Kairos 17.1: Lauer, What's in a Name?

Contextual

Introduction
"The mediated world"

Gunther Kress (1:17)

The mediated world (2010)

If radio, when it was invented, wasn’t named a new medium, or new media, it might have had to do with the history of its invention, which was slow and not, I think, temporally as quick as, say, that digital media has been.

And secondly, I think the issue of media, and the mediated world, or the world in which we are being dominated by media, probably wasn’t the issue in the early parts of the 20th century. So the notion of medium, I think, is in a sense, what is the new part. Although the recognition that we live in a world in which the media are dominant, I think that’s kind of a recognition probably in the second part of the twentieth century. And then one says, ‘oh we’ve got television, we’ve got film..., and then suddenly that kind of gets overtaken by something which is entirely different, and so I would see it like that. I think the time—the enormous pace with which that transition has happened—and I think also socially, or sociologically, I don’t think medium was regarded in the same way in the early part of the twentieth century. It was kind of yet another technology.
"Understanding texts"

Jonathan Alexander (1:43)

Understanding texts (2007)

When we look at a text—a multimedia text or a multimodal text—when we are figuring out how to manipulate them, how to understand them as cultural products, how to understand them as specific instances of literate composition or as changes in what it means to be literate. When we look at them in terms of compositional challenges, trying to actually compose them ourselves, I would say in all of those instances.

Right now I’m trying to wrap my mind around a course I’m developing in the history of the graphic novel. Graphic novels are multimodal texts, and what’s interesting is to see how many of those texts have been moving into online spaces. With graphic novelists actually composing in an online space, so that would be an instance of how a multimodal genre is also engaging in multimedia. Particularly the electronically-enabled media.

So I would say that what I would want to do with students is to talk about the multimodality and multimedia nature of those texts, as cultural artifacts, but also as compositional challenges: how do we work in multiple media? How are we asked to read quote-unquote and be literate with multiple media? But also, I have to admit one of the things I’m really wanting students to do when I teach this class next year, is to buy a sketchbook so that we can actually sketch out ourselves panels and to begin to engage in—although I’m hardly a graphic novelist, and I don’t know that any of my students will be—I want students to have even that rudimentary sense of what the medium must be like from a compositional standpoint.
"New context for new media"

Anne Wysocki (2:07)

New context for new media (2010)

What I decided to do for this chapter, where I had to write about what do technical communicators need to know about new media? So I had to define what’s new media and I’m like oh crap, okay.

And again I was in that boat of: for this particular context do I just list here are things that I think you need to know about? And do I treat it as well new media are games and single-sourcing, because that technical communicators need to know about single sources and ECM and all that stuff, and of course that’s a moving target, but that’s not a text. That’s an approach to composing texts so how do I talk about that, so I kept backing up.

And what I ended up doing is saying okay so new media are, for this context, characterized by certain features. And what I said were: new media result from digitization. So in this case I was changing my definition for this context because it wasn’t useful here to talk about oh it’s more of a, sort of, an aesthetic kind of term or a textual term. So new media result from digitization, entail using code to control the presentation and distribution of media, so I needed to pull in code; depend on digital networks, so pulling in the networked aspect of it. Because again, I worked on this sort of backwards: what are the texts that technical communicators need to know about, what characterizes them? So digitality, networks, are faster than print media, that seemed, I mean it seems sort of trivial, and yet that feeds into what comes next: enabled different kinds of interactivity than print media, are becoming ubiquitous, and that’s it. And then based on those features I said okay, here’s some developments within new media, and ways of shaping texts that affect the work of technical communicators.
"As a result of new media"

Anne Wysocki (:55)

As a result of new media (2010)

Probably most of the texts we could see in this room are multimodal. I wouldn’t call them new media. I would necessarily call anything that just, as I’ve already said, on the computer screen, new media, even though it’s multimodal.

But what I said in this chapter was, as a result of new media—so maybe in this chapter actually what I’m doing is thinking about it more in terms of the new media—and then the results are that it’s just easier to do multimodality.

So, if you’re a technical communicator, and the audience for this chapter, you would need to know how to make those instruction cards. In the past you would have written them and handed them off to a designer, and now you’re needing to be in charge of this, so all this is saying is that as a consequence of the new media, you now need to be aware of this stuff in ways that you weren’t before.
"Origin of the DMP"

Scott DeWitt (4:41)

Origin of the DMP (2007)

I do have a story about why we called the Digital Media Project the Digital Media Project.

When I took over the program [in 2002] it had a long history of being known as Computers in Composition and Literature, CCL is what people knew this program by, and when I took over the program, the chair of the department gave me kind of a big charge, and that was: get this place on the map again. She wanted to put what we were calling at the time Digital Media Studies at the forefront of the department. That was going to be part of her administration. She came on as chair at the same time as I came on as director of this space. And she said, you know, you’ll figure out how to do that.

She didn’t necessarily tell me to change the name , but it became apparent to me that the name Computers in Composition and Literature, had a lot of problems. One, is that it focused on two areas of study in our department, Composition and Literature, in a department that does film studies, disability studies, folklore, sexuality studies; so it just wasn’t very descriptive. It also was not very descriptive... it put the emphasis on what people thought of as the box on the desktop—computers in composition and literature—it wasn’t about other technologies that we might be thinking about. It was also not language that the field was really using very much—the field was using terms like digital media and at that time new media. Some people were starting to use terms like multimodal but I wasn’t hearing a lot of that at the time, so it became clear to me that we needed to change the name of this program.

That name change was also about a mission shift. I had just returned from CWIC New Media that year, so the term new media was very much on my mind at that point. And I had every intention of changing the mission of this program—we’ve always been about production—but I really wanted to expand what it was that students were making in the program.

[a meeting was called were possible terms were generated that reflected the work in the program and the field]

We also wanted it to describe a place to some degree. I didn’t want to lose the sense that this was actually a physical location here in Denny Hall. Louis Ulman was also at that meeting and he provided a really great historical context for us. And before I was really thinking critically about names of programs, we had already made two decisions: one is that we created a 500 level course called Digital Media in English Studies, so that word was already being used by a few people in the department, it wasn’t something that a lot of people were paying attention to at the time.

The decision to use digital media in that course title came because the year before that we had searched for a faculty position and that position was described as digital media. I wasn’t a part of that first one but I was part of the course title and so when we were having the conversation about how we were going to describe the technology or the media, Louis was the one who brought up the point that whether or not we intended it or not, we’ve had two instances of this term, of digital media, and it made a whole lot of sense that if we were comfortable with that term and it made sense with what we wanted to do, it made a whole lot of sense to make sure that within the program we weren’t naming things a whole bunch of different things.

We could use whatever words we wanted to in conversation, but in terms of the naming we wanted to make sure that we were on board and we came to consensus that digital media was working for us and part of that was I think we all like the term new media and we like conceptually the way that people like Anne Wysocki and Madeleine Sorapure talk about what is new media, but in the end we really did want to emphasize technology, computer technology, the kind of peripheral technology. We wanted to talk about the kinds of texts that we made on and for the screen. Even though, again, we might be doing lots of stuff that wasn’t taking place on the screen in the classes, that’s what we wanted the identity of the program to be, we wanted that identity attached to the program. [....]

The other thing that was happening university-wide, is that the University had created a space called the Digital Union so there was another instance institutionally where that term had been used and been getting a lot of attention.
"The politics of terms"

Gunther Kress (3:30)

The politics of terms (2010)

Well for me, introducing the term design was more or less at the same time when I came to this institution, that is to an institution of education. I mean in the overt sense, the disciple, or the area of education. And I thought about what one needed to provide for young people in formal... in institutions of formal teaching and learning. That was really, for me, the new question I had at that time.

I had, I suppose, a 16 year history to be precise, in something that was initially called "critical linguistics" and then became "critical discourse analysis," and I also reflected on that notion.

I mean, it came from the 70s, from the early 70s, the notion of being critical and it had a particular political purpose then. It had the purpose of saying “the organizations of power are such as to produce inequities in all sorts of ways, including in communication, and so therefore we ought to, kind of, critically examine these as a means for brining social organization itself into crisis.

And so critical as being a means of bringing something into crisis. So that was a political, kind of, reason for using that term.

And when I came here. Actually, I became uneasy about it, sort of, in the later eighties, but when I came here [to the University of London], I thought two things. The world is in crisis. In a way it wasn’t in the seventies, or it wasn’t in the sixties, yeah? I mean the kind of, things flying apart, wasn’t the sense in the seventies. Things being open, and kind of, newly open for, to shape differently was the sort of sense in the seventies.

So maybe we don’t need more critique, although not foregoing the resources that were developed in that, but maybe we need now, when the world is flying apart, means for shaping. And that was, for me, really, the main purpose.

But now along come new media, or the digital media, or the media of the screen, or whatever they are, in other words, means, and a world which has move toward, for whatever reasons, into multimodal representation, where the question of “what shall I use?” at this point, in relation to this purpose for this audience, is much, much sharper.

And the resources are more diverse. More diverse than they were, say, for instance, in relation to the page, in print, or handwriting or something.

So the possibility of making things which more aptly, kind of, suited my purpose and the audience also asks for design. So these things, kind of, came together, and that’s what the term does for me.

It’s again, I still think, largely, for me, it’s a political thing, saying: the generations who are about to move into a full social life should have the means for giving expression to their interests.
"Bringing binaries together"

Cheryl Ball (:45)

Bringing binaries together (2007)

I’m seeing myself now, not three or four years ago, but now, more, combining those two views [of new media]. I used to rail against Manovich. I was like how can you focus on the technologies? and that’s sort of where I got the text/technology split. That Manovich talks about it all having to be digital and the five principles and blah blah blah. And Anne was talking about the materiality, that it didn’t have to be digital, and that stuff. So they were these two binaries.

But I don’t think they are. They were just coming at it, one, from a writing studies angle, and two, from a cinematic angle, from a different model. So I think we have to bring those two things together.
"A moment in time"

Cheryl Ball (1:25)

A moment in time (2007)

In my scholarship, I have become invested in the term new media.

At first it was because it was cool and new and I was trying to make the argument early on in my dissertation work that the new part of new media was important. That it was the way that readers interacted... that new media caused readers to interact with the text in ways that readers were unfamiliar with, and thus a new media text was new to them. I had some criticism from folks who said: well what’s going to happen afterwards, you know, what happens after new media? To me that doesn’t matter.

In the end I’ve come to realize, and the way that I’m able to articulate it now is through conversations with my colleague, Jim Kalmbach, he and I are working on this book about new media, Reading and Writing New Media, and what we’ve realized is that new media is really a field, not a thing. So New Media Studies in that case. And as a field, it’s a moment in time.

So when I think of new media now, I think of the momentary aspect of it. What can these ten years, between 1999 and 2009, tell us about the integration of digital technologies and texts into writing studies?
"When things feel new"

Jason Palmeri (:29)

When things feel new (2008)

New media is a historical moment in which media feel new to us.

It can be because they literally are, but also I would say that photography really was—analog photography—really was new to composition in the late 60s and early 70s even though it was not that new to the culture.

But it was diffusing at that point to a broad enough point, and there were people like McLuhan yelling about the death of the word (laughs) in ways that made it feel new.
"Future of the 'digital'"

Jason Palmeri (:42)

Future of the 'digital' (2008)

I wonder if the idea of the digital will ultimately wane.

And the only reason I say that is that... it’s all digital now. So in that sense it’s useful for me historically because I care about the pre-personal computer era in our field. But that’s about as far back as I have to go before I can talk about a kind of composing which is not itself digital.

[So it’s redundant?] I think it is.

I actually think, though, a lot of people out there who are using digital media in that ways are really saying new media but calling it digital media instead.

Introduction

Terms and their definitions are inseparable from the context in which they were developed and are used. This context includes varying social, historical, and technological influences. Terms are often reflective of current practice, favor, and shifts in values.

Our understandings of terms and our choice of what terms to use, when, will necessarily change as the cultural, political, educational, technological, social, and historical context changes. Keeping in mind this inevitability should keep our expectations of terms in check and our scholarly ambitions modest. Ultimately, the ideas put forth in this section may remind us to feel more comfortable with the idea that what we know and believe today are certainly different than what we knew and believed yesterday and may not be at all what we know or will believe tomorrow.

The excerpts included in this section illustrate just how much the existing context or the needs of a newly arisen context influence the development of terms and our understandings of them.

Gunther Kress suggests that new media is a term used currently (and not in previous generations) because of the way that medium has evolved over the past century. In a later clip, Kress traces how the political context informs the relevance and usefulness of terms we use to address our needs at a particular time in a particular culture.

Jonathan Alexander discusses his desire to work with students to understand texts as cultural products that reflect changes in what it means to be literate.

Anne Wysocki discusses the process she took in defining new media for a new audience of technical communicators. She also suggests that multimodal can be better understood and easier to engage with if we understand it as a product of a new media context.

Scott DeWitt discusses the origin of the naming of the Digital Media Project at Ohio State University, including the factors that had to be considered when deciding who the program would serve and what it would represent.

Cheryl Ball discusses the evolution of her understanding of new media, how she’s been able to bring divergent understandings of new media together, and how she now sees new media not just as a thing, but as a moment in time that can inform our understanding of the role of digital texts in writing studies.

Jason Palmeri talks about the new being a relative term in which something feels new, and therefore is new, whether the actual technology itself is new to the culture. He considers whether the idea of the digital will ultimately wane because it is so ubiquitous.

References