For me, this class has been about a crisis in my identity as a writing teacher, a crisis that continues as I write these words. I read words like those Wysocki offers in "Openings and Justifications:" "This, then, is why it matters for writing teachers to be doing more with new media: writing teachers are already practiced with helping others understand how writing—as a print-based practice—is embedded among the relations of agency and extensive material practices and structures that are our lives" (7). It makes so much sense when I read those words: it seems that the work of writing teachers really is central to the structure of life. And yet, as I noted in the margin of my book, I wonder if this is too self-aggrandizing?  Is this a case of praising the profession because we are in the midst of a search for identity?  When Kress suggests that "[i]t is no longer possible to think about literacy in isolation from a vast array of social, technological and economic factors" (1), he seems to speak directly to the writing teacher. If we can no longer think about literacy in isolation, then what is it that we are supposed to do?  Wysocki is certainly right that writing teachers are familiar with print-based practice; does this necessarily qualify us for screen-based practice? Or does it mean that we are as obsolete as the printed page?

One of the effects of New Media is the dissolution of boundary lines. Hocks and Kendrick fill Eloquent Images with "an interdisciplinary array of artists, critics and designers," and bring together "cultural, rhetorical, and applied approaches" (2). With the dissolution of boundaries comes the dissolution of identities. The academic milieu cannot comfortably be divided in the ways that it was before. The divisions have always been somewhat artificial and arbitrary, to be sure, but the changes in literacy and communications prevent us from continuing the cultural narrative that has supported those boundaries for so long.  And yet, let me hedge again and acknowledge that it has not been that long. Kress refers to a "centuries-long dominance of writing;" (1) there are many ways in which that is true, but it is also not true, especially since he discusses writing in terms of the word/image binary. Writing, the word, has had a tenuous hold on academic culture for the last couple hundred years, but the image has always been prevalent in culture. It has never disappeared in the ways that purveyors of the word/image binary seem to imply. And yet, the field of composition, the occupation of teaching writing, has been constructed upon such a binary interpretation of the word.

That is the narrative that we have constructed to justify the existence of writing programs and it is when we realize how much of our identity has been constructed on the basis of that cultural narrative that the justifications seem less solid than before. I question the "newness" of the media that are being touted as bringing change to lives and literacies, and so I am extremely self-conscious at feeling like there is a huge cultural shift going on, self-conscious at hearing myself inscribe a revolutionary narrative upon something that I believe in so many ways to be evolutionary. I think that struggle between a felt sense of real change and an intellectual understanding of glacial progression contributes to my crisis in identity.

I can also see the ways in which the struggle between evolution and revolution has been reflected throughout the ages. Eisenstein refers to the printing as a revolution, yet it did not seem to change all that much at first. The printed pages literally looked the same as handwritten pages, so there was not much difference to be seen at first, and aside from the fact that Gutenberg went broke, it did not seem so revolutionary at the time. It seems revolutionary now because Eisenstein has worked to present the effects of printing on culture and has called our attention to it as a more accurate focal point than cultural movements such as "the Renaissance." At the time of the Renaissance, and the times immediately following, it was the ideas that seemed so stimulating, that claimed revolutionary status; there was little awareness that a technology was causing, or rather was the revolution. And here I return to the idea of a cultural narrative. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, they explained the evolutions and revolutions in terms of cultural, intellectual, and economic changes. We inscribe our century with tales of technology and have reached a level of self-consciousness sufficient to warrant arguing for evolution and revolution simultaneously.

Within that broader narrative, compositionists have written a narrative for themselves that is based on the primacy of the written word. Our existence and identity is intimately tied to the existence of the freshman writing course. We exist because we, and the powers that be, believe that writing is an essential skill for everyone, specifically every college student, to master. That belief is based on a cultural narrative that privileges the written word. At the first reading, I often had difficulty with Kress’ presentation; his abstractions seemed unapproachable.  But the more I question the cultural narrative of the dominance of the word, the more I realize that the whole logic behind college writing is in question (and has been moving in that direction for a long time in an evolutionary/revolutionary way—embodying the truth that from the first day of life everything moves each day closer to death), the more Kress’ perspective comes into focus for me. "As a consequence, a linguistic theory cannot provide a full account of what literacy does or is; language alone cannot give us access to the meaning of the multimodally constituted message; language and literacy now have to be seen as partial bearers of meaning only" (35). I suspect that in many ways language and literacy have always only been partial bearers of meaning, but functionally we granted them more meaning as a way of explaining ourselves to the world and the world to ourselves. We are reaching a point where we can no longer do so, a point where we must admit that they are only partial bearers of meaning. And when I admit that, I find many of the explanations for why we teach writing to be unsatisfactory.

And many others are finding those explanations equally inadequate, which is why the phenomenon of new media studies exists. The move to new media studies is one response to an identity crisis. The old narrative of writing made claims to be central to student learning, and to be an element that participated in all aspects of student life and study.  Whether explicitly or implicitly, the writing teachers congratulated themselves for being the most valuable entity on campus. We explained to each other, and to ourselves, that if students can just learn to write, then they will be successful, in college and in life. In part, this is because we slowly absorbed more elements of experience within our scope. When we realized that grammar and punctuation were not very useful as a subject, we embraced process, which included the learning process as well as the writing process, and with this we emphasized critical thinking. Because after all, writing is a way of thinking, and if students learn to write well, then they are also learning to think well. But what if the opposite is true: what if students who learn to think well will therefore be able to write well?  No, that is not possible, not logical, not… not in a narrative inscribed by the centrality of writing.

Our culture made writing so central to learning that it became possible for the writing teacher to carry the identity of learning teacher. But the primacy of written language has evolved to a point where its primacy is in doubt. And that doubt feels revolutionary because it undermines everything we believe about ourselves. Erosion is slow, but when the house fall, it falls fast.

Cynthia Selfe asks the same question: "Why have increasing numbers of composition teachers turned their attention to new media texts in recent years? What is it about these texts—and the literacies associated with their creation and exchange—that keeps us paying attention to them? And what is it that prevents many of us from using them systematically in the composition classroom?" (43)  We have turned our attentions to them because we see them doing what we understood writing to do, and so we follow the thread of what we see as the intent of the course; meanwhile, we are prevented from using them systematically because we follow the letter of the course, and realize that this is not what we planned for, and wonder if perhaps just teaching writing is valuable, even if it is not the all-encompassing discipline we once claimed it to be, even if it is only a partial bearer of meaning (maybe just doing one part is ok). Selfe identifies the argument of her chapter as saying "that teachers of composition should not only be interested in new media texts but should be using them systematically in their classrooms to teach about new literacies" (44). However, I would like to identify a subplot within her argument, one that argues against the need for composition teachers to do anything of the sort. Selfe introduces us to David John Damon, relates his biography in a way that situates him as a non-traditional student who is intelligent, but has not been afforded the opportunities that would groom him for a successful college career. She then relates the many computer skills that David acquired. "Despite these accomplishments, however, the year was not going well for David. Although his computer skills had improved by leaps and bounds, his skills in communicating in Standard English remained seriously underdeveloped…. As David continued devoting the majority of his days to online design work…he failed two of his more conventional communication classes…" (49).  David ends up dropping out of college, but remaining employed as a web designer. One of the lessons that Selfe draws from her telling of David’s story is that compositionists have to "be willing to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic….or risk having composition studies become increasingly irrelevant" (54). But how would the expansion beyond conventional bounds have helped David?  What I see in David’s story is a person who succeeded without composition. The compositionists of David’s experience were irrelevant, and if they had been willing to expand, it would have done very little for David. If anything, the only benefit would have been to the compositionists, because then they could have perhaps claimed to have participated in David’s success—but that would have been of no intrinsic value to David.

In our class, a hypothetical student kept popping up, and I always wondered what I would teach such a student, what such a student would need me for, and the disheartening answer is always: Nothing. The hypothetical student is the "hacker" or "computer whiz" or "really scary person." If an individual, whom by age we might otherwise classify as student, has learned, through practice, persistence, and a little help from friends, to work a computer, to get into other people’s computers, to rewrite code, in short to move around rather freely, and successfully, in cyberspace, if an individual has learned all this without a teacher, then I have very little to offer. At least, it is very difficult to identify a set of "writing skills" or "communication skills" that such a person would need, because that individual is writing and communicating at levels that I cannot attain, at levels that it might benefit me, and others to learn, but it is the kind of skill that they don’t teach in college. Now it is possible to argue that such a person might benefit from a "well-rounded education," or from some "humanities," or however one wishes to identify the old power structure. But the hacker is tapped into a new power structure, and does not really need the other; besides, there is a good chance that the cyber-skills can transfer into "the real world" at least as well as an introverted academics’ skills prepare them for the real world.

The Hackers probably do not need me, but then there are still the not-so-scary students who need to learn some things from somewhere. If we cannot get the hacker to teach the introduction to writing/communication class, then I suppose that still leaves me with something to do. But since I know that there are Davids and Hackers out there, I begin to realize that composition may indeed be becoming increasingly irrelevant.  And I am left with the choice of whether to try to continue teaching "that which is central to all learning," or to just teach writing, which is still extremely valuable, but can no longer claim to be the gatekeeper of college and life success.  Or perhaps I do not have that choice. "Just writing" is perhaps obsolete already. Bolter argues that the space for writing has shifted already; there is no way to stop the erosion, and the house is falling as we speak. 

But the compositionists' identity and the narrative to be constructed for the next century is still very much in flux.  The shift in the Writing Space is generally constructed as having two components, which are often conflated since they are experienced together: the move to digital and the move to the image. We have repeatedly enacted conversation that assumed the truth of the idea of the turn to the visual. All of the authors we read presented the new media along those lines, that the visual was part of the newness, along with the digitality.  I do think that the digital nature of current communication technologies makes the integration of visual and textual easier for the individual composer.  And, I think that the dissolution of boundaries has limited the ability of elite communications to restrict themselves to words only. But beyond that, I think we need to question the idea of "newness" in the idea of the visual. One way to do that is to look, as Lipson, LaGrandeur, and Kirschenbaum do in Eloquent Images, at the historical relationships.  I, personally, keep in mind the illustrations of William Makepeace Thackeray, author and illustrator of Vanity Fair, which was published in the mid-nineteenth century, just over 150 years ago. His illustrations reflect "work that may both precede and follow text, may suppose, support, subvert, explain, interpret, and critique its verbal partner, entering into complexly reciprocal, interactive, and often compellingly persuasive dialogue" (Patten 92).  Thackeray's novel should not be read without the illustrations, because the illustrations provide information that is necessary for understanding the novel but is not contained in the words (Illustrations of Becky Sharp).  There are many other examples, comic books being among the most obvious, and the graphic experiments of British modernism among the more high-brow examples.

We, as human, have never turned away from the visual; in fact the irresistible human instinct is to turn towards the visual.  We, as academics, tried for a hundred years or so to diminish the cultural value of images by attempting to etherealize them in words but we were never completely successful.  The reason that "the visual" is being discussed now is because "the digital" allows for the integration of words and images in a much more prevalent, affordable, and accessible way.  Hocks and Kendrick call for a dissolution of binaries (3), but the binary is already, and has been slowly over time, dissolved.  Or the binary was always false to begin with, and our cultural narrative is no longer able to support the false dichotomy in the face of digital integration.  It is relatively easy for those involved with new media studies to see the ways in which the binary is false or unsupportable, but the cultural value of the word as compared to the image does not shift so easily.  Images are everywhere, but as Wysocki suggests in Writing New Media, we have not been conditioned to read the image critically.  The nineteenth century reader of Thackeray's novels was conditioned to read images critically; where we skip over illustrations expecting them to just represent the text, the (average) reader of the nineteenth century examined images closely and carefully, expecting to find additional information.  The legacy of the later part of the nineteenth century is that illustrations (pictures) were relegated to children's books, and that is where we expect them to be now. 

There is nothing about the image, however, that makes it necessarily less critical, less substantive, less communicative, or less complex than words.  In her Eloquent Images chapter Wysocki explains that "the concern is that the visual is not serious enough, that its particular and enfeebling topics are advertising and cartoons and propaganda and sex.  The assumption behind the critique of the visual is that we each take in what we see automatically and immediately, in the exact same way as everyone else, so that the visual requires no interpretation and in fact functions as though we have no power before it" (43).  It is particularly the idea of taking in images automatically and immediately that I have come to question this semester.  We do tend to do that, I'll agree.  But I do not agree that it is necessarily that way.  Rather we have been culturally conditioned to view/understand the image as a servant of words, as something pretty to put alongside the words.  We do not expect illustrations to do work that may both precede and follow text, may suppose, support, subvert, explain, interpret, and critique its verbal partner, entering into complexly reciprocal, interactive, and often compellingly persuasive dialogue" (Patten 92).  We expect illustration to present the exact same information as the words and we expect to be able to take it in at a glance.  The "we" of that narrative is very broad: we, academics, have conditioned us, as twenty-first century readers/viewers, to expect images to be clear, explicit and self-explanatory without interfering from the "real" work of the words.  But images are cultural constructs and they occupy the role that the culture inscribes for them, so every time we say what image is, we are saying what position it occupies (or that we assume it to occupy) in our culture.  It seems to me that we know very little of what image can be(come).  I turn again to the novels of the mid-nineteenth century for an example of this.  Hablot Knight Browne illustrates a scene from David Copperfield in a way that, as Robert Patten argues, accomplishes the theoretically impossible feat of inscribing a narrative into a static image.  So "the visual" is not necessarily one thing.

Since I understand that writing teachers cannot limit their practice to words alone, because words are slowly ceasing to exist alone, I am at a loss to identify just what it is that writing teachers are supposed to do.  That has been one of the enduring questions of this class, and it remains a question.  The fact that Hocks and Kendrick can publish an interdisciplinary collection of writing on new media reveals the fact that this is not an area that falls under the purview of writing teachers alone.  And if, or since, that is true, is there a unique contribution that writing teachers can make?  If the answer to that is "no," because the analysis and production of images in conjunction with words can be accomplished elsewhere, then...  Well, I am not sure what then; hence my identity crisis.

I am tempted to end my reflection there because that is where I leave the class.  But I cannot leave without also attempting to propose some solutions.  One solution lies in the field of rhetoric.  Perhaps the blurred disciplinary boundaries will return us, at an evolutionary pace, to an academy centered around rhetoric, and if we see ourselves as teachers of rhetoric, then all communication is within our area of expertise.  I believe this to be true, but at the same time, the history of rhetoric suggests that it is laid claim to in many departments, and so a rise of rhetoric does not necessarily solidify the identity of writing program, if the principles of rhetoric can be effectively taught elsewhere.  That concept of rhetoric being taught elsewhere reflects a Writing Across the Curriculum mentality, which reveals that my identity questions are not unique to me.  Writing teachers, and rhetoricians always struggle with the ways that they participate in, but are unique, from the rest of the discourse of the university. 

I have begun to realize, too, that my questions run deeper than just the identity of writing programs.  In response to the imaginary Hacker "student," and in response to questions we repeatedly raised this semester about how to engage students, about how to get students to care, and to think for themselves, in response to all of this, I question the value of the university itself.  In asking How we should teach students, and What we should teach students, an echo returns: should we teach students?  Especially in the case of the Hacker, but also in the case of the Davids, and in the case of the unmotivated student, the question remains: how is the university relevant to their lives?  I understand the value of my college education, and I see ways that I can offer students new insights, and encourage them to think critically and to communicate thoughtfully.  But does that answer the questions about the relevance to their lives?  Again, I do not think I am alone in asking these questions.  I think universities are, or should be asking these questions and as we slowly approach critical mass in terms of new media, we will be increasingly forced to ask not only how we are going to deliver course content, but what that content should be, and if we should deliver courses in the traditional sense at all.  Eisenstein may provide a model for us to examine of another time, and another technology that slowly revolutionized communication and knowledge apprehension.  The modern university was in many ways constructed in response to the increased breadth of knowledge represented in print.  It may be that a discussion of Technology in English Studies is heading towards becoming obsolete due to the difficulty of isolating technology from English studies, and that the result may be a new construction of what a university is.

We have often raised the question of evolution versus revolution.  I sound revolutionary here, even though theoretically I would not define myself that way.  I expect the university to be around for most of my life; and I even expect to be able to teach writing for most of those years, because institutions do tend to move with glacial slowness.  But I am inclined to notice the erosion at work, and inclined to consider that the house shall fall.  In the meantime I will teach my students to write, and to engage critically with all texts, words and images, and especially encourage them to read images with a critical eye, and to make images that engage in dialogue with words, and perhaps even supercede words.  And perhaps they can rebuild, perhaps with the help of Hackers and Davids, in a way that can claim relevance for the next generation of humanity.

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