Students Showing the Possibilities, Part Two

I want to focus on Michael to show how his project demonstrates that new media literacies can be actualized in writing classes. In one of the project discussion forums, he wrote, 'It turns out I'll have more access to technology than I originally anticipated. I'll have the ability to use a scanner, digital camera, MAYBE a digital video camera, and MAYBE a microphone.' His project incorporated all of these technologies, and then some. This was a student who initially had trouble with the concept that a text can be something other than written language (e.g., the students were new to the idea that written text is also visual in that the typical one-inch margins, etc., of a research paper signal meaning-making conventions that have become transparent/familiar to readers).

About 12 weeks into the 15-week course, Michael had what I call his "aha," or enlightenment, moment in relation to the class material. He describes having this experience after reading a linear analysis I had written about a new media text called 'Murmuring Insects' (Ankerson, 2001). The purpose of that paper was to help them see that new media texts are more than just fancy technology and pretty designs.

My "EUREKA" moment with this course came last week. When I read Cheryl's standard text describing the events surrounding [September 11, 2001], my reaction was completely different than it was when I "read" 'Murmuring Insects.' I believe that the use of other modes contributed to my differing perspectives. The mode, then, is a key contributor to meaning.
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[It] seems to be this exact point that has plagued me since the beginning of this course. Early on, I would write statements such as, 'It's just cheating, that's all it is!' [referring to the use of visuals or audio in a text] or, while writing my remediation assignment, 'I felt like I was assigning links to make the meaning for me.' Well, in a way, I was. The links in hypertext are just one of many "modes" available in new media [that] contribute to meaning. They don't MAKE the meaning, but they help.
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Anyways, for my final project, I would like to create a place to help people understand the various modes of communication in new media and how they can be used to create meaning. I might use color, sound, animation, video, pictures, etc., all to show a reader how they might react differently to the SAME TEXT with other modes contributing to the meaning.

And this is (roughly) what Michael did for his final project. He is, btw, a graduate-assistant football coach at Utah State University (a research-intensive, intermountain West, land- and space-grant institution), an experience on which he draws extensively to support the purpose of this project. He, quite literally, works from his own commonplaces of football and Catholicism to show how different modes of communication provide readers with different, although sometimes connecting, meanings in a new media text. Please watch Michael's new media project now. (It is large--28 MB--for which we apologize, but attempts to compress it created unusable, unreadable versions. Please make sure sound is on. And if the player screen turns black while audio is working, don't worry: That's the point.)

If I were asked to describe Michael's new media text in relation to academic literacies instead of new media literacy, I might conform to traditional writing-instructor/research-paper topoi and say that he was using the evidence of different modes to support his thesis that each mode differently contributes to a designer's intention and, thus, an audience's interpretation of a new media text. Specifically, his evidence could include modes such as writing, static photos, audio, and video presented separately and, sometimes, in tandem to argue that each mode makes meaning differently, and individually. Michael's text is, after all, sequential in its presentation and, thus, it could be "outlined" as if it were a research report, into paragraphs representing each of the modes he uses—written text, images, audio, video. With an introduction (the pipe/painting) and a conclusion (his "thank you"), we have a nicely organized, five-paragraph essay, eh? This generic label makes sense on a certain level.

Describing (let alone interpreting, or grading...) 'Hail Mary' using written topoi and commonplaces doesn't account for all the new media literacies Michael invoked. For instance, how can we account for the way that the materiality of the text makes meaning? Rather than go into a full explanation of meaning related to materiality in this text (as I think it does a pretty good job on its own), I want to discuss some of the topoi that appear in Michael's text and that can be specific to new media texts. (more...)

Although every element besides his voice is a reproduction from (or taken from) another text, he has designed the text in a way that remediates the elements' purposes for use in his particular text. Their sequence indicates levels of emphasis that could be akin to written commonplaces like topic sentences in paragraphs, but by discussing the text in relation to sequence instead of flat/linear organization, we are also able to discuss the text's time+space issues. For instance, because readers don't know what's coming next in the sequence (i.e., can't visualize it in the same way they can visualize the spatial and visual relationships of paragraphs on a page), readers have to pay closer attention to the juxtaposition of modes that Michael makes in order to determine their connections and, thus, meanings within the text (see, e.g., Rice's 2003 discussion of hypertext and a rhetoric of "cool" for more on the importance of juxtaposition as an important meaning-making strategy in texts).

Michael has helped readers pay attention to the text's sequence by providing verbal cues to visual transitions; but he also plays with those transitions by juxtaposing elements readers wouldn't expect to be sequential under any other circumstances--in this case, the audio of the Lord of the Rings knock-off of Carmina Burana's 'O Fortuna', Ava Maria, and Queen's 'We Are the Champions.' He is able to surprise us because of the affordances that a commonplace of time+space in new media texts like this one allow. That is, Michael reinforces the purpose of his text—the power of using different modes of communication in one piece to convey/communicate meanings (especially compared to written modes)—by juxtaposing two elements that could not otherwise be juxtaposed in other media that don't have time+space commonplaces available. In composing the media this way, Michael plays on the immediacy of response that new media texts (as opposed to written texts or even hypertexts) can have with an audience by providing a moment where I, as a reader, can react by laughing (or groaning, if I didn't share the notion of fun that the author seems to have).

Other new media commonplaces that Michael's project addresses are that of emotion and credibility, connected in this text through the juxtaposition of art, football, and Catholicism. I will discuss briefly how these student-based topoi (i.e., what the student knows, which are things he could bring to shape his argument) and commonplaces function in relation to emotion and credibility. First, emotion used as a commonplace in new media texts can help the designer connect with an audience through pathetic appeals, in which the use of aesthetic elements is typical. For instance, in Michael's project, he uses Magritte's painting (an aesthetic element) to elicit a sympathetic reaction from his audience as he explains the efferent (informational) purpose of his text. Thus, Michael successfully draws on a reader's emotional response to the painting while conveying non-creative information verbally. In new media texts, it is important to value the emotional purpose that aesthetic and modal elements carry for readers because such elements are afforded by the technology and, thus, become commonplace for students to use in new media texts.

Although Michael's use of the Magritte painting could be considered a successful example of showcasing his critical literacy skills, his other commonplaces of football and Catholicism (as specific knowledge to him as the designer of this text since he is a university football coach and a practicing Catholic) might make readers question his credibility. In the context of graduate-level work, his reasoning for using these examples to explain a problem and, thus, his credibility as an author/designer might be called into question. Certainly in most public US universities, if a graduate student invoked a sports story or an overtly religious metaphor (let alone both at once) as an example of a thick rhetorical or literary term, he or she might be laughed out of the room. (See, e.g., the National Public Radio commentary by Wolf (2006) on being scorned by fellow academics because of his love of NASCAR).

And, yet, Michael chose to use both of his commonplaces to help make his point. My guess is that he had several reasons for choosing these themes: (a) they metaphorically connect for the purposes of his modal demonstration, (b) he was running out of time to decide what to do his project on (he admitted this in the asynchronous class discussions) and he knew both of these themes well, and (c) he might have considered an audience who knew nothing about literary hypertext or new media. He was attempting to convey difficult information to them in a way that they could easily understand.

We can assume that (a) and (b) are accurate hypotheses of his football and Catholicism references, and, as a teacher, I can hope that he had (c) in mind. But, even if he didn't recognize the ease with which a potential audience would be able to grasp his purpose when he decided to use these emotionally charged, and academically non-critical themes, as a teacher-reader, I argue that his credibility remains intact because his unusual topic demanded an unusual presentation, which new media technologies allowed (see Rice, 2006, for a related discussion on how credibility can be achieved through sampling in rap music; or Hess, 2006, on citation practices can change in new media contexts based on commonplaces composition practices used in DJing).

The fact that Michael was able to smoothly integrate his own ideas with others to reach an audience shows a high level of rhetorical and critical engagement--perhaps the two most important sections in the WPA outcomes statement for first-year writing—even if the text might be considered too linear for some new media enthusiasts.

Michael's new media project was one example of eleven that I received for that particular class. Others were equally representative of the range of possible critical literacies that students could engage in by composing new media texts. Yet, each of these examples required my thinking about the texts (and assessing them) in ways that only minimally relied (if at all, in some cases) on my commonplaces about writing and writing instruction. For instance, let me share below a brief example of another student's project that required me to entirely refocus how I made meaning from these texts in the context of the institution.

Kiersten's project focused on the aesthetic problem of closure in literary hypertexts. Unlike Mike's piece, which seems rather straightforward in its meaning, I had to view Kiersten's piece several times to determine whether she had met the assignment requirements. She was an excellent student in our asynchronous discussions, and so I expected her project to have the same concision she showed in her written posts. In fact, what she'd done in her final project astounded me once I recognized what she was doing: relying almost solely on pathetic appeals within a postmodern narrative structure (replete with gaps in the plot), she demonstrated what finding closure might actually "feel" like. Kiersten used examples from her life (pictures, video, and audio) mixed with a few googled images to demonstrate "personal closure"—that is, having to come to a conclusion in a hypertextual piece based on one's own interaction with it (Douglas, 1999). She composed a new media text that highlighted this personal exploration through the narrative trope of having to come to terms with a loss—in this case, the loss of a friend, or, rather, the "what if" if that friend had not been lost. Without ever mentioning hypertext or structure or closure, Kiersten presented a forking narrative that required finding closure both on the part of the main character (whom we see in pictures, represented by Kiersten) and on the part of the audience-as-reader. It was a sophisticated and subtle text, as well as an excellent demonstration (given the constraints of the class) in understanding how aesthetic elements are instrumental in meaning-making within new media texts.

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If you'd like more on how media and materiality can make meaning in the context of English studies classes and student projects, please see, for instance, George (2002), in which she describes how visual arguments make meaning; Halbritter (2006), in which he argues that film soundtracks can function as thesis statements for movies. Also see the discussion and rubrics that accompany student assignments in Writing New Media (Wysocki et al., 2004).

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