Rachel+K.+Responds


 * 1.** **Reflect on the process of creating the techno-literacy memoir. What did you learn from presenting this project in a mode other than traditional print text?**

When first given this assignment, I admittedly labeled myself a “technophobe.” Literally meaning a person who had an abnormal fear of technology, the term is a bit extreme because, at the time, I did not actually fear technology. I just didn’t understand it. So this project was a huge leap for me, and in taking that “plunge,” I learned multiple things, but mainly, I learned that changing the medium would change my writing process.

Typically, the writing process proceeds planning, translating, and reviewing, to which I would add publishing as a final step. So simplified, this process looks quite unilinear. Within the new medium—a multilinear medium—however, my process changed. It became multilinear.

To begin, I choose a blog for this project, and not knowing what a blog was, let alone how to create one, posed a certain difficulty. However, I learned quickly because the medium was very easy to understand and to manipulate. I composed the blog entirely in an e-environment, no pen or paper was used. First, I simply created a blog with a techno-literacy theme and wrote posts, but as I began to grasp the blog environment and its many facets, I began to move back and forth between steps and sometimes even leaping over steps. In the actual construction of the blog, I planned more often than usual. I had to “map” the overall appearance, publish posts in reverse order in for them to be chronologically in order, and discover where best to place pictures and videos. I regularly returned to the planning stage.

In the translating stage, I wrote as I typically wrote, but something new happened when I clicked “publish post.” It occurred to me that I was publishing (declaring the post ready for public perusal) before I revised and edited. When I selected to view the blog, I was pulled out of the writer and put into the reader. I viewed the posts as a reader would. Viewing the blog with a reader’s eye, I caught errors, found areas where I wandered or was incomprehensible, and realized the best points to incorporate other media. Only then did I return to the “edit posts” to edit and revise. After which I revisited the publishing phase, only to return to edit and revise again and even draft new text. After I would integrate a video or picture, I needed to add some sort of text to relate it to the post and to the overall blog theme. I had to use the different media to complement each other and further my goals for the blog. As a result, I constantly weaved in and out of the writing process, manipulating it to fit the medium and manipulating the medium to fit the message. Breaking out the unilinear, my writing became multilinear and multilayered.


 * 2. Make at least one prediction about where new media will take writing in the twenty-first century. **

Although some propose that multimodal writing is killing print, the claim itself, I think, is a bit extreme. If multimedia writing is remediating print text, then print will need to there to be remediated. I do not think print is dead nor dying, but I do think that new digital texts will “retire” print and allow writing to be more accessible to the public.

In making this “prediction,” I am mainly thinking of a public library. Print text takes up so much room. Thick and thin books are stacked neatly onto shelves, and multiple issues of scholarly, medical, and artistic journals line the stacks of thousands of libraries. As new research is published, the out-dated findings are removed to back rooms to be kept in special collections or stored for other reasons.

Even when new research or books are published and purchased, libraries usually buy only one or two copies. Thus, when all copies of the text have been loaned out, the next borrower must wait for it to be returned. However, if these texts were scanned and stored online, everyone would have access to them at the same time. Libraries would no longer need floors and floors of stacks, but floors and floors of computers with internet access and printers. A person could search for the desired text and, if the library had a PDF or HMTL full text link, could read the text online. There would be no waiting for someone to return the book, no writing down library codes, and no searching for the text in the stacks. Writing would be more accessible to the masses, and exposure to new and different forms of writing would hopefully improve literacy.

** 3. Reflect on the process of creating the web-text. How did the text change in its transition from silent print to the “noise” of cyberspace (and that question can be taken either metaphorically or literally) in terms of stylistic choices and audience concerns? **

For the text to web-text project, I remediated a critical paper about Stevie Smith’s poetic style in her poetry, illustrations, and performances. I really enjoyed writing the paper and assumed that I would take even greater delight in adapting it for a hypertextual structure, especially since my techno-abilities had improved drastically. In translating the print text to hypertext, I had to alter the text to fit my reader; the text became reader-based. In a usual literature class, I wrote to the instructor and sought to meet his or her standards, but in cyberspace, anyone can come across the text and read it. Thus, I had to make the text reader-friendly, which was accomplished in different ways.

Mainly, the text became hypertext. Per the assignment’s requirements, the text was divided into at least six separate pages so the reader would not be intimated by an ongoing scroll of text. Dicing the ten page paper up into short, edible chunks made the material less imposing and more inviting. To help illustrate, I’ll assume that a reader is doing a search for information about Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning” and finds my web-text in her search. After being delivered to the main page, the reader will find the multiple links to “enter” the text, and as her search concerned “Not Waving but Drowning,” she will naturally first visit the page labeled after the poem. From there, she will find links to other pages that show how the poem relates to Smith’s other work, offer an analysis of the poem’s illustration, or cite critical and biographical works referenced in the text, or, having found what she was looking, she could simply leave the text. In choosing any link, the reader moves around in the text in the way that meets her needs and makes sense for her.

The text also became reader-based because I could incorporate images and, more interesting, videos. I was particularly fortunate to find a video of an animated picture of Smith reading “Not Waving but Drowning.” Nothing could have been more perfect because the reader could hear the poet’s voice, see the poet, and read the poem and the analysis I offered all in one text. Visual and auditory elements were woven together with text, and the reader was the beneficiary of the amazing results. It was her reading; it was her text.

** In answering this question, I must first ask, “Where should I start?” My transformation as a writer has taken place over several stages and in several different ways. However, for the sake of terseness, I will briefly discuss two transformations.
 * 4. In what ways have you changed as a writer this semester?

First, I will say that, without a doubt, my consideration of my audience has changed. In the past, the only audience I considered was, sadly, the instructor, that imposing figure who wanted to “slash-and-burn” my writing (or so I foolishly thought). In writing those traditional papers for the instructor, I severely narrowed the audience to one, educated person who probably was not surprised or interested by my words, and why should s/he be when the tone I used was bland and professional? However, in composing e-texts, I looked beyond the instructor-as-audience standard. Because the medium changed, the scope of the writing changed. No longer writing in the typical genres, I had to create text that my reader could encounter as he chose and actively engage with.

Second, I am no longer a technophobe! Nor do I have the same opinion of digital writing that I once had. Instead, I am a writer of traditional rhetorical modes and newer, developing ones (blogs, hypertexts, websites, etc.); I value digital text for its intricacies and its ability to further our understanding of ourselves and the various structures we live in, our teaching of writing, and our irrepressible urge to create and communicate.

** 5. Which theory/theorist have you found most interesting or helpful in understanding digital media and why? **

I took Multimedia Writing out of pure interest. I saw it as a change from the usual literature and writing class and, as I had very little understanding of digital media, thought the class would help me overcome my apprehensions about technology. With that said, practically all of the theories/theorists we have studied have been interesting and helpful, but the one which I found most interesting and helpful has certainly been Jay David Bolter, the author of the bulk of our readings.

Mainly, I think that Bolter’s agenda in //Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print// is what helped me. Without a doubt, Bolter favors electronic text, and his favorable outlook on digital media has allowed me to see that it is certainly nothing to be “afraid of.” Bolter also offers a simple and straightforward discussion of how print is being remediated by electronic text and many of the possibilities of electronic text. He explores several facets of electronic text such as incorporating graphics, the path of the reader, various critical theories that are especially applicable in reading electronic text, and the writer’s defining of mind and self through digital text. And I //really// appreciated his definition of terms which I had often heard but never really knew what they were, hypertext and GUI, for example.