"Toward New Media Texts" Response

As I was reading this piece and my mind was flish-flashing between the text and my personal associations with the symbols before me, I think I stumbled into one of the primary reasons I am reluctant to accept the idea of new media and its necessity in the classroom. Selfe seems to associate the visual very strongly with new media, and in this association lies my argument. If the new media students are learning to read is visual (or aural, or touch, or even all three), then they must also respond to that reading visually. Responding textually to the visual media would presuppose a divergence in language. If students are still placed in the realm of textual response although they are being taught to “read” the visual media, then within the teacher herself there exists pedagogical dishonesty. Suppose the teacher does encourage her students to respond only in the mode they are “reading.” How will the teacher “read” their responses? Consider the cliché: A picture says a thousand words. Let’s add to that: A picture has infinite associations. This is not to suggest that alphabetic language does not possess this same quality. Instead, it is to suggest that the teacher would be utterly incapable of understanding the student’s imagistic response—too many associations exist. Consider how two individuals respond completely differently in their interpretations of a painting. In the visual realm, there is a sense of implicit meaning that only words (spoken or written) can make explicit. This is where the limitations of a visual media lie. The preachers of new media argue that the visual realm is one in which students must become literate, yet their teachers are not even literate to it. In fact, no one is truly literate to it—not fully, not the way we are with alphabetic, where we can respond to written text with written text. The entire English-speaking population would have to endure a mental overhaul that caused them to interpret the visual realm on one level plane with constancy (the constancy currently afforded by the graphic letter). If no one is literate in this way, why should we make the students literate in this way? Moreover, how can we make the students literate to it?

In further support of my argument that visual media cannot be “read” the way written language can be read are Shipka’s assignments. She allows her students to respond in any mode the students see fit, but the students must also include a “Statement of Goals and Choices” written with alphabetic characters. Shipka recognizes her inability to completely “read” what work the students are doing with the visual work alone. She therefore subjects them to producing an alphabetic text that clarifies the work’s purposes.

I do not deny that students must know how to read web pages or billboards or newspaper ads to succeed in our highly visual world, but these are all things that they will learn on their own or that can be taught much more quickly than devoting an entire course to the purpose. Written language, on the other hand, spans all of the English-speaking community. Because of this universality of understanding the explicit meaning of written language, understanding how to communicate any idea through written language to any audience should be the priority of a writing instructor.