Consider the Mediation

By “mediation” we mean at once “appearance” and “meaning-making.” We rely on the meaningful difference between the lyric on the page and the lyric against the music, out loud—the difference between the description of the painting and the presented image of the painting—between the words “feel free to stop by my office” written at the bottom of a student paper or written in blood on the student’s bathroom mirror—we contend that these words are not in any way the same words and that, then, “mediation” and “meaning” are wholly inseparable.

So when we ask our students to consider their media (and when we consider our media) we are doing nothing less than asking them (and ourselves) to revise new meaning-making options—to arrive at a newer place in a newer way.

So we ask how often is the first “paragraph” an image? How often is the third paragraph a sound?  How often is there nothing but, or nothing less than, sound or image, against which the very term “paragraph” seems inadequate or at least in need of revision?  Has any so-called progress been nothing more than a new delivery?  Have we even begun to approach the “full range” to which Hayles refers?

The blank CD, for example, is and has been ready to accommodate at least 700 megabytes of such a “range”—the blank DVD several times more.  (Are you sometimes struck by how little space the standard written document takes up on even a recordable CD?  Almost as if the document demands so little of the potential that it seems not quite to belong—its insignificance charted, instantly, on most burning software?)

The Web page is one oft-cited example of some such progress. Most Web pages, after all, contain images, words, and many contain some sort of sound or animation. 

We ask, then, to what extent the category “Web page” is allowed to intervene in the category we might call “paper,” “composition,” or “essay.”

It seems that we have an exclusive category “Web page”—one that is not automatically allowed by the categories “paper” and so on. 

So, just as the CD is almost entirely empty after we burn our traditional paper on to it, so it is as once full of room. And we suggest that “room” might well be occupied by the conventions of Web composing becoming more readily celebrated in English classes as conventions of all that we do—of our papers and our essays—thereby filling so much more of the meaning-ready space that is available to us.

What, again, sorts of indicators might suggest progress or consideration here?

These might be as simple as our syllabi suggesting, even encouraging, the engagement of various media: 

“Consider adding music or images to your compositions where you think they best help convey your meaning. . . “

We may even do so via a syllabus that takes advantage of the “available disk space” and exemplifies our own willingness toward multimediation

We may begin to see a realization that, in composition, for example, the teacher does well to feel qualified to respond to various media, perhaps in the transition using much of the same vocabulary that we use regarding our traditional papers: “The video serves as a nice transition between your initial idea and your concluding line of inquiry.”

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