Composition or Compilation?

Johnson-Eilola’s chapter in Writing New Media questions the difference between writing and compilation.  He argues that texts are typically a compilation of others’ writing that we mix together for our own purposes, which is probably a familiar argument to many of us.  However, he also goes a step further by bringing up articulation theory.  According to Johnson-Eilola, “Articulation theory provides a way for thinking about how meaning is constructed contingently, from pieces of other meanings and social forces that tend to prioritize one meaning over another” (202).  In other words, no object or word has a stable, inherent meaning.  Instead, our understanding of objects and words derives from their relationship to other objects and words.  Because these relationships are dynamic, language changes over time and has different meanings in different contexts.  Johnson-Eilola argues that the same is true for all objects: the way we understand objects changes depending on how they are connected to other objects.  Therefore, any communication is bound to previous communication; when we write, we are depending on the associations of words and ideas that other writers have already used.  Our writing is in fact a compilation of relationships.

 
Johnson-Eilola provides several examples of what writing looks like when we expand our definition to include different forms of compilation: blogs, search engine results, multi-media online environments, and audio editing.  The audio editing stands out to me as being the most interesting to analyze.  Johnson-Eilola points out that audio editing supports “experimentation, arrangement, filtering, movement, rehearsal and reversal” (224) and explains how this is directly connected to what teachers encourage students to do.  During the RRGSC, I made a similar argument with anime music videos, showing how mixing scenes from anime with music required trimming clips, adding new clips, moving clips around, and then a final rehearsing of timing.  However, I did not have a specific recommendation about how to incorporate this in the composition classroom, and unfortunately none of Johnson-Eilola’s suggested activities directly relate to this topic, either, although he does suggest that Dreamweaver and Storyspace have possibilities.


So what options exist for composition instructors who want to have students compile different elements and play around with the organization until they create a unified message?  The video commentary that many of us do in English 120 is a step in this direction, but it doesn’t directly require some of the revision techniques mentioned above.  When I took the Visual Culture and Language class as an undergraduate, we had a photo essay assignment where we had to communicate a message through a series of pictures with limited text and no audio.  I think this is a step closer, but unfortunately, I don’t remember paying much attention to the effects I could achieve depending on how I presented the pictures.  Perhaps an assignment with a mixture of pictures, quotations, and audio with no “original” wording allowed would be a good way to show students how to play around with material in order to achieve the desired effect.

Wysocki 2: The Sticky Embrace of Beauty

I want to clarify that this selection was not something that we were assigned to read, but, as I started to move on to Johnson-Eilola section, I kept getting sucked back into this chapter of our new media text. Maybe it was because the “sticky embrace of beauty” is paired primarily with the “peek” layout on p. 148 or maybe it is because this selection is really about assessing new media and making good (ethical) decisions while creating our own new media texts. We want to evoke emotion and connection without “using” someone or the idea of someone in parts, but as a whole. The lessons provided in analyzing are teaching students (and us) how to create better new media texts by using critical analysis.  Wysocki argues that “…approaches many of us now use for teaching the visual aspects of texts are incomplete and, in fact, may work against helping students acquire critical and thoughtful agency with the visual…) (p. 149). In the Peek advertisement  Wysocki is moved by both pleasure and anger and goes throughout the chapter to describe the disconnect between good layout and what we may be missing if using the current analysis structure.

She continues by talking about many theorists and texts including Robin Williams, Rudolf Arnheim, Molly Bang, Kant, and Wendy Steiner.  For this blog, I will talk primarily discuss the work of Robin Williams and her text, The Non-Designer’s Design Book. This is a text that has been required for me as a communication and English student at least 3 times throughout my education. I am sure many of you are also familiar with this text, but it is a fairly short and easy to grasp book. Williams discusses four design principles within her text, they are: contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity (p. 150). If you are going by these rules, the advertisement for “peek” is well-done. For the most part it adheres to Willaims rules. But, what are we missing? Wysocki suggests that if we look at Williams principles “as is” we may overlook that we are using someone else’s BODY in the advertisement. She says, “We are not encouraged to ask about the woman in the ad as a woman, only as a shape,” (p. 152). Meaning we are looking at this woman as an image only. Something we can change, tweak, and reduce in order to create a better advertisement. This is where Wysocki’s “anger” comes in, she says, “My very (learned) idea of what is beautiful, of what is well-formed, is dangerous for women and any aestheticized Others,” (p. 168). Being a member of the women and gender studies program, I could not say THANK YOU enough to Wysocki for pointing this out and even offering  a solution (changing people’s minds about what is and is not aesthetically pleasing is sure to stir up conflict on the way). Wysocki suggests that we must criticize, analyze and rethink how we know how to make visual arrangements.  We need to “…learn to appreciate formal arrangements and practices that do not abstract and universalize,” (p. 169). Meaning we cannot change how this media is presented, if we do not go to the roots of how we are taught to present it. We cannot change what is going on through television, advertising, magazines, catalogs, etc. without first questioning and recreating our own methods. Which means as university instructors, it starts with us.

I will end this blog entry by discussing the advertising campaign by Absolut Vodka. The text reads, "In an Absolut world true taste comes naturally" and then "All Absolut flavors are made with natural ingredients." Using Williams principles, how may Williams critique of this campaign differ from Wysocki’s? What would Wysocki suggest we are missing?

Box-Logic: Geoffrey Sirc

“…Do we teach life or college?” Elbow, p. 113

This quote helped ground the importance of teaching and understanding the intricacies of new media. In a nutshell, it is not going away, it is something that students are going to have to use, assess and/or create as they move into their careers. I cannot recall a time where I have asked students to do an assignment in any of the formats that have been shown throughout this text and I know many of you as English 110/120 instructors have. I have, however, given students the freedom to create and turn in assignments that I would consider new media; even though, I feel I have not had the knowledge or tools to assign such an assignment prior to this course. Sirc invites us to push our students to the demands of our current culture and therefore to push ourselves as teachers to grasp and teach to life rather than to many rigid standards of what is considered scholarly work. He wants us to embrace and use a method that is “…suited to the long strange trip,” (p. 113). We no longer need to assess students solely within a standard essay format, but we are able to give students a chance to learn , teach, and present in a new way. A way that will most likely not only be enlightening, but in all probability marketable as they search for jobs within their chosen career paths.

Cody did an excellent job describing and defining logic boxes. Although I have not explicitly assigned a paper or presentation in new media format, I have had students hand in material that fits the criteria we have discussed in this course. Although this is not a crude example to me, perhaps some of you may feel it is. A student in my perspectives in women studies course turned in a three dimensional paper mache vagina made out of fake dollar bills and posted against advertisements and taglines from popular campaigns. She called it “Sexism Sells”.  And without many words, her meaning was clear, women’s bodies are used to make money, they are commodities and they are objects-not whole beings. She was able to take something she passionate about to create awareness by using a visual representation that seemed to impact the other course members in a way that a PowerPoint presentation couldn’t.  Although I did not think of it at the time, this I feel is a representation of new media and it conincides with Sirc’s Activity 1: A basic box on p. 129. I feel that this activity could easily be incorporated into women and gender studies courses both at a 100-level and beyond. Sirc writes, “The box theorists provide a way to think about composition as an interactive amalgam, mixing video, graphic, and audio with the verbal; a medium in which students can both archive their desires as well as publish passionate writing on their social reality vis-à-vis the larger culture…” (p.146). Boxes give students a chance to interact and move with the material and it provides a choice on how to use their voice and I love that. Choices in WGS are always a good thing.

Boxes have impacted me personally and I did not even know it. In 1994, my siblings (all 10-years or more older than me) introduced me to the band Pearl Jam and forever my life was changed (don’t laugh people!). In my mind, Pearl Jam is a perfect example of Sirc’s description of boxes. If you have never owned a PJ album on Vinyl, I would highly recommend it. Each album is packed with material that invokes the senses and makes you think (and feel). The creative process and choices used to write and perform are shown in various art, personal photographs and band members hand-written lyrics. Unfortunately their latest record’s webpage is no longer available, but it was an interactive smorgasbord of art, writing, and music.  Here is an example of how their album Vitology was packaged: http://www.pjcollectors.com/detail.asp?id=1324

Logic Boxes and Enabling Pedagogy for Students with Autism

Sirc advocates the logic box as something that increases the interactivity of a text, enabling students, ARTISTS!, to become aware of texts' materiality. Logic boxes are an interesting idea, not in a patronizing way, things that are a different representation of an age old idea: put things, literally, things, in a square-ish space. It's composition in another form and method, as Sirc points out (122-123): In traditional composition, words (things) are arranged in a meaningful way (sentences, paragraphs) within a limiting space (margins, the rectangular form of paper, etc.). Logic boxes are spaces with borders(are they necessarily boxes? could there be an invisible box?), performing the same function as paper for an essay, that contain things (more than words) arranged in meaningful ways. That last part, arrangement, is the element most liberated in the genre of logic box. Loosely defined, a logic box is a defined three dimensional space in which an author/artist constructs meaning through various objects, often found objects.

Last fall, I took Dr. Mara's class on the rhetoric of creativity. One set of assignments provided creative options, such as a taking a photograph or writing on 750words.com for 14 days...or make a box logic, um, box. The latter befuddled and intrigued me..."what the hell do I do with a box?' I shoveled the idea into my mental furnace but it never resurfaced. And, to be honest, after reading more about logic boxes I may understand the concept more but, for myself, I do not think they are the least bit interesting. However, logic boxes sound uniquely like enabling composition to me.

Sirc's goal, to “journey away from the linear norm of essayist prose” fits well within an inclusive, enabling pedagogy, particularly in relation to autistic students. Personal experience and scholarship suggest that many autistic people have nonlinear cognitive and writing styles, such as Temple Grandin. Anne Jurecic notes in her article “Neurodiversity,” that Grandin's writing does not consider audience because of its loosely connected, tangential structure (430-431). Comparing Grandin's writing structure to Jurecic's student Gregory's writing, this autistic structure, Jurecic suggests, is rooted in autistic students' neurological wiring, brain structures that preclude those students' ability to emulate the academic writing conventions of linear argument, coherence, and focus (429). Jurecic goes on to rally for composition teachers "expand our sense of the depth and reach of difference--not so that we can exclude, but so that we can teach" (439). She is stuck in between a rock and a hard place, trying to enable autistic students to find their own way through the labyrinthine mess of exclusionary neurotypical (neurotypicals are to people with autism what muggles are to wizards and witches) writing conventions, conventions, she implies, that may be rooted in neurotypical neurology (434).

Sirc's logic boxes work for neurotypical students. These boxes reduce the analytic loci of composition, decentering it in favor of something expressive (Sirc 124). Analysis is something many college students with autism spectrum disorders excel at--it's the structure, according to Jurecic, that confounds them. Fortunately, logic boxes allow for flexibility in process and design: citing Katherine Stiles, Sirc explains "What is it that writers do, exactly, if not 'point to things in the world and negotiate their meanings through symbolic productions?" (Sirc 125). He adds that "the new classroom activities to refine these elements let students use what they really care about and love (or hate) as the new subject matter in their work" (Ibid). Logic boxes liberate not only in that they allow for diverse forms of structure, focus, coherence, and meaning-making but also because that allows for student creators to use "what they love." One of the two biggest barriers to success in assignments, not just writing assignments but any kind of assignment, for students with autism is the motivational factor. This framework gives a student with autism the opportunity to work with her special interest, allowing her to find her own voice through the annotating and searching. 

"Toward New Media Texts" (Selfe)

Cynthia Selfe discusses visual literacy and possible assignments to teach visual literacy in the chapter “Toward New Media Texts.”  Selfe points out how many teachers of composition have steered clear of teaching visual literacy (and other literacies involved in new media) because they do not feel qualified to teach about them.  Some teachers have introduced visual literacy in their classrooms but have done so in such a way that presents visual texts as subordinate to alphabetic texts.  According to Selfe, by expanding composition studies to include visual literacy, “we may not only learn to pay more serious attention to the ways in which students are now ordering and making sense of the world through production and consumption of visual images, but we may also extend the usefulness of composition studies in a changing world” (72).  Indeed, the world is changing and relying more fully on new media in order to convey messages.  Alphabetic texts will not disappear anytime soon, but visual texts are becoming more important.  

One of the sample assignments Selfe introduces is “Text Re-Design and Re-vision.”  Basically, the assignment is to take an alphabetic text and rethink it to put it on a website.  This sample assignment is most similar to the video commentary assignment that is part of the “inherited” English 120 class.  The video commentary assignment, for anybody who does not know, requires students to get in groups, take one commentary that one group member already wrote, and remix it into a “music video” format.  Most of the students in my class last semester made amazing video commentaries and were much more familiar with the technology than I was.  I liked the assignment because the students liked it-- I think they liked working in groups and they liked making a video.  However, it was almost unanimously, according to my students, the easiest assignment we did all semester.  I also felt a little silly going over elements of PowerPoint with my students.  I could feel them not paying attention.  

I am looking for ways to make the video commentary assignment more interesting and challenging.  However, when I think of doing something like requiring that every video commentary have one embedded video or something of the sort, I run into the problem that I do not know how to do such a thing.  When I think about teaching iMovie as the basic program to use, I am aware that many students do not have iMovie (and, again, I do not know how to use it).  It also would feel like “I’m making this an assignment requirement because I am trying to make it sound more challenging, but really I’m just a little insecure teaching new media and am trying not to be.”  In short, doing any of these things would be really inauthentic.  

I like the idea of remixing an assignment that is already an alphabetic text.  The video commentary, however,  seems to involve lessons that feel like a waste of time.  Likewise, Selfe’s “Text Re-Design and Re-vision” assignment might involve lesson plans that feel like wasted time.  

But I do know I am being pessimistic.  

Expanding "Text" (Selfe "Students Who Teach Us")

In “Students Who Teach Us,” Cynthia L. Selfe issues a challenge to English teachers to expand their idea of composition so that it includes the new communication methods that students are using (54).  I strongly agree that print literacy is no longer the dominant form of communication, and even electronic forms that resemble print documents are becoming less important.  Maybe our society just needs to take some Ritalin, but I think it goes beyond failure to focus on words.  We have been exposed to communicating through images, animations, sounds, and interactions, and now text doesn’t seem to convey as much meaning as it used to.

By “text,” I am referring to alphabetical language, but Selfe seems to be using a different definition when she talks about “new media texts” (49).  She doesn’t really provide a definition of text in this article, so I’m not sure quite how expansive she intends the term to be.  Perhaps she doesn’t want to limit the term by providing a definition, since Selfe doesn’t know what new forms will appear in the near future that will need to be included under “text.”  For my writing, I would like to at least include those communication tools that involve sound, animation, and interactivity under the heading “text.”  If I can at least expand the term text that far, then I can relate this article to a paper I wrote last semester on webcomics, anime music videos (AMVs), and indie games.

Webcomics, AMVs, and indie games are relatively new creative forms that are dependent on technology and the Internet.  They interest me because, although they use very different means of communication, they attract similar audiences and seem to be fulfilling similar roles.  Through Selfe’s article, I can view these three creative forms as a new type of literacy.  Like David Damon, people who create these forms may not be fluent in print literacy, but they are still capable of communicating, expressing, and teaching through alternative means.  Furthermore, these methods of communication are more relevant to many peoples’ lives than print literacy is.

As a composition instructor, I don’t quite know what to make of this information.  While a unit on AMVs would be fun, our students are probably still too indoctrinated into print culture to embrace such a project.  Also, I don’t think we could possibly teach them enough skills to make them effective in communicating in a fraction of the new types of literacy that are emerging.  However, I still like the idea of analyzing new forms that have emerged through which people express themselves so that we can continually expand our notion of text and composing.

Wysocki

Pointing out the divide in new media studies between the study of how to design and compose individual texts (through graphic design maxims) and the study of the broad effects of media structures, Wysocki argues that composition studies can fill the gap between the two by focusing on the material and social conditions of the production and consumption of all texts, both textual, visual, and digital.

She has five major claims:

1. compositionists have the unique pedagogical expertise to teach students how to think critically about their design and composition choices when writing a text because we already highlight the situated nature of writing.
2. We need to think about the specific material circumstances and choices of the texts we produce, consume, and circulate because no technology is a neutral carrier; our texts contain, in their design and construction, our attitudes, beliefs, and values, both individually and as a society.
3. New media texts are any texts, digital or not, whose composer thought deliberately about the range of material design choices they had and who, in their design, highlight the materiality of the text.
4. We need, as teachers, to move beyond analysis of new media texts and ask our students to craft and produce them in our classrooms, thinking of new media texts not as objects but rather as material practices.
5. We also need to adopt a generous spirit in our reading, knowing that composing these new media texts requires experimentation, patience, and exploration, and in order to appreciate these efforts, we need to realize that texts need not look identical to what we’re accustomed to in order to be useful, that what we might deem mistakes should be thought of in terms of choices.

Significantly, Wysocki defines “New media” as “texts where we keep their materiality visible, both as we work to make them and as we hold them before us.”

 It seems ironic on first reading that Wysocki’s major move in securing the potential of this moment is to ask us to become more conscious of our materials when the zeitgeist behind all things digital seems to be Cartesian—seems, in fact, to be actively hostile toward a consciousness of materiality. This seeming irony, however, is exactly why Wysocki’s five openings are so important. By moving against the anti-historical philosophy of the new technology of writing—and yet embracing the technology itself—Wysocki discovers an opening for a pedagogy wherein students can gain productive access to a larger community [Wysocki explicitly passes on elaborating the well established boons of teaching digital communications technology] while still understanding the historical forces that have had a part in the production of their voices. To borrow from the reasoning of Wysocki’s fourth opening, this is why we as teachers of writing must be active in the production of new media texts: if we can participate in this technological shift in a way that offers radically growth in terms of what new media texts mean, then when the next revolution comes around, perhaps it will come not from an ahistorical Cartesianism, but rather from a place informed by our own materialities and not hostile toward a self-reflexive, self-critical expression of these materialities.