Assessing the benefits and the challenges of a multimodal text, I arrive at the conclusion that it is more advantageous than not. As a forthcoming teacher, especially one who will strive to incorporate writing techniques within the classroom setting, involving a new and refreshing approach to rhetoric text without means of a computer is worth considering.
In Shipka’s critique, “Including, but Not Limited to, the Digital Composing Multimodal Texts”, she examines how students react to this particular method of a multimodal composition. Shipka notes that this type of framework entails students to attend to how language mediates communicative practice when combined with immobile representational systems. Within this task at hand, students record their target goal for their work and illustrate how the choices and strategies they utilized throughout the process either assisted or drastically altered their goals.
Considering Shipka’s two students, Katie and Adam, both needed a considerable amount of time to figure out the way they wanted to take on the task. Both were frustrated trying to figure out how to approach the multimodal assignment. One of the better suggestions was towards Katie. Shipka recommended to create a history about all the histories she did not attempt, meaning all of her false starts and stops. The brilliant idea proved to be solid and sound. Katie’s project was a wastebasket with all her crumpled up ideas on paper. The trash can was written all over (inside and out) with inspirational quotes and phrases such as, “Don’t give up.” I admire the idea that allows students this kind of freedom to break away from a typed document. I find it to be incredibly artistic with this outside the box approach.
Cordova elaborates on what it means to have a multimodality type of literacy with his essay, “Invention, Ethos, and New Media in the Rhetoric Classroom.” Meaning making, which is traditionally rhetoric, is stressed as not a linear system, but progressively more multimodal and interactive because of digital encounters. Cordova highlights three interrelated themes: ethos as a dwelling place can improve a pedagogy of multiliteracies inclined toward the practical side of designing redeeming social futures; relationships that bring to life the New London Group’s understanding of design of cultural society; a storyboard to enhance students’ understanding of multimodality.
Storyboards aim to rethink the meaning of being literate. As Cordova notes, technological modernization shapes our performance of life as well as learning. With this such technology, students construct an across-the-board visual representation of a narrative. These students benefit because they are given the opportunity to literally visualize instead of thinking as their assignment in a linear fashion. It also emphasizes the fragmentary nature of texts as well as the significance of the articulations drawn through each frame of the project. Additionally, it offers a scope of interpretation.
Although the storyboard may produce challenges, it still is an exceptional way to express oneself. Such challenges include: more coaching time in and out of the classroom as well as technological troubles. Yet, it gives a critical understanding of composition. As an up and coming ESL teacher, I know that storyboards are an excellent mode to learn a language. This can apply to native English speakers learning a second language. Listening and observing the way one produces a language is a supreme example of a revolutionary approaching to learning in addition to a new teaching method. Thus, if this is a remarkable tool for language, it is also noteworthy for literacy.

Continuing Donna Haraway’s concepts of a cybertype, Lisa Nakamura examines how race, ethnicity, and identity have been reshaped through cyberspace.  Haraway is quoted that she does not “know of any time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, and ‘class’. “

                Nakamura states that the Internet is a part of a complexity of multimedia globalization.  Western civilization, as referenced in an advertisement in the New York Times, has moved inside media.  We have substituted direct contact with people and nature for replicated versions on TV that are sponsored by major corporations.  This has spread globally and now has severe effects on cultural diversity.  The Internet produces a mental retraining that all cultures are alike.  Thus, it kills cultural diversity.

                Does the Internet create a monoculture?

                Chapter 2 asks if it is truthful to say no one can tell what race you are on the Internet.  Ideally, the Internet does not discriminate.  Even though we are hidden in cyberspace, race does show up in the language users employ.  Being a student of Stony Brook’s MA TESOL program, I have observed how those from countries such as South Korea and China use the English language.  But even if these internet users aren’t a second language learner, there are characteristics that are present within rhetoric that can shape one’s identity.

                Have you seen MTV’s show Catfish?  To explain the show, ‘lovers’ meet on chartrooms or Facebook and never get to talk to this person on the phone or see the person because of various excuses.  Sometimes, actually oftentimes, many people are duped on their once thought ‘lover’s’ identity.  Instead of being a female, they are male.  Instead of being a model, they are an overweight hermit (though that sounds funny, it’s the truth of the matter on the show).  So, people make assumptions about who they are speaking to on the Internet.  How do these imposters do it?  How do they convince the other party that they are who they claim to be?  In order to do this, they must manipulate their own language.  They must get inside the head of how they want to be perceived.  They would never reveal how they would normally get across their language.  Language identifies us.  Additionally, not only is language a way to dupe, but images as well.  Users get a hold of a whole different avatar to reel in their ‘bait’. 

                Another note that fascinated me is the default whiteness.  If one does not claim a race, they are then considered white.  There is much talk about identity tourism which is travel opportunities within cyberspace.  Thus, reconstituting what is travel.  One of the dangers of this type of travel is that it reduces nonwhite identity positions to a mask to hide behind.  One of the reasons nonwhite identities want to claim no race at all, which in turn defaults them as white, is simply stereotyping.  These identities want to be free from such assumptions.  With light to LambdaMOO, it is absurd to ask everyone to comply with real life standards.  It’s fantasy.  The diversification of roles opens up a thought-provoking detachment of race from the body and essentially questioning race as a category. 

                Why is race a choice in these fantasy games? If choosing a different race than one’s own, what are the negative elements one can face?  What other reasons do people choose a different identity aside from dodging stereotypes?  Do people do it to attract other identities in cyberspace (think Catfish)?

Cyborgs and Women

Haraway’s social-political article about cyborgs examines how biotechnology constructs our bodies in a male bias with innocence being violated.  Thus, Haraway creates a stir in many women who can be referred to as cyber feminists who seek alliance between machinery, new technology, and women.  She emphasizes that there is an optical illusion between science fiction and social reality.  People opposed to cyborgs, Haraway describes, aren’t as adaptable; cyborgs are at the purest form.  She continues that cyborgs are as difficult to sense materially as they are politically.  Haraway, who is a professor of the history of consciousness, says this invisibility is deadly cyborgs are about simulation.  The connection between human modern day realities and technology is so intimate that it is difficult to determine where we end as humans and begin as machines.

Cyborgs are oftentimes associated with fantasy, science fiction.  Yet, they have been around for about fifty years plus.  The first cyborg was a lab rat with a tiny osmotic pump that injected precisely controlled doses of chemicals implanted into its body.  Currently, we are very prone to cyborgs.  My own father can be considered a cyborg with having two replaced knees.  Haraway considers cyborgs to be, “information machines.”

“Wired: You are Cyborg”, an article by Hari Kunzro, breaks down Haraway’s scholarly language into applicable terms.  Kunzro even admits that Haraway’s concepts are indeed complicated.  Everyday there are interactions between humans and machines.  I’m doing it now as I type on my laptop; watch a movie on the flat screen TV; and at my side, my iPhone which is constantly informing me about e-mail, texts, and social media.  I will even count the light in the room as a technology, because it is.  Inside our bodies are networks with man-made materials like pharmaceutical drugs or products from agribusiness.

Haraway describes the world of feminism as complex.  She is not a feminist who seeks to be in unity with Mother Nature.  Instead, she searches a different kind of world filled with technological advances.  A cyborg, a hybrid of animal and machine, throws away many beliefs about nature and culture.  That belief is that if something is natural, it is unable to be changed.  For women, we are supposed to be naturally the weaker sex.  The notion of cyborgs is in opposition to what is natural.  Instead, we are constructed beings.  Haraway notes that is it politically wrong to label recent movements that women have in politics as ‘radical feminism’, “Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.” 

What are Haraway’s main concerns with technology and feminism?  She believes that they are encoded in technology, but not in a rhetorical sense.  There is cohabitation between many forms of sciences and cultures as well as organisms and machines.  Haraway, although aware of the complexity of the matter at hand, believes this concept is anything but abstract.  Haraway concludes,

It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

                Though we are complicated organisms, we are not bound by this ‘natural’ identity of sex.  We are constructed to be any identity we choose.

Questions to Consider:

1.       What is your take on Haraway’s essay about having a fractured identity as a female cyborg?  Are cyborgs really created through a male bias?  Defend your stance.

2.       Haraway mentions many aspects: culture, politics, and gender. How do they interweave in technology?

3.       Give your own example of a cyborg and state your opinion on how Haraway’s notion of feminism is righted or wronged.

                Remediation is the concept of borrowing or “repurposing” materials.  Today, we can access older materials through the Internet.  Transparency remains the main goal when concerning remediation.  Ideally, there shouldn’t be a difference between the experience of seeing a painting in person and on the computer screen.  Years ago, our technology was not as visually credible.  The images were grainy and not true to the colors.  As we advanced, we have come closer to this particular goal.  A new medium can try to absorb the older medium entirely.  With many films trying to repurpose digital technology, the goal is to make the computer disappear in order to absorb the older medium.

                We can borrow materials and make them into a new medium entirely.  Those that read “Alfred Profrock,” by T.S. Eliot related the poem to Salvatore Dahli’s Persistence of Memory painting.  Others related it to Hootie and the Blowfish’s song “Time”.  However, the painting and the song do not take over the poem by T.S. Eliot.  Each medium works on its own even if they relate to or inspire one another.  We see this many of time how one medium gives inspiration to the next.  Many paintings throughout history depict passages from the bible.  Paintings such as Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam to John Milton created the epic, Paradise Lost, both based on the biblical passage about Adam and Eve.  Remediation has been in effect for a very long time.  Furthermore, no medium can function independently and establish its own separate and purified space of cultural meaning.  As the aphorism goes, life imitates art.  The same applies to the concept of remediation.  The media comes from somewhere.  Thus, all media remediate the real. 

                One of the most popular form of remediation we see today is the Twilight series.  The novel series which turned to film is repurposed from the classic Braum Stoker’s novel Dracula.   Over the years, Braum Stoker’s novel has been borrowed in a multitude of ways or in this case, media.  From the novel, comes the earliest silent film, Nosferatu.  In the 1990s, Anne Rice wrote the novel, Interview with the Vampire, which turned into the film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.  Twilight inspired and made a pathway for many television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vampire Diaries and True Blood.  Each media has its own depiction of what vampires are like.  Many stick to the characterization that vampires are romantic.  There are also video games that are produced from this particular genre.  Would there even be a vampire genre if nothing was ever produced from the classic novel by Braum Stoker?  Can each of the media that is produced (television, film, novel, video game) stand on its own?  Does each medium absorb the older one?  One does not need to even look to the older version to understand what makes up a vampire.  Many qualities transcend. 

                From the old such as a novel or poem (any text), many times that particular media is transformed into an entirely new one dealing with technology (film, television, computer images).  With an array of media as our learning tools, we have many opportunities to study both language as well as literature.

One of the most inspiring aspects of the internet is how it keeps everyone connected and how it is ceaselessly reinventing itself.   Anyone with means of communication via a computer can alter or change our world which exists in the vast cyberspace.  New ideas constantly arise.  A fifth of those ideas are published by amateurs.

For instance, YouTube is a site that is created by amateur videographers.  It is not a requirement to be an expert film director on this particular site.  Anyone can post anything and within a matter of time, it can be viewed by millions (depending on how it reaches audiences).  Additionally, this site changes television.  Music videos are no longer seen by watching them on MTV, VH1, or FUSE.  Who watches music videos on television anymore?  It doesn’t exist.  The internet, YouTube, is presenting any music video you ever wanted to view within a click.

Other aspects of the internet are created by a community of people who only need access to a computer.  Wikipedia is where these communities come together.  It is our encyclopedia, our informational system, our brains coming together of what we know of the world.  There is a chance by all to edit the information.  It can be altered by anyone.  This can be perceived in two different ways.   One, we hold the power to distribute valid information.  Two, we hold too much power and may mislead and deceive our online community.

One of the many cynical points about the internet is being wired by the government.  This topic is still hot today, knowing that our own lives are being surveyed, mostly by owning an iPhone that contains the internet at hand.  Within the web article, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, John Perry Barlow understands the online community as a non-physical matter.  Therefore, we should not be governed.  We, the internet, do not have a government.  He states that property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to those of the internet since all of those concepts are dependent on being of a physical matter.  We are of the grand continuous space.  There is no government in space.  How can it control something so massive?  Cyberspace cannot be maintained.  It was meant for expressive ideas.  It is meant as a community of people sharing their thoughts which were never meant to be shut down.  Everyone is entitled to convey their point of view on varying matters.

The internet is our brave new connected world.  Anyone can become a publisher.  Though this idea is freeing and inspiring, can we be limited?  Knowing we are monitored by what we say on the internet, can this bring us harm?  Once an idea is posted, it is forever swallowed into cyberspace.  One in three of us (or maybe higher since the BBC series took place years ago) are on Facebook.  Through this site, we are constantly in reach of one another.  We have the site connected to our iPhones through an app.  We can be viewed 24 hours a day.  Our ideas and sharing of many kinds of media can be a refreshing way to understand one another’s lives.

So, with so many constructive and revolutionizing concepts, how can we go wrong?  Have we learned that too much knowledge may lead to hazardous consequences?  Could it end up in the wrong hands?  Or are we advancing as a whole?  The internet has become our world where we consume products, share ideas, find where we are going, watch or listen to any source of entertainment, and constantly learn.  If the internet provided us with three square meals, there would be no reason to leave it behind.