In her introduction (and justification) of “Writing New Media,” Wysocki lays out a simple truth:
New Media is here to stay, as scary and extraterrestrial as it is for the old guard of composition instructors, and to remain relevant in the digital age, learning how best to teach New Media is key.
She offers five different strategies for adopting the study of New Media into composition and rhetoric
(which I will paraphrase):
1. Make sure the New Media is aware of the teacher teaching it.
When Wysocki asks the writer of New Media to be aware of the teacher, she’s also asking the writer to be aware of him/herself. One of Wysocki’s main claims in several of her articles is that writing doesn’t exist in an objective void where the author can totally separate themselves from the material they are writing. So the same way the writing can’t be separate from the writer, the teacher of writing can’t be separate from their own pedagogy and approach to new media. There exists writing that analyzes individual text and writing that about the wide context of media structures but there’s nothing that bridges the gap between the two (Wysocki 6). There isn’t literature even on how to begin bridging the individual writing experience to the larger social experience of writing for a digital audience. “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” (Wysocki 6).
2. New Media’s number one priority: Materiality.
The digital platform offers us an infinite number of choices to convey ourselves and our sentiments: images, color, arrangement, mode, platform, etc. So why do most hardware devices only come programmed with certain settings like paper size and black ink? “Digitality ought to encourage us to consider not only the potentialities of material choices for digital texts but for any text we make, and that we ought to use the range of choices digital technologies seem to give us to consider the range of choices that printing-press technologies haven’t” (Wysocki 10). The computer is programmed for certain settings because those are the settings we are told to use and we facilitate our own limitations in the technology. We influence the technology that influences us. Wysocki acknowledges that shifting this paradigm would be a global challenge. “Few writing teachers are in position to change the design of computers or pen and paper to better facilitate the kinds of thinking we might favor…but we are in positions to encourage thoughtful decisions both about using computers or paper and pen in various stages of composing processes and about the material designs of texts using those different technologies” (Wysocki 11). The materiality matters, but the first step towards it is getting writers to be conscious about the material decisions they are making in conveying themselves.
3. How material are these New Media texts anyway?
Wysocki defines New Media texts as, “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). Such creators are aware that their works don’t function independently and are careful of how they are shown in context. By this definition, New Media texts don’t need to be digital (Wysocki 15) but they do appear different depending on how you define their materiality. If you view the texts through the lens of the visual/cultural, you begin to wonder why it is that academic texts are strictly monitored and not very visual while it is commonly accepted for comics and children’s books to rely heavily on visual elements (Wysocki 16). It becomes apparent that the academic setting made a conscious choice to formally present material this way, as visual elements are indeed effective in conveying messages (just look at this blog post!). If you consider the New Media texts in terms of their material interactivity and the level of interaction between the writer and the reader, we are encouraged “to consider the various complex relations we can construct with readers through the ways readers are asked to move through texts we build” (Wysocki 17). By defining the materiality in the texts, we see all the avenues available to us to manipulate in order to best use our infinite platforms and possibilities.
4. CREATE THE DAMN NEW MEDIA TEXTS WITHIN WRITING CLASSROOMS GODAMMIT
Everything is Henry Ford’s fault. Motherfucking Henry Ford.
As a result of Post-Fordism, we live in a culture that promotes and maybe even idolatrizes uniformity. Experimentation is frowned upon on a cultural level even though it is necessary for a culture to survive. Wysocki encourages such tampering such as the creation of New Media texts in the classroom, using the example that “once those who use an object understand how the object connects into the systems that work counter to their ends, they can then start to work to experiment with and construct other and differing connections” (Wysocki 21). Teaching composition as a material craft helps break it down to its elements which the writer (in this case, the students) can then plug use to plug into different systems (political, social, digital, etc.). Promoting experimentation in a classroom setting, where I feel too little spontaneity and initiative is encouraged, would not only help the spread of New Media as a respectable pedagogy, but also encourage students to keep inventing and redesigning media outside of the classroom setting.
5. Learn to speak the New Media lingo, bro
New Media is a language, a new language, and the majority of the rhetoric teaching profession are not native speakers. The old textbooks and teaching manuals promote the uniformity I spoke of earlier and to ask for anything else is to go against prescribed academic norms. New Media is rewriting the handbook in a language we must not only learn to speak but also to translate to and from quickly. “Texts that alert us to their materiality go against much that we have been taught: all the writing handbooks on my shelf instruct students to print their texts on 8 ½ by 11” paper with one inch margins and a serifed 12 point typeface; none of the handbooks give students reasons for these material presentations but rather just present instructions as though these material decisions are not and have never been decisions but are natural” (Wysocki 22). The same way English speakers might not know the rules of writing but will instinctively know what sounds right, we are familiar with our old language of media text and translating to this new language requires learning all the rules well enough to translate them for ourselves and those who we teach. There’s no need to be fluent in the language of New Media to teach it, as some composition and rhetoric professors aren’t (*coughTomcough*), but a willingness to learn the language along with the students is a testament to the message and materiality of New Media texts: we must practice to learn the language to best speak it in a way that the largest amount of people will understand.
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