RESEARCHING THE SUBJECT...Part Two: Attempting to control the chaos of the electronic space by creating a template
Today we are seeing an undeniable shift from written rhetoric to visual rhetoric, and we can expect the process to move slowly, but perhaps we should take notice. According to Walter Ong: “histories of the relationship between literature and culture have something to say about the status and behavior of readers” (56). After viewing my initial attempts at incorporating technology after the fact, and doing so without regard for the basic principles of visual rhetoric, it is easy to see why my students failed to meet the mark, and why I left the experience feeling overwhelmed and my students left misguided. Simply put, there was no synthesis between current marketplace practices and what I was teaching in the computer lab. Did my students learn the difference between academic writing and electronic marketplace rhetoric? I don't believe so. Were they able to incorporate elements of both in a cohesive manner? Certainly not.
The Internet calls to question traditional views of audience-addressed writing. “By privileging composing as the main site of instruction,” says John Trimbur, “the teaching of writing has taken up what Karl Marx calls a ‘one-sided’ view of production and thereby has largely erased the cycle that links the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of writing” (190). Trimbur also claims that “in writing instruction delivery has been an afterthought at best, assigned mainly to technical and professional communication and associated largely with such matters of document design as page layout, typography, visual display of information, and Web design” (190). As rhetors, we must redirect our focus to reflect the changing literacies of our readers. Delivery is no longer only for the technical and professional writer; the principles of visual display and Web design need to become transparent aspects of every composition class, regardless of whether or not the instructor has the ability to physically design sites for the Internet.
RESEARCHING THE SUBJECT...
Additionally, Phil Anderson and Anne Aronson give reasons why some traditionalists are opposed to incorporating a delivery analysis in their curriculums. They believe the “static, form-centered approach to writing” for which we all are accustomed, contains certain “precepts” that “help to explain why visual images are so marginalized in academic writing” (118). Furthermore, they claim that the current-traditional method only promotes reader-based prose, writing that summarizes disciplinary texts and ignores personal knowledge. They argue that this practice leaves students with the misconceived notion that knowledge is to be read, not discovered or created by the students themselves (119). I agree, and I’d like to add “not visualized” or “conceptualized” through a multimedia presentation. So often students have admitted to making a career of writing “flat” meaningless essays that fit an assignment intellectually but lacked any passion or personal commitment to the particular subject. Anderson and Aronson believe that this autonomous text “is an ideological artifact, not an adequate explanation of what really goes on in writing and reading,” yet they like to point out that it “shapes” our everyday practice of teaching writing. In short, the academic community still privileges the word over the image (119). “The condensed, multi-layered nature of the image is antithetical to the long, linear reach of the academic essay” (120). Anderson and Aronson believe that Blair’s influence on the academy, his “refined taste” and appreciation for canonical literature, has fostered a kind of “intellectual snobbery that continues today within the academy.... The implication is that incorporating visual imagery and design into the academic essay may taint it; it might become something that can be thrown up on the Web next to advertisements for miniature camcorders” (123).
Part Four: A final reflectionRESEARCHING THE SUBJECT...
What does this mean? Well, perhaps we need to consider that the marketplace of electronic discourse communities and our own rhetorical communities are not just separate themes running concurrently in our increasingly technological world, but rather, they are separate ends to the same means. Rhetoric operates much like the birch tree. It is pliant, flexible, often changing its form. The tree will bend in compliance to the wind’s forces just as Bitzer’s rhetorical situation will make a “fitting response,” one firmly established by its situation (10). A birch tree by the sea will often grow crooked, bending its limbs sideways to flow within the force of a constant ocean breeze. It houses living things, seaside birds, insects, and small rodents burrow in the ground near its shade-bearing trunk. The birch tree does not exist separately from the wind, but lives within its environment, establishes itself as a functional member of its ecosystem. This is how we rhetors need to view our roles within our current rhetorical situation. In short, we are the tree and technology is the wind that constantly blows us into shape. How we mold ourselves depends completely on our ever-changing electronic environment, its prevalence in our society, the trends it sets in conjunction with our consumer society.
Perhaps current traditionalists should look at the positive implications of a Web site project which incorporates visual rhetoric. Lanham tells us “in electronic media, readers, writers, producers, and users experience the text as something “bi-stable,” something that oscillates from the transparent to the opaque, from the unself-conscious to the self-conscious, from that which is looked through to that which is looked at” (80-83). In visualized English studies, Stroupe tells us, “writers are ... conscious of the need to resist the traditional impulse to isolate themselves in the cozy kitchen of verbal literacy. [...] Words don’t simply talk to words, but to images, links, horizontal lines—to every feature of the iconographic page” (618). This is the new literacy that surrounds our culture—a literacy that will eventually effect the way composition is taught, making the Harvard School of Thought an antiquated means of writing, because in our society effective writing has and continues to be synonymous with communication.
Visual rhetoric is only one aspect of electronic writing that sets it apart from the traditional print text. “Hypertext seems to suggest... a different way of thinking about writing than does the traditional essay form,” Thomas Reynolds explains. “Theorists of hypertext such as George Landow and Jay David Bolter tend to emphasize the associational character of (hypertextual) writing. ‘Connectivity’ of texts and ideas takes precedence over the linear assumptions of print forms” (142). Simply put, the author of a Web site understands that he or she has no control over the depth, breadth, or route a reader will take when viewing his or her site. The control is not in the writer’s words, but with the reader’s choices. This altered attitude about the roles we must play in order to communicate, the considerations we must have about the written and visual word, and the importance of disseminating information in a reader friendly manner makes us better writers.