The New New Media

Computers are a central part of my life as a student and as a human being. I use computers every day, and probably create some sort of “new media” text several times a day. I am not exactly sure how to tackle the problem of computers as a necessity, though. I think if they were magically removed from the world tomorrow, I would certainly be deprived of an ability to create and gather knowledge, but I think that if computers did not exist something else would. There would still be some sort of “new media,” or other technology to accomplish similar goals.

Wysocki defines “new media” as any media which is aware of its material. Presumably the media would have to somehow reference itself and its own material, otherwise it would be impossible to determine if it “knows” what its material is. An essay which comments on its own nature as an essay, a webpage which references its existence on the internet, and so on. Wysocki’s definition is concerned with “materiality,” which is an over-suffixed way of saying that the medium of the text is just as important as the content. I agree that this definition is more useful than the more common definition of new media as digital media. I think that Wysocki is right to make this distinction: an essay in PDF form is not “new media” simply because it is on a computer. It is essentially the same text. But I think a PDF with links, or images, or other digital aspects should be considered new media, even if the text does not explicitly reference its own medium.

Should this blog not be considered new media unless it references its own nature as a blog? Should it be considered new media simply because it does?

Perhaps more useful would be to define a text as “new media” if it uses its medium in such a way that another medium could not adequately do the same job. A film could not be printed as an essay and retain all the same nuances. A webpage could not be made into a photograph, and a journal article could not be turned into an interpretive dance. Certainly these various media allow for unique modes of communication, and I think that this uniqueness is more useful than reflexivity for discussing new media. Reflexivity is certainly interesting (and I think reflexive texts would fit under my vague definition above), but I don’t think Wysocki’s definition is inclusive enough.

Composing on the Internet

Since I have not yet begun teaching, and have never formally taught in the past, it is difficult to summarize my views on a field I have not really thought about until a few days ago. However, many of the points raised in Yancey’s paper seem very important, particularly her discussion of how students learn writing in a variety of ways on their own which they are discouraged from using in an academic setting, and how different mediums create different sorts of writers.

Students learn to write in a variety of places, namely the internet, but the style of writing developed there is not encouraged in class. I don’t think this itself is a bad thing, since academic writing should probably be more structured than, say, a blog post. Instead of trying to use blogs or other new forms of communication to connect to students, perhaps more important is creating the motivation for writing in the first place. In class a student is required to write a paper, while on the internet they choose to write a blog (or other sort of communication). I don’t think the method of writing is really the problem - getting the students interested in the topic seems more important. Simply turning a paper into a blog post doesn’t remove the nature of the assignment: it’s still an assignment.

This also connects to Yancey’s discussion of writers created by different mediums. Would a writer created by the medium of a blog really be more desirable than a writer created by the medium of the printed page, at least as far as academic writing is concerned? Again, I think this has less to do with the medium than the motivation, or the content of what is written. A huge variety of writing exists on the internet, just as a huge variety of writing exists on the printed page. Different arrangements of text and other opportunities are presented in different mediums, but without the proper motivation or content, they are each as vacant as the next.

If students who would rather spend their time on the internet writing blogs or posting on forums is the problem, turning writing assignments into blogs and forums is not the solution. A student is no more going to want to write a blog as an assignment than a paper as an assignment. Just because they like writing blogs on their own time doesn’t mean they want to write blogs for a class.

That all seems kind of negative... I did find Yancey’s discussion of remediation to be particularly interesting, and think that this sort of use of different technologies could be rewarding, since the focus there is on the actual content, and how it changes in different mediums.