Page 65 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of New Media On

34 CHAPTER 2

to craft messages for a public audience, and then the teacher over-
rides or overwrites student work designed for a specific Internet au-
dience, what does it teach the student? Moreover, when assessment
practices infringe on the students' writing for a global audience, even
when the materials are produced for a class, which holds more
sway—the assessment mechanism or the audience?
Before I attempt to answer these questions in later chapters, it is
important to examine the critical element for transforming our
present theories of writing assessment in the age of technological
convergence: the text. In Composition, we regularly think of the text
as the Text—something singular, even if written collaboratively, and
enduring—the "finished" product of multiple drafts and revisions.
Yet this is a very isolated understanding of what a text is and what it
can do for electronic communication. Technological convergence al-
ters this older, print-driven expectation of what a text is. In conver-
gence, writers use and combine different media to communicate
similar ideas and goals. Depending on a writer's techniques, limita-
tions, and language ability and selected media technologies, a text
can become highly fluid and obscure those characteristics that many
writing instructors have come to associate with the idea of the Text,
that is, the feeling of bookishness (Haas, 1996) that a traditional
papertext format presents to a reader.
Through the influences of poststructural and postmodern the-
ory, numerous compositionists recognize that writers shape texts
along multiple social, political, gendered, economic, racial, and aes-
thetic lines. To some degree, these newer theoretical lines help us to
reduce the bookishness that exists in more traditionally written
texts, because these ideas suggest that even the most solidly written
article or book maintains points of fracture and disjunction that al-
low us to unravel the text's meanings. However, even the most ex-
perimental or unraveled papertext still conforms to enough
conventions for instructors to make some kind of informed judg-
ment on the work in front of them. This is because, as Gunther
Kress indicated in his work Writing the Future, there are three dis-
tinct textual categories in the English curriculum that govern our
decisions on how to approach a text:

• The culturally salient text
• The aesthetically valued (and valuable) text
• The mundane text (1994, p. 34)