Converging Assumptions

Changing the rules of the game: New media on a creative <---> scholarly spectrum

In the vein of composition and digital writing studies, Goeffrey Sirc (2001) and Christopher Schroeder (2001) have both suggested examples of teaching students to produce texts that combine creative and scholarly purposes (e.g., collages and skits). Jody Shipka (2005, 2006) has also written about students producing popular forms of texts such as original music CDs and museum tours in order to learn critical and rhetorical skills associated with traditional academic literacies. Also extending the possibilities of academic literacies into multimedia projects, in Writing New Media, Anne Wysocki, Cynthia Selfe, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, and Geoffrey Sirc (2004) discussed texts as varied as video literacy narratives, soundscapes, websites, and collections of objects a la Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project. Inherent in each of these assignments is an acknowledgement that students should approach learning academic literacies through ways of composing with which they are already familiar. In other words, students should—as Sirc (2001) and Schroeder (2001) and Hardin (1999) all insisted—be able to start their composition process through their own topoi and commonplaces (Ball & Moeller, 2007): with what they already know. (We talk about students here because the example we use later started as a student project, but this argument serves faculty members equally well, as Wesch’s example shows.)

In many cases, students’ compositional commonplaces will be texts they encounter daily, which often means popular new media texts. By design, many new media texts like YouTube videos or Facebook pages combine different forms of scholarly and creative presentations. Here we are defining a scholarly presentation as one that employs the logic of linear arguments to persuade an audience. The most common association of a scholarly presentation would be the academic article or essay. In contrast (as is often the case) is the aesthetic presentation, which we define as the use of persuasive and emotional appeals made through multimedia. A common example of an aesthetic presentation would be a photograph, an animation, or a video with a soundtrack, for instance.

In another instance, we have pointed to Wesch’s argument regarding Web 2.0 as made through words. But let us turn to the soundtrack for a moment. It is an instrumental piece with futuristic tones that matched the feel of cautious optimism in the piece. That’s a persuasive use of an aesthetic element, the song. But we might also ask whether the sonic mode complements the linguistic, spatial, gestural, and visual modes in the video (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000)? Or, similar to how Allison Brovey Warner (2007b) argued in assessing the value of digital scholarship whether the form enacts the content (or is it vice versa?), we can ask whether Wesch’s use of that particular soundtrack promoted or enacted his argument as effectively as it could have. Did Wesch, as Bump Halbritter (2006) argued in “Musical Rhetoric in Integrated Media Composition,” use the soundtrack in ways that reflect the text’s purpose, its thesis? We would argue not.

One cannot argue with the popularity—scholarly (as this text indicates in its extensive use of Wesch’s piece) or otherwise—of Wesch’s video. Viewer hits for the video reached over 2.5 million less than a month after it was published. Writing now, a year after its initial publication, hits on “The Machine is Us/ing Us” have reached 4.6 million and, anecdotally, has circulated on every listserv we know of, which would never happen to an article or even a book. (Of course, the video doesn’t make the top 100 all-time viewed videos list, nearly all of which are music videos, ripped copies of High School Musical, or advertisements for porn sites; Wesch would need to triple his hits to make the list.) Such rapid change in compositional possibilities—including the option for any of us to post videos (home or work related) on YouTube and receive 2 million hits in a month—indicates that academic literacies made public in a format that invites popular and scholarly critiques (as Wesch’s video has) should be valued by the academy. McKenzie Wark’s (2007) GAM3R 7H30RY (i.e., Gamer Theory), Mitchell Steven’s (n.d.) Without Gods, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s (in progress) Expressive Processing are similar examples of scholarship-gone-popular, by having been composed (to varying degrees) in the network of a blog-like interface complete with user comments on in-progress drafts. (In Wark’s case, the comments, written by experts and non-experts alike, were used to revise the new media version of his book into a print publication for Harvard University Press. The same will be done for Wardrip-Fruin’s piece and The MIT Press.) So as not to get distracted from our point: We mention these examples by respected humanities scholars to suggest that there are multiple possibilities of what can count as knowledge in our field. That is, if we propose to change our assumptions—by embracing the scholarly and creative, high and low culture, pop and academic texts—then new media can help us expand our understanding of and function in the world.