This section brings together the Map of the Crossroads, the Physical Crossroads, and the Rhetorical Crossroads. It addresses specific pedagogical questions while more generally explaining how this approach can be beneficial in a writing classroom.
What is the main claim of the Map of the Crossroads?
My claim is that the Map of the Crossroads illustrates a writing practice that is unique to electracy. As an example of "choral writing," the map provides a means for students to negotiate composition practices that exist beyond print literacy.
The Map of the Crossroads takes an online digital map and enables students to attach meaning and memory to specific places without changing the physical space. This allows for an infinite number of people to potentially alter the meaning of the map without changing the landscape, which creates an ever shifting rhetorical consciousness of the places we inhabit.
How does the Map of the Crossroads relate to chora and electracy?
Keeping in mind that chora is a strategy that can help "consider the 'place' and its 'genre' in rhetorical terms" (Ulmer, 1994, p. 33), the map simply realizes this idea. It visualizes how we might define the rhetorical nature of one physical place.
The map utilizes the practical potential of electracy because it facilities the communicative capabilities of electronic media without altering the space itself.
What is the course of action being suggested?
The shift from literacy to electracy can be seen as a crossroads, and the classroom is largely where this shift should be taking place. Therefore, this webtext urges composition instructors to see beyond literacy, and to teach students how to move into electracy with greater ease and clarity.
What should I expect from students when assigning the Map of the Crossroads?
Many students might already have experience with navigating digital maps, however, I begin more simply with a map of my university's campus, which I physically print out and bring to class. I have them use this map to draw their own personal and/or institutional crossroads. Then, I challenge them to develop some of the more rhetorical or metaphysical layers that might be latent within their own personal crossroads.
From here, I explain how this activity can be furthered through the creation of a digital map. I further this idea by explaining that a digital map's interface forces its writer/designer to engage the complex nature of spatiality. The result is that they see that the map is not the territory, but rather it is their own memories that guide the map plotting. By urging students to think about the affordances and constraints of memory in relation to Google Maps, they can see beyond literacy.
Most students have never thought of using mapping technology in this way, which not only presents minor technological hurdles, but also some important creative decisions. By introducing this creative component to mapping, the crossroads map assignment ostensibly serves as an introduction to heuretics (i.e. the logic of invention). Whether presented in the context of introductory or advanced composition, if students follow the basic idea presented here, then they can come to know electracy as accessible and practical creative process.
What's the main take-away?
This project examines how reading, writing, and thinking habits have been altered in the crossroads from literacy to electracy. As Nicholas Carr explains:
Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
With this conversation in mind, it becomes clear that we can learn from the previous shift from orality to literacy. In particular, we should see the wisdom of electracy not as a mere "conceit" in comparison to the "real" wisdom of literacy, but instead as a new social apparatus for the transmission of knowledge and information. While Socrates rightfully feared a rise in forgetfulness in people who were not forced to exercise their memory through orality, the Map of the Crossroads is an exercise in memory through electracy. It is the centrifugal connection that bootstraps orality and literacy into the digital age.
Like Socrates who remained unable to perceive the conceptual benefits of literacy, it will inevitably take some time for the definitive benefits (and downfalls) of electracy to come into focus. This project simply provides one facet to illustrate the positive impact electracy can have not just on students, but the world at large.