writing new media

Wysocki -> “Opening New Media to Writing”

  1. The need, in writing about new media in general, for the material thinking of people who teach writing
    1. New media needs to be informed by what writing teachers know; new media needs to be opened to writing
  2. A need to focus on the specific materiality of texts we give each other
    1. Digitality invites us to consider the “potentialities” of material choices for digital texts and for any other text we make. (Sheridan et al.)
    2. Digital technologies give us a perspective that printing-press technologies have not.
  3. A need to define “new media texts” in terms of their materialities
    1. We should call mew ,media texts “those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality
    2. New media texts should alert designers and readers see how any text doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts
    3. Do not have to be digital
  4. A need for production of new media texts in writing classrooms
    1. Composition of the page and the screen is a material craft
    2. Producing new media texts while attending to the relationship between maker/thing/user/context (Stolley, Prins, Gauintlett)
  5. A need for strategies of generous reading
    1. Strategies that help us look beyond the naturalized rules and guidelines associated with print
    2. Approaching texts with the idea that choices were made, not mistakes

Selfe -> “Students Who Teach Us”

Noting that teachers are more interest in new media texts, that there is access to new media texts, and that students are paying attention to new media texts, Selfe argues that new media should be used in classrooms to teach new literacies.

She offers a series of lessons about literacy:

  1. New forms of literacy have life spans. In different social context, they emerge, accumulate, and sometimes compete.
    1. Sometimes, print literacies (the university’s) and the student’s own digital literacies compete for attention within the students – hindering students’ ability to work within multiple literacies
  2. New media literacies play an important role in identity formation, the exercise of power, and the negotiation of social codes
    1. This is typically played out in terms of *relevancy* in the lives of students
  3. Composition instructors need to expand their own understanding of literacy beyond the alphabetic
    1. If we are teaching students to participate in a democracy, we much teach them to design communications using a range of modes (Johnson-Eilola and Selber)

Sirc -> “Box-Logic”

Sirc describes his pedagogy: asking students to re-arrange textual materials – both original and appropriated – in order to have those materials speak to the student’s own voice and concerns, allowing them to come up with something obscure, perhaps, yet promising illumination

Sirc describes this practice – made possible through box logic—as a possible foray into new media composition: one that does not necessarily rely on “articulate coherence” (Alexander and Rhodes), “conventional organization,” and “extensive development”

For Sirc, “arrangement of materials” is one of the more important compositional skills

Like Alexander and Rhodes, Sirc is drawing from the avante garde to consider the ways that composition – even where there is technology present – fails to teach new media

Wysocki -> “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”

Selfe argues that new media design tends to be presented without “context or comment” suggesting they are neutral and timeless. However, as Wysocki shows looking at an ad for sexual and erotic photographs, design principles are not neutral: they are contextual and they have social consequence. For her, the *neutrality* of a design indicates a persisting form/content divide

Johnson-Eilola -> “The Database and the Essay”

Like Sirc, Johnson-Eilola emphasizes the role of arrangement in new media writing. Like Wolff, Johnson-Eilola is working toward a definition of writing, and not unlike Wolff, Johnson-Eilola’s exploration is located in a database created through intertextual references and not necessarily from a “single, monolithic, textual object”

Moving forward, he considers a few textual forms:

  • Blogs:  A site for interaction with complex rhetorical systems and multiple authors, blogs are a space representative of a new kind of economic and symbol-analytic work (Datacloud) where original and found material are not differentiated.
  • Web search engines:  Part of a larger constellation of database-driven texts, search engines offer a site for the role of organization in new media writing, providing a “unique textual space” driven by “automatic, contingent rhetorics”
  • Nonlinear media editing:  Finally, Johnson-Eilola looks toward the applications like Protools as a site for composing where “experimentation, arrangement, filtering, movement, rehearsal, and reversal” are practiced

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