The Work of Five Principles in Sorapure's Article and Some Inquiries

Following Manovich’s order of writing, I read the work of the five principles with more of a technological approach at first. Contrary to this sense, Sorapure’s article enables me to experience them in separate as well as combined ways simultaneously via the concrete examples she includes. Some examples work well in illustrating the specific principle they are subordinated to, however, they also embody other features of new media at the same time. For instance, the way in which the text and fragmented pictures are arranged to embody numerical representation in that section opens possibility of the order of reading as clicking on the images with random turns can alter it. Same connection with variability applies to the assembled texts for the modularity and the automation sections as well. The fourth and the fifth principles (variability and transcoding) thus appear to be ultimate features of new media that are likely interwoven into most new media composition. Exploring the creativity and interactivity that new media brings to writing and thinking in the classroom is illustrated as highly valuable via Sorapure’s assemblage of real examples. In this sense, Sorapure explains well how Manovich’s approach of defining the new media—“focusing on the materiality of new media by focusing on the influence of the computer”—is an efficient one. It seems as if writing teachers can anticipate a new era in cultivating students’ creativity, thinking, and ethos as writers within the domain of new media and technology.

I can’t help thinking that Manovich and Sorapure seem to reinforce deconstruction and separateness by looking at how multimodal, multi-genre, multi-tools, and various signs and semiotics play out in new media composing. First, as being echoed by Tracy Banks’s example in the variability section, the meaning of written text is unstable, and interpretation may vary as the text being tore and placed differently. There are no fixed meanings, and based on the many examples provided in the article, those students’ projects represent both texts and images as “a fabric of traces” that are able to build “a differential network”—just as how Derrida spoke of texts and construction of texts (Though Tracy describes her work as an illustration of “contexuality”). Students find more tools and medium (images, movie-maker, flash, songs) to play with in delivery of meaning. In this sense, they find more linkage with readers “out there.” By consuming the various linkage in enhancing interactivity, it is also likely that students are building more and more interfaces among the text, the medium, and their audience. This leads to my second inquiry—if encouraging new media composition emphasizes the separateness of various elements of a piece of “writing.” Thinking back to students’ projects in Sorapure’s article, what they invest in, in general, is linking texts with images in order to reach different rhetorical effects. It seems to accept writing with slogans for most of the time, and it underlines what Grusin and Bolter refer to as hypermediacy in Writing Space (, the notion that writers emphasizes the reader’s choices through the process of linking) (185-86). From this perspective, Sorapure’s article draw back the question of what is teaching writing to the picture. In my opinion, the new media writing displayed in the article works for the teaching of literacy specifically, while teaching writing is certainly more than that.