Influences

When I began reviewing critical and pedagogical materials relating to writing in the new media, the direction for my particular class seemed -- at least to me -- a bit out of sync with much of what others in my field were doing. This class is not, strictly speaking, a composition class, a creative writing class, or a class devoted to pure experimentation with the limits of hypertext. It is more of a specialized technical writing class dedicated to working with forms that, while still  emerging, seem to be at least partially established as “interactive genres.” Since it is classified as a career rather than a transfer course, it is probably less theoretical in some respects; however, the work of people like Landow, Bolter, Murray, and many others were still essential to me as I set about designing this class. Specifically, they helped me articulate three core principles for the philosophy and pedagogy of the class:

1. Understanding how to write for interactive media begins with understanding how to read interactive media.
   

2. Teaching writing for interactive media holds challenges in scope and emphasis that traditional theory and pedagogy both can and can’t prepare us for.
   

3. Creating in interactive media involves a shift in guiding metaphors.
   

Understanding how to write for interactive media begins with understanding how to read interactive media. The literary and critical work of Michael Joyce and the books written and edited by George P. Landow demonstrate that “narrative” is a thing that shares the same paradoxical elements as light. Like light, narrative demonstrates traits of being both particulate and stream. A seminal example is Joyce’s groundbreaking work Afternoon. That “text” – a web of computer-navigated scenes which the reader may access through a variety of sequences – is particulate, but the user’s reading – the interpretation of the actions and dialogue into one continuously threaded story – becomes streamed because of what we have learned about comprehension from reading and cognitive research as well as hypertext theorists like Espen Aarseth and Mireille Rosello (whose essay appear in Landow’s Hyper/Text/Theory). The upshot is that, in order to write for interactive media, an author needs to “read” the media in enough volume and with close enough attention to its workings to be aware of how the product is functioning on a meta-cognitive level, which is why I require five separate product analysis of already published projects in the course.

Teaching writing for interactive media holds challenges in scope and emphasis that traditional theory and pedagogy both can and can’t prepare us for. In the most important way, the challenge of teaching a writing for interactive media class is the same as teaching any writing class in a room with computers -- that challenge is keeping the class student- or subject-centered rather than allowing it to become computer-centered. Fortunately, our discipline has addressed this issue with great attention and care in our professional journals. One specific collection of essays on pedagogical practices and hypertext, Scott Lloyd DeWitt and Kip Strasma's Contexts, Intertexts, and Hypertexts, was extremely useful in understanding the peaks and the pitfalls of using interactive media to teach undergraduates about writing. 

Creating in interactive media involves a shift in guiding metaphors. In David J. Bolter’s 1991 work Writing Spaces, Bolter transformed the way many saw text away from the straight narrative line that traditional technologies had steered us toward to a more two and three-dimensional metaphor. The text in interactive media is truly situated in spatial metaphors -- windows, paths, trees, chatrooms, web rings, digital environments -- all of these words refer to places that don't exist in the analog world but which have helped acclimate us to the digital one. In their Interactive Media assignments, my students are responsible for turning in a conceptualization of the "spaces" they would design in the form of cluster maps, "hot spot" screen mock-ups, storyboards, or flowcharts -- something that creates a sense of geography for their project.

As interactive media continues to develop and computational speeds double, the possibility that a human metaphor will be combined with or even replace the spatial metaphor has been proposed by advocates of artificial intelligence like Ray Kurzweil. In addition to Kurzweil, other important influences from outside of linguistics, rhetoric, and composition included John von Neumann and fuzzy logicians like Bart Kosko. I began reading von Neumann's work on game theory hoping to latch onto something that would make the concept of developing a role playing game more clear. Unfortunately, apart from some brief and disturbing insights into how Richard Hatch might think, I found little that I could apply to my context; however, I did find a little book called The Computer and the Brain written as a series of lectures in the late '50s. In this 82-page book, von Neumann essentially lays out a metaphor that many of us have come to accept without much thought and one which will probably increase in importance.

Of course, it is impossible to conceive of computers successfully taking on a human metaphor without linguistic ability, and the notion of the language's role in the development of artificial intelligence has long been flirted with by linguists like Steven Pinker among others. With an understanding that digital environments are procedural (Murray) and that grammars (in the linguistic sense) are sets of executable rules, the connection seems too inevitable not to explore. The "rules" of grammar themselves, however, have been considered an obstacle since they cannot be defined clearly, which is what traditional computing and science has always looked for. 

Chaos itself is the final important metaphor that influenced the development of this course. Scientifically speaking, "chaos" is, as N. Katherine Hayles notes in her introduction to Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, not the opposite or order but the opposite of simplicity. Chaos theory does not insist the world is random, only that its systems are very complex. In that sense, writing done for interactive media is chaotic -- is consists of a complex set of material accessed in various sequences creating unique experiences for each individual user. As our culture slowly changes from order to chaos as the guiding scientific metaphor, I believe we will find ourselves working more effectively with the loose or "fuzzy" rules that more accurately describe language. The final assignment in this class (constructing an interactive database) miniaturizes the development of a human/conversational metaphor -- by designing a product in which the computer "asks" a set of questions, "reads" or "listens to" the user input, and then determines a correct response by executing a "grammar" of Boolean rules, the students plot a short but complex exchange between human and non-human.