I asked yesterday, “why teach digital genres?” I do it — I incorporate Web pages into the essay assignments I give my first-year composition students — but yesterday, with a head full of introductory economics, I was having a hard time seeing teaching through any non-economic perspective. I’m feeling slightly less fuddled this morning.
One of the reasons I gave had to do with weblogging as a form of “low-stakes” writing, but since I don’t incorporate weblogging into my syllabus, there are other digital genres that I feel bear examination, I believe the most significant of which is the Web page. I agree with Douglas Hesse and others who argue that writing for the Web is in many ways quite different from what we know as conventional or print-based “essayistic literacy” (Hesse’s term); the Web’s favoring of parataxis as opposed to the hypotaxis (and here I’m disagreeing with the way Doug Brent seems to define hypotaxis; my definition is coming out of Lanham’s Handbook and Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca) of the essay being but one of those ways. So: one motivation for teaching digital genres is that writing for the Web opens up different modes of argumentation that students may find useful.
Another argument that’s been made for teaching digital genres in comp classes is that these are texts that students are, in fact, interested in. While there are few first-year students who’ll eagerly pick up Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem or Jonathan Franzen’s How to Be Alone for pleasure reading, many do read — or at least surf, or browse, or whatever your verb of choice is — on the Web. Helping them to produce better documents for a forum that interests them (and us) seems a worthy goal, particularly when we acknowledge the ways in which these digital genres have shown us anew (via blogrolls, via the links we e-mail one another, via hit counters) the social value of texts.
And this idea of social value brings me to what I think is the most important argument for including digital genres in the composition curriculum: the argument concerning how texts are valued. Bruce Horner, in Terms of Work for Composition, does a careful and brilliant analysis of the use and exchange values of work done in the composition classroom that I really can’t do justice to here; however, one of his big concerns (and I apologize for being reductive) is that the conventional model of such a classroom alienates students from the work that they do in class — their labor — by understanding that work only in terms of its exchange value (i.e., they trade a paper for a grade). As long as the teacher is the only end consumer of the student essay, this will continue to be a problem. But! Here’s where the Web can help. I haven’t yet thought this all the way through, but it seems to me that if students put their writing online — if we make essays into Web assignments — then their writing has a broader audience than just the teacher; the writing circulates, and can have a value beyond just the exchange value of the grade assigned to it by the teacher.
I’ll have to go back to Horner (and, well, Marx) to figure out if/how this would actually constitute use value, but I think it’s worth thinking about, especially when I imagine Web essays with the same sorts of commenting features common to weblogs. I can picture students getting comments from outside the classroom, from real life (well, at least as it exists on the Web) about their writing, and just totally getting into it and enjoying writing: in short, in having writing have value to students beyond just the grade.
And then sometimes I get carried away and think of a searchable database of essays circulating on the internet, Napster-style, that would simultaneously be the best anti-plagiarism resource a composition teacher could ask for and a place where composition students collect, exchange, trade and read essays like they do .mp3s, or like some people do with baseball cards. But maybe that’s kinda far-fetched.
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