In the Mirror of Genre: Students Write this World
A Research Report
Doug Brent
This is a version of a talk given at Inkshed XVI on May 6, 1999. It is based on the set of slides accompanying
my talk, expanded enough to be accessible to people who were not there. The research is just beginning. Please
email me at dabrent@ucalgary.ca with any suggestions, ideas, responses, etc. This print version is only a paper
shadow of the real version, a native hypertext that can be found at http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dabrent/Mirror/Mirror.htm.
I strongly encourage you to read the hypertext version, which will allow you to explore the sources and examples
of webtext in richer profusion. It will, I acknowledge, be harder to read in the bathroom.
This piece is based on the following premises:
If these predictions are at least partly true, then we as teachers have a mission to figure out how this kind of text will work, and to help our students to learn the rules of this new language game.
Nancy Kaplan's Mission Statement
It's probably obvious why all of this matters, but I think that Nancy Kaplan captures the urgency of it best in her article "E-Literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print."
Equitable access to computers, modems, and Internet services alone will not be sufficient. Unless people know how to read what they see and to write when they can--unless e-literacies are also equitably distributed--equitable access will be for naught. The humanists among us must take responsibility for the literacy education that makes access meaningful.
So here is my challenge to English departments, Education departments, and teachers everywhere: learn this space. And contribute. Write this world.
For me, this issues a challenge. We need to do more than read books on efficient hypertext design. We need to become actively involved in discovering how web texts perform in a living social space, and to learn how to use that knowledge to empower students to construct their own web texts with full rhetorical understanding. Since web text is evolving faster than we can ever hope to understand, this task is of course impossible. But that has never stopped rhetoricians before.
The Research Project
In the research project described here, I wanted to see what students made of texts they found on the web, and what sorts of webtexts they produced themselves based on their (albeit highly limited) exposure to these texts. In other words, I was interested in what genres they seemed to be construing.
Communications Studies 380 is not primarily a writing course; it's a Communications History course. After a term of discussing communications history from cave painting to mass media, a la McLuhan, Ong, et al., students start considering new media.
After some preliminary warm-up projects, I asked them to look for some "interesting" web sites and discuss how they work. I left the definition of "interesting" largely up to them, but as starters I pointed them to some sites that use webtext in some of the non-linear postmodernist ways described by David Kolb, such as Michael Joyce's hyperfiction "Twelve Blue" and John December's article "Living in Hypertext." Then I encouraged them to surf.
Later in the course I got them working in groups of about three or four to create their own webtexts. I let them use a "default mode" of writing separate on-line essays and linking them to each other and to source and amplifying pages (Kolb's "caterpillar text"). However, I gave them enough time (most of a term) to work themselves into more elaborate forms if they choose to. In particular, I was interested in whether they would produce anything that resembled the highly postmodernist forms of argument listed by Kolb.
For this Inkshed research report, I highlight four pages:
These pages and others can be viewed on my web page at http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dabrent . Follow the "Student Web Pages" link to COMS 380, 1997-98.
What I find interesting about these pages is that they look remarkably professional, considering that most of the students who made them had little or no experience writing web pages and received relatively little direct instruction in web text genres.
"Hypertext Fiction Review" is a remarkable synthesis of on-line 'zine genres with a healthy dose of Siskel and Ebert. "Virtual Adventures" takes up the hobbyist and commercial page genres. "Virtual Life" is probably the least adventuresome of the four, taking most closely the form of hard copy essays linked together, but it still pays attention to matters of visual design and balance that could only have been learned from observation of other webtexts. "Hypertext Fiction" is a variant on this form that illustrates how quite short pieces of original text can be used as a framing text for links to other material. Interestingly the hard copy distinction between "primary" and "secondary" sources is scrupulously observed though not named as such. (This text also suggests the traps that students can fall into when they put glitzy background ahead of readability, but that, too, seems to be a common web genre: the unreadable page.)
Interviews on Web Pages
Three students volunteered to be interviewed at intervals throughout this process as they read and then wrote hypertexts. Some of these interviews included read-aloud protocols as the students surfed their way through the web reading assignments. Others were retrospective accounts of how and why they composed their texts the way they did.
For this report, I'll cut a hundred or so pages of not-well-analyzed transcript down to one paragraph.
I asked one of the students who worked on the "Virtual Life" text what she liked and did not like about her own contribution, the "Cyberstalking" page. This is what she had to say:
It's kind of funny, 'cause I've gone and created a site that's a little more text than anything else. Which goes against what I actually liked a lot. So I think what I would have done is maybe try to condense the text that was actually on this site. But it still would have a link to the Hitchcock case and a link to these people because I thought they were important. Even possibly have a little bit of information from myself connecting to those sites. But I don't know how to go about doing that.
In other words, she would attenuate her own text to "a little bit of information from myself" and concentrate on smooth connections to other people's material. This in fact is more like what other sites such as the Hypertext Fiction site do: the author's own text performs bridging and summarizing tasks rather than making its own argument in any detail. Students who do produce large amounts of their own argument seemed faintly embarrassed about the fact that in doing so, they reproduced the linear hard-copy essay: the only available model for extended argument.
A Brief Digression on Ethics
At Inkshed, the presentation just before mine was a set of stories by Stan Straw, Sandy Baardman, Laura Atkinson and Pat Sadowy, each of which raised a gripping ethical dilemma. This sent a cold chill down my researcher's spine.
In usual researcher style, I promised students complete anonymity in this project. However, the texts they produced are on the web for the world to see. In fact this proved to be one of the more popular aspects of the project: the unusual ability to write material that people other than the prof and the other students might actually read. Therefore, there's not much point in anonymizing people and pretending that readers can't infer in about five seconds which student wrote which quotation from the transcripts.
That observation is trivial compared to the larger issue of not only making students' texts public, but also of moving them to my server to prevent their being extinguished when students' accounts expire. This not only affords students a humble bit of immortality--it also removes from them the opportunity to edit or delete their texts in future. This is the ultimate in textual appropriation.
I have no answer to this.
In Lieu of a Conclusion
If I live long enough to analyze those many pages of transcript, the texts my students have produced, and a reasonable sample of the bargeloads of text on the web, perhaps I'll be in a better position to pretend I have a conclusion. In the meantime, I offer the following observations based on what I have looked at so far.
Students are expert at intuiting the forms "proper" to web space. No surprise there. However, they seem to perceive web space as
In other words, they intuitively work within a cluster of genres that I call "web encyclopedia" genres, geared to the rhetorical purpose of gathering up and making available information that is already there. This is not what I think we mean by a "writing space."
The only alternative seems to be the more-or-less linear essay reproduced on the web. This should not be surprising in view of the fact that most of the on-line academic journals reproduce this form. For instance, take a look at the American Communication Journal on the discourse surrounding the recent Zippergate affair (issue 2.2). This issue clearly takes advantage of the multimedia features of the web, not only merging text and graphics but also allowing readers to access streamed video version of Clinton's famous apologia courtesy of C-Span. But scratch the surface--that is, actually read one of the essays--and you'll find dressed-up linear text.
Not that there's anything essentially wrong with dressed-up linear text. But it does not provide an opportunity for students to see the glorious riches of Kolbian multi-voiced postmodernist philosophical hypertext at work.
I am not at this point quite sure what this means. Maybe it means that the hypertext gurus are too optimistic, or maybe it means that we are still at the stage print was in when it tried to look as much as possible like an illuminated manuscript. Maybe it means that, if we truly think that multi-voiced polylog is a useful genre, we will have to provide more opportunities for students to read and write it.
Maybe before students can write this world, we will have to.
Works Cited
American Journal of Communication 2.2 (January 1999). http://www.americancomm.org/~aca/acjdata/vol2/Iss2/curtain3.html
Bolter, Jay David.. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Fairlawn, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991.
December, John. "Living in Hypertext." Ejournal 6:3 (August 1996). http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/v6n3/v6n3.html
Kaplan, Nancy. "E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print." Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine 2:3 (March 1995). http://sunsite.unc.edu/cmc/mag/1995/mar/kaplan.html
Joyce, Michael. "Twelve Blue" Postmodern Culture 7:3 (May 1997). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v007/7.3joyce.html
Kolb, David. Socrates in the Labyrinth: Hypertext, Argument, Philosophy. Watertown: Eastgate Publications, 1994.
Landow, George. Hypertext 2.0. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
Miller, Carolyn. "Genre as Social Action." Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151-67.
Moulthrop, Stuart. "Shadow of an Informand." http://raven.ubalt.edu/Moulthrop/hypertexts/hoptext/A_Beginning07084.html