Karyna's response

[Robert Greco]

#873

In a long run, I do agree with Shipka’s claim that “we need to continue broadening our understanding of the multiplicity of modes, genres, moves, and strategies that might result in extremely compelling, purposeful work–work that simultaneously challenges and enriches our understanding of the various ways in which, and resources with which, meaning might be made.” New media and new technology has been around us for a while now. Images, sounds, smells, and other agents that stimulate our senses have been a part of our meaning-making scheme probably since childhood. It is not that all these things are new, they just have been existing in their separate universe, outside of a writing classroom. So what happens when we bring them all together?

This semester, as I was working on my experiments, I have been thinking a lot about what I am gaining and what I am loosing when I compose in a multi-modal format. On the gain side, I felt how my scope of thinking about concepts was broadening. Creating a final piece was no longer about choosing the right word; it was about choosing the right music or the right picture. Otherwise, the whole piece felt handicapped, unfinished, meaning-less. These experiments expanded my thinking of the power of visual representation. In prezi, I can not only tell my story or my argument, but I can also reflect its shape through the visual design.Is my argument an hourglass? Is it just an exploratory shapeless doodle? Possibilities are endless.

As a psychologist working within a discipline that privileges often dry, depersonalized forms of wiring, I was able to think of ideas to create multi-modal presentations that are representative and reflective of the dynamic and multifaceted concepts the discipline engages with. In line with Shipka’s concern, I suspect that a group old tenured white male philosophers, to whom I will be presenting in August, might think that this form of composing is experimental and nonacademic, but at the same time I know that even theoretical writing can be multi-modal.

On the other hand, I can’t stop thinking that something is, in fact lost, in multi-modal composition; something intimate and dear, something only pen and paper can do. Sometimes, it seems that inserting a picture instead of a carefully crafted description is too easy; it’s almost like cheating; depriving yourself of a valuable skill, of mastery of language; when every word conveys something important, something meaningful.

Overall, this course has been both a revelation and lamentation; the felt sense of something gained and something lost; something I can’t quite put a word to yet. It was a time and place of thinking at the edge, dwelling in the discomfort, origin of which remains unknown. What happens when you step over?

[Sondra Perl]

#880

Beautifully said, Karyna. “Revelation and lamentation” — something gained and something lost.I not only wonder what ‘that’ is — if you stayed with the murkiness of that and let it speak, ‘dwelling’ longer in the discomfort until words come to express it — and what it would look, feel and sound like if you portrayed it in a digital format?

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