Oops, that had the opposite effect

I was much more open to arguments for teaching "new media" texts before I read these three texts. For some reason I just am not persuaded that students lives will be irreparably damaged if I don't teach them to create and upload crappy videos.

I might have been more persuaded by the Ball and Moeler article if I hadn't kept having this irresistible urge to go out and by a Big Mac... ;)

Despite all the apocalyptic rhetoric of these texts covering seven years of imminent danger to composition if it doesn't realize that composition students' futures absolute depend on their ability to learn how to impose text over images while music plays in the background because, well, just because that's what everyone's doing, or will be doing some day...someday when I won't be able to write this blog entirely in alphabetic text because...well because...

So, I think I'm a bit skeptical about the need for everyone to learn how to compose multimodal texts. I really don't see a time when not knowing how to compose with Flash will severely limit anyone who isn't going into a career where knowledge of flash is essential.

I also don't fully accept the assumption that new media texts construct meaning in radically different and new ways. We had "multimodal" texts before computers came along. Television and Movies have been mixing visual, audio, and textual modes for over a century. That we can now do this so much more easily doesn't create a radical shift in how those modes interact to make meaning. The more things change: the more they stay the same. I don't deny that things are changing, but it is more a matter of style than substance.

All this skepticism isn't aided by the fact that these texts themselves are such terrible examples of new media texts. Their designs are horrible. Sorapure's text is itself at least visually appealing though awkward and ironically linear (at least if you don't intentionally fail to follow all the cues designed to help you read it linearly), but the examples of student texts it holds up as models of academically rigorous texts that we should replace alphabetic assignments like research papers with seem mediocre at best. They certainly fail to convey as much information as a good academic essay, even those written by freshman. The effect of these student examples is to destroy the ethos of these new media advocates, who are making huge claims and then supporting them with these compositions that can 't help but underwhelm anyone who has taken undergraduate graphic design classes.

Why teach students to write alphabetic texts when they could be making really bad social action commercials. That's as important as helping them learn to write academic essays and articles, isn't it.

Sorapure's text is, at least, fairly well designed itself, something I can't say about Ball and Moeller's, which presents itself as the epitome of  bad design from the McDonald's colors to the division of the screen directly in half with a box screen making the text marginally more readable, the visuals of this text are cringeworthy. Add to that the fact that once again, for all its pretenses, this is a linear alphabetic text (with a few opportunities to diverge if you want), and the persuasiveness of the text is destroyed. This is what we should be producing? Teaching? This is more important than some aspects of print literacy?

Admittedly I've been sick and sleepless for days, so maybe I'm overly critical, but these texts persuade me that the fervor over new media is largely just frivolous distraction.