role of new media + writing + box

Now I’m suffering from information overload, infoglut, datasmog – however you like to refer to it. I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out how to organize thoughts this week because so many great ideas were provided. These authors (Wysocki, Sirc & Johnson-Eilola) wrote creatively about writing and new media while providing inspiring solutions to the changes they cited. Like the authors took their own advice (to an extent), I’m going to [attempt to] contribute accordingly. As Sirc (121) mentioned Richard Selfe, “Don’t suck the playful, exploratory spirit out of the digital media!”

Joseph Cornell, The Crystal Cage, 1943

Box: A new discussion of new media
After reading these chapters and considering the software available to us, I am amazed that software companies, designers, and consumers are satisfied with the logic of word processing programs (as well as other textual programs). Microsoft Word, which dominates most academic disciplines and professional organizations forces the user to act in a linearly. Wysocki points out “how many word-processing or Web page composing software packages do you  know that encourage scribbling, doodling, writing outside the margins, or writing in anything but straight lines? (Wysocki, 6)” In this sense, a pen and paper provide more freedom. I understand there are programs like InDesign, Illustrator, etc. that do provide a blank canvas (relatively speaking) but most writers would exchange freedom for ease of use (mostly in regards to time) which the other programs don’t really provide. I’m currently writing in Journler that allows for the easy addition multimedia but the format is still top to bottom, left to right. This is also like most blogs. Maybe with the use of touch and smart screens the software will begin to provide further freedoms and in turn different ways of thinking about organization and writing. In one of Wysocki’s suggested activities she asks students to write with a crayon instead of a pen or word processor and then asks if they found themselves thinking differently. I think this assignment would benefit graduate students as well. I’m curious how or if we would think differently. To me, her definition of new media texts is fascinating for this reason because though she steers us away from a technological deterministic mindset [“to look at texts only through their technological origin is to deflect out attentions from what we might achieve mindful that textual practices are always broader than the technological”] but also urges for the awareness of materiality “new media texts are those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality (Wysocki, 15). I think it would be interesting for students of our program to hear more about why the term “digital media” was chosen over “new media”. 

Box: New strategies
The following quotes I thought were interesting in regards to how they would relate to evaluating assignments because they discuss untraditional criteria that really are important or that reward creativity and a variety of styles and learning methods.

Some of the most important rhetorical strategies… searching, selection, juxtaposition, and arrangement/layout, as well as the always-important ability to phrase important personal insights in as clear and memorable a way possible”. Sirc calls this the “heartfelt pensée.”

The search engine: what categories to include, what to exclude; which category to put first; etc.,– we can start to argue that these choices involve responsibilities to the reader and to society (Johnson-Eilola, 220)

Caesura — the stylistic device most absent in our curricula (Sirc, 123)

“Like Cornell and Benjamin, as well, it’s the poignant mix of poverty and desire, laced with an aesthetic of the cool” (Sirc, p. 118)

Charles Simic — “This is what Cornell is after[:] How to construct a vehicle of reverie, an object that would enrich the imagination of the viewer and keep him company forever” (44). 

Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887–1968)

Prior to reading the Sirc chapter I really was not familiar with Marcel Duchamp. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a really interesting website full of thematic essays which includes a short bio on Marcel Duchamp along with the of his work that has been donated to the museum. Sometimes we scoff at adding a picture to an essay without a concrete reason for how it adds to the text but sometimes having any visual along with a text helps us/students remember something about the text. Kind of like how a certain smell can bring back memories. Having investigated Marcel Duchamp and arriving at this well-designed site, I am much less likely to forget my encounter with this new character. 

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box)

Box: visual considerations & visual argument
“There is little or nothing, for example, that encourages someone composing a Web page to think about how and why, in her place and time, her choices of color and typeface and words and photograph and spatial arrangement shape the relationship she is constructing with her audience and hence shape how the audience is asked to act–as active citizens? as passive consumer? There is little or nothing that asks composers and readers to see and then question the values implicit in visual design choices, for such design is often presented as having no value other than functionally helping readers get directly to the point (Wysocki, 6).” This quote along with some of the rhetorical strategies Sirc discusses really inspire me to design a course on the visual rhetoric of new media. Wysocki’s assignment where she asks students to build a visual argument I think could be adapted for the course. Like in 702 where Dr. Gallagher had us create a rhetorical artifact so that we acted as rhetoricians and not only critics– this assignment reminds me of that. I think the idea of visual argument is so interesting because in some cases an argument can be made with no text at all (like many mathematical examples). These arguments definitely suggest images/design/arragment are powerful and when combined with text it’s hard to imagine that all we would examine is how an audience gets “directly to the point”.

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