WEEK 2: A Tale of Two Compositions: My reflections on Alexander and Rhodes' "Refiguring our Relationship to New Media"

It was the best of times. It was, well, the best of times. The first chapter of On Multimodality provides readers with a non-linear timeline of noted rhetoricians/compositionists' mostly positive [-ly framed] responses to the emergence of new media and the possibilities of new literacies and rhetorical compositional practices. They begin by noting the optimistic expectation some compositionists of the early nineties held, that the combination of literacy and technology (i.e. www) would revitalize each other, specifically through improved access to information, increased engagement of audiences and the dissemination of "a diversity of views" (32) - that is, once the generalized threat of technology to human safety, privacy, and political upheaval was satisfactorily contained.

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By the early 2000s, it appears that the focus on the threats or fear of the possible negative impacts of technology on text production had been, by one person's standards, overcome, but by a perhaps more discerning person's standards, better concealed. How multimodal texts should be conceptualized, the role teachers of writing play in the production of digital texts, and the lenses that the creation process should be or not be viewed through were now at the crux of the discussions. Views on the form and significance of digital productions and whether they [should] reflect aspects of syllogistic, hermeneutic, "certifiable" print texts were convincing on both sides of the coin and reminiscent of conversations about orality vs written forms during the peak of ancient Greek philosophical and rhetorical debate.

Personally, I was struck by the phrasing of an admonition of a scholar in the article to refrain from "colonizing new media" with traditional concepts, particularly as other semiotic tools, like images, carry their own persuasive power. Suddenly, my skepticism of the rhetorical value of Shipka's ballerina shoe text (from my previous post) made plain the irony that I too had become a colonizer of sorts, perpetuating the kinds of rhetorical constraints placed on me, in the larger political conversation of standard and other Englishes in the Caribbean, on creators of multimodal forms of rhetoric.