Submitted by Jim Brown on August 28, 2009 - 10:55am
I have been away from the Blogora for too long, and it's time to get back into the swing of things. How about a post that begs you to see new media scholarship as something relevant to your life? Sound good? Good.
New media scholarship is seen as a specialization within various disciplines. In Rhetoric and Composition, new media is "computers and writing." It's something the "tech people" do. Collin Brooke's new book, Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media, shows us how misguided this approach is.
Lingua Fracta develops a rhetoric of/for new media by reworking the canons. By staging a confrontation between "rhetoric" and "technology," Brooke hopes to transform both. His reworking (remixing) of the canons is a way to 1) shift the conversation from analysis and interpretation of new media texts to the production of them; 2) remind us that the canons are not (never have been) static. His updating of the canons is a reminder that the canons have always and everywhere been shifting and that they are a set of ratios (all five happening at the same time) like Burke's Pentad. Brooke is interested in the canons as an "ecology of practice."
Brooke does not get wrapped up on defining new media. In fact, he argues (along with Derrida) that the "What is _____?" question covers over too many important things. He is more interested in practices of new media than he is in defining new media. Yet he does see a very important distinguishing characteristic of new media, and that characteristic involves how new media present us with interfaces rather than objects. A web page is an interface that serves as a "way in" to a large database of information. That interface does important rhetorical work, but it isn't an "object" in the traditional sense. It's a bit more fluid than an object. The "object" is a database of information. The interface is where the rubber meets the road.
So, Brooke argues, rhetorical theory (and maybe even literary theory?) can and should change. Rather than analyzing certain works, new media asks us to understand interfaces. For example, it's difficult to analyze the narrative of hypertext fiction because it's fluid and different for everyone. However, what readers of a hypertext work would share is the interface. Further, Brooke's hope is that we move beyond analyzing interfaces to figuring out how to write them.
I recently posted something over at my blog about this with regard to Infinite Jest. IJ offers a complex set of narratives by throwing too much information at the reader. It's a novelistic enactment of "information overload." And this makes it very difficult to discuss the text with other readers in terms of the narrative. Different readers pick up different details and tidbits. However, the "interface" that Wallace offers is (in some sense) shared by readers. His footnotes or his unique way of dealing with time end up being the "shared experience" that lays a groundwork for critical discussion. This is why I've argued (also on my blog) that IJ is what Lev Manovich calls a new media object.
This shift from "object" to "interface" is what most interests me about Brooke's project, and I wonder what others think. To me, it's exciting to begin to think about brand new ways of producing, consuming, and critiquing text with this idea in mind. If Infinite Jest can be defined as a new media object, then we are well beyond a conversation amongst "the techies." However, this shift is probably a threat to some longstanding traditions in English departments or in rhetorical theory.
Thoughts?
