reading response for 10-7-09

Though I hesitate to see myself as a “Millennial,” there have been moments in my life when I’ve faced the reality that the old forms of communication no longer work for me. One such instance arrived with the recognition that after attending a few hundred concerts over the past 15 years, I no longer have any real interest in watching musicians stand and play instruments for two hours. I need something more than a dude with an acoustic guitar to be entertained, and some artists are starting to provide that by making their shows multimedia events, rife with projections, costume changes, and showers of confetti and performance art flourishes. While reading “The Net Generation in the Classroom,” “Thinking About Modality,” and “A Multimodal Task-based Framework,” I’m starting to come to the conclusion that for many people, words on a page are no longer enough, either.

This is an exciting prospect in many ways. I take seriously the point that a multimodal approach allows students to create texts in an infinite number of innovative and imaginative ways, ones that allow them to consider rhetorical approaches from different angles and truly require creative thought and complex problem-solving skills. I also understand that solely word-based texts are a dinosaur on its last legs, as students no longer live in a black and white, Times New Roman world and desire something that will allow them to express their ideas with every available tool at their disposal. If we want our students to “ache with caring,” then we need to engage them in as many relevant ways as possible, giving them every opportunity to care as much as they can. With the imminent death of the newspaper industry and print journalism, we’re certainly running headlong into a brave new world. The idea of what we’ll find there is both exhilarating and terrifying.

Still, the death of words on a page is at least somewhat distressing to me. I still believe that the ability to use words is a laudable skill, and it seems to be a shame to assume that they are no longer sufficient for illustrating the internal landscapes of readers’ minds. Are we entering an era when being an effective writer isn’t enough for most audiences? Would Hemmingway be ignored today if he couldn’t produce a video montage to accompany For Whom the Bell Tolls? Would Faulkner be rendered irrelevant because of poor sound-editing skills? Are we now a film adaptation culture, one that will only choose the medium that engages the most senses and dismiss everything else as being too narrowly constructed?

These articles also raise many questions of disciplinarity. If we aren’t essentially concerned with the written word, what exactly is our area of expertise? Don’t these multimodal forms belong just as much to the other disciplines as they do to us? It seems that all of the considerations of rhetorical argument, independent thinking, audience, voice, etc. are covered at least to some extent when similar projects are assigned in the disciplines that make their living exploring these forms. For a field that is often assailed for having no real core knowledge area, aren’t we running the risk of exposing ourselves as being inessential if we’re ultimately producing the same sorts of texts that are the specialized content of the other fields? If we aren’t about the written word, why are we needed at all?

I also wonder why, if our students are already adept at using these multimodal frameworks, we even need to teach them to express their ideas in this format. If this is their preferred language and they are fluent in it, isn’t it second nature to them, with the ability to interpret and digest these texts already in their skill set? Chances are, they’re going to know the technology better than we do, and if they are already using it to express their ideas in the private lives, what do we really have to offer them? On the other hand, if conventional writing skills and texts are inferior when compared to the multimodal options, why continue to prop up a dying form at all? If words on a page aren’t the best way to reach the goal of “communication and meaning-making,” why not embrace the multimodal world fully?

On a practical level, I also have the concern that as an instructor I have absolutely no idea how to evaluate multimodal projects. Is it possible for a student to be a fantastic writer but to be completely lacking in visual or artistic sensibilities and, therefore, struggle in a writing class? What exactly are we evaluating? Are we rewarding analytical thinking or good production skills? Good ideas or good visuals? I know something (but not much) about writing. I know nothing about what constitutes good or bad multimedia projects.

In the end, possibly due to the years of my life that I’ve devoted to words on a page and my almost complete lack of experience with multimodal production of texts, I just feel a little conflicted about all of this. I don’t want to be Socrates, railing against the rising tide of civilization, soon to be an anachronism and symbol of an antiquated era. But I also worry about the written text. I know the goal of multimodality isn’t to replace the written word, but I don’t know how words on a page could ever compete with images, sound, and hands-on experience. After all, Socrates was right about one thing. The written word eventually rendered his industry obsolete. I wonder if the same could happen to ours.