Are You Aware of the Materiality of the Comment You Will Soon Post to This Blog Entry?

We spent a fair amount of class time last Thursday considering Wysocki's definition of "new media texts," or "those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality." Cynthia Selfe, in this week's chapter, defines "new media texts" as those that are "created primarily in digital environments, composed in multiple media . . . , and designed for presentation and exchange in digital venues."

Wysocki's definition of the term does not limit a new media text to a "digital environment." Many of her example activities do not necessarily have anything at all to do with "new media" in Selfe's sense. I suppose Selfe is not limiting her definition either, "primarily" is not "exclusively," but she is approaching the term differently, and intuitively her definition is easier for me to grasp.

If new media texts must, in Wysocki's sense, "make as overtly as possible the values they embody," could a novel with a certain jacket design be considered a new media text? Take my edition of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a Vintage International paperback. It's really nice. Certainly the Vintage people wanted something that would look both serious and handsome. Ellison's name is a little bit lower than the halfway point on the front cover, white type on a black band, and a rust-brown plane spreads across the space above, more than half the cover. Below Ellison's name is the title of the book in a sans serif font I don't know the name of. For whatever reason, the two i's surrounding the letter s in "Invisible" are two shades of gray, and the a in "Man" is the same rust brown as the top part of the cover.

Certainly some design values are being embodied here. Maybe the two i's, both lower case, are pointing to some divided identity rendered unimportant, uncapitalized, by racism. But maybe I'm reading into it. Have a gander and decide for yourself (and keep in mind, I haven't really mentioned the novel itself!):

I guess what I'm getting at is any text, digital or otherwise, embodies some value, so then (a) what the hell is it? and (b) prove it. Can a composer of any text ever be completely aware of the values his or her text embodies? Given that even, or especially, in the digital age, texts are composed collaboratively, how does one account for the multiple values inevitably at play? The phrase "as overtly visible as possible" in Wysocki's definition is tricky!

Probably I am wading a bit into interpretation-related questions and not focusing enough on the materiality aspect. Something happens when you write in crayon or when you write a blog or when you make a YouTube video, something directly related to the materiality, or the inherent possibilities in the chosen medium or media. But whatever that something is, it seems to me, is inevitably an interpretive question, because it will always be a little bit different for each individual.

Does this blog entry qualify as a new media text? According to Selfe, it probably does--because it is digitally produced and offers interactivity (you can comment)--but I'm not so sure it does in Wysocki's sense. Or if it does, my awareness of this blog entry as a blog entry doesn't necessarily contribute anything more significant than the structure of this template. But maybe if I write, in the entry, "You must comment!" I have called attention to this blog entry's materiality. Hey, you! You reading this! You must comment!