Hayles's concern with Media Specific Analysis may be particularly relevant to the current discussion of C-MOC as a process and a medium. Media Specific Analysis (MSA) “attends both to the specificity of the form . . . and to citations and limitations of one medium in another.” She further explains that MSA “moves from the language of ‘text’ to a more precise vocabulary of screen and page, digital program and analogue interface, code and ink, mutable image and durably inscribed mark, texton and scripton, computer and book” (“Print” 69). Computer-mediated oral composing research is currently positioned primarily within the language of ‘text,’ depicting the process as either a remediation of an existing spoken genre (such as public speaking or conversation) into text or a transparent interface for speaking the written form of a genre.
Expanding upon her discussion of Media Specific Analysis, Hayles's book, Writing Machines, explains why we have not always considered the medium as intimately related to the message. She writes that “there has traditionally been a sharp line between representation and the technologies producing them” and that literary studies in particular have “generally been content to treat fictional and narrative worlds as if they were entirely products of the imagination” (19). Hayles explains that “the power of MSA comes from holding one term constant across media . . . and then varying the media to explore how medium-specific constraints and possibilities shape texts” (“Print” 69).
We should, Hayles suggests, consciously note the differences between older and newer media to understand what changes lie ahead for our print-based society. She states in “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality” that “without nuanced analyses of the differences and similarities of print and electronic media, we will fail to grasp the fuller significance of the momentous changes underway as the Age of Print draws to a close and print . . . takes its place in the dynamic media ecology of the twenty-first century” (271). Hayles’ scholarship, though it often focuses on hypertexts as the locus of the debates on print and electronic media, provides several concepts related to the complexity of C-MOC as a new composing medium.
Hayles’ work also helps shed light on the idea that VRT programs show agency when writers interact with them. She comments that “when we read electronic hypertexts, we do so in environments that include the computer as an active cognizer performing sophisticated acts of interpretation and representation.” Regarding C-MOC, we can see the effects of this cognizance in examples such as Julie Perks, who admits that the language appearing on the screen during her exams was not fully her own—yet she found it acceptable enough to submit to her graders. Hayles also explains that this cognition is “distributed not only between writer, reader, and designer . . . but also between humans and machines (which may or may not be regarded as separate entities)” (“Print” 84).