Page 96 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of New Media On

WHO OWNS THE WORDS? 65

print and electronic. The acronym YOYOW (You Own Your Own
Words) rings true for many students' communication. And the
power inherent in owning one's words—especially in a multimedia
world—now extends to the way one writes in a classroom setting.
Carla Hesse, writing in The Future of the Book (Nunberg, 1996),
suggested that

the critical distinction between "the book" and other forms of printed
matter is not the physical form of the printed word, or the implicit set of
social actors that it requires ..., but rather the mode of temporality
that the book form establishes between those actors. The book is a
slow form of exchange. It is a mode of temporality which conceives of
public communication not as action, but rather as reflection upon ac-
tion. Indeed the book form serves precisely to defer action, to widen
the temporal gap between thought and deed, to create a space for re-
flection and debate, (p. 27)

Hesse's point is critical for writing teachers, because much of tra-
ditional writing depends on the "bookish" sense of temporality and
the position that good writing takes time and reflection. Most
compositionists hope students create spaces for reflection and debate
in their writing, not to act on words hastily but to think and deliber-
ate the ideas that words elicit.
However, this bookish sense of temporality privileged in writing
instruction is at odds with the immediacy of electronic communica-
tion. E-mail, chat, MOOs, weblogs, and the like are not always re-
flective genres. These genres beg a call to action from an audience.
These mundane texts are public communication in action, and the
type of writing involved in producing such e-texts is intended to be
both sudden and widespread. E-texts are meant to be interactive, not
necessarily reflective. Therefore, these texts provide the writer with
great power to inspire an immediate effect on the audience, whether
for good or ill.
This shift in the mode of temporality for a writer, from reflective
to interactive, changes the role of the student writer in the college
composition classroom. Interactive writing parallels oratory, in that
writing becomes performative. As with other performative speech
acts, the student writer depends on locutionary, illocutionary, and
perlocutionary language acts (see Austin, 1962, for a complete dis-
cussion of performative speech acts). Locutionary language acts in
cyberspace function similarly to other speech contexts—the writer