Chichi's Magic

In my previous posts, I mainly discuss issues that relate to technology, digital texts and print texts, and teaching, but for this post I would like to tell a short narrative about how the World Wide Web made a small “dream come true.”

It begins really with my mother. My mother was raised in an abusive environment. Her father was a felon and a wife/child abuser, and her mother never tried to stop his abuses. By the time she was eight years old, the family was reduced to living in a van on the side of an abandoned road. After her infant brother died of pneumonia, social services sent her biological male parent to jail and split the four remaining children among family members. In a few weeks the only family life my mother knew was destroyed.

My mother and her next older sister (my Aunt Sandra) were sent to live with their uncle and his wife. While there, she was not physically abused, but she was mentally abused. Constantly reminded that she and her sister were the poor castaways, she never found a stable and loving home environment, and being a precocious youth, she sought comfort in other areas, mainly reading. She often visited the school library and borrowed books to occupy her thoughts. She was particularly fond of one book, Chichi’s Magic, a simple tale of a young boy in love who is turned into a monkey by a witch. Over time, she grew out of such “silly” tales and soon forgot Chichi and his journey, but she never lost her love of reading, a trait that got pasted to both my sister and I.

As the youngest of three, I have never been able to escape “The Baby” label. After my mom and I would drop my older siblings off at school, we would go to breakfast at Grandy’s, a restaurant that seems to exist only in Florida, and then to the library. I was very young when she first mentioned to me “to keep an eye out for a book with a monkey on the cover.” She was trying to find Chichi’s Magic, but she couldn't remember anything about it except that it was about a monkey and that the cover had a drawing of a monkey swinging through some trees on it.

For years, I always remembered to look for that book, and I even asked librarians if they knew of it. But when all I could them was that the book was about a monkey, the reply was always the same, “No, dear, I’m sorry. I don’t know of a book like that.” Long after my mother had given up, I kept searching, asking middle school and public librarians until, finally, I stopped asking. I really stopped looking too, but I never gave up on the idea of finding it.

Years and years later, we moved to Texas. I had graduated from high school when one day my cousin Jason asked me if I had ever read Chichi’s Magic.

“No,” I said, “I’ve never heard of it. What’s it about?”

“It’s a children’s book about a monkey (my ears perked up), but I think you’ll like it. It’s has all these mythical retellings; I’ll bring it by tomorrow.” True to his word, Jason brought the book by, but there was no monkey on the cover. Still, I read it; it was certainly a cute tale about overcoming obstacles. I had had it for only a couple days when mom asked me if I still asked people about the book with the monkey on the cover.

“No, I stopped asking about that years ago,” I told her, all the while that book Jason had loaned me was running through me head. Just for curiosity’s sake, I got up and walked into my room, rummaged around a bit for the book, and reappeared in front of her with it in my hands. I handed it to her and asked her to look at. She looked skeptical—there was no monkey on the cover, but when she opened it, the title popped off the page, and there, in a brightly colored illustration, was the monkey we’d all been looking for. She literally jumped out of her seat and screamed, “This is it! This is it!” After years of searching, my mom was reacquainted with Chichi, her childhood friend.

But this story doesn’t end here. Of course, the book was Jason’s, and Chichi had to be returned to him. By this time I was in college and after years of searching, I couldn’t let all of this go, so I began searching the internet for old and used bookstores. I found biblio.com, a site for used and rare books, and an antique bookseller in New Jersey had one copy listed under its stock. I called the store, and a charming old lady answered. With the patience of a saint, she listened as I told her about my decades long search.

“Yes, I still have it. In fact, I was doing inventory the other day and placed it on a back shelf.” She placed me on hold as she rummaged through her stock.

“Here it is. It’s in excellent condition, a first edition too. A library edition, I think.”

“A library edition?” I questioned her.

“Yes, it’s probably one of the first editions that the publishers issues to elementary schools.”

I liked the idea of finding an almost exact replica for my mom, but I needed to know one more thing.

“What’s on the cover?”

“It’s a picture of a monkey.” Without a second thought, I bought the book and had it shipped. I wanted it to arrive in time for Mother’s Day, but it was a few weeks late. It didn’t matter. I just left the gift at the house along with a note explaining that this was her belated Mother’s Day gift and went to school. Hours later, I got this call; it was my mom. She was crying so much that all I could understand was, “I got the book.”

Later, I sent a "thank you" to the bookseller for helping me in my search. Her reply was simple, “I’m glad that I could help make that dream come true.”

Can You Help Me Out A Bit More, Mr. Elbow?

Peter Elbow. “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process.” The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford UP, 200. 54-66.

In his delightful article, Elbow puts forth a simple argument. “My argument is that good teaching seems a struggle because it calls on skills or mentalities that are actually contrary to each other and thus tend to interfere with each other” (54). Well, his argue looks simple, but the underlying issues are those that every writing instructor faces. On one hand, writing instructors “have an obligation to students,” but they also have “an obligation to knowledge and society” (54). Seeing teachers torn between these two obligations, Elbow categorizes writing instructors as one of three types. First, there are the heartless ones who are so dedicated to what they are teaching that the halls run red with ink. Second, the softer teachers who sympathy with their students sacrifice the craft to help students “get by,” and last are the halfhearted ones who, being committed to both, fall somewhere in between.

However, Elbow likes “to think that these two commitments coincide,” and it goes without saying that they usually do (54). Every composition instructor has been confronted with that student who tries and fails and tries and fails again. Should our commitment to standards be so strong that we assign the failing grade and leave a blistering comment? Or should we realize that the student needs something more, that she needs “praise and support rather than a tough grade, even for her weak performance, if she is really to prosper as a student and a person” (54)? How do we resolve these two obligations for the betterment of all parties concerned, the student, the society, and the instructor?

Elbow points out that as composition instructors, we are both allies to the students and guardians of the social standard. As allies, we try to make students comfortable to ask naïve questions and “to invite all students to enter in and join us as members of a learning community” (55). However, as guardians, “we must discriminate, evaluate, test, grade, and certify” (55). In order to do the greatest good for ourselves, our students, and our society, Elbow remarks that we must bring these two responsibilities into harmony. He admits that “there is obviously no one right way to teach, yet…in order to teach well we must find some way to be loyal both to students and to knowledge or society” (64). For me, I hope that with experience comes a wisdom to deal with this dual loyalty and an ability to serve these two “masters.”

Thoughts on Hawisher and Selfe

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe. “The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class.” The Writing Teacher’s Source Book. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 129-38.

Since the first fully-assembled microcomputer was introduced in 1977, technological changes have swept across the nation’s classrooms. As money has become available to school districts, computer-mediated classrooms with Internet access for e-conferences became the “norm.” Particularly within the English language arts classroom, computers redefine how we understand text, how we read and write, and especially how we teach composition to students. In today’s environment, however, composition “instructors who hope to function effectively in these new electronic classrooms must assess ways in which the use of computer technology might shape, for better and worse, their strategies for working with students” (129). While using technology in the classroom can benefit students, writing instructors also need to be aware that technology can also reinforce traditional and ineffectual learning techniques. In their article, Hawisher and Selfe accomplish three goals. First, they explore the discourse that has surrounded the incorporation of computers into the classroom and how it has caused change and how it has maintained the status quo. Second, they discuss how technology can solidify ideas of authority structures, and third, they propose that computers present us with an opportunity to transform our writing classes into other forms of learning environments.

In exploring the discourse of implementing computers into English classes, Hawisher and Selfe surveyed numerous writing teachers at a 1988 Conference on Computers in Writing and Language Instruction and found that many composition instructors have found numerous positive results. In their responses, the instructors point out that computer-mediated classrooms allow students plenty of time to write, opportunities to peer teach, one-on-one conferencing with the instructor, and more collaboration between the teacher and students, among other things. By using technology in their classrooms, these instructors considered themselves not as the traditioanl “dispensers of knowledge but rather as collaborators within a group of learners supported by technology” (133). They rarely spoke of any negative outcomes of using technology in the writing classroom, which did not help the authors explain the “less positive, more problematic uses of computers that [they had] encountered during the last five years as [they] visited many other electronic writing classes” (133).

Since the authors could not find any responses to help them solve this dilemma, they conducted their own formal and informal observations of writing classes. In observations, Hawisher and Selfe note that computers did not make an ideal learning environment. In one class, the students wrote a great deal using computers, but there were no notable exchanges of value between students and the teacher. In another, the teacher used computers and projectors to display sample texts to be critiqued by the class. Here, however, only three or four students participated, and the class as a whole “seemed to be searching for answers to the instructor’s preset questions” (134). With these two classrooms, the use of technology merely made the course more “teacher-centered” and “teacher-controlled”—not exactly the ideal computer composition classroom (135).

So how are we to proceed from here? The authors show that merely using technology in a writing classroom does not always improve student writing and learning, but technology cannot be ignored nor abandoned. As a result, the authors wisely propose that we use “our awareness of the discrepancies we have noted as a basis for constructing a more complete image of how technology can be used positively and negatively” (135). In considering all possible effects, writing instructors can build a better writing curriculum that incorporates electronic technology effectively.

Using Font

When I first heard McLuhan’s aphorism “the medium is the message,” I was a bit perplexed. As the statement suggests, the medium—not the message—is the central focus of study. While I understand (at least, I think I understand) the issues surrounding the idea that the medium is the message, I remain skeptical. I question whether an unstable medium should be focused on over the message, especially when that medium came break down so easily—the web browser is “not responding;” the power goes out; one of the applications crashes; cyber flu circulates; or a toddler finds the remote and programs the system to speak in Dutch with Swahili subtitles. However, I do fully support the idea that the medium should enhance the message.

Using the digital medium to support the message is almost limitless in its application. Although print has already incorporated charts, diagrams, and images, digital writers can incorporate them as well as video and audio and hyperlinks to allow for multilinear readings. They are also at more liberty to manipulate colors, font, and arrangement of their digital texts to enhance their meanings, to adjust the tone, or simply to appeal to a particular audience.

One aspect that particularly seems appealing is altering font. It seems to me that readers rarely see multiple fonts in print text. In order to make text more readable and unified, most printers probably use only one or two types of fonts in their texts. The only instance when I saw multiple fonts used in a print text was the Harry Potter series. At several points in the series, the author would provide letters that the characters had written to each other, and of course, each character had his or her own individual handwriting. I particularly enjoyed seeing the different styles because it allowed me to know the characters even more intimately. Each font has its own personality and reflected the personality of the character, much like this video shows the personalities of different fonts.



Also, as the current editor of Pulse magazine, I’ve been particularly interested in seeing how the font can be used to emphasis the content. In almost every past issue, the editors stuck with the tired-and-true Times New Roman. Blah! That ubiquitous font, for me, has come to represent mediocrity and a lack of imagination. Although I want the journal to maintain its professional and literary image, I would like to see it manipulate simple elements like font to further its content.

Questions of Authority, Part 2

In an earlier post, I briefly discussed the issue of print text’s traditional authority over digital texts. I gave the reasons that print text has a lengthier legacy than e-texts and that people value print text because it costs them money. While I would like to revisit the money element later, I am going to continue in this post with the second arena I mentioned: establishment and reputation.

Before beginning my previous discussion, I recounted a short debate which involved me and two others. In the end, my opinion won out because I had a degree, and behind this degree stood an established institution and its reputation. With print text, there is also an establishment and reputation to consider.

First, print text as an establishment goes back to its legacy. Because print text has been around a long time and widely circulated, it has been established as the dominant form of text, and the producers of print text have been established as well. They have money to print, and they want to profit from their print texts. So, they select only the most profitable materials for printing. “Most profitable” could be anything from crowd pleasing love poetry or “page-turning” novels to the most respected scientific or literary discourses. Printers became known for the types of text they printed and distributed. Today, we have the highly respected Norton Publishing Company, Oxford University Press, Longman, and others that are established as critical and literary publishers. Scholastic is known for printing educational material for children in elementary and secondary schools. Marvel and DC print comics, and even well-known booksellers, such as Barnes and Noble, have established themselves as printers as well. Writers seek out particular publishers to print their materials because these printers have established the standard for text, and that standard is prestige and print. Even Bolter admits that “as authors and readers, we still regard books and journals as the place to locate our most prestigious texts” (3). The Internet, on the other hand, has neither the history nor the establishment that print has. It also does not have the reputation.

Again building on its history, finances, and establishment, print text outweighs digital text because it has a reputation. People respect print text. It is stable, fixed, permanent. A reader can reasonably rely on a book standing on a library shelf or on a local bookstand. However, a digital, especially online, text may not always be there, and it may not be the same text a reader viewed yesterday (even in our blogs, this idea is true). Also, the printers who print particular genres have reputations to consider as well. If they are to be known as the forefront of quality text, then these printers produce only the highest quality text, text that will be respected, valued, and purchased. These printers are exclusive; they do not print “just anything,” only the materials that meet the standard. In an online environment where “publishing” is free, anyone from admired and educated theorists to fans who only state their biased opinions can be published. Thus, “[f]ew authors today aspire to publish a first novel on the Internet (it is too easy); they still want to be in print” ( Bolter 3).



Works Cited
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence, 2001.

Click Here

We’ve all been in contact with various types of advertising: TV and radio commercials, newspaper ads of different sizes, large billboards, skywriting and aerial banners, etc. It’s amazing to see how far vendors will go to increase the public’s demand for their products. And the internet is no exception.

The other day I visited a web site (dictionary.com, one of my favorites) and was quite disgusted by an advertisement. The advertisement consisted of two images. One was a horrible thing: a large, flabby, frumpy gut bouncing up and down, and to make matters worse, it bounced up and down again and again. The other image was a perfectly toned, flat stomach. The caption read something about losing weight—no surprises there.

Since then, another advertisement has sprung up about botox for hair, promising to reverse the damage done to hair from years of blowdrying and sun exposure. Another advertisement that I’ve seen about cybertown shows several people dancing for joy that their mortgage rates were reduced and tells surfers that they, too, can save thousands! There was even confetti.

All of these advertisements have one thing in common: the words “Click Here.”

“A very simple and effective tactic,” I thought. After attracting the surfer’s attention with images of contrasting ideas and color, the ad commands him to “click here.” Many are strong and can resist, but the weak ones, like me, just can’t help themselves. They must find out where they will go once they “click here;” they have to satisfy their curiosity, like Eve biting the apple. Slowly, the mouse pointer is pulled to the link like a pin is drawn to a magnet. Once it is in place, the crushing weight of a finger, pulled by gravity and pushed by muscle, selects the link, and the reader is carried to another web site where the condensed advertisement explodes. Here, testimonials, doctor endorsements, directions for use, ordering information, opportunities for free trials, and so much more can be accessed at the click of a button. There’s even a “fine print” link too.

Although it seems trivial, the internet has certainly changed advertising. With only a newspaper ad or billboard, advertisers of the past were limited to a few, catchy words or an all-defining image. With radio and TV, a memorable jingle and video helped capture people’s interest and remind them of the product and its location. Even though audio and video allowed for more information to be given, advertisers were still forced to leave out a great deal. They had to rely on the quality of teh advertisement to propel people out of their homes and into businesses where everything else could be relayed to the consumer. But now, consumers can access everything at the click of a button, so to speak. They no longer need to visit store after store comparing prices, quality, or testimonies. Advertisers merely establish a website that does all this for them. Once limited to a few words and images, now advertisers can say everything they want to say in a well-built web site. All they have to do is get me to “click here.”

Questions of Authority, Part 1

A couple of months ago, two casual friends of mine were arguing over how to pronounce “Oedipus.” In the surprisingly hot debate, one would say, “No! It’s O-di-pus, you twit. Look how it’s spelled: O-e-d-i-p-u-s.”

The second answered, only slightly more calmly, “Ed-uh-pus.”

I watched the pair go back-and-forth, back-and-forth until, finally, they decided to get a third person’s opinion to settle the dispute. So they turned to me, neither one knowing that I, in fact, have a Bachelor of Arts in English.

Patrick* turns to me, “Rachel, how to do you pronounce O-di-pus? Theodore says Ed-uh-pus, but I say O-di-pus. Isn’t that right?”

“Ah, no. Theodore is quite right; it’s Ed-uh-pus.”

At this point, Patrick turns slightly red at having “lost,” and being a sore loser, retorts, “How would you know? Who made you the Expert?”

In the most smug and pedantic voice I can muster, “Well, it’s this little thing called a degree, Patrick. I just happen to have one, and it’s a Bachelor of English. So, yeah, I know.” At that moment in time, I suddenly became the authority. I had the degree which immediately established me as the expert, and neither Patrick nor Theodore could justifiably question it. Neither questioned it because having a degree meant (1) time and money and (2) establishment and reputation.

So how does this short narrative relate to multimedia writing? Mainly, it prefaces my thoughts of authority and how and why print text is commonly held as the “authority” over digital text.



Pulling from my short narrative, one arena in which print text towers over digital text is time and money. First, let us explore the time element.

Indubitably, print has been around for a long time, much longer than digital text. First hallmarked in 1455 with “the ‘Gutenberg Revolution’…which marked the emergence of modernity,” print text has been maturing for over 500 years (Rhodes and Sawday 1). Like a fine wine, it seems to have improved with age, evolving from obscure religious texts into monuments for “instruction, pleasure, information, delight, devotion or distraction” (Rhodes and Sawday 1). Print text, given this time to ripen, has produced both a tested legacy and an amazing bulk of timeless works respected by generations and generations of scholarly and popular readers.

In addition to the time over which it has grown, print text also has money on its side. The costs of ink and paper, printing presses, labor, distribution, and many other constituents add up. Print text costs money to produce and to purchase, thus it has to have undeniable worth. In a capitalist economy such as ours, printing is a market like almost everything else. First, a publisher reads a text and determines that it will sell, that a demand can be created among consumers, that the text is worth spending money on. After printing, the text must be marketed, advertised, and distributed. Book signings are arranged across the nation or even the world, and interviews on Oprah, Larry King, and radio stations are scheduled. The demand for the printed text grows, and people, hungry for what the suppliers tell them they must have, buy the printed text. They view that printed material as something worth spending money on and worth spending time reading. And while these consumers are paying for the paper, the ink, the binding, etc. of that book, they pay more for the words and how those words come together to create a new world for the reader to explore; this is where the true worth of the text lies.

Words Cited
Rhodes, Neil and Jonathan Sawday. “Introduction: Paperworlds: Imagining the Renaissance Computer.” The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. Ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. New York: Routledge, 2000.

*Names have been changed to protect the stupid.

Blogger Therapy

Recently, in my English composition class, we discussed the cause-effect rhetorical mode. As always, I have the students read at least two examples of the rhetorical mode that we are studying from the Longman Reader, and over the next few class days, we discuss them. One of the readings for cause-effect was Stephen King’s “Why We Crave Horror Movies.” In his article, King proposes that each of us has a bit of insanity lurking inside and that we watch horror movies to pacify this emotion. By watching others being mutilated, murdered, bludgeoned to death, or frightened out of their wits, we vicariously satisfy those same emotions within us; we purge ourselves of those emotions and can live our daily lives. Hmm, so horror movies can be a kind of therapy, at least, for Stephen King they are.

I also thought of Greek tragedy as a kind of therapy. I’m sure that in watching these magnificent scenes of the protagonists’ downfalls, a sobbing viewer turns to his or her right and sees that person crying too. In a gesture of friendship, the former offers the latter a handkerchief, which the latter gladly accepts. An exchange has occurred. Both reveal a side of themselves to the other, and both are purged of their emotions. As a result, sense of community has been established.

So how do these two ideas relate to blogging?

Well, blogging is its own kind of therapy.

In a typical diary or private journal, the writer is writing only to himself. He does not intend for it (his private thoughts, fears, desires, emotions, etc.) to be read by an audience. He merely writes down his emotions for himself to read. However, this act of writing to the self is not a complete purgation. It is not a complete purgation because the actor is the recipient of the action; the subject is also the direct object. There has been no displacement of emotion to an outside source, no sympathy or reaction from another entity, from another human. Therefore, no complete purgation occurs.

In a blog, the writer has an audience. She no longer writes to herself, but she writes to someone. Exactly who that someone is the writer may not necessarily know. Nor does she need to know. The mere fact that someone “out there” maybe reading these emotions and sympathizing or even empathizing with them is release enough for the writer. In fact, because the medium can support many followers to a single blog, the writer reaches a larger audience. In having a larger audience, the writer will, more than likely, have a greater number of sy/empathizers, people who can relate to the writer’s emotions and postings. The writer, having an actual audience to “vent” to, can feel relief that she is not alone, and the larger the audience, the more complete the purgation.

I’ll say a few more words on audience before I go.

In addition to serving as the recipient of the writer’s venting or as the direct object of the action, the audience also establishes a support group for the writer by posting comments and offering suggestions or words of comfort and humor. This communication between blogger and follower builds a relationship, and through these relationships, a community is built. A community where one human has been connected to another on levels that only they will understand.