So we got back from the Watson conference last night. More about that in the second post probably. Here I’ll address several comments from Kress’s article. Please forgive the piecemeal nature of this; I’m running low on energy and brain power (not to mention time) at this point.
[A related aside here—interesting that Kress has downplayed the role of time and sequence. These are still tremendously important in my day to day life… and I do expect that newness plays a significant role in how people who are “regulars” to particular sites examine the pages. i.e. registering to be alerted of favorite blogs being updated…]
Anyway, first observation. Kress suggests that traditional written pages have one entry point onto the page, which we don’t even notice. Online pages have multiple entry points. This suggests the possibility of readers coming from various perspectives and social groups. Consequently, he posits that the site author(s) assume a fragmented audience. Kress states that the order of the site is open (p. 10-11). He does suggest that the site’s authors “imagine the possibilities of reading” (p. 10), but he insists that these possibilities are only suggested, as opposed to managed with little opportunity for reader/ “visitor” resistance.
However, I think Kress is being a little too generous (idealistic?) here in a claim which seems to hint at the possibility of the web as a democratic place. I would argue instead that one needs to take into account the economic machinery in place. There are definite assumptions being made about users’ paths. This is evidenced by the placement of advertisements on online pages. Marketing research is used both to steer and to predict where users’ eyes will go.
Kress also suggests that the logic of space is a different approach from the traditional logic of reading, which relies on a sequential/chronological approach. This differentiation seems crucial as it hints at the possibility of significantly different cognitive processes involved in reading/analysis between image and text. While on many levels I embrace the social turn in our field, I do hope that we can find places for cognitive analysis too, because when cognitive approaches are set within the social, this seems to me to offer a powerful tool set for insight.
The final observation I want to discuss is Kress’s claim that the “elites will continue to use writing as their dominant mode” (p. 18). I found this claim particularly interesting in light of Cindy Selfe’s warnings that we need to pay attention to the questions of access—who has and does not have technology. At the Watson conference, one of the plenary speakers, Omar Wasow, suggested that the gap is still really a literacy gap, not a technology gap. However, another speaker, David Kirkland, described the ways and places he has observed underprivileged youth (declared illiterate by elites such as their school teachers) becoming authors on the web. This dovetails with Kress’s comment that “everyone can be an author” on the screen (p. 19). Kress also suggests that this decreases authorial authority.
But, taking these differing views together, I wonder if we’re seeing technology and literacy both set up as parts of Graff’s literacy myth. Perhaps we’re imbuing too much power in the social goods (Gee) of literacy and technology themselves. Instead, I think a whole lot more attention needs to be focused on the economics of literacy. Brandt’s sponsorship work provides one way into that.
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3 comments:
To pick up on your point about cognition, I agree that it is useful and underestimated at times in the field. I am finding it refreshing reading Gee's Social Linguistics and Literacies because it seems that much of his ideas have been influenced by cognitive theory. His cultural models are similar to schemas, the stories within these models are symmetrical to scripts, and there are many times when he considers selective attention because of cognitive overload—that we just cannot deal with every detail of every piece of information presented to us. Social determinism erases the ability for individual agency (and, for that matter, psychology as a field of study). This is why in feminism and critical race theory there was a shift from notions of “victimhood” to that of agency and transformation. One thought was that if we keep reinforcing the fact that we are powerless (that the hegemony has all the power), then we have created a self-fulfilling prophecy for our positions in society. Maybe we can encourage others to disrupt the system by focusing on those who have—those who have agency. However, this shift to agency did not bring with it a study of the individual psychology of the agent. Motivation was the sole characteristic of this agent—a drive to disrupt the system. Increasingly, though we are as a field coming back to other parts of ourselves, such as our bodies and our emotions. Spirituality, however, is still seen as simply retrograde b.s. (“barbarian stupidity”) or seen as simply the sociological institution of religions. Cognition has been one of the bad guys, since we’ve found it fashionable to diss the Enlightenment—and for good reason, especially for its universals and its dissociation of the mind and body. Nonetheless, there may still be insights we can learn from cognition that do not fall into either of these traps.
I also wonder--and have for some time-about Kress's comments that, "[w]riting will remain the preferred mode of the political and cultural elite" (2003, p. 1) and "The elites will continue to use writing as their prefrerred mode" (2005, p.18). Each time I encounter his framing of his dicussion of multimodality with this caveat, I am given pause. What I wonder is if this cultural/political divide will be drawn in some manner along these lines--that the power discourses will contune to be played out in "traditional" text, if we are giving students a social handicap by over emphasising multimodality. I know that complex and precise theories--such as what we have been reading this semester--can only be explicated in all their complexity, distinction, and nuance within domain of the verbal, whether delivered/recorded in print or voice. While I think that multimodal presentation affords us the opportunities to use multiple means of persuasion, I do wonder if overdependence on media other than print is a way of dumbing down our students. It almost seems that it would be pedagogically wise to require separate instuction in multimodal and print composition. If the cultural/politcal elites will always favor traditonal print text, don;t we do studnets a disservice if we don't as well? I don't believe instruction, production or consumption of text should ever be either/or, but Kress's caveat always troubles me. If tradtional text is the medium/instantiation site of power discourse, don't we have an ethical responsibility to make the playing filed as level as possible? Or are we merley reproducing power relations by offering multimodal comp as a "vulgar" discourse--the discourse of the people?
I am not, of course, insinuating that multimodal comp is less sophisticated. Some of it is decidely more so than traditonal texts--but you get my point.
BP
My response here follows from BP's comments. While attending the Watson conference, the complexity of valuation of multimodal composition was brought to the fore for me. I sat in on a roundtable of editors-- Cindy Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Cheryl Ball... one of the discussion points there was how difficult it is to get tenure/promotion (TP) committees to recognize the intellectual commitment involved in producing multimodal texts. For instance, one person spoke about how she had generated 80 pages of code for one scholarly piece, but even with printing out all that code, there remains a translation difficulty regarding explaining what is entailed to TP committees.
Despite resolutions passed by both MLA and CCC, it continues to be a real struggle for scholars to gain recognition for their multimodal texts. I suppose part of this is the sheer difficulty of determining appropriate means of assessment.
However, another challenge here, which was not brought up during the roundtable, was that these multimodal scholarly textual venues often haven't been around long enough to allow the bureaucratic powers time to assess their contribution to the field. i.e. I know in the field of Organizational Behavior, they assess journals based on their acceptance/rejection rates, citation indices, and overall statistical indices which allegedly indicate "impact on the field."
I don't know exactly how we determine the value of journals in our field, but I suspect we do look at acceptance/rejection rates and possibly the other factors mentioned above. i.e. I see that Written Communication notes on its website that it is included in the Thomson Reuters journal citation Report, and they note the journal's impact factor...
I suspect that part of the problem with valuing multimodal texts is that they haven't been incorporated fully enough yet into the evaluation system we use for print texts. But that leads to another question (or perhaps back to my earlier thought...): Should multimodal texts be incorporated into the same framework of assessment, or do they require an entirely new form of assessment? If a new one is required, what would an intellectual contribution point system for multimodal scholarly compositions look like?
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