Readings

As a digital immigrant, I hated the experience of reading Walker's Hyper:Acivity, although truthfully, that is probably more about my dyslexia than about the digitalness.

I rely on the structural cues that a page offers in order to read. In fact, I print everything that I read for all of my classes, always. New media texts, such as this one, can't really be printed. Which means that I have a hell of a time reading them. I can read individual words over and over again, but they don't fit together to make meaning for me. Really, other than pod casts (because, frankly, I am an auditory learner), I hate having to obtain information from mixed media texts. Even podcasts, and videos, though make information harder to get. I am skilled at using print texts. I understand the format. I know where the important information is supposed to be. I can skim and get a fairly decent understand of what is going on. I have no idea how to begin to skim a video. Or a podcast.

And I am not even sure how to read this piece. I am reading it one column at a time, but I feel like I am missing something. I keep thinking that the texts are supposed to relate to one another.

Ah! I found instructions. I am not sure how I feel about needing instructions to read a webpage. Or any page for that matter. I am so immersed in literacy (print literacy) that this is really, really hard.

And, as I read on, I see that the authors agree with me:

Where am I coming from?
1. Material Rhetoric: The concept that physical contexts affect the rhetorical power of a text and its ability to make meaning.
2. Activity Theory: The effort to understand human interactions with physical/spatial/cognitive/time components in the production of a specific text.
3. Multimodal Theory: The concept that meaning-making is altered and shaped both by the tools of composition (pen, computer, crayon, piano) and by the symbol systems that are used to produce a text (alphabetic text, images, movies, spoken words, music). (slide 5)

Well, not that this is very hard to read, but that the material conditions of the piece affect its "ability to make meaning."

Oh,and here I am again in slide 10:

The reader may experience a sense of alienation from the text.

I don't know what it is about my background (maybe the stint writing training material), but I tend to focus on making my writing clear and understandable for the audience. New media texts that explore new materialities are deliberately not audience centered. They want to force reaction/interaction from the audience in a different way from the one that a "typical" audience expects.