Embracing New Media in Writing Classroom?

One of the most important elements of cyborg era is the blurring boundaries between human and technology. People start to view that human bodies and technology mutually overlap with each other. Meanwhile, with the presence of technology, the subjectivity of human beings has acquired a different platform for different kinds of development. The feature of computers as new platform requires writing teachers to realize that computer technology has eroded into/changed our everyday communication pattern. Failing to embrace new media is failing to notice an ever increasing portion of communication and composition.
New media have created composition in a different style. With the introduction of technologies, computer and internet per se, writing classroom is no longer so strictly defined by space and time. Students can drop their assignments in the digital drop box on the online blackboard anytime before the due date rather than physically meeting the instructor in class time or conference time. Meanwhile, they can just click and submit wherever they have access to internet. Not only the location, space, time have changed with the arrival of new media, but also its content and the form. For example, in email, blog, facebook, we frequently use the symbols of emotions, like , to supplement our verbal message while the symbols, when written or typed, cannot be strictly said to be nonverbal. To judge these new uses of symbols is one pending issue that computer technology creates. The rise of such issues make it necessary for writing teachers to view these more diversified ways of expression as blessings for enriching the different patterns of composition potentials in new era.

“as the cyborg era as a term suggests, technologies should be foregrounded equitably with individuals and contexts around them, enabling a more careful and reasonable assessment of those technologies, one not restricted by problematic binaries and instead, featuring attention to the unique character and implications of the technologies (Computers and writing: The Cyborg Era).”
Technology does not/has never come as pure knowledge that can be defined by its own self. It has to be defined by its social use, which contains important factors such as culture, personal experience, and education, etc. Viewing technology as a tool is to rigidly define the relationship between human beings and technology as subject and object. This underlying definition/assumption offers very limited explanatory power of how technology can change us as persons, and how our existence as human beings is self-explanatory either. Indeed, it enables us to think technology as both a tool to make the job completed and also a chance to view daily life from a different angle. Therefore, technology does not participate in our writing passively but rather actively.