"I Drank What?" -- A Look at Where We (Might) Have Gone

I just saw a really awesome analogy for what I'm about to try doing here -- Paul Andersen's description of moving from a regular classroom, which is like a schoolbus that all the students get on and the teacher drives everyone to the same place, to a class where everybody gets in their own car and heads out for a rendezvous the teacher has given them a map to. No one is terribly surprised when not everybody shows up at the rendezvous. 


So as the teacher, I'm sitting here in the last week of class wondering, where'd everyone actually go in the journey this course has presented? Most of you have shown up at the rendezvous, but what routes did you take to get here, how did your experiences vary, and how, thus, has your learning varied?  You who are reading this have all shown up: what do you actually know, now? I'm the bus driver, but since you weren't really on the bus, I dunno.  I'll find out as I read the reflective work in your final exams, but for now, me = in the dark.


I thought, then, that perhaps since I do know where the bus went, maybe it would be a fitting final-week post to say something about that. It would let you compare notes between where I would have had us all go, and where you might have gone along the way. To get straight to it, then, here is some of what I would have liked you to learn during the course -- what I hope you will believe and act in accordance with, on down the line.


Writing is rhetorical: situated, motivated, contingent, interactional, and epistemic. There are few universals in writing, and most of those are questions. (Who will use my writing? What do they need and want it to do? What is the exigence for it? What will make this writing "good"? etc.)  No modalities or genres of writing, therefore, are inherently superior to any others, and none are inherently inferior: their value varies with the rhetorical situation, which will render some genres and modalities better and others worse.


"Writing" includes both the acts of composition and of inscription: inventing and designing (together, composing) material, and inscribing that material into a text. It is crucial to understand writing as the entire development process of a text, from recognizing an exigence through the entire lifetime of development and use of a text by writers and readers.


Writing is by definition technological because it requires tools, and this reality presents two major implications for writing. First, tools are rhetorical constraints that powerfully shape the text they create by affording some designs and not others. Second, a master writer must thus by definition be a master of writing tools, in some way. Being a master or writing tools will certainly not be sufficient to guarantee the development of effective writing in any given rhetorical situation, but it will be necessary to creating the most effective possible text.


Different technologies used to write reveal different aspects of writing. Electronic, networked writing technologies demonstrate writing to be an intensely visual and intensely collaborative activity in ways that 500 years of alphabetic-paper writing technology and Enlightenment, hyper-rationalist culture masked. 


Lastly, I'd like to suggest a few basic stances of effective writers in a digital age -- those who adopt these as defaults will tend to be more able writers with current technologies.

• Effective writers in a digital age think in terms of designed documents and texts, rather than only in terms of the words in a text, understanding that the impact of a text involves not just what it says but what it looks like, because its looks are part of its use.
• Effective writers in digital technologies understand and rely on the relationship between alphabetic text and image. Digital writing demands images (unless, of course, you're me writing this blog, but then, check the links) and the farther we go into the digital age, the stranger pure alphabetic texts will seem to users, except for very specialized uses where images actually get in the way of the text's use.
• Effective writers in a digital age think in terms of audience values and implications, and for multiple audiences in time and space. They understand primary and secondary audiences, compound rhetorical situations, and especially audiences through time.
• Effective writers in a digital age think not about how their writing will be read, but how it will be used. The writing exists to allow its readers to accomplish something with it, whether that's as narrow as winning a building contract or are broad as being entertained by it. Effective writers now ask, how well can this document be used?
• Effective writers in a digital age join the network: they link actively and extensively to other writers, thinkers, and readers.
• Effective writers in a digital age are effective remixers. As a writer in digital environments, you need to develop your own personal ethic of remix: of what exists, what will you take, and how, and what are the boundaries of its use for you? The very nature of writing today is copying; what will your ethic of copying be?
• Effective writers in a digital age think ahead about how their work will be re-used and re-mixed by other writers. They think, automatically and always, about permissions and licenses. They think about the nature of copyright and how invested they are in it. They think about the balance between giving their work away in order to develop demand for it, monetizing their work through direct sales or through advertising, and about what they will consider illicit use or theft of their copyrighted material.
• Effective writers in a digital age plan primarily for a text's electronic life rather than its paper life. They think in terms of texts "born digital": you don't convert a text from paper to online; you convert it, if necessary, from online to paper.