Reading New Media

I enjoyed reading Ball and Moeller’s web article. Sorapure’s annoyed me. Each of these was a new media text and reminded me of one aspect of new media that I do not worry about (as much) when I read a regular old hard copy ink on paper book: design. I liked Ball and Moeller’s design (for the most part), but I hated Sorapure’s design. The different fonts Ball and Moeller used and the mixing of textual voices in their introduction impressed me and was a great demonstration of the potentialities of new media. While I continually forgot which block of the alphabet I had last clicked, the content of each “block” kept me reading. The intertextual links were effective (mostly).

Sorapure, on the other hand, had a design that was extremely distracting from the content of the words (which might have been the intention). I did not like being required to click something every three seconds to read the next two sentences. This, as well as the puzzle keyboard, seemed to be there only because she thought it was cool and wanted it to be unlike other reading experiences. (Again, this may have been her intention, then). However, whether it was her intention or not, the distracting and frustrating nature of her web design, for me, made it a very ineffective piece of new media. (Unless, of course her idea of effective was to frustrate and annoy her readers). Is this the future of academic articles? I hope not, if they follow Sorapure’s design.

Now that I have ranted a little at my dislike of Sorapure’s website, I did take a few other things from the experience of reading multimodal articles. (If we can still call them articles). As I read, I thought, “This would be a great way to read all the writing center articles I used to read (and all the other articles that spend an inordinate amount of time on describing what might have been more easily seen in a video clip of a video-recorded interview).” Some articles I’ve read (and no, I can never remember exactly which ones off the top of my head . . . it’s been a little while) have struggled with the medium of paper and ink. When a study depends on transcripts and visuals and the only medium of publication is a limiting hard copy journal or book, then something more freeing, like a new media digital article with lots of bells and whistles, would be a lot more effective. When Ball and Moeller describe the students’ projects, I did not have to sit and wish I could see them or go to the trouble of finding a computer and typing in a web address to see it. All I had to do was click, download, and watch the student projects they were talking about.

I have come this far without addressing the words of their arguments. Much more than hard copy books, of course, these online articles made other, visual and layout arguments that were prominent. While there was a lot of text, the layout and appearance was another layer to be looked at rhetorically—something I pay less attention to with old media texts. While this can certainly be a benefit and can add something to the argument while giving rhetorical choices that were not available before, this new media kind of text could be a problem for some academic articles. If all articles used the layout of Sorapure, I would pay much less attention to the content of the argument. While I like all the new rhetorical choices available with new media, I don’t think we should forget the challenges that such rhetorical possibilities can bring with those choices.

Can You Read This?