Box Logic

As a person who loves technology, I find this week’s readings quite interesting. It is true that composition has been tremendously influenced by technology, thus causing noticeable changes in composition. People can use technology for various purposes, and for people in rhetoric and composition, we can use technology to incorporate pictures in different colors and music in different styles to express our thoughts and successfully win the readers’ heart. If pictures can express themselves in still images, the introduction of images in motion adds more dynamics in visual rhetoric.

But on the other hand, I tend to agree with “The means or media are not as important to me as the expressive or conceptual uses afforded by them” (Sirc 113) I used to think that technology is super great and the acquisition of it gives people so much freedom and the cool feeling of “being modern”. However, the more I apply technology in my projects, the more careful I am when I want to use technology. It is not so easy to acquire all the skills needed for the application of various softwares, but the real hard part is the principle that we need to learn to effectively utilize these tools. Conceptualizing how images, colors, fonts, audios work for the project is a life-long process. I believe it is an art that reveals the writers’ personality and thoughts. When the writers deliver their thoughts to the targeted audiences by means of computer-mediated texts, their purposes are not to display how tech-savvy they are, but to effectively inform or persuade them. Therefore it only makes sense if we direct more attention on what the messages are and how to reduce the loss of the messages to its minimum.

The “box logic” made me to think of the classroom as a box too. This box is made of items like computers, chairs, overhead, printer and also the most important items like teacher and students. I think when the writer picks up items from the box to compose, he is quite selective. Such selection applies to the classroom too. Students select courses and they come to the classroom. The difference I see here is that the most important items in the classroom are quite active since they can choose which box to go while the items in the author’s box are quite passive. Within the big box—classroom, there are lots of interaction between the students and the teacher, students and students and students and computers. Students and teacher can work as individuals or groups quite flexibly (just like researching to cut and paste to see what works together and what not). Of course the effectiveness of such a classroom is to a large extent decided by how successfully the teacher carries out his/her pedagogy. If the instructor’s methods work well and do make the class move like fluid instead of being static, probably the class is successful in the sense of helping students to be creative, collaborative and interactive.