Blog 5: Media Designs

Blog 5

In “Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of a New Media Text Designer” Cynthia L. Selfe, an educator, speaks of David John Damon one of her students who taught her about literacy and the composition of new media texts.  Selfe articulates the growing interest of new media texts by English composition teachers. She describes new media texts as “texts created primarily in digital environments, composed in multiple media… and designed for presentation and exchange in digital venues” (43).  In addition, she states that new media texts do not usually conform to parameters of genre studies.  In general, new media texts experiment with the communicative arts and explore aesthetics, design, and innovative visual presentation that span prose, poems and performance (43).  

Selfe gave three reasons for the growing interests of media texts with English composition teachers. Firstly, new media texts are more prevalent in their lives and they see that they are aesthetically more appealing than that of regular text. Secondly, new media texts are more available for composition teachers to consume on various levels and also for them to produce. Thirdly, students of English composition teachers are utilizing them in the classrooms.  Thus, Selfe argues that teacher of composition should not only be more than interested in media texts but also be utilizing them in their classrooms (44).

So what are the lessons that David Damon taught Selfe? They are as follows:

1.     New forms of literacy don’t simply accumulate. Rather, they have life spans.

2.     In a postmodern world, new media literacies may play an important role in identity formation, the exercise of power, and the negotiation of new media social codes.

3.     To make it possible for students to practice, value, and understand a full range of literacies—emerging, competing, and fading—English composition teachers must be willing to expand their own understanding of composition beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic.  And we have to do so quickly or risk having composition studies become increasing irrelevant. 

 Selfe’s willingness to learn from her student, David, is admirable.  She quotes the New London group on the value of new emerging discourses in multimedia. Hence, she proliferates the idea that teachers have a civic duty to prepare students to function in a society in which students need to be computer literate and must be able to use the available modes of representations.

Geoffrey Sirc’s theory of the “Box-Logic” is a move away from the traditional form of writing to an interesting open box layout for composition writing (113).  Sirc states that the means or media are not as important to him.  However, they should be important since they have some influence on the users’ manipulation of the media text with which they are presenting, thus influencing the “expressive” or “conceptual” uses that a particular text media will allow.  Sirc also comments that he wants to give students an easy entré into composition by allowing them to re-arrange textual materials (113).  His intentions are noteworthy but confusing. Does he want to create a poem, free from the prose through this box-logic?  Or, is he articulating his pedagogical beliefs for the box-logic?  Sirc seems to be fascinated with Joseph Cornell’s artwork. Cornell uses boxes as his artistic genre for his “visual” poems. That is, he collects random things of interests and showcases them in boxes. Hence, this is just one type of presentation. He states: “a primary goal in my classes:  to show my students how their compositional future is assured if they can take an art stance to the everyday, suffusing the material of daily life with an aesthetic (117).”   What’s being taken away from all this is that there is an aesthetical value to Sirc’s box-logic. Take it for what it is, but one does not have to like it. 

Sirc’s Box-Logic or box-compositions is similar to Cornell’s box artistic genre. The Internet is where the artist (student) can gather artifacts from various text media similar to Cornell’s travelling around New York City and collecting artifacts to display in his boxes. However, when learning box composition, students need to practice the art of annotation and note taking (122).   Sirc, it seems, associates note taking to Cornell’s gathering things in his house before he makes art out of it.  

Sirc’s box-logic is avant-garde, in that it goes beyond what is expected of compositional writing.  Is, however, text as box equal to author as collector? There is value to Cornell’s collection because he would eventually use them in his artwork.  There is a means to an end for Cornell’s collection. It is unclear as to whether or not this is the purpose for which students collect media texts online.  Thus, poets may feel indifferent to this text as box. However, text box writing, in essence, can be seen as artwork because it is expressive and conceptual. Like Selfe, Sirc speaks of enabling students for the media text-heavy Internet community.  Sirc takes it further in saying that students can take an art stance with composition aesthetically (117).  He also views students as designers not essayists and that’s an interesting take because one would believe that media text is a genre unto itself (121).

 In encouraging one thing, another is limited when they are closely connected. Sirc maintains that for too long he (like other composition instructors) has been the academic gatekeeper, since educators determine which students’ writing pieces are worthwhile and of academic standards (126). As gatekeepers of academia educators are like curators collecting the same mundane artwork, paying little interest to non-mainstream works. Sirc points out that there is a struggle with media texts and their designs, and with traditional academic writing and their structure. A basic box, according to Sirc, makes allowances for juxtapositions with texts and visuals or other media texts. Therefore, students can understand and explore aesthetics, design, and innovative visual presentation for their writing.

Textuality refers to the placement of words and how readers interpret them. Johndan Johnson-Eilola in “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation,” poses some different ways for educators to understand textuality and literacy, while exploring some of the contradictions and contingencies that are often glossed over or treated as isolated cases.  In redefining compositions, Johnson-Eilola uses two methods to explain understanding textuality, that is, symbolic-analytic work and articulation to describe writing practices in concrete rather than abstract ways (200-201).  “Symbolic-analytical work focuses on the manipulation of information and suggests connections to a new form of writing or new way of conceiving writing in response to the breakdown of textuality” (201). Writing as “articulation involves the idea that ideology functions like a language, being constructed contingently across groups of people over time and from context to context” (201). These terminologies are important in explaining intellectual property vis-à-vis Bender versus West Publishing. Johndan argues that there are shifts in how society perceives text and communication; more so, there are shifts as to what constitutes as “originality” in copyright laws and “creativity” in writing (204).

Based on Johndan’s postmodernist view of textuality, meaning is not done in isolation, but is based on the value ability to understand both users and technologies. Thus,  “articulation theory means providing a way for thinking about how meaning is constructed contingently, from pieces of other meanings social forces that tend to prioritize one meaning over the other” (202). So, the lines are blurred with regard to intellectual property when something is said in isolated creative utterance and is being used in another in a creative way such as a blog.  Johndan explains that intellectual property is something that came about as a result of the postmodernist capitalist who continually fragments “texts.” Like Sirc’s aesthetical value in the box-logic theory so is Johndan’s understanding of the articulation theory and symbolic-analytical work. The web is a collection of a wealth of resources that should not be restricted because of copyright infringements because capitalist individuals or groups want to hoard information that should be readily available. Sirc, Selfe, and Johndan all seem to agree that educators should be more than interested in the effects of multi-media texts. Finally, educators should embrace these new shifts, understanding the cultural and economical implications of how communication works with regard to multi-media text.