The new media issue: Introductions

We were honored to receive so many quality new media texts. As we stated at the beginning of our discussion, all of the texts within this CoverWeb point to the fact that we can no longer simply and unequivocally use the term author. New media has pushed us beyond author/designer terminology (and moved us way beyond whatever split in collaboration those terms might imply), and we have adopted the more media-rich term: composer.

We have grouped the texts into two categories we believe are represented by the composers' texts. The first category is The Performed Argument in/of New Media Texts represented by Adrian Miles et al. and Veronica Austen. First, we start with Adrian Miles et al's Flash-based, Violence of Text. This text covers pedagogical implications, "kewl" texts, media-rich performances, and scholarly applications of sound, video, text, motion, and scripting through six, individual texts that make up the anthology. As Miles explains in the introduction to this compilation, Violence of Text was intended as an "online academic publishing exercise," and was designed by six students in one of his classes. The six texts in this anthology examine a wide range of topics, including epigrams as open texts, blogs as new media texts, and explorations of readers' notions of composing argument and interpretation of web elements such as HTML code and images. Each text explicitly "performs" its argument, as in the case of Miles' own text called "Digital Multiliteracies." In this instance, Miles' argument for the necessity of teaching students to be digitally multiliterate through the use of video-blogs, or vogs as he calls them, is enacted when the reader has to engage the text by choosing and arranging a variety of clips to play back in a video-like performance. The interface of this text appears similar to video-editing software, and readers are encouraged to make their own vogs with the supplied still-photo, audio, and written text clips. Violence of Text is rich, and Miles' introduction is particularly interesting--in it, he describes each of the six texts, remediated from symposium papers, and describes how those texts operate in a new medium. If you have trouble navigating an individual text, remember to return to Miles' introduction where you will find a short explanation of each.

In Veronica Austen's wonderfully fun and intriguing text, "Writing Spaces: Performances of the Word," she explores "the nature of writing for the computer screen as opposed to writing for the page." Following a tradition of visual poetics, she simultaneously questions and demonstrates how writing changes when one composes on screen rather than in private notebooks. Composed in Macromedia Flash, Austen performs this text by playing with the look of language, as words disappear, fall apart, and become animated.

The second category is Pedagogy of New Media, represented by Alexander Reid, Daniel Anderson, and Heather Ross. In "New Media's Long History and Global Future: The Uniplanet Project," Alex Reid examines new media as "a critical-intellectual, humanistic enterprise that requires us to examine how the technology shapes, and is shaped by, our concepts of writing and the writer." Tracing the most visible developments in the technologies of writing, he demonstrates that the evolution of new media, much like other writing technologies, demands new tools for mediation. For Reid, it is clear that new media technologies have not developed in a vacuum, but rather, he calls for further examination of the mutually affecting relationships between culture, economics, technology, our ways of teaching and learning, and ultimately, knowledge-making. Reid suggests teachers explore new media literacy in their own classrooms. To demonstrate this, Reid presents the Uniplanet Project, a student run weekly magazine from SUNY-Courtland in collaboration with other academic institutions around the globe. Uniplanet, by providing students with authentic writing experiences, stresses the social dimension of learning/writing while allowing students to explore the implications of technology in the global marketplace of ideas.

Daniel Anderson, in "Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Consumption and Production in Continuum," offers a theoretical grounding in why teachers should be using new media technologies such as digital video in classrooms. Dan's text uses a combination of HTML pages and embedded videos, each of which point literally to the other in some surprising ways that we'll save for you to discover -- but let's say: If you don't know who Dan Anderson is, you will be delighted to get to know him through this composition.

In "Digital Video and Composition: Gauging the Promise of a Low-Maintenance High-Reward Relationship," Heather Ross examines the process, implementation, and implications of digital video in the classroom. In Ross' own words, the goal of this presentation is to "analyze the goals of the writing composition program at the University of North Carolina and decipher and analyze whether new media, and particularly digital video, in the classroom coincides with the achievement of those goals." Ross offers her assignment descriptions, handouts, rubrics, and examples of student "public service announcements" composed as the culmination of a series of projects. In the "final analysis" Ross explicitly questions the use of new media and digital video in the classroom through various lenses, including the evolving roles of writing teachers, writing program goals and new technologies, and the responsibilities of students, teachers, and educational institutions in the teaching and learning of new media.

Note to our reader/viewers: Some of the texts that contain digital video may take patience when loading (Miles, Anderson, Ross). For some, you may want to have access to a modem faster than a dial-up connection. Having patience is, unfortunately or not, one of the by-products of new media scholarship. Consider it a perfect time to get coffee. We hope you enjoy this CoverWeb as much as we have! We encourage questions, comments, and responses to these texts. Please feel free to comment on these texts by emailing us at coverweb@cfcc.net. We will post any responses we receive.

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definitions of new media | paying attention to new media
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