Sunday October 26, 2008 CRD 704 - Reading 10
Pace wrote
"Pauses, inaccuracies, and other features of the program?s mediation allow the writer to treat the program less as a personal assistant than as a co-writer. And so, in noting the potential for VRT?s mediation to affect and maybe even guide the writing process, we might begin to look at it more as a scribe than as a tool."
which led me to think about what other sorts of software blur the line from "just a tool" to software having a sense of "agency" that force a particular path of interpretation or representation. Of course MSWord is one such program, as are integrated development environments through what languages they allow you to usev ia the languages that they "support". If an integrated development environment (IDE), software used for developing and testing software programs, doesn't support HTML (for instance) then it might mean that developers won't use HTML which could lead to a variety of other design decisions that effect the end user. In this way, those choices could become embedded in the software's design. That's still not a 100% example of agency, like the author points out, but compilers used by the IDE do interpret the code - sometimes in unintended ways.
At the same time, Pace points out that
"writers also have to be open to the idea of the computer as a co-writer in order to use errors as a heuristic device. When errors are used to change the content of text, the composition becomes more malleable than it is when typing or dictating to another person."
Even though Pace's article is about "computer-as-co-author", and some of the issues involved with using VRT software, I think that CMOC can have a valuable influence on the thought-speech paradigm in terms of preparing students for the professional world. Just reading Chandra's conversational-style transcript was painful with its multiple incomplete thoughts. Yet it seems like this is how the current generation communicates -- un-consecutive 15-20 word blurbs (texts, blogs, twitter).
Wouldn't CMOC be a useful exercise for a public speaking class? -- I wrote that before reading Comstock and Hock's piece on sonic literacy. I could see where having to use it to "write" a paper, or to compose a voice-over narrative in Comstock and Hocks' examples, would help students understand 1) how they really sound when they speak 2) the thought required to speak clearly, with clarity, rhetorically, etc. What is particularly interesting is that, at work, I often feel I have to speak the way I have been taught to write: clearly, logically, concisely. I often find myself consciously trying to limit an oral explanation to 2-3 sentences. It's like I write it in my head before I say them, and I speak more slowly to allow that time to think.
In Pace, Chandra' said that learning to use the software helped her with style:
"She felt that changing ?finds out? to ?discovers? made the sentence sound more formal and more appropriate for an academic audience. She, therefore, reflected on the error?s effect on the style in her text. Such reflections and interactions with errors will make students more consciously engage with their own concerns with style."
And I think that sonic literacy is an interesting concept... because my initial reaction was like "what?" but after thinking about it, I realised we have a sonic rhetoric that is transformed by digital media.
Posted by hkvonlud ( Oct 26 2008, 03:32:20 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]