Don’t panic, but the future of human existence depends on what you choose to teach in your Composition course.

I couldn’t quite tell if I was sensing a tone of excitement or panic in this week’s texts.

While I think both Miller and Yancey (CCC 56:2) make excellent arguments for rethinking and possibly expanding our practices (we already inhabit a world heavily influenced by screen literacy), and I couldn’t agree more when both Wysocki (Writing New Media) and Yancey suggest that the writing we ask students to do in school is not connected enough to their lives, I’m still not convinced that this justifies changing the purpose of a first year writing course from “writing/composing” (as Hesse argues in CCC 61:3) to “rhetoric/composing” (as Selfe does, also CCC 61:3).

I do think we should teach composition in a broader context, integrating visual arguments and the rhetoric of new media composition, but I think this has to be a different course than what is usually conceived of as first year comp. Might a certain large, urban state university in northern California change the focus of its second year composition course, currently emphasizing writing about literature, to multimodal composition? I, for one, would love to teach a such a course, but I would want students in it to have a good handle on written composition (and here’s maybe where we need to expand beyond the singular focus on the academic essay, considering that the world we inhabit includes written composition in many forms, some of them digital), so that writing can be one of many possible modes of communication for our students.

So, while I hear the new media alarm, it’s competing with others that have been going off for some time—in particular, the one screaming about the need for colleges to equip students with basic writing skills.

Consciousness and the writing medium

After reading these articles, I find I am unable to come up with a satisfying thesis to unify these works. Although I found them the most difficult, Reid’s and Ong’s articles seem to work the best in finding related approaches to the functions and/or effects of writing on human consciousness.

Reid discusses the reduction of binaries, focusing on the bridging of internal and external in the creation of consciousness. Once the thought becomes external instead of purely internal, the external world would be more able to affect it. It then makes sense that the medium could affect thought, unlike the Platonic conception where it was untouchable by the technology used to record it.

(As an aside, although my understanding of the ideas discussed here is shaky at best, I wonder if the changed notion of authorship ties into this bigger idea of consciousness. If there is no set notion of authorship, how does this change the consciousness of an individual working on a Wikipedia article with numerous other authors as opposed to, say, an individiual essay he or she would turn into a teacher? Is this much different than a pre-internet article written collaboratively with other individuals?)

One aspect of Ong’s writing that struck me was his comment that “new tracks for thought are imposed by the new technologies. And the software of the computer vigorously interposes even another consciouness or other consciousnesses–the programmer or programmers–between the knower and the known.” This may have a number of interpretations, but one way I see it is that whatever operations a given word processing program allows you to do may affect what you write. The software engineers guide how you are able to express certain ideas through choices such as font selection, stylistic alterations like bolding and italics, or the ways in which graphics can be inserted into the text. The differences may be negligible in individual instances, but the implication seems to me to be that over time, writing with Word or Notepad or a WordPress account will change what and how students write. And as is evidenced by the comments from blog posts and class discussion, the mere use of the technology for posting a blog can cause some anxiety, which might affect what is ultimately written. The inverse may be true as well–some students who become nervous when faced with a pen and paper might feel more at home using a computer, simply as a medium where they are more comfortable, where legibility of handwriting is not an issue.

I realize I have gone slightly off-topic here, but it does relate to what a student’s writing output will be. The effects on thinking and consciousness detailed by these writers refute the claims in the Phaedrus that writing only records pre-conceived thought or a Platonic truth, that only fools think “written words can do anything more than remind one who knoews that which the writing is concerned with.” The modern arguments seem to be that writing is generative, and as such, the tools and technologies used to generate the writing will affect what the writing itself will be.