I'll take "Grad School Luddites" for 500, Alex

When I opened Ball and Moeller’s site, I was pumped. What an interesting sight (very punny) for my eyes: neon yellow, a cuckoo clock, and an easy to navigate alphabetic menu.

And then I started reading. I started wondering about time—the Golden Globes were coming on soon, you know—and the lack of page numbers left me wondering how much devotion the reading would require.

And then I got bored. So I looked at Twitter to see what E!News and Kelly Oxford were saying about Christian Bale’s doppelganger Jesus look and Lea Michelle’s pathetic weeping. The browser made me do it, I swear.

And then I felt a migraine coming on, like always, when I stare at a computer screen for too long.

Meanwhile, my notebook filled with scribblings of topoi and textual anthropology.

And then I thought: WAIT. Ryan and Cheryl (first name basis because of their colloquial tones and Cheryl's frustrated, borderline bitter voice made me feel like we were fighting on the same team) worked so hard to make this interactive lesson for me and how do I respond? By getting all ironic on them with my pen and paper.

New media is a duel between convenience of the old and the innovation of the new. The lack of page numbers, an unknown end product, and distractions that are only a click away have the potential to change reading habits, citation methods, retention, and meaning making as a whole. If this way of communication draws from “art, graphic design, film, poetics, linguistics, education, communication” and of course, composition, does this type of meaning making belong in the English department?

Cheryl argues that new media texts are “designed using a range of materials and media to create something that doesn’t rest on the laurels of written text to convey meaning." I, for the first time in the two-week period that has been our class, agree this is valuable for students to learn. But—and there is always a but—it then lies outside the realm of English composition studies and evolves into its own major, especially if we are going to change writer to designer and paragraph to element. I can’t imagine my students telling their parents they have a lot of homework that weekend, like they have to design for their English class. Maybe that will forever remain my flaw in this course—I can’t imagine the change from traditional composition classes to new media composition.

Between celebrity gossip updates and Excederin migraine binges, I found two take-away messages from Ryan and Cheryl’s site:

1. English studies need to get with the times and integrate more work with digital rhetorics and multimedia composition and

2. Written text is so 1980, especially the school kind that only means anything to the “academic elite.”

I get it, Ball and Moeller. Despite picking on the naysayers of new media (bad rhetoric), you convinced me through example it is worthwhile.

My take-away message then, is that this type of composition might need its own field instead of falling on the laps of composition teachers who might not be ready to neglect the power of the written word.

P.S. Cheryl LOL-ed . . . as if I needed another reason to keep internet culture out of the composition classroom . . .