Book Review: Writing New Media

Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, by Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004. 276 pages

Four veteran computer and composition teachers as well as advocates of new media—Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc—bring together their well-tested theories of composing and composing using new media in Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, a collection of six essays, and attempt to expand the traditional boundaries of composition pedagogies and practices hitherto dominated and driven by the print culture. Citing existing composition practices and pedagogies as parochial and limiting, all these authors forcefully present new and innovative ones informed by computer, information and web technologies. Hallmark as these technologies and media have already become of everyday life and activities in 21st century, these authors call on all composition teachers to incorporate or introduce these new “materialities” into composition pedagogies and classrooms as well as into the composing practices of their students and themselves both in and out of classroom situations.
The collection has six essays: “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications” and “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty: On Some Formal Problems in Teaching about the Visual Aspects of Texts” by Wysocki; “Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of A New Media Text Designer” and “Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the Challenges of Visual Literacy” by Selfe; “Box-logic” by Sirc and “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” by Johnson-Eilola. The essays are loosely connected with one another though all of them endeavor to offer new “openings” from or into new media and composing practices.
In “Opening New Media to Writing,” Wysocki “describes through considering… five possible openings for how what we know about writing can usefully affect how we approach new media” (5). She argues that new media needs to be opened to writing and that writing about new media needs to be informed by writing teachers’ awareness of how situated people use texts to make things happen as well as by their capacity to bring a “humane and thoughtful attention to materiality, production, and consumption,” (7) to new media texts. She also expresses the need to critique new media in the essay. In her second essay in the collection, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”, she, through examples, analysis of design principles, activities and discussion of Kantian understanding of beauty and judgment, discusses “how visual arrangements both carry values and shape our relations with texts and each other” (9). As had she pointed out the need of critiquing new media texts in her first essay, she here critiques many existing approaches to teach visual aspects of the texts by saying that most of them are incomplete and counterproductive as well as they, in fact, are working against helping students acquire critical agency with the visual by unnecessarily emphasizing the form over content. She then invokes eighteen century definitions of beauty and aesthetic judgment to set the “ground for shaping how we teach visual composition” (149). She also tells her students how they can strike a balance between tradition and innovation; why they should follow the principles and where they can push against them to make “reciprocal communications, shaping both composer and reader and establishing relationships among them” (173). She finally asks her students to see visual composition as rhetorical and encourages them to compose effectively with the visual elements for various rhetorical circumstances and make changes and create a different relation between themselves and their audiences.
After Wysocki, in “Students Who Teach Us,” Selfe, through a case study of a student, David Damon, a young black man from Detroit, who makes his way into the world of technology desite his failure in academia, argues that composition teachers should use new media in the classroom to teach new literacies or multiliteracies and thereby change the concept of literacy in the twenty first century partly because comp teachers now have access to these media and students as well are increasingly using them in their day-to-day lives/activities. For Selfe, David’s case suggests “about the changing nature of literacy and about what this means for composition pedagogy” (45) as it also teaches some lessons about literacy in postmodern world, when “new media literacies may play an important role in identity formation, the exercise of power, and the negotiation of new social codes” (46). In this changed landscape of literacy, she calls on English composition teachers to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic in order to avoid composition studies from the risk of becoming “increasingly irrelevant” (46).
Selfe’s other essay, “Toward New Media Texts,” claims that understanding visual literacy is route to understanding new media. Her again, she emphasizes that comp teachers need to be aware of the new technologies and media largely because they have already become integral parts of students’ ecologies. As she neatly states her plan at the beginning of the essay that her “chapter…seeks to provide a brief rationale and several specific strategies for integrating visual literacy into composition classrooms—both in terms of composition and production” (68), her achieves what she had planned for by the end of the essay. She becomes successful to communicate that by adding a focus on visual literacy to existing one on alphabetic literacy, we become able to know how our students are making sense of the world through the use of visual images as well as increase the relevance of composition in a changing world.
Geoffrey Sirc, in another essay in the collection, “Box-logic”, defines comp teachers’ new roles as curators in academia, who can “exploit possibilities of …[their] status, exposing students to a range of culturally valid forms as well as non-mainstream content; in so doing, ……[they] can provide……[their] audience with a host of possibilities for worlds and forms to inhabit” (126-7). Citing three historical figures who collected things in boxes, Sirc imagines students as collectors and texts as boxes filled with selected objects structured through some kind of loose association. That’s why he calls his students designers, “free associational drifts” trying to capture a mood or vision and their texts as collection of “retrojective, idiosyncratic dream-moments, now electronically gathered, framed, and exhibited” (11). His primarily goal as composition teacher, he maintains, is to encourage his students to take art stance to the everyday thereby giving it an aesthetic touch. Bringing the reference of box-theorists thus, he conceptualizes composition as an interactive amalgam of video, graphic, and audio, a medium to express students’ desire as well as publish their passionate writing in their social reality. For him a model of college writing becomes the DVD—“a compendium of “finished” text, commentary, selected features, interviews, alternative versions, sections initially deleted (but now appended) from the main text, amusing bits, and other selected assorted items of interest, clickable as desired, rather than the traditional scholarly essay” (146).
Finally, Johnson-Eilola’s “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” offers two ways to understand textuality in a changing world: symbolic-analytic work and articulation theory. While symbolic-analytic values manipulation of information, articulation theory allows us to figure out the meaning by looking at the ways how information is arranged and connected. He claims it “can offer us a way to understand the “mere” uncreative act of selection and connection as very active and creative” (226). Discussing some recent court decisions which show the increasing trend of valuing arranged collection of information fragments over creativity and intellectual property law, Johnson-Eilola emphasizes that writing is always already connected to economics. One remarkable thing he does in the essay is defining writing in a totally different way as a collection of information fragments which is broad enough to bring even search engines and weblogs under the categories of writings.
Thus, all the chapters in this collection explore new media and their implications to composing practices. The book makes a serious appeal to everybody that since there is a possibility of having or creating texts that look different than what we are accustomed to, “we approach different-looking texts with the assumption not that mistakes were made but that choices were made and are being tried out and on” (23).Most wonderful thing about this book is that each of the chapters includes some well-tested new media classroom activities, accompanied by teacher’s notes, objectives, targeted level and so on which are easily adaptable in our own classrooms. Therefore, the book is invaluable for everybody wanting to make an entry into the world of new media or for teachers who are looking for “openings” out of or into new media and composition. I highly recommend this text; its worth spending at.