Proposal DRAFT (read at your own risk--needs much focusing, organizing, revision)

Building New Literacy with New Media:
Spider Web Rhetoric

I dreamed about Ray Charles last night
And he could see just fine

James Berlin claims that “literacy has always and everywhere been the center of the educational enterprise” (1). Literacy requires “a particular kind of rhetoric--a way of speaking and writing” that fluctuates with context (Berlin 3-4). Literacy changes not only what we think, but also, according to Walter Ong, how we think. It changes consciousness, changes minds, changes lives. It is powerful. Yet within literacy’s power resides potential for abuse. J. Elspeth Stuckey argues that traditional verbal Western literacy reinforces social class structures. Contrary to its reputation as an empowering and liberating panacea, Stuckey claims that it perpetuates power differentials and serves the dominant hegemony. It is important to understand “the relationships of literacy” to a culture of inequality (Stuckey 59). One possibility Stuckey suggests to diffuse this oppressive system is to apply Paulo Freire’s “conscientization” approach to literacy (66). In this approach, literacy, not the literate “becomes the object” of interrogation (Stuckey 66). Freire also proposes that “students and teachers of literacy […] assume ‘a radical posture’ […] of solidarity” to ensure the equality of literacy’s “special power” (Stuckey 66-67). New media’s multi-vocal, multi-modal nature offers the opportunity to use literacy as a way to democratization.

Dreamed about Ray Charles last night
And he could see just fine, you know
I asked him for a lullaby
He said, "Honey, I don't sing no more"
No more, no more, no more
Ray don't sing no more
In her discussions of new media literacy, Anne Frances Wysocki evokes a web image as a connector, using it as a kind of trope. This image rhetorically performs two ways: it visually recalls a spider web’s strength and connectivity. It also metaphorically represents the World Wide Web, the space in which new media takes shape. Wysocki quotes Kress’s claim that we are at a time “’in the long history of writing when four momentous changes are taking place simultaneously: social, economic, communicational, and technological’” (1). The centrality of image in communication is, as Kress notes, “’challenging the dominance of writing’” (qtd. in Wysocki 1).
Wysocki argues that present-day visual composition epistemologies do not, cannot facilitate students’ acquisition of visual literacy because they separate form from content, privilege form, fragment content, and enact one-way, (literally) top-down communication that destroys reciprocity and dialogue. Wysocki sees these standards as enacting certain unquestioned values that are historically grounded and consequential; they grew in post WWI industrial contexts that “entwined information and desire” and disseminated• compositions which embodied fragmented content and valued efficient form. While such design principles offer framework for discussing composition elements, the framework enacts and replicates those unquestioned values. Thus composition elements are treated as abstract, disconnected, decontextualized, missing necessary social-historical grounding.
She argues that “formal approaches to the visual” are neither “neutral” nor “univeral” (Wysocki 158). They are political. They are powerful in their abstract, groundless, taken-for-grantedness, embedded in cultural framework.

They are, I argue, religious. They require building a new literacy with new media: spiderweb rhetoric.

He said, "Since I got my eyesight back,
my voice has just deserted me.
No 'Georgia On My Mind' no more...
I stay in bed with MTV."

Repetition of “standardized, linear” form manifests everywhere in western culture, echoing unquestioned values of “unity, efficiency, and coherence” through factory lines, “parking lots,” “rows of desks,” and academic texts that demand certain value-laden order. Wysocki advises against reductive pedagogies that teach form separate from content, for “form is itself always a set of structuring principles, with different forms growing out of and reproducing different but specific values” (159).
In attempting to trace the origins of these specific values, Wysocki summarizes Kant’s three philosophical critiques and examines the positions of Nature and form, or “intellectual design,” and the role of “universal thought” expressed in connective arcs of “understanding,” “reason,” and “judgment” (160-61). An oppositional dialectic emerges, nature vs. man, real vs. ideal, grounded vs. abstract, from Kant’s critiques, problematic opposition which paradoxically embodies “universal thought.” For Kant, judgment allows recognition of beauty, connecting pleasurable feeling with “concept of the purposiveness of Nature” (qtd. in Wysocki 162). Yet Kant claims that a curious and counterintuitive disconnect between the beautiful object and judgment—disinterest—must exist. Aesthetic judgments “start with the object, but quickly” move to “appreciation of the formal relations suggested by the object” (Wysocki 162). Beauty following the line of “universal thought” universally pleases and is thus “formally inherent” (Wysocki 162).

But is there any such thing as “universal thought”?

Wysocki introduces Wendy Steiner’s ideas that Kant’s philosophy is not “disinterested,” rather, it is specifically masculine and speaks to specifically masculine interests. Femininity is rendered invisible by disinterested “universal thought.” Hence, Kant’s assumption, his “certainty in the possibility of universal intellectual conditions—cannot be separated from how his sense of the world and its functioning grew out of his ability as a man of his time and place to look upon his experiences as being, necessarily, the experiences of all others” (Wysocki 164). Wysocki also shows how Steiner traces men’s so-called aesthetic “disinterest” through recent “art and literary practices” that widen gaps between the concrete, “factitious,” real and the abstract, ideal, unreal (165). Visually supporting this discussion are halftones of de Kooning and Picasso paintings on page 166 that depict fragmented, disembodied, unrecognizable feminine forms.
Wysocki concludes that a new sensual aesthetic grounded in “reciprocal relationships” is needed to replace this bifurcation of form and content with views of form as emanating from, and integrated with, content (170). She suggests seeing “beauty as coming out of the day-to-day necessities of our social existence—an ‘experience of community and shared values’”(qtd. in Wysocki 172). ***I argue that a foundational, grounding component of this formal revision requires building a new literacy with new media, grounded in a spiderweb rhetoric that empowers feminine and masculine principles equally.

Then Ray took his glasses off
And I could look inside his head
Flashing like a thunderstorm
I saw a shining spider web

According to Christine Alfano and Alyssa O’Brien in Envision: Persuasive Writing in A Visual World, visual rhetoric “is a form of communication that uses images to create meaning or construct and argument” (5). Visual rhetorics take the shape of advertisements, art (two- and three-dimensional), cartoons, computer programs that compose imagistically such as PowerPoint, computer screens filled with purposeful images, film, graphic design, architecture, signs, photography, and television shows. Understanding visual rhetoric requires visual literacy, or “learning how to read our visual world” in its rhetorical context (Alfano and O’Brien 6).
Similarly, in The Elements of Visual Analysis, Marguerite Helmers defines visual rhetoric as referring “to the way that images persuade viewers to adopt attitudes or perform certain actions” (2). Helmers asserts that “images convey meanings, perhaps more so than the written word” and studying the meaning images reveal entails understanding interrelated political, power, and social constructions (2). According to Helmers, “we never simply look. We are constantly engaged in a process of looking and forming an opinion about what we see” (3). Thus, the concept of reflexivity is important to visual rhetoric.
Carolyn Handa’s “Introduction: Placing the Visual in the Writing Classroom” articulates the interdisciplinary nature of visual rhetoric, integrating ideas “from fields as diverse as art history, design, philosophy, and graphic arts to ethnography, cultural studies, typography, and architecture” (2-3). This underscores visual rhetoric’s multivalency; while visual rhetoric requires ideological identification of and with images, it can convey a number of interrelated, layered messages. Handa points out the important distinction between merely possessing “technological skill” and understanding “rhetorical questions” the creation of successful visual rhetoric demands and urges composition faculty to fill this gap (3). She states that “visual rhetoric in the composition course . . . serves two ends: to help students better understand how images persuade on their own terms and in the context of multimodal texts, and to help students make more rhetorically informed decisions as they compose visual genres” (Handa 3).
In picturing texts, Lester Faigley, Diana George, Anna Palchik, and Cynthia Selfe remind readers of their tendency to assume that their “personal view of reality is the truth” (324). Because visual rhetoric relies upon vision, and because vision depends literally upon the way we see things, the way “our visual perceptions are ‘photo-edited’ in the mind’s eye,” and how our assumptions and perspective(s) filter what we see, it is important to recognize that our “preconceived notions about race, gender, beauty, and other things affect not only how we react to others but also how we see them” (Faigley et al 324). Since “no text is created in a vacuum,” context can determine how we see what we see (or what we don’t see), and “relationship between immediate and broader contexts” is important to recognize (Faigley et al 14).

Spider web
Spider web
Spider web
In Ray Charles' head


Hocks, Mary E. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments.” College
Composition and Communication. Vol. 54, No. 4. (June 2003) 629-656.
Hocks offers suggestions for engaging composition students in multimodal discourse that results in reflexive projects integrating verbal and visual rhetorics, featuring composer and audience interaction. She claims that “critiquing and producing writing in digital environments actually offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and important new pedagogy of writing as design” (Hocks 631-32).
Hocks suggests that students begin multimodal projects with analysis and critique of the design of multimodal discourse and hypertext. Discussion of design “moves [students] from rhetorical criticism to invention and production” of their own projects (Hocks 644). Hocks asserts that “design projects . . . bring . . . multiliteracy squarely into the middle of the composition process” and helps “students design . . . activist academic projects[s] that represent new knowledge for . . . real audience[s]” (650).


Kress, Gunther. “English at the Crossroads: Rethinking Curricula of Communication in the Context of the Turn to the
Visual.” Passions Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies.
Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, eds. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 66-88.
Kress questions English curriculum purpose and claims that it needs revision and focus “on the future . . . to provide [students] with dispositions, knowledges, and skills” their lives will require (66). Now a “language-based enterprise,” English curricula, with its split emphasis on form and culture also “will need to change” if it is “to remain relevant as the subject which provides access to participation in public forms of communication . . . [and] understandings of culturally valued texts” (Kress 67). Kress argues that English pedagogy “based on theories of semiosis of convention and use cannot hope to produce human dispositions deeply at ease with change, difference, and constantly transformative action” embodied by the new media (67). Semiotics of convention, previously valued over creativity, are inadequate for communication in present-day information and knowledge-based economies which demand innovative ways of thinking. Kress notes that the intersection of changes in economy, technology, society, and politics “requires rethinking of the processes and the means for representing ourselves and our values and meanings,” a revision of literacy (67). “The word ‘literacy’ presents [a] diverse range of phenomena as one reified thing” when it consists of a range of linguistic skills and possibilities that new media open and complicate even further (Kress 68).
One example of this complication is how “the visual is taking over many of the functions of written language,” signifying a shift from “temporal-sequential [verbal] logic” to “spatial-simultaneous [visual] logic” (Kress 68). Thus, the dominant discourse of narrative has begun to give way to a semiotics of display, where reader / viewers read / view what they need to know, and, Kress observes, the visual assumes many functions of the verbal, offering as an example contemporary textbooks, “collections of resource materials” whose “emphasis is less on reading than doing” (68). While Kress suggests that “communication has always been multi-semiotic,” the hegemony of writing, especially in the last two or three centuries, has “made the always-existing facets of multi-modality invisible” (Kress 70). Visual rhetoric, however, can be seen as marginalizing verbal rhetorics in the discourse of the new media.
Kress asserts that “information which displays what the world is like is carried by the image,” while “information which orients the reader in relation to that information is carried by language” and that “the functional load of each mode is different” (76). Since visual and verbal elements constitute the visually dominated page,

Reading the page demands from the reader a constant switching from abstract to realist forms of representation. This new
representational and communicational situation is not one of lesser complexity, or of lesser cognitive demand: it is one of a different kind of complexity, and of different cognitive demand. (Kress 76).

(Written) language is used, but in a new way and through a new medium, electronically-mediated communication where “screen is the new space of representation” (Kress 82). According to Kress, image and word perform differently, they do different jobs; they do not merely co-exist, yet there seems to be “strong interaction between the two which could, over time, have real effects on language in the written mode” (82). As existing theories are inadequate to describe visual rhetoric, Kress calls for “serious rethinking” of semiotics and the creation of new theory to redefine language and literacy in the context of change-mediated, imagistic discourse.
Finally, Kress discusses “synaesthesia,” or “the transduction of one semiotic mode in meaning to another semiotic mode, and activity constantly performed by the brain” (86). A new theory of semiotics that accommodates multimodality must take synaesthesia into account and reverse the institutional, educational repression of synaesthetic activity (Kress 86). Textual critique will be replaced by textual design that shapes the future (Kress 87).

I dreamed about Ray Charles last night
He took me flying in the air
Showed my own spider webs
Said, "Honey, you had best take care.

Stroupe, Craig. “Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on the Web.” Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World. Carolyn Handa, ed. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2004.

hypertext: “ structure composed of blocks of text, or lexias, that are verbal” (13)
hypermedia: “includes lexias with graphic and multimedia material” (13)

Stroupe enjoins “English studies” professionals to reconsider the “text/media dichotomy—particularly the dialogism between verbal and visual discourses” (13). Besides teaching verbal and visual rhetorics that include hypertext and hypermedia, English Studies must consider what W. J. T. Mitchell identifies in “customary cultural attitudes toward visual discourses” as “‘fear’” of a “’racial, social, and sexual other’” manifesting in academic “‘contempt’” for visual discourse (Stroupe 14). He describes a method for teaching verbal and visual rhetorics together, what he calls “visualizing English,” that maintains their “distinctive literacies” (Stroupe 14-15). He advocates a “hybrid approach of a visualized English” that allows “dialogically constituitive relations between words and images . . . which can function as a singly intended, if double-voiced, rhetoric” (Stroupe 15).
Traditional assumptions about literacy are problematic for Stroupe, and he identifies “points of friction” between verbal and visual discourses as well as “continuities between visual digitality and verbal literacy” (15). He suggests that visual and verbal literacies can co-exist in a complimentary way through “elaborationism . . . the idea that . . . composing . . . can produce more critical forms of consciousness” (Stroupe 15). He claims that “elaborationism represents a potential common thread that crosses not only the visual/verbal border, but also the boundaries that politically polarize and artificially stratify the discipline into curricular dichotomies of poetic and rhetoric, high and low, literature and composition” (Stroupe 15).
Stroupe’s discussion of “Points of Friction” compares contrasting verbal and iconic approaches in Peter Elbow’s popular expressivist Writing Without Teachers composition text and Elizabeth Castro’s Netscape 3 for Macintosh (a Visual Quickstart Guide), discussing each form of literacy in its own cultural terms (17). Stroupe discusses representations of both texts’ literacies via their respective histories, their “players” or “interface between writers and their social, rhetorical, and technological contexts,” (19) their “difficulties” (20), and their respective “desires” (22), connecting ideas with Elbow’s metaphor of cooking. Stroupe invokes Baudrillard’s term “digitality” to describe present-day literacy as it has evolved from orality and written literacy (23). In this new hybridized literacy, words and images interplay reflexively on iconographic pages that retain elements of both (Stroupe 25). This mutual synthesis transcends superficial juxtaposition of words and images to achieve “’illumination’” of languages or forms” through ideological and historical unity (Stroupe 26). Words and images work together, complimentarily. Web essays composed by George Landow and Greg Ulmer provide examples of such “elaborationism” that Stroupe discusses.
He concludes that “when we acknowledge that elaborationism is expressed outside its traditionally recognized forms and media, we discover continuities between traditionally defined English studies and certain possibilities in the hybrid practices of popular and Web cultures” (35).

The world is made of spider webs
The threads are stuck to me and you
Be careful what you're wishing for
'Cause when you gain you just might lose"
You just might lose your...

Shlain, Leonard. “ Image/Word.” The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between
Word and Image. New York: Penguin / Compass, 1998.
Acknowledging the “explosive changes” (1) the acquisition of writing brings to any culture, Shlain examines the “relationship between literacy and patriarchy” (Preface ix) and claims that “writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook” and in its “alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power” (1). Shlain recalls Marshall McLuhan’s theory that society is sculpted by communication methods more than communication content, his classifications of media and their corresponding technologies, and his claim that communication technologies infiltrate the “collective psyche of any society that uses them” and from that “stealthily” hegemonic position “exert a powerful influence on cultural perceptions” (2). If new communication technology not only conducts communication, but also creates “new social patterns and new perceptual realities” (qtd. in Shlain 2), Shlain asks “how the invention of the alphabet affected the balance of power between men and women” (2).
Anthropological evidence suggests that in the absence of literacy, ancient and diverse agrarian cultures—“the Iroquois and the Hopi in North America, the inhabitants of Polynesia, the African !Kung, and numerous others around the world”—enacted egalitarian female/male relationships (Shlain 3). Strong evidence of the sacred mother’s veneration and of goddess worship in the earliest, pre-literate agrarian societies suggests women’s shared sovereignty with men. Citing Claude Levi-Strauss’s claim that the “appearance of writing” resulted in the development of “hierarchical societies,” Shlain equates the rise and fall of misogyny and patriarchy with the rise and fall of the “alphabetic written word” by interpreting many cultural god and goddess myths and historical correlations (3). He claims that images are “primarily reproductions of the sensual world of vision,” concrete approximations of reality, the parts of which “the brain simultaneously perceives” as wholly integrated “synthetically into a gestalt” (Shlain 4). Images, mostly, are recognized “in an all-at-once manner,” while the “comprehension of written words emerges in a one-at-a-time fashion” (Shlain 4-5). The linear logic required to analyze letters, words, and sentences and make meaning from them is what Shlain calls a “prime example of reductionism” that relies on abstraction, since alphabetic symbols “do not represent the images of anything in particular” (5). Thus, the brain works differently to view images than it does to read text. Image recognition requires “wholeness, simultaneity, and synthesis”; reading text requires “sequence, analysis, and abstraction” (Shlain 5).
Shlain asserts that cross-culturally, images and even the processes used to perceive them are labeled feminine, while words and the processes used to understand them are labeled masculine (5). He suggests that “the decline of the goddess began” with the advent of writing, and with it, the devaluation of images (and women) as ways to relate to the world (Shlain 7). This change, according to Schlain, created patriarchy. His observation that three powerful, patriarchal world religions are anchored in the words of the Old Testament that “features an imageless Father deity” who claims authority through “his word” supports his theory (Shlain 7). Shlain’s interrogation employs “competitive plausibility” to “consider . . . which of the hypothetical explanations of historical events is the most plausible” (3). Shlain posits that the re-emergence of the image into worldwide collective consciousness through the new media and Internet technologies will revive egalitarianism.
Spider web
Spider web
Spider web
What Ray Charles said

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” College Composition and Communication. Volume 56, Issue 2. (December 2004) 297-328.
For Yancey, the present “tectonic change” in literacy complicates definitions of writing (298). Limiting literacy to “words on paper” that tests assess ignores “proliferations of writings outside the academy,” the enthusiastic, fertile compositions of “words and images . . . blogs . . . video . . . web [pages] . . . instant messaging” that question how “what we teach can be so different from what our students know as writing” (Yancey 298). Her delivery of this CCCC ‘Chair’s Address’ from a podium sandwiched between two PowerPoint presentations that ran simultaneously as she spoke enacted an interface of verbal / oral / visual rhetoric. Yancey suggests writing is no longer only words on paper, but also intersections of images, ideas, and words that emerging technologies enable composers to combine.
She compares the present-day rise of pluralistic (what I mean here by pluralistic is crossing point of verbal, visual, aural rhetorics) literacy “outside of school” to the rise of 19th century novels and notes the significant role of reciprocity between author and audience in both (Yancey 300). Yancey suggests that today’s interface of verbal, visual, and aural rhetorics in diverse media (what I mean here by media is the plural of medium) changes composition. Text is no longer authoritative, but medi-ative in constructing “newly-imagined communities [like flash mobs] that cross borders of all kinds” (Yancey 301). Elizabeth Daley proposes that “literacy of the screen . . . become a third literacy required of all undergraduates” (Yancey 305).
She notes the importance of strong writing to the success of students in college and beyond and encourages broadening the multiplicity of methods faculty use to enact “a theory of communication that is both/and: print and digital,” and she claims that we are already digital, at least in process” with “course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT” (Yancey 307). Yancey asserts that the content of composition is its process, that multi-modality is part of composition content and structure (308).
She argues for three pedagogical strategies to propel composition into this multi-modal revolution: creation of a “new [21st century composition] curriculum,” revision of “writing across the curriculum efforts,” and development of “a major in composition and rhetoric” (Yancey 308). The goal of this new curriculum would be to create “thoughtful, informed, technologically adept writing publics” (Yancey 308) by teaching students to compose in multimodal rhetorics for multiple audiences, “to develop as members of a [real-world] writing public” (Yancey 311). The new model of composition would consist of “three key expressions.” The first is “circulation of composition,” or intertextuality, interpolation (“re/mediation” (Yancey 313-14) of medium into / on other medium) and relationality. The second is “canons of rhetoric,” or interrelationships among “invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery . . . in much the same way as the elements of Burke’s pentad” interrelate (Yancey 317). The third is “Deicity of technology” or technological changes that change literacy (Yancey 318): “Deixis, linguistically, refers to words like now and then, words whose ‘meanings change quickly depending on the time or space in which they are uttered’ . . . Literacy is deictic . . . deixis . . . ‘is a defining quality of the new literacies of the Internet’ and other information communication technologies” (Yancey 318). “Envisionment,” or applying technologies in ways that diverge from their purposes, offer new possibilities for invention (Yancey 319). According to Yancey, “this new composition . . . includes rhetoric”; it “is about literacy,” but an integrational kind of literacy that “may require a new learning site for all of us” (320).
She points out that faculty must successfully blend new technology with composition pedagogy to avoid “students in our classes learn[ing] only to fill up . . . templates and fill in those electronic boxes—which, in their ability to invite intellectual work, are the moral equivalent of the dots on the multiple choice test” (320). Faculty must claim the “intertextual, overlapping curricular spaces—between school and the public . . . print and screen” (Yancey 320). Yancey equates the technological changes reshaping composition to tremors and maintains that “rhetoric, composition, and communication process, activity, service, and social justice . . . are at the very center of
those tremors” (321).

When you're feelin' lonely
When you're hidin' in your bed
Don't forget your string of pearls
Don't forget your spider web
When I go to sleep tonight
Don't let me dream of brother Ray
No, no, no, don't...
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he sees
Just like him best the other way

Spider web
Spider web
Spider web
What Ray Charles said...
In Ray Charles head

All I got's my spider web
Keepin' me alive
C'mon Ray