Of course this week’s readings contribute much to our discussions of the effects of digital media (dm), the ways dm reflects and shapes how we think and behave. In fact one of the most memorable and necessary ideas emerging from the readings for this course appears here, I think, in Cindy Selfe’s “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning.” Here she paraphrases Patricia Dunn:
“It is an understandable, if unfortunate fact…that our profession has come to equate writing with intelligence…the unspoken belief that those who do not privilege writing above all other forms of expression–those individuals and groups who have ‘other ways of knowing,’ learning, and expressing themselves–may somehow lack intelligence” (644).
Of course it isn’t just “our profession” that has come to operate by this equation. What would the medical field be like–how would it function–without writing? I can imagine images and orality/aurality would be quite different–“professionals” would perhaps by default develop stronger visual/speaking skills? Politics and Law… Do we not value the skills of aurality/orality in the practice of law? Are these not as valued (if not more) as writing skills? But the University, operating via exchange of ideas via recorded forms, are we to operate as though our context–academia–should, and perhaps will, begin to comprehend and value aural/oral (and visual, gestural, etc.) modes of communication as equally capable of yielding and communicating meaningful knowledge, analytic knowledge?
How do we analyze in sound?
I don’t understand this; I haven’t the imagination for it. Of course this doesn’t mean it can’t happen. But writing has its affordances. So does sound, Selfe and all would say. Sure. I’d like to understand how one analyzes and comes to understandings via sound. And is this what we value as “intelligence”? Yes, this, I think, is what makes the entire “multimodal” movement so powerful and good; it forces us to question our values, to realize these values are arbitrary, if not baseless, and inspires us to imagine other powerful ways of “knowing.” I argue, though, grouchily, that it doesn’t empower us much to do so.
*** Works like Ceraso’s don’t help by resorting to dire warnings: “Thus it is imperative that teacher-scholars of rhetoric and composition–and English studies more broadly–develop listening practices that can help students cultivate a heightened sensitivity to sound in different contexts” (103). Ceraso loses me at this “hello” moment, two paragraphs into his argument. I can see the value in teaching students how to “listen” with their whole bodies. This fits into Selfe’s call for broadening the purpose of Rhet/Comp; “…our responsibility is to teach students effective, rhetorically based strategies for taking advantage of all available means of communicating effectively and productively as literate citizens” (644). But I bristle at Selfe’s sometimes fuzzy differentiation between students’ consumer-driven desires and their “multiple ways” of composing and communicating meaning. I’m just not sure that composing in the medium of music or podcast or video necessarily heightens student awareness of and skill with rhetorical practice. Ultimately Selfe promotes rhetorical awareness as the ultimate goal for composition students:
…teaching stuents to make informed, rhetorically based uses of sound as a composing modality–and other expressive modalities such as video, still images, and animation–could help them better understand the particular affordances of written language, and vice versa. (643)
It could. But it doesn’t necessarily. Just as a raised awareness of the bodily effects of sound doesn’t necessarily precede a raised awareness of the rhetorical effects of sound, of any medium, on a person. In fact Ceraso seems so charmed by the notion that sound is felt, that pollution “deadens” our experience, that he never gets around to helping me understand why all of this is bad. He briefly mentions that this deadening makes us more passive consumers, and renders us vulnerable to some sort of manipulation, but he doesn’t substantiate this. The biological fact is, though, that our brains must filter experience or it will get overwhelmed. The filtering is a good thing.
Today I’m grouchy. I really wanted to spend most of my time here complaining about the Grunkel piece, because he really did have me at “hello,” but he lost me (and “it”) completely on page 11. Love the Phaedrus application, but it doesn’t work in the most obvious (to me) ways. Basic reader-response and social-epistemic theories render Socrates’ depiction of the book as inert, dead, voiceless, unmoving, wrong. In fact Grunkel’s whole notion of “child,” which he limits to references to Socrates’ “bastard” metaphor and the notion of the paternal authority, could be followed through to obvious and contradictory conclusions (contradictory to Grunkel’s thesis). I mean, my kid is a perfect “mash-up” of my chromosomes and my husband’s chromosomes. That’s the material from which Wyatt is made. But no one would call him a simulacrum. That’s just dumb. To call a mash-up an inert, dead, mere mechanistic re-mix and thus devoid of “originality” is to deny the spirit of the thing and the fact that it underwent any sort of crafting at all, which of course it does. No one would argue that as an artifact, the mashup is distinct in spirit–and thus effect and meaning–from the parts from which its made. This seems so obvious to me. I must be missing something. Or maybe this article charmed people because…
The Phaedrus is so awesome.
Leave a Reply