Reading and Interactive Media
In order to write for interactive media -- web pages, kiosk databases, educational and entertainment CDs, and videogames and cyberliterature -- students must begin by grappling with the concept of audience as partner in the production of meaning, which means that before they write, my students read and analyze the metatextual cues they are picking up from the text.
Metaphor is a theme I return to frequently in my thinking and writing about how meaning is extracted from Interactive Media. While I see a tremendous similarities between how web sites are designed and cognitive theory maps as well as how "readers" interact with the new media and the give and take of human conversation, I am constantly haunted by Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. Both cognitive and computer studies emerge at roughly the same time employing striking similar metaphors. Have we, I wonder, consciously or unconsciously modeled computerized media on a human communication metaphor, or is it possible that communication and cognitive theorists adopted computers and web metaphors as handy and tangible explanations the way Newton took the clock to explain the world. I believe that serious discussions of the new media should spend at least a little time considering the impact and validity of the underlying assumptions the controlling metaphors bring.
Comprehension Metaphors (reading reading -- why think about it?)