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Articles Conference Reviews |
2007G02BeaudinG02: Identifying the Writer as Re-mixer: Rearticulating “Writing” in New Media
Shaun Slattery began his presentation, “Writing as Remix: Coordinating Increasingly Fragmented Texts,” by reminding us of the proliferation of texts that surrounds writers as they create. He discussed the ways in which we “cannibalize” our texts: emails, word docs, the many open documents that cascade across our literal and digital desktops. We are creating increasingly smaller and more fragmented texts: containers, chunks of content that, thanks to markup generated markup languages (such as xml), are compiled at the moment of production. Such practices create more control for organizations (think of how content management systems can standardize appearance and textual relationships through templates, cascading style sheets, tagging). But, as Slattery (quoting Latour) noted, such also “increases the ‘feats of strength’ needed to compose.” In his study, Slattery researched the screen environments of technical writers, using video screen capture to measure the frequency with which various subjects “remixed” or “sampled” various documents during their composing process. One subject, Dirk, opened twenty documents, ran fifteen programs, and referred to two printouts in the course of a 1.5 hour session. Slattery’s concern: this looks little like what we as writing teachers model and teach our students in classrooms. Ultimately, Slattery argued for greater attention to information technologies and its influence on writing practices, called for more careful study of the conditions of digital composing, and appealed for a revision of writing pedagogy. How do we begin to think and phrase this conversation as to the writer’s role and writing as remix? At the onset of his presentation, Jason Swarts admitted that he could not fulfill the promise of his title, “Writing as Remix: Identifying and Describing Base Units of Remixable Content,” as the units he would define could become increasingly and infinitely smaller without ever reaching the “base.” While Swarts may not have arrived at the base unit, he has identified and classified many of the “containers” that could aid teachers to begin the discussion that Slattery prompted. Swarts began with the premises that there is an “abundance” of structured information (texts that are, by virtue of markup languages and processing, “written” as they are read) and that the concept of remix is connected to a wider range of discursive practices (such as quotation and paraphrasing). This can lead to a problematic perception of texts as modular or legolike (bits created as building blocks to construct “the text”). Swarts hypothesized that information is not legolike, because all information has a form of expression, or, to paraphrase Lanham, all information bears “traces of the company it has kept”: all information is shaped by its containers. He identified three challenges of remixing: content is locked in source structures which shape and divide information (tied to people and locations of use); content varies by modal form (forms associated with particular uses); and not all information can be extracted (as it is locked into delivery substrate). Swarts then defined his concept of “transactive bonds,” in which the information holder assumes particular uses and use settings. Such bonds imply an energy that holds the texts together and, in his view, reasserts the viability of the containers. Using video screen capture, Swarts tracked the composing process of three writers, all of whom “sample” and reuse content in texts; his goal was to find the base unit of content. Instead, he found that the samples tended to be the smallest containers. Probably of greatest interest was the taxonomy of bonds and containers that Swarts developed. The broadest grouping is that of external bonds and containers: the network container (units, clusters of text, collections of texts, materials resources), the sets/ repertoires container (entire texts, interrelated clusters of texts, pointing to common units of expression, locations of use, and histories of development), and the modes/ substrates container (ideas expressed verbally, visually, substrates fuse layers of content). Within the modal substrate container lie genre/form (phrases, ideas, intertextual references) and the grammatical container (sentences, clauses, paraphrases, easily remixed by following rules of grammar). Swarts left us with a question—what containers can you “peel away”? The units become infinitely smaller, but there still is no base unit. Chris Berg’s “Writing as Remix: The Argument for the Interscriptor” was a fitting culmination to the panel presentations. Berg addressed the ways in which networked texts often do not have (or have minimized) the inherent cues and connections that help us as readers create meaning. Returning to Swarts’s concepts, when information is chunked, traditionally understood cues—e.g., introductions, conclusions, transitions—may no longer be included within the container. Extend this to graphics or other data, and it may become apparent how, as Berg asserts, the text is no longer a text (why do I hear Eliot chiming in here with, “I can connect nothing with nothing”?). Berg then argues that the ultimate responsibility for text generation lies on the reader (the text becomes an interaction between artifact, user, and environment). Enter the interscriptor, which Berg defines as “a scripting of possible interaction with the artifact.” The interscriptor scripts potentiality, while the user actualizes the potential. Using examples of various diagnostic applications, Berg demonstrates how the interscriptor’s choices can be crucial (especially in terms of including extraneous data or excluding data, creating tags, planning for and being aware of hardware constraints). Berg summarized his presentation by positing (and this is more or less directly quoted) that interscriptors create potentiality by creating the informational network as well as the means by which the user navigates the network; composing nodes and affordances, offering the reader pieces of texts and suggestions for connection; and offering tools to aid in those connections, all the while keeping hardware considerations in mind. Reviewing this particular panel proved to be a bit of a challenge because I felt more of a desire to share all that I gained from it rather than to critique it in the traditional sense of a “review.” My questions had little to do with the presenters’ scholarship or argument; instead, the questions turned inward—to my classroom practices, to fundamental analogies or correlations that may or may not exist between what we perceive to be traditional composition practices and those that are digitally influenced. I think that many of us—myself included—teach at least some aspects of writing as a linear process, simply because guiding students to navigate those cascading windows, fifteen programs, and multiple-tabbed browsers is a hefty task, and one that is not usually considered intrinsic to academic writing. It’s time to mix things up. Comments? |