Composing New Media: Cultivating Landscapes of the Mind

"'In Composing New Media: Cultivating Landscapes of the Mind,' I'm trying to model new media composing processes and the kinds of knowledge these processes require. This model is also, simultaneously, a demonstration of the potential of interactive new media. It asks you to become performer of the model as it makes you question the conventions for interactivity that you may have already developed. These vending machine models of interactivity (i.e. point, click, gratification) limit the potential of new media because they make you into a consumer of information. New media allows its producers (both authors and performers) to co-create compositions. In fact, with your willing suspension of your conventional notions of interactivity, you will cultivate the seven landscapes available to you in this piece and develop an understanding of the topoi of knowledge needed to compose new media. That is, we author this piece together, and our joint composition has interesting implications for scholarly work."

Ellen Cushman

So Much, So Far, So What? Progress and Prediction in Technorhetoric

If we know whether what we have said will happen did indeed happen, we would then have a useful sense of the accuracy of our predictive mechanisms and the perspective necessary to anticipate change with greater accuracy. Additionally, and more importantly, examining our claims in retrospect can give us a clearer idea about what we were “really” looking toward (as opposed to what we “got”), and in particular, can give us an idea of what we should strive for.

Bob Whipple, Jr. and Robert S. Dornsife, Jr.