Section One - Redrawing Borders and Boundaries
In "Being Linked in the Matrix: Biology, Technology, and Writing," Marilyn Cooper argues that writing is an embodied response arising from social and physical environments. Writing in this sense becomes the fulcrum of our humanity; it becomes the pendulum between cultural and biological practices. One significant implication is that as writers we are not merely manipulating technologies, but that we can unwittingly be rewritten by the technologies that we employ.
Echoing this awareness of technological agency, Johnson-Eilola in "Among Texts" questions “What happens when our texts become actively social?” (37). He answers this question by painting a multifaceted picture of texts networked as Artifacts, Products, Gizmos, and Spimes. While extrapolating on these terms, what is important is how all of these texts are actively integrated and thus traceable by database systems. Like the reciprocal process Cooper assigns to writing, Johnson-Eilola helps to explain the processes through which networked reading practices can generate metadata about readers. The underlying implication is that we are increasingly being catalogued as we read. By beginning his collection with these two views, Selber allows Cooper and Johnson-Eilola to redraw the borders traditionally assigned to the reading and writing process.
In "Serial Composition," Geoffrey Sirc makes a clarion call for composition scholars to redraw disciplinary borders. He claims that “when other fields have changed in interesting ways, college composition has remained static” (57). To address this concern, Sirc does more than retrace “combinatory logic,” or the kind of commonplace thinking akin to essay writing. Instead, he directs our attention to a new method that he calls serial composition.
As a way to free ourselves from the grip of essay writing, and as a way to critically disrupt ways of knowing that stagnate the field of composition studies, Sirc uses “serial logic” to name the kind of thinking characteristic of the swift moving, “short, staccato bursts,” and “pithiness” found in electronic environments. For example, the kind of writing found on MP3 blogs does “not value brevity at the expense of complexity.” Instead, in this new form of composition, “juxtaposition creates its own dense meaning” (70). Sirc's focus on serial composition works in chorus with the other chapters in this section, which all introduce key concepts and ideas that composition scholars might adopt in the move beyond traditional reading and writing practices.
