SMEP #10: Reflections and a Final Question

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed the SMEP project. I think utilizing different mediums to express thought forces writers to adapt to the affordances and constraints of each medium, which in turn helps to develop writing ability across genres. For example, social media sites are often used to write personal narratives or short user-centered posts, such as their likes and dislikes, but a platform like Twitter can also be used to express serious thoughts and questions about a field of interest. Therefore, a user can engage in the genre of academic writing through the medium of Twitter while simultaneously using the site as a means to express personal narrative. Of course, again using Twitter as an example, the user must find a way to adapt their approach to writing in a particular genre to the limitations imposed by the medium; in this case, 140 characters. One of the most beneficial affordances of composing through Twitter seems to be the ways in which it allows the user to brainstorm. Having only recently begun studies in rhetoric and composition, there were many gaps in my knowledge, and I had several questions for which I sought to find answers. Twitter allowed me to post these questions as they occurred to me, generating further questions as I engaged in the act of writing, and they remained on my wall as I a guiding reminder of what to look for as I continued to read scholarship in the field.

As I thought about using social media sites as platforms for composition, I began wondering to what extent we, as teachers, must pair multimodal writing instruction with user “guides” for using these different mediums. For example, if the goal is to create a website as a composition, isn’t there a need to pair the project with literature concerning website design, and how to go about actually “making” a website, outside of the content? We did so for our coursework in 5010, reading much about what makes a website effective, and it seemed to me to be a natural pairing.

However, doesn’t this need to pair writing instruction with platform instruction pose interesting questions for the teaching of writing? If literacy continues to be at the heart of the academic institution, and if first year writing programs continue to be a mainstay of the university, doesn’t it require composition pedagogy to branch out in such a way that the class also becomes, to some degree, a “how-to” course in the use of disparate platforms? I think this question extends beyond social media: how do we teach someone to put together visual rhetoric? Do we need to incorporate art instruction in that event? Isn’t that what art classes are for?

I guess, at this point, I’m just speculating, using this blog as another means by which I can brainstorm, but it’s got me thinking about where to draw a line, or if even a line needs to be drawn. If we embrace multimodal composition,  at what point should we cease pairing platform instruction with writing instruction?

SMEP #9: Hacking as a Unique Constraint of Social Media Compositions

It is pretty well known, at least to me and my two followers, that I’ve been using Twitter as the social media platform through which I’ve attempted to establish my own ethos as a serious rhet/comper. I’ve been posting my thoughts, ideas, and questions about the field through Twitter, and have used the blog here as both a means by which I might reflect on the use of Twitter as a mode of composition, but also as a place in which I can extrapolate on ideas that were otherwise relegated to 140 characters. While I feel the project is going well, I was beginning to struggle with forming new questions/thoughts to tweet over the weekend.

Though I didn’t end up posting anything on either Saturday or Sunday, I was really thinking about what more I’d like to say/do on Twitter, because I felt like I had run out of fresh ideas, and then I got an email. It was from Twitter, notifying me that a strange post originating out of Texas had appeared on my wall. Curious, I took a peek, and discovered that my account had indeed been hacked and someone had posted some link or advertisement for a product on my account. I deleted the tweet and updated my password and wasn’t really all that concerned, but it did raise an interesting question: isn’t hacking a unique constraint of using social media as a platform for composition?

I don’t know how the whole hacking thing works, really. I’m not sure if it’s an actually person or some program or virus that generates content upon gaining access, but I wonder why someone/something would bother hacking the Twitter account  of a user with all of two followers.

However, let’s say I didn’t have only two followers. Let’s say I had a thousand or more. Let’s say I’m super famous and everyone is waiting to hear my next thought (which would be weird, but it’s okay; this is hypothetical). If that’s the scenario and my account is hacked, suddenly a large group of people are following links or potentially buying products that they think I’ve endorsed when I haven’t.

Worse than that, though, is the idea that hacking could compromise my ethos if I’m truly looking to use social media to compose and to “brand” myself a serious scholar. The hacker seemingly posted an innocuous ad, but what if it had been worse? Something socially unacceptable? If I were an established scholar using Twitter as a means of composition, couldn’t hacking potentially discredit the work that I’ve done?

It seems to me that hacking must be unique to social media (or digital technologies or networks) because it’s not possible to “hack” an alphabetic text…is it? There are unique constraints to print-based mediums as well, to be sure, but there’s something sinister about an unknown entity posing as you, stealing your identity, and using that stolen identity as a platform to further their own agenda.

In that way, doesn’t one also have to consider cyber-security when establishing an online persona?

SMEP #8: Affective Mapping

I realize, after reviewing previous blog posts and tweets, that I’ve touched on the topic of mapping the history of rhet/comp as a discipline through a kind of affective lens, but I’m not sure I fully articulated what I meant. I added a few new tweets in an attempt to succinctly draw out this map, but was once again reminded of the affordances and constraints of Twitter as medium for composition: 140 characters is a great way to force communication into concise statements, but it doesn’t necessarily allow for a thorough extrapolation of complex topics. Of course, I suppose one could reply endlessly to a single tweet, thus negating the 140 character limit, but doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose? If I’m resistant to reading long, blocky paragraphs of text, why would I then be inclined to read a Twitter conversation equivalent to a long paragraph if it is only differentiated from the paragraph by chunks of 140 characters? It would be an interesting study–to investigate the preference of a general readership, asking or surveying a group to see which style they’d be more inclined to engage with–but I digress; I’d like to use this space to further extrapolate my tweets concerning the affective mapping of rhetoric.

The objective of the “new” American university, historically, has always been literacy. Composition courses have continued to be a mainstay for undergraduate education, particular in the form of first-year-writing programs for incoming students. It’s problematic to over simplify the purpose of these programs, but in a general sense, the goal is to develop literacy for the purpose of transferability; a student should be able to read and write and thus effectively communicate in the world outside the institution. From a utilitarian perspective, this goal would allow for students to enter the working economy well-equipped to become productive members of any particular industry. However, accepting this generalization requires problematizing the curricula of composition programs. If the purpose is indeed to develop literacy for real-world application, we must attend to the ever-present ideological and cultural shifts of society. In other words, as were are continuously introducing new modes of communication and are required to have knowledge of these systems, we must address these needs in composition pedagogy. For example, digital media and social networks allow for the distribution and circulation of ideas, images, sound, etc., and often we must engage with these modes of communication as members of a larger workforce. Therefore, addressing the multiliterate nature of our world requires multimodal instruction in composition studies. If we follow this line of logic, then courses in composition cannot be defined as epistemological, they must be considered ontological. As social beings, communication is essential to our existence, so how could we not look at the study of communication as an ontology? Further, if communication is at the heart of our being, mustn’t also our emotionally affective responses to the world become a part of this ontology? The reason a multimodal approach to the multiliterate world works is because we learn to understand and engage with the world in ways that promote positive affects between us as people.

Viewing the history and contemporary practice of rhet/comp as a discipline through a lens that attends to this discussion provides a deeper understanding of the ways in which academic disciplines are formed and maintained. In my mind, it also provides instruction on the ways in which we might approach pedagogical reform from the locus of affect.

SMEP #7: The Point of Composition

Reflecting on my Twitter posts this week, and also upon the research I’ve been doing, I’d like to attempt to further discuss/answer the question that arose: what’s the point in composition class?

Historically–and really, very much in a contemporary sense–literacy has always been the objective of writing courses in higher education. However, the definition of literacy has been challenged throughout the discipline’s history.

As living beings, we are always communicating through a variety of means. Communication occurs not just in our speech or writing, but also when we view images, when we taste, smell, and feel. Occasionally, we even communicate in silence; I hate to make assumptions, but I think this one is fairly safe: haven’t we all been in a “fight” with someone we’re close with, and without being told, or even necessarily “viewing” that person’s body language, we “know” that something’s wrong? Considering the variety of modes of communication, and the nature of being in the world, how can we define literacy as just those skills that pertain to reading and writing? If we interpret reading and writing as modes of communication, wouldn’t that necessitate the need for multiliteracies and by proxy, a need to introduce multimodal composition?

Perhaps in part because of these questions, writers like Jody Shipka and The New London Group (et. al) have wrote extensively on this topic. However, outside academia, I wonder how the general public, how students would respond to the question: what’s the point in composition?

To me, writing class is the one unique locus in which we can teach and examine the nature of being. To be is to communicate, to some degree, and a class without rigid disciplinary criteria makes for a space in which students can be educated about the nature of being in the world in which they live. If you follow this line of reasoning, composition becomes an ontology, not just some kind of discursive epistemology, and embracing its nature as such opens the possibilities for education and learning. However, I’m not sure the general public or even students, honestly, are sold on this argument. Largely, I’d guess that they mostly consider composition as place in which the learning of where-to-put-the-period and other mechanics should be taught.

SMEP #6: Moving Beyond Mapping

Initially, my goal for SMEP was to use Twitter to develop my ethos as a serious scholar in the field of rhetoric and composition. In order to do so, I thought it would be useful to use Twitter to pose questions about the field, both in general and as they related to my own particular interests, as I gradually expanded my knowledge of the discipline through coursework and independent study. However, what was initially a fairly broad objective has become one with a more specified focus; having obtained an elementary understanding of its history, I find myself moving beyond a general mapping of the field and am now wondering about the ways in which multimodalities and affect theory interact in both the history of rhet/comp as a discipline, and within its current discourse.

Jody Shipka’s A Composition Made Whole poses questions that I’ve found myself contemplating as I delve further into the study of multimodal composition. In a previous blog post–or maybe in a document I uploaded to Blackboard–I thought about how often, it seems, scholarly discourse often conflates multimodality with digital technology, or rather, some kind of screen-based mediation. Often, the site of this conflation is social media, which makes a degree of sense; if we consider audio, visual, and alphabetic texts equal representations of compositions, the task of distributing these texts requires, at least broadly, a reliance on social media platforms that can accomplish the task of distribution. For example, if I compose a visual argument, perhaps a video, social media provides multiple platforms through which I can distribute the content; I can post my video composition to YouTube, share it on Facebook, or even post it to my Twitter page.

However, I agree with Shipka in the sense that composition is always already multimodal. When we think of the term technology, we often think of digital technology, but technology is a much broader term that resists encasement within a specific locus such as the digital. In a classroom, as Shipka points out, there is a variety of non-digital technologies at work: light bulbs, blackboards, ceiling tiles, etc. If we consider the space in which we write as something that contributes to the writing process–and for my purpose, that space is the classroom–we must consider the various technologies within the classroom that influence us as writers, thus impacting, to varying degrees, the content of our writing.

Furthermore, if we accept the classroom as a site for non-digital multimodality, mustn’t we consider the process of writing a product of an affective state? If we are influenced by the lighting, the smells, the interaction with other students and the instructor, and that influence translates into our writing, there must be some kind of affect produced by the space in which we write, thus causing me to wonder how things like the act of writing, multimodalities, and affect are dependent on each other.

Perhaps I haven’t clearly articulated my thoughts here, but that’s kind of the point in this project, right? It’s a means by which to develop ethos, and by extension, the questions we seek to answer. There’s a sort of funneling happening here. What became broad is now more specified, and though still vague, the skeleton of something is beginning to emerge.

SMEP #5: The Advent of Frustration

It’s happened. I’ve become frustrated with Twitter.

The advent of frustration is in itself unsurprising; my online persona is anything but notable, mostly because I rarely use social media, and this lack of use is largely due to the rigor of simply having the account to begin with. An online profile via any of the social media platforms requires a degree of maintenance, and the degree to which you maintain your account seemingly reflects the depths of your commitment to your online profile. For many, I’m sure, this act of maintenance is entertaining and pleasurable, but to me, it only represents the addition of an item to an already lengthy daily to-do list. I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: for me, online profile maintenance is the equivalent of making my daughter eat her vegetables; it’s annoying, but I know I should probably do it at least once a day.

I currently have three different email accounts: a Gmail account for general/personal use, a Wayne State email that, in my head, is the important email account, and an account with the school at which I teach. I understand how mail forwarding works, in theory, but I prefer to keep them all separate and check up on them routinely. It’s something I enjoy, probably because I’m always excited to get an email from a colleague or student. I wonder, though, why it is that I get so burnt-out by social media, and not email? Couldn’t we call email a type of social media? Or, if not, at least a cousin to social media?

To be clear, I’m enjoying my Twitter use for the purposes of SMEP because it allows me a place to pose questions about research topics of interest, but the more I use Twitter the less if feels like an assignment and instead becomes more like a way-of-life. When social media becomes a way of life, I feel myself growing so terribly exhausted. Why might that be? Funny that it doesn’t feel exhausting when I’m doing as part of course work. But when I forget that it is course work, I grow weary of the commitment.

All that said, I continued in developing my ethos as a serious scholar via Twitter posts that ask questions about finding a balancing between theory/professionalization and teaching methodology. It seems that if we become too absorbed in our own theories and professionalization, we are susceptible to foregoing continued development of our teaching methodologies. These two aspects of academic life are equally important, and I think it’s healthy to remind myself that I need to frequently (re)attune to the craft of teaching as well as my own professionalization.

 

SMEP #4: The Fear of Professionalization

I posted three or four tweets earlier today about a class I’d taught that hadn’t gone so well, and how it acted as a self-reminder that I don’t simply want to professionalize myself (i.e., develop myself into a serious rhet/comp scholar), I want to be an effective teacher.I don’t think the two goals are by any means interchangeable. In fact, I think the former often works as a detriment to the latter. Let me elaborate more fully (this blog is great for expanding thoughts generated on Twitter):

I teach two composition courses at a local community college. One section meets twice a week on T/Th, and the other meets once a week on Fridays. I always really enjoy my Friday class, mainly because they are all pretty serious students who are easy to engage in conversation, and they are a little less concerned with having a grand, predetermined structure/schedule for the course. This fits my own personality, both because I tend not to worry about scheduling or looking too far ahead, and because I’m trying to apply theories of ecological pedagogy to an actual course.

I really enjoy my T/Th students as well, but they present interesting challenges. They’ve pretty much collectively agreed that they need a course schedule, a road map for the rest of the semester. I’m hesitant to do this, not because I don’t want them to feel comfortable, but because I’m trying to maintain flexibility in both course content and classroom discussions. The class, in a general sort of way, also seems a bit less dedicated than their Friday counterparts. Two weeks in, and issues of attendance and failure to complete simple assignments have already been pervasive. They’re also a bit harder to engage in conversation.

All of this hit home this morning, and so I tweeted about it after class. The problem is not theirs; it’s mine. I’ve recently been extremely focused on my own studies, really trying to present myself as a serious academic, and in doing so I’ve been spending a lot of time theorizing and thinking about what kind of argument I’d like to eventually make about the field of rhet/comp. The class this morning didn’t go well (from my perspective), and it reminded me that aspiring to do something reputable as a scholar shouldn’t mean sacrificing my ability to teach. Teaching involves, at the very least, a special kind of attunement to each course. When things are easy, it’s not difficult to go with the flow and let the class proceed while you’re otherwise preoccupied with your own research endeavors. It takes a class like today’s to remind you (and by you, I mean me, of course) that you have to find a balance between the two (professionalization of self/being an effective teacher) in order for them both to be realized.

SMEP #3: How is the development of ethos evaluated, and by whom?

I graduated from Fordham University in 2015 with a Master’s degree in literature; by 2016, I’d moved from New York back to Michigan, had begun doctoral coursework at Wayne State, and had switched my sub-discipline from literature to rhetoric and composition. Looking back, it was a complete overhaul in both my personal and academic life, and though I speak about it as if it all happened so long ago, here, we’re only a month into 2017. I guess my point is this: a lot has changed in a short amount of time. But that’s okay. I like change and I like keeping busy, and though saying so might sound trite and cliche, I love embracing new challenges.

I looked at this SMEP project as a legitimate way to develop myself (internally and externally) as a serious rhet/comper. One of my projects this semester is to essentially “catch up” on the history of composition studies and the current topics in its discourse, and I thought my SMEP project on Twitter could help articulate points of interest while also communicating my growing knowledge of the field (and the growth, so far, has been nice, but anything but grand; it’s like a seed that has so far only pushed out the beginnings of a stalk).

I’ve enjoyed the experience so far, but looking back on my Twitter posts, I reminded myself of my purpose: I’m using Twitter to develop my ethos as a serious academic. The reminder caused me to pause for a moment and wonder whether I’d achieved anything to the effect so far. I like the sound of my posts (and throwing in that quote from Berlin might reflect to the growth I mentioned previously), but is there a means by which the development of ethos can be measured? Internally, I feel like I’ve made progress–and that’s exciting–but does ethos require more than just an internal evaluation? Is it dependent on the evaluation of others who’ve already achieved a similar kind of credibility?

Traditional methods of establishing oneself as an authority in an academic field require publishing, having those publications reviewed by peers, and accepted into an academic cannon. Can Twitter subvert that process? If established academics follow me on Twitter, and accept me as “one of them”–which sounds rather cult-ish, doesn’t it?–have I successfully established ethos?

Social Media and Immediacy: The Audience is There Before You Are

After discussing the affordances and constraints of alphabetic, visual, and audio compositions, my thoughts turned to social media. Without thinking about one website or service in particular, social media, in general, represents a unique space in which all three of the aforementioned modalities can potentially coexist. For example, I can generate a series of tweets on Twitter to tell a narrative, or make an argument, and within each tweet there is a degree of flexibility with regard to modality. If I’m describing my trip to the beach, I can begin the description with an alphabetic text in one tweet, followed by an image in a subsequent tweet, and I can round-out the story by including a final tweet with a short video or audio clip. It is therefore possible for me to share a story with my followers using not one but three modes of composition, a seemingly obvious affordance particular to social media—I’m not sure we’ve found a way to put audio or video clips into traditional, bounded texts just yet. However, while social media may provide a space in which we can create multimodal compositions and therefore be allowed to expand our understandings of what a composition is and the means by which we produce them, it comes with a potentially costly constraint: the immediacy of the audience. In their essay, “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience,” Alice Marwick and danah boyd make a claim that every “participant in a communicative act has an imagined audience” (115). It’s a fairly acceptable statement, isn’t it? The writer, in addition to writing for him/her self, is writing for an intended audience; the film maker, much like the writer, has an audience in mind; and so on. However, the immediacy of the audience is a problem unique to social media. When an academic writes an essay for publication in a reputable scholarly journal, the writer is very much cognizant of the scholarly audience to which he/she writes. However, the publishing process for traditional texts is lengthy, and the writer’s words will likely not meet their audience until long after the essay has been written. This, at least to a relative degree, is an affordance of traditional alphabetic text; the writer can write without facing immediate criticism upon completion. Conversely, social media sites like Twitter allow for a thought to be expressed, read, disseminated, critiqued, argued against, supported, laughed at, and lauded all in the time it would take the writer to wait in line at Starbucks (unless you’re like me and have only two followers, in which case, all of this would happen before the guy with the skinny latte in front of you finishes placing his order). The audience is already (t)here. The audience is at your fingertips. When compared to the length of time it takes to publish a traditional text, the immediacy of the audience is certainly a constraint as awareness to the fact will influence the manner in which the composer composes. Perhaps counterintuitively, there’s actually more at risk expressing and composing through social media, simply because the composer doesn’t always have time to evaluate and critique their own work prior to releasing it to the digital masses.

However, there is a context in which the immediacy of the audience might become an affordance. Marwick and boyd claim that “Twitter flattens multiple audiences into one,” in a strategy known as “context collapse” which makes it “virtually impossible for Twitter users to account for their potential audience” (117-22). In the event that the audience becomes so diverse, so populous that its sheer magnitude makes them invisible, the composer on social media might then be allowed to pretend there isn’t, in fact, any audience at all.

 

SMEP #2: Upon Further Reflection…

I’ve added three more posts to my Twitter page–which, incidentally, has a grand total of two followers–that complicate my question of ecological pedagogy. I’m finding that the Twitter format is actually really conducive to creating a line of questioning, because, as I mentioned previously, the character limit forces the writer to be brief, and as a result, the questions just keep popping out. It would be interesting to track the quality of those questions as I mosey along this digital road; I wonder if the rapid-generation Twitter enables correlates to a gradual decline in the quality of content. I guess I’ll find out.

Back to the questions, though. In previous posts I wondered whether a spontaneous, ecological pedagogy is possible. What might it look like? I’m not sure, and I wonder if such a thing can even truly exist in its purest form; a truly ecological pedagogy would be something created in-the-moment, and could not be premeditated. Therefore, the writing of class schedules, assignments, even lecture preparation would go against a purely adaptive, spontaneous pedagogy. Is it possible to show up to a composition class on day one without even a piece of paper in hand, and simply create the method while performing the method? Does thinking about an ecological pedagogy require such a practice, or can there be degrees of preparation/spontaneity? Do the two necessarily have to compete? Additionally, if we want to investigate such a “purely spontaneous, ecological mode of teaching,” and are able to prove, show, and demonstrate the benefits of such a practice, how can we then turn it into teachable content? It seems like theory that is put into practice often becomes dogmatic, which would seem to be the binary of ecology; dogma doesn’t adapt, it just is.

And here, I’m rambling. It’s a fun topic, though, and I certainly don’t know nearly enough about my field to provide any confident answers to these questions–yet–but using Twitter to think/question aloud (insofar as I use the term to describe my digital voice) has been a lot of fun so far.