Why pay attention to new media?

Authors have been composing webtexts for Kairos in various hypertextual patterns for nearly a decade. Although readers have become accustomed to clicking on links and reading lexias to determine a text's message, over the past few years arguments against a traditional link-node structure have begun to emerge in new media studies, specifically in electronic writing circles (see Ankerson & Sapnar, 2002; Glazier, 2002; Sanford, 2001). Regarding the changing styles and materiality of writing for the web, Christy Sheffield Sanford (2001), a web-based poet, said that "the dependence on endless linking has weakened in favor of show-hide scripts and scripts that allow a number of documents to open simultaneously or in tandem. …The ability to work with space time has grown more sophisticated." Such changes represent purposeful intellectual and scholarly uses of technology that are, perhaps, becoming more consonant with those engaged by technology developers and industry leaders.

If we look at the literature within the fields of new media studies, we see Günther Kress (1999) citing a communication "revolution" -- one whose effect "has been to dislodge written language from the centrality which it has held" to the benefit of "the visual in many areas of public communication" (p. 182). Kress nodded to information technologies as a factor in our increased production and awareness of visual modes (p. 183). But, he said, it is not simply the rise of the visual that is changing the way we communicate; it is the necessity to treat "all text-like objects as multimodal" (p. 184). If we do "treat text-like objects as multimodal," the implication is that we can articulate the meanings that we think the designer may have intended with each mode (such as sounds, graphics, time-based elements, and so on). By paying attention to all of the modal elements in a new media text, we differentiate between what is important in those texts compared to what has been deemed important in the ways we read and value the arguments and forms of online scholarship and scholarship about new media.

Acceptance and understanding of new media scholarship is vital to expanding our notion of technological literacy, both for ourselves and for our students -- and for those who are the next generation of media developers from whom we will gain the newest technological tools. Technological literacy, as Cynthia Selfe (1999) defined, is "[. . .] a complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills, involved in operating linguistically within the context of electronic environments, including reading, writing, and communicating" (p. 11). If we agree that teaching new media design and reading strategies is a necessary element of our students' education, as Kress (1999) and others stated, then we should begin to test our own knowledge of design through new media compositions that express their arguments in multiple modes -- not just writing about why and how a still image or animation can be read, but also presenting how it works. Our thinking here is not unlike that of Lynn Bloom (1990), who, in "Why Don't We Write What We Teach? And Publish It?" argued that rhetoric professionals should engage with the types of communication -- by writing it and publishing it -- that we require of our students. We gain deeper understanding and stronger authority through such acts -- and we demonstrate for students and colleagues the inherent values that we otherwise teach about composing and literacy.

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