E-expressionists and neo-platonists, now I see why this is so important...to them.

I have to credit Jon Holmes for first bringing my attention to the latent expressivism that has been underlying a majority of the texts we have studied. It is certainly interesting how much writers and student examples seem to focus on creativity, artistic expression, and allowing students to direct their own work. Geoffrey Sirc's article makes the expressivism here very explicit.

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.

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.

Thinking about (teaching) design

I've taught visual design in freshman composition classes before, and I always encourage my students to be creative about the materiality of their papers and to think about what that materiality itself communicates. The experience of teaching some basic principles of designing texts visually complicates my views on teaching students to produce multi-modal texts.

Every time I took part of a semester (I haven't tried this on a quarter system) to discuss visual design and have students produce multimodal texts, I found I couldn't take enough time to really be effective. Just the most basic principles of producing visual texts: some basic typography, issues of layout, focal points, creating emphasis, avoiding distracting visual problems, white-space, variety takes considerable time to cover because, with most students, I would have to start from scratch. This compares to having to teach students basic reading and writing before teaching them composition.

I am not really surprised that a lot of those who advocate for having students construct multimodal texts seem to advocate just asking students to produce these texts rather than attempting to help them do so skillfully. This, however, conflicts with what Wysocki advocates in Writing New Media. If we are only asking students to produce multimodal texts without taking the time to address how those texts communicate materially we are certainly not "bring[ing] to new media texts a humane and thoughtful attention to materiality, production, and consumption, which is currently missing" (7). We are simply teaching abstract concepts about rhetoric and the communication of ideas through an invisible medium.

Add to this, of course, the whole complication of technology (which many of my students were largely ignorant about) and we find ourselves dedicating a great deal of class time just laying the groundwork for teaching students to produce successful texts. I find it telling that Takayoshi and Selfe avoid rather than answer the question: "When you add a focus on multimodality to a composition class, what do you give up?"

I, of course, have been discussing just teaching the visual design of printed texts, which is a minor step beyond teaching traditional alphabetic writing. What happens when we try to add video composition to a class? If we want to teach how to use images effectively, shouldn't we teach students to skillfully manipulate photographs?

So, what does all this have to do with discussing Wysocki's approach to defining new media texts as "those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality"? I think that one of the implications of this definition is an attempt on Wysocki's part to downplay the difficulty of introducing the production of new media texts into the classroom. If writing new media simply means producing texts that are self-consciously material, then that might not seem like such a big endeavor as trying to teach students to create their own website—at least one that isn't ridiculously tacky and obviously uncaring of its materiality. My experience, however, suggests that even spending the time to call attention to the materiality of the essays students write and help them to incorporate images, even type as image, requires a dedication of time and resources that necessarily replaces something else.

I may be unfairly attributing such an implication to Wysocki's definition, but it is something that seemed implied in the rhetoric of the reading. Perhaps Wysocki is not trying to downplay the time, resources, and effort necessary to address new media in the classroom. If so, I rather like her definition of new media. I think it counteracts some major problems in the way new media is often presented—that is as if no one ever thought about, or needed to think about, the material appearance of texts before computers came along.

I agree that our attention to new media should embrace a broader attention to the materiality of texts and how we are situated by and through those various materialities—though "new media" does become somewhat meaningless here. After all, I didn't try to do units on design and layout just for kicks. I think they are important parts of writing that are significantly neglected—and significantly and often abused by writing instructors. I try, even when I don't attempt to teach visual design, to present texts that depart from the traditional materiality of texts, starting with my syllabus. But, I think that there are many other aspects to writing that are more important—so many, in fact, that I can't cover them all in a quarter or a semester. As of now, writing and new media is a great focus for an upper division class, maybe even a 308J class, but not something that I feel inclined to devote significant time to in a 151 class.

Of course, I think that students should take more than just two required writing classes, and I could easily get behind an effort to at least provide if not require more writing classes including writing and new media—ah the dreams of a world without business oriented administration.

Process, Post-Process, Complexity Theory/thinking, and the splattering of my brain

John H. Whicker is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University currently working on an amalgamation and investigation of all things process through the lens of complexity theory in an attempt to revive and re/imagine a conceptualization of process that includes the rest of the process and makes the language of process available and useful—not to mention interesting—to twenty-first century composition.

When scholarly work in combination with teaching (English 284 "Writing About Culture" currently) and taking graduate seminars hasn't turned me into an office hermit, I like to go home to my wife (Juliann) and three children: Greyson 7, Charlotte 5, Colin 3.