Coming to Commonplaces

In his essay, 'Non-linearity and Literary Theory,' Espen Aarseth articulates the difficulty of using contemporary literary theory to explain hypertexts, or as he refers to them, 'non-linear texts' (Aarseth, 1994: 52). Instead of adapting and piecing together various theories to explain texts that are dependent upon a reader who makes meaning amongst the various links and navigational apparatus, he turns to rhetoric. Aarseth investigates non-linearity itself as a type of rhetorical figure (or device) to theorize how meanings are negotiated among readers, designers, and hypertexts. He defines several categories of rhetorical devices that are used to understand how readers negotiate texts:

In terms of the simplified hierarchy of non-linear texts, these classes of figures belong to the following levels: forking, found in the spatially non-linear text; linking/jumping, belonging to the stratum of hypertext; permutation, computation, and polygenesis, all found in both determinate and indeterminate cybertext. (Aarseth, 1994: 80)

These new rhetorical figures explain how readers make meaning from texts that are not always presented in linear, written formats and include things like links, argumentative uses of space and distance, special awareness to time and context, etc. Aarseth's resulting explanation is a type of 'textual anthropology,' whereby the critic observes the making of meaning through the process of interacting with a text. His rhetorical figures, then, serve as commonplaces, or ways of explaining readers' processes of meaning-making while interacting with texts.

My point in beginning with this example is that theories of linear textuality are not always the best ways of explaining texts that are written in new, non-linear formats. Multimodal texts, those that combine written text with audio, graphical, and video elements, require new theories in order to explain how audiences make some meaning out of their complex parts. In Writing New Media (Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, & Sirc, 2004), Anne Wysocki explains that the nature of multimodal texts requires specific attention be paid to the materialities of those texts:

I think we should call "new media texts" those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality; such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text--like its composers and readers--doesn't function independently of how it is made and in what contexts. Such composers design texts that make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody. (Wysocki, 2004: 15)

By referring to a new media text's overt design, Wysocki implies that a text's material elements (such as visual, aural, spatial, and other modes of communication) must be made available for a reader to interpret. This materiality, then, is what makes new media texts multimodal. In Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, Kress and van Leeuwen build on the notion of multiliteracies made popular by the New London Group by arguing that readers and designers assign semiotic meaning to all of the 'modes deployed in a multimodal object/phenomenon/text' (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001: 28). From these multiple layers of meaning, a unified interpretation of the elements in a designed text can be made visible and meaningful to a reader. These elements serve as commonplaces as well. They are moments, spaces, and places where readers can ultimately come together and agree about what they see and why they see that particular element in the context they do.

In our argument here, we will discuss some of these commonplaces as ways to talk about, study, and theorize texts that add to current models of textuality. These might look like Aarseth's textual anthropology—a hyper-awareness of one's meaning-making processes through and in a particular text—and they may look even more like usability studies—studies that seek to understand how readers make meaning in particular texts and how designers can use that understanding to create more successful textual experiences. The point is, our field should be changing: from English studies, we should be seeing more substantial work being done in digital rhetorics and multimedia composition.

To accommodate a new rhetoric of new media, we suggest that terms such as element, designer, and wow should replace traditional uses of paragraph, writer, and assessment. The materiality of new media texts shifts the focus of communication from what was—a speaker delivering a speech to a finite audience—to what is—valuing how visual, audio, gestural, and other non-written modes of design make meaning within a network of audiences who participate in a collective experience of signification. Subsequently, notions like argument, evidence, and citation in scholarly contexts become much-changed and more collaborative, reader-based endeavors. For example, terms like organization or structure, which are so important in written texts, do not fully encompass the meaning-making process a reader participates in when encountering a text that has an open structure or one that is organized around links outside of itself. In this case, terms like design, navigation, interactivity, or reading do a better job of explaining what processes belong to the text's production and can be anticipated in advance by the author/constructor of a text and those that rest solely upon the attentive reader who chooses what to read and when. Citation, a term so important to the research-based, scholarly article, becomes almost tedious when referring to one's ability to link to ideas and show connections to established ideas and arguments (commonplaces). Likewise, evidence, which is often presented in the form of citation, proofs, and description in written texts, is enhanced by the ability of new media texts to provide examples through links, animation, visual explanation, and the juxtaposition or intersection of elements.

We are not suggesting that these concepts share a simple, binary relationship or that they correlate perfectly across the boundaries between linear, written texts and new media. Rather, we are suggesting that we need terms such as these to reconfigure teaching and learning with and in new media technologies. And to begin to understand the meaning-making processes behind texts that demand their readers take an active role in shaping how they mean. For example, a typical rhetorical situation for Aristotle would include a speaker, an audience, a speech, and a purpose (an action or response that the speaker wished to accomplish by speaking). However, today's complex rhetorical situations rarely afford a designer direct contact with her audience—the audience has become an idealized fiction which may or may not actually exist. What does exist, of course, are readers who will experience a text by positioning themselves with or against the designer's audience as they choose and is convenient for them.

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