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12/24/2003 Archived Entry: "mystory"

Lisa Gye has a nice piece on the mystory in Fiberculture's second online edition. What I like about teaching the mystory is that its focus - unlike many other technology oriented ideas circulating in composition and "media studies" - isn't on the tools available for usage, the differences b/w online/print practices, the role gender or race plays, etc. Instead, Ulmer is inventing an electronic writing practice much in the way many literate practices of writing were invented for print (i.e. the essay). For all the work done in composition, for instance, which focuses on electronic writing, very little identifies the appartaus shift underway, the rhetorical shifts underway, etc the way Ulmer does with the mystory. The mystory is one good place (and I think cool, cyborgography or funkcomp are others!) to conceptualize the effect of new media on worldviews, on making meaing, on subjectivity. The mystory is pure McLuhan - shifting knowledge making from linear structuring and categorizing of ideas to pattern formation (chorography).
I'll teach the mystory again next semester in the teaching of writing class I do here. The important thing about getting students to do a mystory is getting them to actually write in new media, to engage with the theoretical and pedagogical aspects of new media, and not just write about new media (the literate task).

Such is the problem many new media ideas are running into today - in particular weblogging (and still hypertext). Yes, many classes have students write blogs. But I see so many classes in which students write about blogs they've seen (here are some food blogs I visited; here are some blogs about politics), and aren't doing anything with the blog itself. Or like the web writing class which asks students to "analyze" websites ("In your essay explain how links are used in the web sites you visited), these kinds of assignments are no different than the print based assignments which preceded them. If a class is going to be called "Writing for the Web" or some variation, then students need to actually write for the web by constructing theoretically, critically, and challenging documents in new media (not in print).

Ya. This is my mantra; for some reason it is occupying my thoughts (yet again) this not so cold Detroit morning as I think about next semester's courses. . .(maybe Dave got me thinking about it too since he's talking about mystory as well).

Here's a link to Gye's own mystory.