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Articles Conference Reviews |
Session H39Sustaining the Wave of Critical (E-) Literacy: Multimodal Rhetorics and the Question of Content The second speaker of three listed in the program – Tony Michael of Avila University -- was not present, and the other two presenters spoke in reverse order of their listings in the program. David Sheridan of Michigan State U., started by asserting that “Comp. studies has not yet adequately confronted the issue of students’ electronic literacy,” and he said that a theoretical underpinning needs to be established in order to answer the question: what do students need to know in the way of multimodal rhetoric? He yielded to speaker #1 before taking the microphone again to conclude the session. The second speaker (listed first in the program: Daniel Mahala of the U. of Missouri-Kansas City) seemed to try to supply some of the theoretical underpinning that Sheridan had called for. He said that the “open, democratic” nature of cyperspace allows for or requires an ideological content to “fill up” the space and that regulation of the Internet is becoming a problem that reduces the openness of it. He cited some countries that regulate the Internet for their citizens; in the U.S.A., this regulation most often appears through employer policies on employee use of computers, rather than being exerted from the highest political level on down. He said that American citizens must press authorities to regulate, if they are going to regulate, in such a way as to ensure freedom of electronic speech, privacy, and liberty. All this, he said, raises the question of how will we educate students about issues of political power that are often invisible in cyberspace. Then speaker #3, Jody Swilky of Drake University, concluded by saying he would focus on how multimodal affordances articulate with public rhetoric in new media. He stressed that three-dimensional rhetoric (the rhetorical mode of things, objects, material culture) is at work though invisible in new media and that comp/rhet had explored this dimension but not as much as it had with two-dimensional objects such as the display on computer screens. Now, however, technologies of desktop manufacturing exist that allow the design of three-dimensional objects in the two-dimensional space of the computer screen (for example, three-dimensional scanners and printers). So that today, part of any rhetorical situation is the material objects necessary for the rhetor’s purpose and audience. Objects do mean, he said; they don’t just function. His example was jackets and coats, which can make a more succinct and effective statement of the wearer’s social status than words describing that status could do – simply because they are material objects that have cultural meaning. He concluded by saying that teachers need to understand the rhetoric of three-dimensional objects in order to teach better about public rhetoric. |