digital(only)ity
i have to confess to be reading all this focus on the digital through the lens of my reflections on gunther kress's take on multimodality (see kress, 2005; prior, 2005; prior & hengst, 2010) and especially through the lens of jody shipka's toward a composition made whole (2011), and her question of why the focus of multimodality is so often only on the digital.
performances, enactments and installations—often computer-mediated in some sense—are a common feature of jody's classrooms, but never a required feature.
and jody is better than anybody i know at asking incessant so-what, explain-this, why-did-you-choose-to-write-in-this-color-lipstick-on-a-full-length-mirror kinds of questions.
and that's the rub, the lipstick on the mirror is all about the question of seeing the work done in relation to the media and activity used to communicate that work rather than our business-as-usual fetishization of some form: the question she worries is the notion that scholarship and instruction has to hew to some currently privileged form (print paper, hypertext html, prezi, tweet, speech, powerpoint, flash). i worry with her frankly.
the problematics, for example, that purdy and walker lay out about scholarship aren't limited to digitality, though they certainly play out in digital spheres. purdy and walker recognize this at several points, citing, for example, boyer on teaching—which could be, still often is, simply people standing in a room talking and writing on paper and board.
and as i discuss in art & alt, richardson writing in sociology and bridwell-bowles writing comp/rhet in the 1980s and 1990s were already not alone, not first, in raising discursive and epistemological challenges to old genres/rhetorics/practices of scholarship...or in recognizing how such challenges also challenged the uneven social relations that those genres/rhetorics/practices were both grounded in and supported.
richardson and bridwell-bowles also looked to repurposing literary genres and practices as one way to disrupt and re-invent scholarly exchange and scholarly communities. yet neither was especially focused on the role of the digital in these changes.
so we're back to what's new in new scholarly genres. much of what is discussed in these chapters—the desire for a form of exchange less rooted in persuasion and argument, the personal-is-political currents that refuse to let unmarked social categories stand invisible and that push suppressed/repressed/marked social identities to the fore, the attention to reworking scholarly values—all seem like the digital re-media-tions of feminist discourse, critical race discourse, post-modern avant-gardism, post-marxist frameworks. much is about reworking social relations still too rooted in a particular white, male, classed, heterosexist ideology that dominated the rapid processes of disciplinary formation over the past 200 years (as well as those of the western european world over the past 2000 plus years). barthes' (1988) reflections on the deep embedding of ancient and medieval rhetorics in western culture is relevant here.
does it give us pause that so much of rhetoric's tradition is a tradition of re-marking on deviations from the norm or the transparent (todorov, 1981)? tricky tradition that for folks who want to make it liberatory.
digitality could invite us to re-think our material-semiotic attunements, or it could re-focus us on another dominant.
gone, says gunther kress, the settled age of print literacy;
here, the settling new age of digital literacy.
just to be very clear, i think this periodization of multimodality is a real error, and not only because digitized technologies appear to be anything but settled and print literacy remains more than a troubled spirit lingering on the scene of its demise. what kress's narrative obscures are the multiple semiotics of the past and future as well as of the present. so let's aim instead for a new, dialogic, semiotically alert, activity-and-body-alert rhetoric (grounded in a dialogic, body-and-activity-alert semiotics), not another privileged metonymic media-icon.