Thankfully, there have been several jobs this year in “digital media” and many more traditional rhet/comp jobs where one of the specialities listed was digital media. That being said, I’m a bit flumoxed by the separation between production and theory that many of these programs seem to be promoting. At some schools completely different tracks have been developed that separate the two, while at others it seems to be acceptable to work on multimedia theory within the English or Rhetoric departments but the production courses are left to Art and/or Design programs on campus. Of course, this assumes that production courses do not connect theory with production, which seems a bit strange to me–and to other colleagues of mine working in this field.

The only explanation I can come up with is that although many programs are finally beginning to recognize that this is a speciality they need within their departments, they aren’t really sure what this speciality is or what it should do. In fact, another trend in the digital media market this year seems to be that the programs that are hiring are looking for their new hires to tell them what digital media is and why it should matter to them. (And I hasten to point out that this can be a good thing as long as the technology and T&P support is there for this type of work.) This seems to be a continuation of the growing divide between the verbal and the visual within the field of English studies. It is also, I believe, related to some of the debates going on within the field of rhet/comp about what the subject of composition is–because let’s face it, would anyone try to separate writing from theory at this point?

Since this is a debate I address in my disseration, I thought I’d include a few paragraphs from my dissertation abstract about this debate (especially since precious few schools actually requested my dissertation abstract–about 6 out of 50–and since I spent a heck of a lot of time on it, someone should read it, darn it!)

Historically, changes in communication methods have produced sharp debates about the value and legitimacy of those practices. From Plato’s denunciation of writing in the Phaedrus to the current debates surrounding the proliferation of images (moving and still) and a decline in literacy, new technologies force us to reevaluate the ways we communicate and understand each other. And, as each new technology evolves, it requires the underlying rhetorics of the communication practices to evolve too. The recent reemergence of the visual as a dominant mode of communication and the subsequent development of a dual model of rhetorics (visual and textual) have had the unintended result of furthering the divide between rhetorical theory and its compositional practice (at least as it has been practiced since the late nineteenth century), as well as creating a divide within the field of Rhetoric and Composition between scholars who believe the visual belongs within the field’s domain and those who do not. One of the contributing factors to this growing divide is the determination by the field to continually repurpose the unimodal rhetoric of the classical period to address each new mode of communication as it emerges; however, we can no longer afford to look at each mode as separate and distinct (i.e., unimodal). Rather, we must begin to develop a rhetoric that addresses the combination of multiple modes with which our students are engaged and in which they compose: we need a mutlimodal rhetoric.

The development of such a rhetoric will also require a re-imagination of composition as an academic subject, which is why I begin my dissertation with a historical analysis of how our conceptions of rhetoric inform the term composition as it is currently used in English Studies to refer only to the act of writing. However, a look at its use in other disciplines (e.g., Art & Design) shows that the term composition reflects a larger practice of gathering and arranging elements to create a unified whole, a practice that more closely reflects the Latin root compositio. Applying such an expanded definition to the term in English studies would allow for the development and introduction of a multimodal rhetoric in the composition classroom; the art of using all available means of persuasion becomes a multimodal act. Simply using one mode (writing) to persuade is too restrictive; rather, students need to have an arsenal of persuasive means/modes (e.g., text, image, video, sound, etc) at their finger tips and the knowledge of when to employ each of these modes to greatest effect in their arguments. Thus, an expansion of both rhetoric and composition is vital to address new and emerging literate practices.