What's New about "New Media?"

In “Openings and Justifications,” Anne Wysocki  defines “new media texts” as those “made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight [that] materiality”(15). Her definition of “new media texts” requires attentiveness in designing texts to acknowledge the fact that “any text—like its composers and readers—doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts” (15). Wysocki’s understanding of “new media” extends it beyond forms that are digitally produced since new media compositions can appear on paper. Her definition of new media focuses on how the author/composer shows awareness, attentiveness, and alertness of how the materiality of her text (her use of sound, image, background, color, layout, etc.) contribute to meaning and reveal the values she embodies as a member of a certain community (15). Here, I’m wondering about the issue of form and content in Wysocki’s definition of new media and how this shift of using “new media,” particularly in the way Wysocki defines it, would affect/ is affecting our concept of the writing process and product and our perception of composing texts. Is there an inclination in Wysocki’s definition to value product over process? How does she define product? Is product for her an ongoing process since whenever I read a text that I have composed, I feel the urge to modify/edit/ revise/ reorganize/ reshape/ reformat my text. I identify strongly with my work, like other writers, because I “own” it (as in it belongs to me). Since texts don’t function independently I feel both protective and vulnerable because I’m aware of how much my personal identity and my membership to different communities are exposed.

In her opening chapter, Wysocki lays out five openings that she sees enacting in her own practices:

1.      The need, in writing about new media in general, for the material thinking of people who teach writing

2.      A need to focus on the specific materiality of the texts we give each other

3.      A need to define “new media texts” in terms of their materialities

4.      A need for production of new media texts in writing classrooms

5.      A need for strategies of generous reading (page 3)

What I find interesting about these five openings is that she embraces the concept of “new media” to accommodate writing rather than digitalize writing to accommodate “new media.” Her approach to “new media” promotes a deeper understanding of the materiality of the texts we produce that “help use hold present what is at stake: to look at texts only through their technological origin is to deflect our attention from what we might achieve mindful that textual practices are always broader than the technological” (19). In other words, Wysocki’s definition of new media encourages an approach that AVOIDS technological determinism and sees “the apparently growing emphasis on the visual in our culture and time” as “a historically situated process” (16). Interestingly enough, Wysocki highlights a theme similar to that echoed in Wesch’s video “Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us”:  

“[Technologies] are in our world and they have weight—but we probably ought not give up our own agency by acting as though technologies come out of nowhere and are autonomous in causing effects” (19).

       

This emphasis on human agency in interacting with technology and molding it to serve our needs rather than acting like passive receivers of technology empowers the composition teacher as an expert who knows how people compose, use, and exchange texts and why they “make these combinations of material.” She then uses her knowledge and expertise to inform new media and extend composition pedagogy toward the visual (19).

               

In contrast to Wysocki’s broad definition of new media, Cynthia Selfe emphasizes the visual elements in her understanding of new media as she believes that new media texts are created in digital environments and that aural and video composition “articulate meanings students struggle to articulate with words” (2-3).  Selfe makes it a point to mention later in this chapter that “the multimodal compositions are not dependent on digital media” (10).  However, she acknowledges the fact that some may accuse her approach of sounding like “technological determinism,” which entails that “our professional work and values should take into account changes and developments in communication technologies” (3). She justifies that by stressing the importance of keeping up with the ways in which students communicate (3). Although I think that Wysocki’s and Selfe’s definitions of “new media” support the new trend of extending our concept of literacy to include a deep understanding of the relationship between form and content, I see Wysocki’s definition more relevant to and more inclusive of non-digital applications and compositions that can be interactive without the integration of technology. 

 

While reading Wysocki’s chapter and before reaching the end of it where she has included a number of creative classrooms activities, I was contemplating how attention to materiality can be taught to students who are very much part of what Wysocki calls “the consumer culture” that “uses visual representations to create unselfconscious and uncritical consuming desires” (16). After reading the activities and noticing the way she lays out this chapter (her use of a variety of font type and size and her experimentation with side notes and page numbers and titles), I now have a better idea of how form and our choices of form indicate the cultural structures and practices that mold us into certain individuals and allude us to believe that we have CHOICES.

 
My favorite classroom activity from 

Wysocki’s chapter is the one in which

students are asked to work on visual 

arguments. This motivated me to

include some visual arguments that 

I found online.

An example of these structures is patriarchy and its value of seriousness, authority, and standardization (Times New Roman, font 12). In other words, we are disciplined to desire and “choose” the very things that we are limited to by these structures. Free will, for example, is a necessary delusion for the existence of patriarchy, which brings me to these questions: Do our students really have choices to compose freely while there are higher structures that entail the implementation of certain criteria for evaluation and assessment? How much can we, Teaching Assistants (given our limited access to resources and our "inferior" status in academia), provide our students with spaces that actually produce people who can identify the social, cultural, and political forms that shape them and provide them with the opportunity and agency to make change without walking into, what Selfe calls, "minefields," whether on the university level or the political level? And does this opportunity/agency translate into a sociopolitical one?