2008 Fall – RHE 312: Computers and Writing
Course Description
The dispersal of computing devices throughout our society, coupled with near-ubiquitous networking, has resulted in a shift of publishing power into the hands of consumer-producers, who—through the creation of blogs and podcasts, videos and mashups—are “writing” more than ever before, for greater and more diverse audiences. The object of study for this course will be the means by which this proliferation of computers and computing devices in our society has enabled new kinds of writing, texts, and collaboration.
As new media publishing becomes easier, this ease brings with it new challenges for authors, challenges that are largely rhetorical; that is, they relate to the difficulties in creating texts as well as securing an audience for those texts. Some of these challenges include the difficulty in creating texts that can be easily found and accessed online; the problems with establishing textual authority and persuading an audience; and the ethical concerns arising from this persuasion, as well as the fact that the description in the preceding paragraph only applies to a small fraction of the world’s population.
While the history of writing’s development as a technology will be briefly discussed, in this course we will focusing primarily on current technologies for creating and disseminating texts. Developing trends like ubiquitous computing, ambient technology, and video gaming will be examined in relation to new media creation, and our historical-analytical study will be supplemented by experimentation with tools for creating new media. After completing the course, students will not only be familiar with the history of writing, but they will also be producers of new media.
