My “Readerly” Experience of Sorapure’s piece

I think that Sorapure’s “Five Principles of New Media: Or, Playing Lev Manovich” is a true manifestation of the marriage of theory and practice, and how multimedia can teach and entertain us simultaneously. It was an interesting experience reading this scholarly article and interacting with the text. As noted from the title, Sorapure’s piece illustrates the five principles of new media as articulated in Lev Manovich’s book, using multimedia technology. While reading this piece, I spent most of my time figuring out how to read it, deciphering the visual images, clicking all over the images, reading the students’ examples, looking for possible hidden directions/clues here and there, and making choices during the interaction. For example, when I was reading the definition of the first principle "numerical representation," I was impressed with this principle at work! I was moving the mouse over the image and I was watching the mouse coordinates change, while the eye in the background was gazing at me. The interaction between me (the reader) and the text played out visibly on the keyboard and on the screen. What usually takes place in my mind while reading a printed text was visible and external.

The one thing that I didn’t do well, I think, was reading the alphabetical text because the interactive part was far more engaging and sometimes distracting, which made me wonder if I had enough training reading interactive texts to do so effectively. Sorapure comments on the challenges that she faced in composing this article. She writes:

“This article is itself a new media composition, and the five principles described by Manovich certainly can be seen here. There are also some unique challenges involved in composing an academic article in Photoshop and Flash, in combining almost 3500 words of text with graphics and interactivity.”

“Aside from the matter of coding and designing the article, the most difficult challenge for me has been presenting text in a way that's detailed and yet compact, with short independent units combining to form a coherent argument and with interactivity that enhances rather than distracts from the text.”

I wanted to learn more about these challenges as I felt that Sorapure cut this discussion short (for formatting reasons, maybe? Would she have done the same if this article was a traditional one?). How can we prepare our students for these challenges? Are these challenges unique to multimedia texts? From a pedagogical perspective, I feel that managing time should be one of the challenges since, obviously, Sorapure's article represents hours of hard work (there are a great number of images and codes embedded in this article). Also, this article shows great literacy and competency in designing and composing new media texts. Where do we draw the line between experimenting with form and disorienting or distracting the reader? While reading (is reading the right word? Should we substitute it with browsing?) I was tempted to click on the link that said “You can also read a text-only version of the article in PDF format,” but I resisted doing so to experience this multimedia text in its fullest potential. As I was nostalgic to read an essayistic text, I was reminded with Clark’s thesis in “Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy:”

“In our nascent digital culture, the traditional essayistic literacy that still dominates composition classes is outmoded and needs to be replaced by an intentional pedagogy of digital rhetoric which emphasizes the civic importance of education, the cultural and social imperative of ‘the now,’ and the ‘cultural software’ that engages students in the interactivity, collaboration, ownership, authority, and malleability of texts” (1).

Interesting choice of words! Why did she use the words “imperative,” “outmoded” and “replace,” not “incorporate?” Why do scholars believe that in order to push their agenda forward they need to trash the current practices and call them “outmoded” and “traditional?” Although I found interacting with Sorapure’s article engaging and original, my readerly experience was interrupted, which makes me wonder if I’m ready for Clark’s “pedagogy of digital rhetoric.”