Let me end by revisiting where we started. The syllabus:
I have two primary purposes for this semester. First, I want to expose you to as many new technologies as possible. It is quite likely that you will be called to use several of these technologies in your career as a professional or technical writer. The incredible development of new communicative technologies over the past decade requires writers who can compose in a variety of spaces for diverse audiences with multiple media.
But I would also suggest that the same incredible development of new technologies transforms more than the ways in which we communicate. So, second, I want to explore how these technologies impact epistemology, ethics, morality, education, and aesthetics. Put simply, what is “new” about new media?
To begin to answer this question, we first must have a sense of what constitutes the “old” media, which we will begin to glean via Walter Ong’s seminal essay, “Writing is a Technology Which Restructures Thought.” We will use Ong’s essay, and its consideration of literacy, as a foil for understanding Gregory Ulmer’s theory of “electracy.” Our semester long exploration of electracy and new media will interrogate the ways in which new technologies prioritize subjectivity, transience, contingency, ambience, dependence, risk, and affect over objectivity, permanence, assurance, abstraction, autonomy, security, and logic.
I believe the first goal is self-explanatory: this semester we did in fact use a wide variety of technologies: image editing software, web managements systems, video recording and editing, and twitter. Let me be clear: the idea isn’t to master using a particular technology, but rather to encourage an attitude and method toward working with technology. Whatever the technology, google up some tutorials and just start using it. While we cannot predict what technologies you will use in your professional career, we can predict that you will use a number of them. Hopefully, after the disorienting experiences of this semester, you feel more capable of coping with new technologies.
The second goal is more complicated to summarize. We encountered attitudes toward new media in Ulmer’s work on MEmorials, and again in Rice’s counter-histories of Detroit. Both suggest that navigating the digital world requires a different sense of priorities than schools are accustomed to teaching. What priorities? Or, in other words, what do I think puts the “new” in new media? To answer my own question, I would begin by stressing: change. New media change. And new media changes everything.
To explicate: unlike old, analog media–be it print on paper or action on film–new media are open to change. A book is forever–whatever was printed there yesterday will remain on the page until the end of tomorrows (of course, one can burn a book). There is no permanence to a new media composition, it can be altered, repurposed, erased. The world is now, at least in part, a wiki. To explicate: the world has always been composed in terms of a struggle over who gets to say what. Always. Books offered us an idealism. They offered an illusion of control. One writer controlling all the choices. Twitter, by comparison, is a chaotic cluster fuck. Yes it is. But so is the world, the real world, the rhetorical world that needs citizens with the talents, ambition, and patience to harness its potential and orient its interests. We can look at the changes initiated by new media as the loss of the literate ideal or as the offering of a new potentiality.
That is both the danger and the promise of new media. They might no longer carry the idealism of a book–one world controlled by one author ordering an infinite number of readers–but they open us to (re)consider a democracy in which anyone who has access to a computer (which isn’t everyone, of course, we shouldn’t be tricked into thinking that everyone has access and opportunity to enter into the digital world) has the potential to speak and contribute to the chaotic, messy wrangle of the (post)human barnyard. I hope this semester has made you feel more comfortable with the tools that enable such speaking every bit as much as I hope your education as a whole compels you to speak.
