Sirc states early on that he is "most intertested in composition that has an ultimate poetic effect" (114). This poetic effect seems applicable to all the new media texts we've looked at both the texts we've read and the student examples those texts have pointed us to. All these texts seem to offer much more of an artistic experience than any substantial information or argument. What arguments they do make are severely restricted by their designs.
Is new media just the latest excuse for people who don't really like or want to teach pragmatic print literacy to teach something else? Forty years ago, teachers of Freshman Composition decided that they'd much rather teach students to write poems, personal stories, creative non-fiction than academic papers; now, those same teachers, or their descendants, find it much more interesting to teach their students to make web-videos, web-cites, collages, and other multi-modal texts than academic papers. Only now, those teachers can go on and on about how these are the texts/genres of the future and how everyone is communicating this way, or will be soon, so teaching these things is as vital if not more than teaching students to write print-based academic papers. Plus, students like playing around with digital technologies and constructing artistic digital texts, and they've never liked writing academic papers. Why would we want to try and teach students things they don't find fun?
All of the arguments against expressivism from the eighties seem to apply here. Sirc seems just as obsessive about the heroic individuality of the designer as early expressivists were about the individual heroicism of the writer, and just like those of old, he holds up artists as the examples to follow—not scholars, not professionals in common careers, not anyone who large numbers of students might have a chance to, or might actually want to, be like.
Sirc really loses me when he makes the absurd claim that students "compositional future is assured if they can take an art stance to the everyday, suffusing the materiality of daily life with an aesthetic" (117). Wow, I'd like my "compositional future" to be assured, but I've been around the block a few too many times to be naive enough to think that all readers appreciate "an art stance to the everyday." Some audiences absolute hate such stances—any audience would probably hate some "art stances" depending on the designers idea of "art." This claim is the same expressivist idea that all any text needs is a good voice to be successful. There's just more to writing than that.
On the other hand, new media scholars also seem to exhibit a bit of neo-platonism, at least in the sense that they forward new media texts as being somehow more "real" or "true." Granted that this camp is much smaller than the digital-expressivists, and few of them would actually openly argue any such thing, but there is an underlying sense that many new media scholars see new media texts as somehow more than alphabetic texts. If not more real/true then more empowering, expressive (there it is again), enabling, free, independent, resistant, etc. Much of what we have read seems to hold to the strange idea that composing such texts is somehow more liberated and liberating when it comes to social norms and ideology than composing alphabetic texts. Our experience and understanding of ideology since Althussuser and Gramsci, however, tells us that we are never more under the influence of ideology and hegemony than when we think we aren't when we think we have found ways to break out and be subversive. Interpretation is coconsitutive with/by socio-political forces within ecologies and new media in no way does away with that.
So why did I think to label this a type of neo-platonism? Well, it was mostly because of this quote from Brooke's article:
According to Elkins, "we have largely forgotten perspective as practice." For better or worse, this was Plato’s fear of writing, that it would divorce language from its immediate context. Electronic writing restores that context in ways that exceed those of the spoken word, without entirely doing away with the durability that we associate with print.
http://enculturation.gmu.edu/4_1/style/
So, electronic writing is more real because it provides more "context" to help us interpret it—more likely more context becomes a way of hiding what is meant not to be seen. Once again we have a strange animosity toward writing (or at least alphabetic texts) that seems to ultimately be rooted in Plato (a prolific writer). Why?
I myself am way too much of a sophist to buy into this kind of neo-platonism. I'm more likely to be swayed by digital expressivism—I do have some sympathies for the expressivists—than by these prevalent assertions about the superiority of multimodal texts, or the urgency of teaching them.
I have searched for evidence of a method of action in expressivists works, new media or not, in obtaining the kind of liberation and free expression that they claim it facilitates.
ReplyDeleteYou are right to say that nothing prevents the hegemonic from working upon us short of being raised in a bubble. I am also troubled by the unstated assumption of expressivists, that cultural forces somehow inhibit the "real self" when, from what I know in psychology, our real selves are in many ways made possible by the everyday interactions, exposure to ideas and challenging assumptions.
We have plenty to fear from forms of communication being too structured, and of the majority's power to dominate. But pure expression, apart from interaction, does not exist.
"So, electronic writing is more real because it provides more "context" to help us interpret it—more likely more context becomes a way of hiding what is meant not to be seen."
ReplyDeleteMy comment is about this idea, not necessarily your blog post. When we first started reading for this class, I was freaking out because the authors were talking about this "context" that you mention. And I just kept thinking about imagination. I find one of the greatest things about words is the power they hold to create images and force the reader to work a little bit harder to understand and comprehend. Sometimes I feel new media abandons that, like even with all of the technology used it is still too simple and dumbs down the reader.