Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres

3. Including, but Not Limited to, the Digital: Composing Multimodal Texts

73 C h a pte r 3 Including, but Not Limited to, the Digital Composing Multimodal Texts Jody Shipka Under this new definition, neither is it “new media” simply to have a text that incorporates texts and sound and graphics and animation and photographs and illustrations in some combinatorial ratio other than that of a traditional academic or literary text. . . . I am trying to get at a definition that encourages us to stay alert to how and why we make these combinations of materials, not simply that we do it. —Anne Wysocki (2004, 19) In “Part 1: Thinking out of the Pro-Verbal Box,” Sean Williams (2001, 23) suggests that composition is a “largely conservative” discipline because it tends to “cling to the idea of writing about representation systems in verbal text because that’s what we do in composition.” According to Williams, while ideas about appropriate subject matter for writing courses have broadened, form has remained fixed as students are still often expected to compose linear, print-based texts. For Williams and others, the goal has been to work toward the destabilization of form by highlighting how “meanings are made, distributed, received, interpreted and remade . . . through many representational and communicative modes—not just through language” (Jewitt and Kress 2003, 1). In the years since Williams’s “Part 1” was published, there has been an increase in scholarship providing readers with ways of, and further 74  Jody Shipka justifications for, extricating ourselves from the “pro-verbal box” (see, for instance, George 2002; Hocks 2003; Sorapure 2006; Wysocki et al. 2004; Yancey 2004; Zoetewey and Staggers 2003). Although I value scholarship that underscores the importance of providing students increased options for engaging with course materials, the first concern I would highlight here is how a tendency to equate “multimodal ” or “multimodality” with digitized, screen-mediated (i.e., “new/ digital media”) texts may severely limit the kinds of texts and communicative strategies or processes students explore in our courses.1 When it is suggested time and again that “new media writing affords students new opportunities to reassemble the world outside the linear constraints of the print paradigm and make things fit in new ways” (Zoetewey and Staggers 2003, 135), I have to wonder whether, in attempting to resist the pro-verbal bias, we have allowed ourselves to trade in one bundle of texts and techniques for another: pro-verbal becomes pro-digital. Beyond seeming to assume that students have already exhausted every affordance associated with linear print paradigms, the suggestion is that students would not be able to or would simply not want to demonstrate how they have thought to “reassemble the world” and “make things fit in new ways” without necessarily taking that work online. Connected to this first concern is that a tendency to identify or label as “multimodal” only certain kinds of texts—whether they are digitally based or comprised of a mix of analog components—works to facilitate a text-dependent (or textually overdetermined) understanding of multimodality , thereby limiting potentials for students to consider the scope, complexity, and pervasiveness of multimodal practice. Following Paul Prior (2009, 16), I argue that multimodality is not some special feature of certain texts, objects, or performances, but a “routine dimension of language in use.” As Prior (ibid.) explains: “Multimodality has always and everywhere been present as representations are propagated across multiple media and as any situated event is indexically fed by all modes present whether they are focalized or backgrounded. . . . Through composition, different moments of history, different persons, different voices, different addresses may become embedded in the composed utterance.” The problem, as Prior and others have noted, is the field’s tendency to “freeze” writing, to treat it as a noun rather than a verb, and to privilege the static text—what Prior (ibid., 8) refers to as the problem of “composed utterances.” In her critique of “strong-text conceptions of literacy,” Deborah Brandt (1990, 104) compares the analysis of static artifacts— searches for stable “patterns in language-on-its-own”—to “coming upon Including, but Not Limited to, the Digital  75 the scene of a party after it is over and everybody has gone home, being left to imagine from the remnants what the party must have been like” (ibid., 76). Prior’s point, and the point I’d like to echo here with Brandt’s party metaphor in mind, is that texts—like parties, objects, and other events...