Multimodal Composition; The QuestionsThat Modern Composition Scholars Face

For this assignment we were asked to take first-hand experience on what it means to compose in a multimodal format. We were asked to do so in groups of three people to see how effective this was for collaboratively composing. Our group chose to compose narratives about our personal intellectual coming of age. We did so by using Google drive as our primary mode of composition.

            Overall I found this method to be fairly ineffective in it’s incentive for collaboration, as my group dropped the ball with our lack of collaboration. This wasn’t Google Drive’s fault; rather it was our own misinterpretation of our assignment. However, Google drive did prompt some form of cohesiveness throughout our project.

Since our group wrote independent narratives, the effect of writing on a shared mode of composing (Google Drive) prompted us to read each other’s short essays. What we concluded was that we all wrote about a similar theme after reading each other’s essays. After this first exploration of “collaborative” composing on a shared e-forum, I found that this style of collaboration has many pros and cons.

The pros; Google Drive made for any easy to write, Microsoft Word styled format. You can track your revisions with hardly any effort and it is very easy to edit. That is a major advantage for collaborative composition as you can easily edit others or reverse others edits that you don’t approve of. The cons. Virtually composing lead to several communication gaps, which inevitably led to our collaborative demise. Communicating virtually isn’t entirely reliable as you are never sure when the other person may have time to respond. When you couple that with the impending due date of an assignment it causes people, as it did our group, to rush over directives to ensure the assignment is completed on time.  I feel like w also didn’t oppose to anybody else’s ideas and I fear that we may have conceded in sense to ideas that we may have been able to more effectively voice our concerns over in person.

            All in all, I found this to be a pioneering mode of composing and I feel that in society or at least in the world of academia, we will begin composing in these new virtual modes more often. As Susan Delagrange opens on the first page in her intentionally ironic e-novel Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in Digital World, “We stand at a unique moment of convergence in the humanities, when scholars in Digital Media Studies have the expertise and the opportunity to set the tone to influence the direction of digital standards and practices for years to come.” What an exciting moment in composition that this makes for.

Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepard wrote an essay called Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog, where they analyze blogging as a genre. They don’t question much of whether or not the blog itself is functioning as it’s own genre; rather they assume the blog a genre and answer questions upon that assumption. That action alone functions as a milestone in composition scholarship. This is because by now assuming blog as a genre, we no longer question the validity, impact or relevance of these forms of composing. The have their own styles, standards, formal features and serve a pragmatic action. For blogs specifically, Miller and Shepard state, “Self-expression is a salient theme among some bloggers.”(Pg. 9). This shows how multifaceted these new genres are, because clearly blogs have other social actions and pragmatic actions. For example, they serve as an educational tool, because I am blogging right now in collegiate level curriculum.

This raises a simple question. How long can we deny these methods from common pedagogical approaches? Obviously some professors have incorporated new forms of multimodal composing but unfortunately this still seems to be a pioneering form of pedagogy. When computers were invented and deemed practical in most senses, it be came inevitable that society would use them to compose with. As a result, we integrated our school systems with computers and software in the hopes of improving education. Now we have furthered that progression by creating newer forms of composing. Forms that scholars like Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepard say that we cannot even deny as independent genres anymore. Yet, institutions and most of academia are slow in their acceptance of these new genres into their curriculum. 

For example, as illogical as it sounds, for the sake of making a point, say the genre of essay writing was just introduced into the world of composing. Essay writing serves a clear pragmatic purpose and needs to be taught. So we invented classes for that. We have essay and article technique classes, yet we offer very little for multimodal composing, or blogging. Essay writing is a phenomenal skill to possess because it shows informative and defined points. It helps people say what they want to say in a clear, cohesive manner. That being said, is virtual and multimodal composition not just as relevant and impactful in modern society? On page four of Blogging as a Social Action, Miller and Shepard quote Calvert's notion of voyeurism. A term which Calvert defines as "the consumption of revealing images for purposes of entertainment -- , through the means of the mass media and the internet".

This serves as ammunition for two points I would like to present in context to one another. The first point being that the majority of American citizens have some form of internet access and the second point being that it is often used for entertainment. Those two things being said; Does multimodal composition open the door to a never before breached realm of scholarship? That realm of scholarship being the ability to make it appealing to people outside of academia. Any attempt to make education more fun or interesting should be pounced on as quickly as possible. If these forms of composition can be more interesting to people, yet equally informative, then we need to integrate them into our curriculum as quickly as possible. 

As Katherine Hayles writes about in her essay Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes, there is a cognitive difference evolving in attention spans and multi-tasking in society. She hypothesizes in her introduction, "that we are in the midst of a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses challenges to education at all levels, including colleges and universities." She claims that younger generations require more stimuli to stay engaged and excel in multi-tasking, over deeper, more analytical thinking. If there's a chance that multimodal composition could bridge that gap by offering multiple stimuli to the reader, then how long can we deny it from our pedagogical approaches? 

These multimodal composing methods are now more relevant than traditional forms of compositing and we now must decide how we choose to accept that. Do we alienate them from scholarship and accept them as a more social form of composition, or do we incorporate them into scholarship? If there is anything we can draw from the research of other scholars into this matter, it is that the movement of multimodal composing is inevitable. We must now choose to accept or deny it.