New Media! NOW!

What I mostly got from the Anderson article was the idea that there is a resistance to new media in the teaching of composition, but that resistance needs to be overcome if students are going to be truly literate. In the video portion of the article/presentation he mentions that literacy in new media means that students must not only consume the digital images, sound, text, video, etc that comprise new media, but that they must also produce it. His argument for including digital projects in composition included the idea of cognitive impoverishment, where students are basically deprived of critical thinking skills by being denied new media. He also mentions the idea of remediation in new media, where integrating some low end technology and media in a composition classroom could help students to not feel “run over by the information superhighway.” But he goes on to dispute this idea, asking, “is low end enough?” He says that students are already used to non-textual communication in this ad driven, image saturated world, and that they are ready for a challenge. He ends by encouraging teachers to push their students beyond low end technologies.

The Digital Rhetoric article mirrored a lot of what Anderson had to say. On page 232, the authors mention that “foundational changes [are] needed for writing pedagogies to account for the effects of digital technologies.” This article also mentions the resistance to research into digital technologies. It goes on to point out how technologies have converged to give writers more advanced tools that ever before for composition, citing Bill Gates in an attempt to promote the many uses of the new technology. The article also examines the way in which multimedia devices “play a rhetorical role in our lives,” arguing that this alters communication to the point of new language creation (237). Echoing Anderson even more, the article mentions that “Writing today means weaving text, images, sound, and video—working within and across multiple media, often for within and across digital spaces” (240). This idea, that digital media changes the way composition is approached on all levels, is discussed in detail for most of the rest of the article, arguing that “digital rhetoric moves the purposeful communication off the page and into systems, pictures, and electronic devices” (243). The article also mentions that “students’ needs are met when they are engaging in the analytical and productive practices of digital rhetoric (249), and that “students [must] be given time to apply what they learn” (254). To me, this felt a lot like what Anderson said about bringing in new media and digital projects to promote true literacy, where they are both consumers and producers.

Manovich ties into these articles with the extensive discussion of the convergence of media and technologies to produce the new technologies, and in turn, the new media. He goes into detail about what new media is, referring often to the idea that new media is programmable (27). He spends most of the section delving into a fascinating (for me anyway) discussion of the development of different technologies, all of which converged in a way to bring about new media: the old media in a computable format. This all felt pretty straightforward, but there were several sections that mentioned how old media was mass produced, factory like for the sameness of the industrial age, and that factory produced media made sense for that era. Now, with the advent of the post industrial age, new media is highly specific and individualistic (41). “[Websites] assemble…information from databases and format it using generic templates and scripts” (32). I took this to mean that modular design lets automation create highly specific media rather than something general. Manovich also mentions that the new media has two layers (a computer layer and a cultural layer) and that those layers influence each other (46). In the next section of the book (What new media is not), Manovich acknowledges that all new media has its roots in old media. And with what seemed to be a nod to the Weinberger book we read earlier, he mentions that a “relevant question is how much information in an image can be useful to the viewer” (53). bringing up the idea that with so many leaves to rake together, are all of them necessary? He also mentions that interactivity is a basic concept of computable media, so it should be understood that new media is interactive. But he then goes on to say that interactivity is an old media concept as well, mentioning that “all…art is interactive in a number of ways. Ellipses in literary narration, missing details of objects in visual art…require the user to fill in missing information” (56). It’s interesting that what Manovich effective does in this section is completely validate and idea proposed in the Digital Rhetoric article: that new media is old media with electricity.

Overall, I think the real thread through this is that new media is the convergence of all the most useful ways of conveying ideas: still images, text, audio, and video can be combined in a way that each medium enhances each other medium. I think the Anderson article was supposed to be an attempt at this, but for me, as a reader/ watcher/ assumed interacter, it fell flat. Mostly this is because of the deluge of information on the screen at any given time. Some words that came to mind are: overload, frustration, subliminal messaging, total engagement required. I can see the advantage of such new media convergence, certainly having the full text of a book the article mentions available to read on a whim would be useful to understand the nuances of Anderson’s argument. However, it did remind me of Fox News a little, where there is too much going on to really pay attention to any of it. I know that there is a cultural ideal for multitasking, but I think that there are plenty of articles out there that actually dispute the idea that the human brain can do more than one or two things at once. I think that new media, like anything else is still subject to those same expectations of clarity that any old media would have. Just because you can have all of these things at once doesn’t meant that you should have all of them. I think that, like with booze, pie, etc, moderation could benefit new media. And really, like viewing a Dali or Krasnyansky painting, multiple representations need to be considered and savored to be truly understood. Just as an aside, I always try to encourage my students to incorporate visual media and such in their papers/ projects. Like Anderson said, I think it is imperative for teachers to encourage new media literacy through application. I just think that Anderson went a little overboard in his use of that new media representation.