports this definition by observing that these kinds of texts ‘place a heavy emphasis on visual elements”, instead of relying on words alone to convey meaning, and often are interactive at some level. Both definitions support the necessity of extending our concept of literacy to include understanding the relationship of form to content. However, I personally see Wysocki’s definition as more relevant because it avoids the misconception that visual rhetoric and interactivity are only present in digital settings. While digital technology makes new media texts easier to produce, forms of interactive children’s books (“pop-up” books, for example) have been on the market long before the proliferation of computer technology. Ad agencies also, were using text/image rhetoric to peddle merchandise when the first government employed Univac was state –of –the –art computer technology. In this sense, one could argue that the “new” in new media texts is somewhat of a misnomer. What are new are our efforts to include this kind of writing in composition classrooms.
In his chapter titled “Box-Logic”, Geoffrey Sirc gives the reader yet another way to think of new media texts by drawing attention to the way they build coherence. Unlike traditional texts which develop logically in a linear fashion, new media writing delivers its message using an associative kind of reasoning. Undoubtedly with hyperlinks in mind, Sirc uses examples of collage art in comparison. Collages juxtapose images, and/or items within a framework, allowing the viewer to extract meaning by examining associations between the collected items. Sirc then, sees new media writing as demonstrating an artistic consciousness, not only in its materiality, but also in the logic it employs as it takes shape (123).
HOW CAN WE MAKE STUDENTS LITERATE IN NEW MEDIA AND HOW IS NEW MEDIA LITERACY DIFFERENT?
This is a question that each author deals with, according to individual perspective and expertise. Each chapter includes descriptions of specific activities that they have used in their own classrooms. Although useful, I found some redundancy in the activities described. Several times, the authors repeated the entire template of the lesson, plugging in different key concepts to illustrate how the lesson could be customized. I appreciated their willingness to provide a springboard for teachers who are just starting to teach this kind of writing, but I didn’t think the repetitions were always necessary. After reading a few, I got the idea that the activities offered were flexible enough to cover a variety of situations, and so I stopped reading all of the examples. I can only conclude that the average reader would react in the same way.
I was, nevertheless, impressed with the range of rhetorical aspects that these activities addressed and how well they promoted student reflection, collaboration, and cooperative learning. Each activity also allowed students the opportunity to think critically about their classmate’s projects.But what I found the most useful was the fact that none of the activities was exclusively dependent upon the availability of digital technology to prove its point. It’s a fact of life that in public secondary schools, access to such technology can’t be taken for granted. Lesson plans that assume access will not be a problem are of limited value, because in the public education venue, the technology “have –nots” still (regretably) outnumber the “haves”. The fact the authors offer "low- tech" alternatives for all of the activities increases their book's appeal for public school teachers.
Besides the explicit methodology, however, there is plenty of theoretical discussion about what it means to be literate as the term applies to the ways in which form and content interact. Anne Wysocki, in particular, looks at the ways that the interdependency of form and content is acknowledged, or in many cases, ignored. In a chapter, called “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”, Wysocki argues the approaches we traditionally use to teach students about a text’s visual components are inadequate because they fail to acknowledge that design is evaluated contextually. To illustrate her point, Wysocki uses some commonly accepted canons of design to analyze an advertisement for a book of erotic photography. The principles she used, demonstrated how the featured picture of a semi-naked woman exemplified aesthetic competency, yet failed to explain why some would find the picture offensive. Wysocki accounts for this failure by pointing out the fact that most design instruction does not address contextual implications of design choice. The picture choice for the ad in question did not consider the fact that many would consider the picture to be exploitive of women.
The paradox of this divorce of context from aesthetics is that, as Wysocki points out, our judgments about the nature of beauty are, in themselves contextually determined. The tendency to ignore the value-attached aspects of how we perceive beauty deceives us into the belief that beauty results from attaining some universally held ideal. But standards of beauty are not universally agreed upon. Wysocki notes that, “When form is as though it is abstract—unconnected to time and place----then, bodies and history are not called to sight or question. And what is most valued is form”(152). True literacy, then, involves the ability to question traditionally held ideas about visual arrangements, and instead examines them with an eye to their rhetorical implications.
WHY SHOULD WE PAY ATTENTION TO NEW MEDIA TEXTS AT ALL?
The authors respond to this question with reasons that are both rhetorical and social. Johndan Johnson-Eilola offers rhetorical implications of databases and search engines as reasons for instructors to alter their ideas of literacy to accommodate cyber text. He points to the recent attempts by publishers and other agencies to make “commodify” knowledge, in an effort to protect their livelihood against the kind of easy access to information that the Web provides. The result of this commodification is the fragmentation of information into marketable chunks, in order to “fit into the increasingly small micro-channels of capitalist circulation” (203). This makes it possible for those who access it, and utilize it to connect the fragments in ways that will further their message; a practice defines the act of writing more in terms of compiling information than in terms of creating it from the mind of an individual. Students need to understand that writing produced by collecting and assembling the information fragments which best suit the writer’s purpose is a social and political act, because the knowledge created by such writing comes not from “neutral” facts, but is selected. Search engines participate in this commodification of knowledge by bestowing privileged positions in the results order to sponsored sites (i.e. those who pay advertising fees). The practice of creating knowledge by means of selection and collection has ramifications in shaping what students believe to be “truths”.
From a social standpoint, Cynthia Selfe gives the most compelling rationale for bringing new media texts into the academic writing classroom. She warns us that “in a postmodern world, new media literacies may play an important role in identity formation, the exercise of power, and the negotiation of new social codes” (51). Therefore, to ignore it could result in the disenfranchisement of our students from the social and economic systems of the future.
MY IMPRESSIONS
From an educator’s perspective, I found this book to be a “keeper”. So often, we are exposed to books which expound theory exclusively. We read them, and often value them. But when space gets limited and schedules get tight, we ultimately forsake them in favor of books which are more grounded in “real life” practice. I don’t see that happening to “Writing New Media”. This book is such a good blend of ideas and methods, that even after we read it for the theory, we will likely keep it around for the applications.
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