Thinking in New Media

I am trying to think about what writing can be, what thinking can be, if I step outside my comfort zone, and try to construct thought, or communicate, in a new form, a new medium, a new rhetorical mode or situation.

We don't make this kind of leap very often. (And yet the incomplete list below will suggest a discontinuous yet continual map of such leaps.)

Those of us who teach can sometimes get mired in our habits of mind. With good reason, I might add. After all, most of the rhetorical modes and media have stayed fairly stable in our lifetimes. But that is not the case now.

So, if I can look back at my writing life, can I identify those few times I started writing in a new form, a new situation, a new media?

1. Writing started on a tablet with blue and pink lines, with a thick pencil, copying letters. At first the conventions seemed new and unknowable--the right margin appeared suddenly like terra incognita with every stretch--the letters decomposed, fattened, or shrunk, as I grew conscious of the edge. The edge seemed like the original wraparound--simply move down and continue. Writing was like copying telephone poles, balloons with sticks, fantastic shapes that easily betrayed my control as I copied copied copied.

2. Cursive. Once mastery of print was attained, we trained on cursive--the same tablet paper, the same rote routine, only this time the strange shapes had no correlative. We saw printed letters in books and text spread everywhere, but cursive only appeared in disembodied white lines on green placards arranged around the top walls circumnavigate the classroom. The temptation was to revert to print, especially when trying to think or write. Trying to write cursive and simultaneously think in cursive was heartbreaking. We'd achieved some mastery, literacy, but now we were prevented from utilizing this powerful language. We must devote ourselves to cursive. But cursive was also adult, a portal from childhood to the mysteries of garlands of handwritten thought.

3. The eraser was introduced.

4. We were deprived of tablet paper and forced to adjust to a paper with a different orientation--instead of reaching across, we had to think vertically, our horizontal world had shrunk. The paper changed to white, with blue lines and pink vertical margins--another convention to master. The left margin is inviolable, the right inexplicably flexible, provided we master new rules. The space between lines had shrunk and we were now imagining a middle line...

5. The report. Somehow, along the way of learning social studies, we learned how to compile a report--usually about a country in South America. We cataloged information: maps, images, short paragraphs about natural resources. We copied information from whatever sources we found. All information seemed equivalent. That's why in 5th grade I could write a title like "The Flamboyance of Bolivia!" not because I knew what the world "flamboyance" meant, although I had some strong contextual clues from the colorful, energetic photos I found in a National Geographic article, but because that's what the article I found said. I compiled 50 pages of paragraphs and pasted pictures and maps I mimicked from encyclopedias. I was constructing information, collecting, copying, absorbing, providing evidence of curiosity. The result was a binder of thick and curled pages of raw data, some of which I actually understood.

6. Math. There were special moments of growth that were evidenced by new visual languages: operational signs, division tables, equations, geometric proof tables, etc. Each leap forward in computation or dialect required mastery some new set of signs and functions, each an expression of meaning that was learned by rote first, then cursory understanding.

7. I forgot workbooks: Published texts with lines and spaces into which we were allowed, even required, to write. Not all books worked this way!

8. Books. The picture books. Dick and Jane paragraph and "chapter" books. SRA cards. An evolutionary ladder of texts that increased in complexity and presented new conventions. Flash cards. Textbooks that looked like impenetrable fortresses, sphinx-like in meaning, where decoding text meant nothing--comprehension beyond the immediate symbol, comprehension beyond simple narrative. Who spoke that way? Maybe the whole civilization idea would go away if we just stared at the blocks of text. Paperbacks. Hardbacks. The Dewey decimals system.

9. Libraries. The school library. Books in the classroom. The bookmobile. Trips every weekend to the downtown library.

10. Comic books, 8 cents each: for the price of four returnable bottles collected along the old highway.

11. Street signs that made no sense: "No U Turn"? "Yield"

12. Recipes

13. The newspaper.

14. The Bible. Sunday school magazines, the church bulletin.

15. There were so few books in our house, and what we had we read over and over: the Starrett Tool catalog; Mad magazine; the Golden Treasury encyclopedias; a few album covers; dad's National Geographics;

16. Wonder of wonders: the reversible book! Double paperback!

Back to writing:

chalk--the blackboard

developing a signature and claiming an identity

The typewriter with unlined paper--where and what is a margin? Uniformed letters that seem to wander away from your finger tips. The legibility and uniformity of letters: what gets lost when the personality and intimacy of the hand is left behind?

Manual, electric

The ink pen: now writing with a cognizance, an insistence, to not make mistakes, no erasures, no blobs or gooey puddles.

The outline: imposing the order of Roman numerals on information--creating a hierarchy of data

The index card: recipes, notes, bibliographical data
maps

tables

The term paper

The theme

The story, the narrative

A poem

A song: choir and band and music class--new symbols and lines and decoding for time and tone and meter and articulation

the letter--camp, love, thank you, etc.

the computer screen, with wraparound, virtual pages

encoding a text with symbols and icons about formatting

notes from a lecture

a personal journal

a business report

an Analysis;

a=n argument
]
a compare/contrast

etc--all of the modes

a memo

a letter of introduction

A computer file

email

an attachment

cut and paste

creating a link

a spell checker

Powerpoint

a website

a 2-D design

a blog

downloads

software: Word, Adobe Photoshop, In Design, etc.

blending audio, design, photographic, image, text--hypertext

transubstantiation--miracle of miracles--reading or creating a text that has so physical substance.


Each of these represents a minor shift, but at the moment of the shift we are recreating, innovating, discovery, confronted by challenges, the lure of the new, on the cusp of understanding, on the edge of leaving what is reliable but no longer sufficient: terra incognita, the monsters at the edge of the new world maps


Each of these represents a set of conventions, rhetorical situations and modes and expectations, opportunities, rote learning and communicative power, radical transformation


I've wandered in my original idea here. Certainly these lists can be categorized and added to. I have not mentioned any literaey genres, aural texts, films, tv, radio, etc. Perhaps just compiling this list, brainstorming, leaads me to rethink all of this...