JAC Volume 15 Issue 1

Even the most cursory examination of the literature concerning computers and composition shows that computers are generally thought to be an addition to the composition classroom. The designation "computer" composition enforces the idea of the computer as an addition to an already constituted "composition," and other common terms such as "computer-aided instruction," or "computer literacy," and the titles of books and articles such as Collins and Sommers' Writing On-Line: Using Computers in the Teaching of Writing and Hawisher and Le Blanc's Re-Imagining Computers and Composition work to reinforce the idea that the intersection of computers and composition is dominated by the addition of a computer (see also Balestri, Miller, Sadler, Schwartz, and Selo. Thus, however much computers may change our view of what counts as writing, our pedagogics are already fundamentally constrained by a view of composition that privileges composition-as-writing at the same time that it seeks to incorporate the computer into a new view of composition.

In a general way this concern with writing and with texts might seem unexceptionable. But a closer examination of the literature of computer composition shows that the language of writing and of texts already shapes the kinds of projects that we consider “writing" and the kinds of texts that we will consider proper to the composition classroom. This fact is perhaps best exemplified by the way the discourse of computer composition has taken shape around a notion of "computer literacy," which inevitably links our understanding of computers and composition to our ideas of what it means to read. Gail Hawisher and Paul Le Blanc, for example, ask us to "Imagine what happens to our notions of literacy when text becomes virtual-when it is produced, transmitted, and consumed in electronic form on a computer" (ix). However "virtual" writing may become for Hawisher and Le Blanc, it never ceases to be "writing." Composition remains concerned with written texts, though these texts are now electronic. The fundamental difference between an electronic text and any other text is its "electrification." But that "electrified" computer composition text remains a product of "literacy" rather than a product of some perhaps only imaginary beyond of writing and

text. In this essay, we argue for our responsibility to that revolutionary "beyond."

We do not, even cannot, propose here another "computer composition" pedagogy. Instead, we argue that to realize this "beyond" we must first come to terms with the computer as transformative. Paul Taylor usefully marks the beginning of this transformation when he writes that "Computers are transforming the nature of texts, and some forms (such as the expository essay) may not figure prominently in computer-based discourse of the (near) future" (146). Similarly, Hawisher and Le Blanc argue for the necessity of new terms: "Along with our understanding of the very act of writing, our terminology regarding discursive practice must change to account for phenomena that are foreign to our notions of paperbound products" (xv). As these two citations suggest, the computer is and will continue to transform the nature of texts, of writing, of discursive practices, and thus inevitably the ways in which we and our students compose. Our essay seeks to facilitate that transformation.

Before this transformation can occur, we need to situate the computer in a technological context. Although the computer is often taken to be an “active" element, as opposed to the "passive" technologies of television and video, we argue that this simple opposition of computer as active and television as passive leads us to misunderstand, and underestimate, the place of computer and video in our classrooms. We suggest that only after we realize that computers and video are neither passive nor active can we proceed to allow "collage" to restructure our pedagogics.

Hawisher and Selfe argue that we must be skeptical of revolutionary claims for the utility of the computer in composition classrooms. In their "'Be Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Classroom," Hawisher and Selfe write that "Writing instructors who hope to function effectively in these new electronic classrooms must assess ways in which the use of computer technology might shape, for better and worse, their strategies for working with students" (55). They argue that we must subject all claims for the computer's revolutionary impact on composition to critical scrutiny. In the conclusion of their essay they suggest that:

The current professional conversation about computer use in writing classes, as evidenced in published accounts is incomplete in at least one essential and important way. While containing valuable accounts of electronic classes, this conversation fails to provide us with a critical perspective on the problematic aspects of computer use and thus with a full understanding of how the use of technology can affect the social, political, and educational environments within which we teach. (64)

We echo their call for a critical perspective on the use of computers in composition. We suggest, however, that any such critical perspective must acknowledge that computers are not a simple additive element in the compositional mix; they are revolutionary. Although that revolution may not be fully realizable at this precise historical moment, our responsibility to the future is such that we must endeavor to create the conditions within which that revolution can animate and transform our classrooms and our pedagogies.

We suggest that in order to facilitate this revolution we must view the computer as a transformer of composition, not as an addition to composition. Instead of seeing the computer as the only technology with which composition ought to be concerned, we wish to show that only when other contemporary media-- television, video, photography, music, and so forth--are considered, and the notion of a "text" broadened to include everything from conventional essays, to paintings, photographs, videos, and hybrids that we have yet to imagine, can "computer composition" really become a living discipline in an academy that responds seriously to the lives its students live. If we believe in literacy as the condition of a meaningful and engaged life, our notions of what counts for literacy need to expand. We do not argue that "writing" as we know it will pass out of the composition class. We argue that our students must be empowered to think critically about the commercials, news, and music videos they consume, and about the videos they will compose, and the versions of reality those media will represent and shape. Further, we argue that to be genuinely empowered composers, our students must not only think about media; they must write about it, criticize it, edit it, and create it.

William Wright has written that "Unfortunately, some schools, in their push to get some equipment, are letting companies 'give' them television sets and VCRs if they agree to show students news highlights. Students stare passively at images--'news' which is interspersed with commercials for such items as soft drinks and expensive athletic shoes" (112). Although Wright is anxious to integrate computers into the curriculum, as he makes clear in his essay, he nonetheless reveals an attitude toward other forms of technology that is less laudatory. Many of us will recognize, and perhaps even sympathize with, Wright's complaint that watching television, even television connected to VCRs, is a passive activity. On the other hand, most of us are anxious to view looking at a computer screen, especially a computer screen connected to a keyboard, as essentially active. Television, on the other hand, even when mediated through various reproductive equipment--VCRs, camcorders, and remote controls--is thought to be a fundamentally passive form of entertainment. To a somewhat lesser extent, other technologies--photographs, slides, audio tapes, movies, and so forth--are also thought to offer fundamentally passive experiences.

We suggest that such media are neither passive nor active. There is nothing inherently passive in television, though the language that we use to describe the activity--"watching"--and the fact that watchers typically sit--"couch potatoes"--reinforces a view of video as passive. But this view cannot withstand the introduction of interactivity, or the concomitant awareness that all "watching" is a form of meaning making. The corollary of the realization that television is not inherently passive is, at least for us, the realization that as educators we have typically disdained television as passive without dealing with its very clearly active potential. Even Wright seems to realize that television is not really passive. As he notes, television's apparent “passivity" is transformed into the power to sell-shoes, cereal, cars, indeed everything that television does sell. Thus, there need be nothing passive about watching television.

Once we are divested of the belief that there are active technologies that are "good" and passive technologies that are "bad," we are free to begin to think about computers and composition in a different frame. Our pedagogics can become attuned to technology as an element in a meaning-making process. We argue that these exclusive attitudes should begin to give way as the computer redefines what is now a gap between various technological forms, bringing computer, television, VCR, photograph, painting, and an ever-broadening range of other forms of composition closer and closer together, making them more and more amenable to an understanding shaped by the medium of cyberspace, virtuality, or whatever name is given to the space in which computers transform media from manifestly physical "objects" into digitized bits.

Janet Eldred and Ron Fortune write that "Metaphors are the handiest--and best--tools we have to define and make the virtual age" (72). The process of digitization serves as a useful metaphor, since technically all such digital information, before recoded, is similar. As a result, the medium of what will become a written word is no different than the medium of what will become that same word spoken, sung, painted, or acted out. As this similarity extends beyond technical discourse to a more common discourse, the implications extend accordingly. What we now think of as "multi-media" will eventually not be multi-media at all, but will instead be one, single "unimedia" or medium. For example, current distinctions between the written text and the video text, which exist now as a result of the distinctly different technologies necessary to each, will become so seamless as to be no distinctions at all. As a result, the more multi-media exists, the less "multi-" the medium becomes.

Hawisher and Le Blanc usefully anticipate this power of the computer in the preface to Re-Imagining, when they write "We might need to talk about ‘scanning' graphics and 'importing' video into hypermedia documents to make our writing more visually appealing and effective for the readers of our virtual texts" (xv). As this line makes clear, however, the power of the computer to transform "discursive" practices is always seen in terms of its relation to writing, and other modes or genres of technology--graphics and video in this example--become useful to the extent that the computer can transform graphics or video into bits that can be incorporated into writing.

What disappears along with the seams of these once different media are passivitv and the stigma that once applied to those supposedly passive media. Since the computer transforms so-called passive media into active media, to separate some forms of text, such as television, from others, such as writing, limits what we now term multi-media from becoming the type of inclusive and eventually inseparable medium that we predict. The more "multi-," the more useful, present, and empowering the resulting medium will have to be.

Our assertion that multi-media will give way to a single composite medium looks forward to a moment that has yet to arrive. So, in the short- term, we are left trying to arrive at pedagogics that anticipate and facilitate such an eventuality and provide the necessary technology of transition. Allow us here to sketch what such a pedagogy might consider and how it might be incorporated into our classrooms.

We believe that computer composition pedagogy must begin with an articulation of the ways students already make meaning with and through technologies. A metaphor that we have found useful in terms of our continued "re-imagining" is that of "collage." The architecture of the computer itself suggests a kind of "collage"--the convocation of a "screen," or television, or "monitor," a keyboard, a disk drive or drives, and the box that holds the mystery that is a computer. This architecture models a computer composition pedagogy in which the meanings we attach to the pieces are shaped by their relation to the idea of a computer. We propose a techno-sampling or collaging as the first step in a pedagogy that would seek to braid together all of the multiple ways we now have to interact with, and be acted upon by, the world.

Even in the absence of computer hardware, we can import the possibilities that the computer makes ready. Certainly, the beginnings of such a strategy will be primitive. We can, for example, encourage our students to experiment with multiple media or to compose entirely in a non-traditional medium. We can accept a song with an accompanying written text. Or, more boldly, we can accept a song with no supporting text. The earliest examples of such hybrids may still be paper-bound. One recent example from an advanced composition student included a color laser copy of a "painting" as the introductory paragraph of the text. But, on the whole, this text was still stapled together, and was still mostly a conventional paper. Other pioneering examples from the same course are not paper-bound, but are even by current standards clumsily juxtaposed against tradition-the student introducing a paper who must first lug all of his musical equipment into the computer room, for example. What matters most, however, is that we invite our students to think, to read, and to compose across the whole range of media that  make up their (and our) daily lives.

William Gibson's recent computer artwork Agrippa offers several intriguing possibilities for the construction of a computer composition pedagogy that demonstrates the possibilities of collage. Its status as one of the most well-known electronic texts, reviewed in the Village Voice and The New York Times puts it tantalizingly close to the edge of the virtual or cyberspaceage. Gibson's use of the fiction of a photograph album to structure his electronic text gives Agippa the contour that we have just been sketching. Gibson's poem begins

The poem continues as a meditation on the labeled photographs that Gibson or his narrator finds in his father's photograph album--Agrippa. The experience of this old photograph album structures the autobiography, or one possible autobiography, of the narrator. At one level the poem is the hippest of cyber artifacts, existing only on self-consuming software that limits each reader to one reading of the text--banishing all other "readings" of the poem to memories as fragile as the decaying photograph album that originally elicited them.

Gibson's use of the photograph album already suggests the beginning of a composition class that is given over to thinking about the way technology shapes the memories, histories, and lives of our students and ourselves. We might easily follow Gibson into photograph albums of our own, even into "essays" that find their occasion and form in photography, video, sound, or combinations of these media that we can only begin to imagine. Unlike a pedagogy that focuses exclusively on the computer, a pedagogy that situates the computer in a technological context can tap the students' own experiences with the construction of meaning from a variety of technologies that might include everything from pictorial narratives like those suggested by Gibson's Agrippa to videos, digital sound tracks, and hypermedia projects.

Such a pedagogy proceeds from the lived experiences of our students and encourages our students to reflect upon the ways they shape the realities they live. This fact alone is enough to recommend such an approach to us, but in addition such a pedagogy facilitates the critical awareness for which Hawisher and Selfe call. At the same time, such a re-imagining allows our technology to at once serve and inspire our machine dreams.

In fourth grade, an assignment one of the present authors and his classmates shared was to take our life-sized black construction paper silhouettes and decorate them so as to represent our minds and our lives. The results were, and had to be, collages--collages consisting of everything from past worksheets to magazine clippings. And, through the technology of scissors and paper, the results did indeed "[bear] a relationship to any two minutes of who or where [we were]" (Coles 18). Now, decades later, the academy needs to make similarly bold and inclusive use of its available technology. To empower our students, we need to claim the metaphors of collage--of multi-media and its emerging medium-so that our writers can advance as composers.