Multimodality

Since Marshall McLuhan declared, "The medium is the message" in 1960s, the medium has evolved itself into more various forms, which now seem to dominate our sensory world and the message it produces. Those different media such as TV, Internet, magazine and newspapers, textmessaging and academic journals have greatly influenced words, images and symbols that it conveys. In this sense, as McLuhan acknowledged, the message might be nothing more than the combination of all; words, visual images, sound, and the communication technology, and the environment where you read, listen to, or watch the text. If this is true, shouldn't we redefine the meaning of "text"? Now a text is making a sound, moving, and having colors. It is spontaneously being produced and reproduced as it is communicated. It never stops flowing. It is also the confluence of the rest of the texts. That is, a text is already intertextual.
In this context, the issue of multimodal pedagoy might be addressed too late. More and more young students are used to communicating through various media. In addition, the new media is getting faster, more diverse and more sensuous. While the old texts instigate your senses through your imagination, the new media arouses each of your senses spontaneously.Perhaps, the more you are used to its speed, diversity and sensuosity, the more easily you lose your patience and taste in reading, intepreting and producing old print-oriented texts. These texts might teach us the depth of our life yet not quite well talk about its width and varieity. Fortunately, we no longer want the depth actually; instead, we appreciate the shallow vivacity of the world represented by TV shows, disposable movies, and internet. Perhaps, it is more exact to say that there is a different kind of depth in the new media.
Then, what a composition teacher can do in the world becoming more sensory? How can these sensual texts help to develop our thinking and sophisticate our writing? Or, aren't they detrimental rather than helpful? How can the new media take off the scarlet letter of "shallowness" attached to it? To me, all of these questions still remain unsolved despite many educators' passionate advocacy of the new media.