Converging ASS+U+M[E]+ptions


Web 2.0: Converging or creating binaries?

It is not uncommon in digital writing studies to assume that texts can embrace scholarly and creative purposes at once, as a good portion of multimodal and new media scholarship already suggests (e.g., Ball, 2004; Ball & Moeller, 2007; Walker, 2006; Sorapure, 2006; Wysocki, 2001, 2002, 2004). However, because these binaries still exist in and outside of English studies (e.g., as evidenced by the many tenure guidelines that label research as either creative or scholarly), we have chosen the scholarly/creative trope here in order to demonstrate how new media texts are neither one nor the other. Rather, they can and often do converge scholarly and creative purposes. Based upon a demonstration of this convergence, we hope to offer a way of bridging the slash (/) in traditional English studies assumptions about what is valued in regards to tenure and promotion for one, and pedagogy for another. In this text, we attempt to build the new media bridge between rhetoric and aesthetics, between the scholarly and the creative, between low art culture and high art culture, and between academic texts and popular texts. New media texts can help authors speak to their readers in vibrant ways, helping us understand the potential role new media can play in converging English studies.

 

One text that attempts to bridge the binaries of form and content (as well as rhetoric and aesthetics, scholarly and creative, low art culture and high art culture, and academic and popular texts) is Michael Wesch's (2007) YouTube-distributed video, "The Machine is Us/ing Us." (Note the binary in its title!) The purpose of this 4:30-minute video is to answer the question “What is Web 2.0?” Wesch, himself a cultural anthropologist, explored technological, social, and cultural changes that have occurred in relation to the development of World Wide Web technologies. He compared the highly static and alphabetic beginnings of the Web, when form and content were presented together via HTML tags, to its current XML instantiation, which is touted as being more collaborative, database-driven, and dynamic—as seen in sites and programs like Flickr or iTunes. Thus, as Wesch argues, XML separates form and content because content can be database-driven, and a user—who no longer needs to know programming code, HTML, or a web-editing program—can contribute dynamic content (i.e., writing or static pictures or single videos, etc.) through blogs, wikis, and other pre-coded interfaces. He suggested that Web 2.0 technologies allow users to think separately about form and content as discrete communicative practices, and he concluded the video by suggesting that viewers should rethink commonplaces in our society including copyright, commerce, ethics, rhetoric, and aesthetics.

 

Wesch argued that Web 2.0 changes how we present information—where presentation means a separation of form and content—and he argued this position by posting an academically minded genre (informational video) in a decidedly nonacademic location (YouTube) using a medium (video) in which form and content are intimately connected. That is, Wesch’s argument regarding Web 2.0’s ability to split form and content is presented in a medium—a video—that converges the two. Although Wesch didn’t comment on his own combinations of words and images and video and other aesthetic modes of communication, such as sound, he successfully used the dynamism of the Web to distribute his message. And yet while Wesch used what might be considered aesthetic elements of communication such as animations, images, and a soundtrack, the logic of his argument is still embedded in words, words that he recorded himself typing on screen–yes–but words, and thus traditional, academic structures, nonetheless. Worded, linear arguments are what we expect to find in traditional, linear scholarship (like this article, for example). When readers are not able to make sense of the too-quickly flashing images of websites that Wesch provided, the written content points out his argument in an established, academic mode ofliteracy. The message this video (perhaps unintentionally) sends is: When all else fails, use words. Why? Because when academics are neither trained to teach or read aesthetic modes of communication in the pursuit of scholarship, we fall back on the assumption that writing does not also merge form and content. And it most certainly does. We just often fail to see it that way.