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

Historically-Situated

Introduction
"Proximity and history"

Gunther Kress (2:36)

Proximity and history (2010)

In my way of thinking, signs are always newly made. So there isn’t ever an overlap but there is proximity. And I think you need proximity and novelty all the time. And I think for certain purposes, quite a lot of proximity is useful. And being aware that each person who uses the term, or their version of the term sort of clustered around, will be different. I mean, grammar was very useful for a long period, I think for social reasons, because you wanted to name something which metaphorically mirrored the stability of the society in which you hoped to support by the stability of the term in its major resource in its place of speech or writing. In a period of intense change, a notion like grammar with its very weighty history of stability supported by power may be a less useful term.

So, for instance, you could use syntax, but you would say syntax is arrangement, and so at the moment I probably prefer the term arrangement because it doesn’t come with that heavy notion of you cannot change. You must abide by strict rules. But I think syntax seems to me a term that names arrangement. And there will be arrangements; the arrangements will change maybe more over a while now than they have previously. They always have changed, as you know.

So I think it’s really a serious reflection about what it is one’s naming. Is the history of the term worth challenging? Is there some of it that’s worth carrying over? So I would, for instance, want to keep genre. As saying it names how social relations appear in semiotic objects.
"Reseeing the field's heritage"

Jason Palmeri (1:10)

Reseeing the field's heritage (2008)

For me multimodality was a really useful term to think with in the dissertation because it allowed me to attend to the complex intersection of word, image, and sound. So I wanted to go looking back to the pre-digital era, or in some cases to work, like, say, Flower and Hayes’ early 80’s work, which wasn’t necessarily pre-digital but wasn’t really focused on issues of technology per se, and argue that it had multimodal implications. So that allowed me to see that pedagogies of voice suggested that the alphabetic and auditory were deeply connected. It allowed me to see that Don Murray’s talking about invention in terms of photography was a way of pointing out that the visual is an inherent part of writing. So for me, multimodality was a way to resee our field’s heritage and it was really powerful because it allowed me to kind of connect alphabetic writing as an inherently multimodal thought process and a multimodal process of invention in that you invent through talking, you invent through listening, you invent and revise through literally reseeing, often by, say, drawing out your ideas of seeing an image, or finding an image, etc. So multimodality was a great term for that.
"Media have complex histories"

Jonathan Alexander (2:11)

Media have complex histories (2007)

New media seems to always, as a term, privilege the most recent technological innovation in media production and dissemination and reception.

I tend to eschew the term new media simply because most media has strong antecedents in preceding media. Such that, even a blog, for instance. A blog is a medium which is not dissimilar to other kinds of larger journal projects or even collaborative journaling projects, so to call it new would be to make it seem as though, in student’s minds potentially, that the actually medium, the blog, is something generically brand new, and it’s not. Yes, it is new in the sense that people have not journaled or presented ideas in that specific technological format before, but the genre, the larger genre is very similar in some significant ways to preceding manifestations of that genre – journaling, diaries, communal journaling and things of that nature. So I tend to eschew new media, or the new aspect of new media, because I don’t want people to forget that whatever is new has its roots in preceding media.

So I tend to try to emphasize those interrelationships, those interconnections and that allows us to point out what actually isem> new. So it’s not even so much that the medium is fully new, but maybe the technological apparatus to support, render, disseminate and receive the medium—the technological surrounding—may be new, but the actual medium is more complex, has a longer history.
"Endless succession of new media"

Cynthia Selfe (3:02)

Endless succession of new media (2007)

When I was at Michigan Tech, the term that was often used for the kind of work that we did was new media work. But I grew increasingly dissatisfied with that term, and I grew increasingly dissatisfied with it for a couple of reasons.

To a great extent that was a term being used by what I would call sort of the artist segment of people who work with digital media: the digital poets, the digital non-fiction writers, the flash artists and the video artists, too. And Lev Manovich’s book convinced me that that term had a great deal of cache and meaning and depth and resonance with the community of digital artists, but it tended to bother compositionists who have enough sense of... who have a different sense of the historical, the historicity of their own field. So, for instance, I started being influenced by people who noted like Eisenstein who noticed that the printing press was once a new media and Jim Kalmbach who noted that the typewriter was once a new media, so the notion of new media just seemed to me to be predicting an endless succession of new media and I knew there was enough in composition studies about that endless succession of new media to get enthusiastic about that we wanted to avoid.

One of the problems that Gail [Hawisher] and I have identified was that with each new medium or each new technology, everybody got so excited about it and predicted that it was going to solve all the problems, be a panacea and address all of the difficulties that we face, that it was just a…it became so repetitive with every new iteration of technology that we just didn’t need that kind of new, new, new, new.

So, new media seemed to me to be a term that not only belonged to the artist, it was not descriptive or wasn’t productive for teachers of composition.
"The new world"

Gunther Kress (:45)

The new world (2010)

Well, it's a little bit like all these places you find in the new world. Where people have come from the old world and now that we're in a new place. So it needs to be seen in terms of what direction people have travelled and where from. And so radio must have been a new medium at one stage, and the magic lantern was a new medium at one stage.

So I think it's always a temporal and, metaphorically, a spatial kind of description: "I've come from here now that I've seen or made this, it is not what I used to have or used to use or used to make before. I will therefore call it new." So that would be my first way of thinking about it.
"Technologies remaking the field"

Jason Palmeri (:59)

Technologies remaking the field (2008)

For me, picking up that term new media is allowing me to go back and look at these 1970s experiences and talk about them as a technologic moment, historicized, of new media.

The moment the “slide show” entered composition and we re-though what composition would be because this new technology was available to us and we drew upon old conventions of rhetoric and speech making in order to organize or contain it in some way. Lately, the word processor as new media, which has now been naturalized.

We have a long history of technologies remaking the field that we forget about because technologies either fall out of our view or become so commonly used that it also falls out of our view.
"Horseless carriage of multimedia"

Gunther Kress (1:12)

Horseless carriage of multimedia (2010)

[Multimedia came about from] the convergence of media from mono-modal to multimodal, from, say, films being made by people who belong to distinct professional groups: lighting, scriptwriting, casting—quite distinct professional groups—photography, who did their own thing, but were, as it were, orchestrated by the director who produced these things. And then suddenly you have a device which brings these things together. Well how do you name that thing? You had distinct, discrete media, now these are one thing, and so you have a medium which offers the multiplicity of these possibilities and I think that’s the process of naming there [with regard to multimedia]. I don’t think it’s useful to name, say, the desktop on my desk, or even these portable things now as multimedia because it’s like looking back to the horse that drew the carriage and still calling those things horseless carriages.
"Multimedia feels old"

Scott DeWitt (1:19)

Multimedia feels old (2007)

For me, multimedia feels really old, in comparison to new media. Multimedia is a term that lots of people have been talking about, and interestingly enough, when I think about the work that I’m doing with some of my students, multimedia is probably the most descriptive. It’s the one that fits the best, that everybody gets and we understand, but it also feels really old. I think if you named a program something about multimedia or you named a course multimedia I think that it raises two concerns. One is that it seems that it’s nothing very cutting edge, that multimedia work has been around for a long time. And I’m not agreeing with that necessarily, but I think that’s the public perception. The other thing is that it’s language that is still very much used by k-12 teachers, which again I like that and I wish we were more connected, that we saw a vertical curriculum that went all the way from the beginning all the way through secondary all the way through higher education, but I think at the university there’s this weird bias against multimedia because it feels like it’s very k-12.

And again, I don’t agree with that but I’m very aware of that public perception of the term itself.

Introduction

No term or definition is developed in a vacuum nor is it ever entirely new. It can come about in response to a technology or practice that itself has evolved from other technologies and practices. In this way, no term, no matter how new, is ever really separated from the work that has come before it.

Much of the baggage that a relatively familiar and ubiquitous term like multimedia carries with it is not because the name of the term or its definition no longer apply, but because it has a long history of referring to technologies and practices (audio-visual devices, the CD-ROM, etc.) that have long since been overtaken by newer technologies and practices. So people go looking for new terms or adapt other terms to apply to newer practices and technologies. And yet sometimes a new term may be developed or applied in such a way that its break with history can be seen as problematic. This is the case with the term new media for some scholars quoted in this section.

Gunther Kress suggests that signs, though newly made, carry with them various levels of proximity to the signs that have preceded them. He suggests that it is important to reflect on the practice of naming by asking if the history of a term is worth challenging, or if there are things about existing terms worth carrying over.

Jason Palmeri discusses the usefulness of terms like multimodal and new media in how such terms help us better understand and talk about what was happening during previous periods in the history of our field.

Jonathan Alexander and Cynthia Selfe discuss the pitfalls of the new in new media as something that masks the fact that the composing practices and technologies it describes are not that far removed from what we’ve been doing already. Yet Gunther Kress would suggest that the inclusion of the new automatically suggests its history rather than masking it.

Finally, Scott DeWitt and Gunther Kress consider the historical context of multimedia in their discussions of its waning relevance to what we do today.

Works Cited