If you are thinking about new media and first-year composition programs, my advice is don’t waste your time. OK, some well-endowed universities might have new media composition. When I was at Georgia Tech, there was a pilot program in writing in electronic environments. But only a pilot program, a curiosity. At smaller colleges, such as my own, this it totally unthinkable.

Let’s put it this way. Who actually teachers composition?

1. At PhD granting institutions the answer is grad students.
2. Everywhere else the answer is adjuncts, mostly with MA degrees in English.
3. A small fraction may be taught by tenured/tenure-track faculty in English.

How many of these folks will have training in new media? Virtually none. Who wants to pay to have them trained and then keep them current as the technology advances? No one. Oh sure, you may occassionaly see some big name university that receives some huge sum from some corporation or foundation or government department to do this or that with new media, but there will be no “trickle down,” b/c there’s no money to support it.

Even if we magically had a group of faculty who were new media savvy and willing to keep themselves up to date free of charge, my College (and many others like it) couldn’t afford the hardware, software, and networking costs associated with a new media composition program. We have more than 1000 students in composition every semester. We would have to buy at least 200 stations, replacing 50 every year (on a 4-year cycle). Assuming they cost $1000 a piece (they have to be high-end enough to remain functional for 4 years), that’s $50,000/yr, plus software, plus support, plus networking costs. That’s on top of what we are already spending.

By the way, I haven’t even mentioned yet, that it would be completely idiotic to have a new media composition program unless the students then went on to produce new media compositions in their other courses. This would mean new media training for faculty across the curriculum and more workstations, more applications, more networking, and more support.

In short, my sense is that first-year composition is the last place one needs to worry about as a site for integrating new media. Of course, I imagine there will always be opportunities for individual faculty to take on this task, but the costs of instituionalizing such an activity are very high. Only when the majority of academia insists upon new media composition will this shift actually be made, just as composition as we know it today exists only b/c the academy has insisted upon the need for students to receive writing instruction.

Folks who are writing “practical” guides for rhetoric and composition to do this or that with new media (you know who you are) are, IMHO, missing the point. First, any practical assignment will be outdated almost before coming to print by the rapid development of new media technology (as in one needs a guide to incorporating a MOO into one’s class as much as one needs directions on making papyrus). Second, the REAL LESSON we need to learn from new media has nothing to do with the specifics of the technology, but everything to do with its materiality as an information processor. That lesson has to do with moving to a new sense of distributed consciousness and authorship. As useful, in a limited sense, as suggestions about using contemporary new media in composition may be, they are counter-productive to the extent that they occlude our shifting sense of consciousness and authorship. All they end up doing is securing the ideological subject of the author/knowledge worker for further exchanges in other classrooms and later in the workplace.

Let me add, by the way, that I’m not speaking specifically of the authors of Writing New Media. It’s just that reading the book has me thinking about these things. I endorse the notion of rhet/comp faculty engaging the challenges of new media composition. In fact, my own book hinges on this endorsement. It is crucial that we start to figure these things out before we get buried in them (ooops… probably too late). What I’m pointing out here is that we cannot imagine new media comp as a systemic feature of first-year writing courses; at least not in the near future, and by the time it does, the technology will be very different from what it is now.

In a way I suppose this is good news: trying to institute such a change at a college like mine would be an absolute nightmare. You’d have to fight and scrape for every dime. 90% of the composition faculty would be opposed and deeply resistant. The majority of the English faculty would have no idea what you were doing (not that they’d care all that much) and the rest of the faculty would just be totally perplexed: exactly how is teaching new media composition going to reduce the number of comma splices in the papers I get?