“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”

— Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

 

Technology, the noted philosopher and communications theorist Marshall McLuhan explains, is and has always been an extension of ourselves. Just as the wheel extended our own range of physical movement, your smartphone and the social media programs that you use have become an extension of yourself. We are able to communicate on a scale that would have been unimaginable only a few decades prior, and this expansion has brought with it great power as well as great risks. As the chapter on personal essays notes, you are part of a generation that is communicating more than ever before in recorded history–even if the form of that communication has extended beyond the medium of paper itself. The words that you author and the digital content that you create and share can be seen by an almost infinite number of audiences and can endure more or less permanently once the post or send button has been submitted. You can post content that can inspire millions or, in a weak moment, you may share something that can cost you friends or perhaps a career, days or even years after the fact.

Often, our move into an evermore digital existence is greeted with the worry that our writing and intellectual habits are being forced into a state of decline. This is an understandable concern as informal writing conventions continue to creep into professional spaces under the twin forces of social media slang and text message vernacular. Writing can feel like an outdated art under siege from all corners with no hope for respite ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

However, like the assumption that no one reads or writes any longer, the idea that writing is in a state of essential decline is an oversimplification. Cutting against the grain, linguist Gretchen McCulloch has argued that our writing has actually become far more empowered with the rise of social media and text message norms. Even the most informal aspects of these worlds, such as bitmojis, popular onomatopoeias (oof, lol), the use of gifs in place of words, or the humble emoticon, have effectively “restore[d] our bodies to our writing” and allowed us to “give a sense of who’s talking and what mood we’re in and when we’re saying things. . . . To be fully ourselves in an online world.” We can now massage meaning within our communications in ways that mimic the presence of the human body (our facial expressions, sounds, physical gestures, etc.), and this has, rather predictably, created a vast range of experimental and new linguistic forms. These communications are indeed far less formal than a professional letter, for example, but that does not necessarily make them less effective or even less nuanced or thoughtful.

What has created trouble is the fact that the borders between these new and old forms of communication have become blurred. Slang and conventions from one space are often deployed in places where they do not belong with disastrous results (e.g., using uncapitalized I’s in a letter to your professor or work supervisor). However, these sorts of communicative mix ups do not ipso facto render new forms of communication themselves less valid in the spaces where they were first engineered. In communications with friends and family, it is often rhetorically more effective to respond with an onomatopoeia and an emoticon when difficult subjects arise.

Traditional writing skills also have their place in this strange world of ours, and we should not lose focus of that either. In many ways, a firm grasp of effective writing conventions and rhetorical awareness about the situation in which one is composing have become more valuable than ever before. The rate of technological change is not receding. It is accelerating, and in this shifting world, one must be develop a flexible toolkit to be a successful communicator across an everchanging sea of technologies, audiences, and objectives. In other words, you should strive to become a Swiss Army knife as a writer so that you can successfully compose in the many writing environments that you will find yourself over the course of your personal and professional life. With some luck, this chapter will offer some guidance to make the most of life as a writer and, by extension, content creator in the twenty-first century.

Is the Medium the Message? Watch This Discussion of Marhsall McLuhan’s Idea by MIT Media Lab and decide for yourself.

A multimodal composition will:

• Use two or more of the five primary communication modes (aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, and visual).
• Understand how media differ from the communication modes.

First, what is multimodality? Multimodality refers to the five primary modes or ways by which we communicate: aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, and visual. Think of it this way: If you were composing a message on a social-media platform like Twitter or Instagram, instead of “relying only on alphabetic letters, [you would] include voice messages, images, photographs, music, emoticons, web links, and other . . . multimodal elements to make [your] points” (Ball and Loewe 311). The reference to “alphabetic letters” refers to linguistic communication modes, while the other options draw primarily on visual and aural modes. The key point here is that you would very likely use several communication modes in your post, not just because you can on those platforms but because the combination suits your audience, purpose, and context (i.e., the rhetorical situation).

All communication is multimodal. In this textbook, for example, we communicate with you via words on a page or screen; our modes are linguistic and visual. On the other hand, you may be listening to these words, which we would describe as an aural-linguistic mode. Most communication also includes spatial modes that communicate meaning: On the page or screen, for example, letters are grouped together as words, with space between them; paragraphs are separated in ways that enhance communication, too, along with section headers and titles. In face-to-face interactions or on Zoom, we would speak these words aloud but also add gestures that communicate additional information or cues; such an interaction combines aural, linguistic, and gestural modes.

Multimodality an important skill for your genre toolbox. By choosing the mode(s) best suited to your rhetorical situation, you improve your chances of communicating persuasively and effectively. Being able to choose and mix modes makes you a more skillful communicator. In the advertisement genre, for example, you may be familiar with television ads calling on you, the viewer, to help save abandoned or abused animals. What kind of music typically accompanies the visual and alphabetic elements of such an ad? Sad music. Would these ads work if the music was happy and upbeat? Remember that we have expectations about genres; we expect the music and images in such an ad to evoke sad emotions. In these ads, sound/music, images, and words work together to communicate a message.

Modes and media are different but related concepts. A medium is a singular material or interface through which we communicate a message or messages. Examples of media (the plural of medium) include newspapers, paintings, social-media apps, Zoom, or even your course learning management system. In a sense, media are the materials that lie between the communicator and the communication. A mode, on the other hand, refers to the channels or resources through which media are sent. For example, have you ever seen words or images etched in chalk on a sidewalk? The sidewalk and the chalk are the media; the words and images used communicate the creator’s message through the visual and linguistic modes. In the case of this textbook, the medium is the computer screen; the mode is visual and linguistic (and possibly aural, if you’re using a screen reader or reading aloud).

What’s it like to consider the modes of your composition? Elsewhere in this chapter, we discuss genres that, when considered as written compositions, employ at least two modes (visual and linguistic). Other multimodal possibilities for getting your points across include infographics, photographs, charts and diagrams, slideshows, presentations, podcasts, animation, videos, and so much more. You can use these multimodal genres to supplement your written, “alphacentric” essays, or expand them into new compositions on their own.

For example, in “The Scissors Incident,” a crafted project featured in the 2020-2021 FYC eReader, the student multimodality transformed a narrative written earlier in the semester. For a remix project later in the course, she pondered ways to present her project in more than two modes. One aspect of the resulting project was a diorama she made of a “crime scene.” What three modes can you identify in a photograph of her project?

When the student presented this project, she used the premise that her “audience” of classmates were investigators attending a “crime” update. First, she provided her audience with a police report documenting the crime, then she talked to them as if she were the chief investigator. Her presentation was aural, linguistic, visual, spatial, and gestural. The diorama is visual, linguistic, and spatial in its use of modes, and so were the handouts. The entire project exemplifies multimodal composing as a practice, a skill you use every time you communicate.

Let’s review. First, modes are the primary ways we communicate—aural, visual, linguistic, spatial, and gestural. Second, all communication is multimodal; that is, all communication combines at least two modes in order to deliver or create meaning. Third, by understanding the modes best suited to your audience, purpose, and situation, you can communicate persuasively and effectively. These factors are why multimodal composing is such a valuable skill to employ across genres.

Attribution on the Web

Sometimes, the web can feel a bit like the Wild West, but as Jude Miller, Amanda Haruch, Samantha Kennedy, and Amy Woodworth note in the following section, careful consideration needs to go into deciding how to use and provide attribution for information on the web.

Writing involves an ethical dimension, and an important aspect to considering the ethical dimensions of writing involves following proper attribution protocol when we’re borrowing information from elsewhere. Equally, while we might be familiar with one or two particular citation methods–like APA, MLA, or Chicago–it’s useful to note that the way we’re citing information is dependent on our audience’s expectations and what’s appropriate for the genre we’re writing in. On some level, we’re all already aware of this, since some classes require us to cite things in MLA, while others require APA or Chicago or something else.

Following a set of attribution protocol for any given writing project, then, requires us to understand what the appropriate citation conventions are for the genre we’re working in. Oftentimes, when we’re writing something for a class we’re in, the genre we’re writing in is “College Essay,” or, more accurately, it’s probably a sub-genre of the larger genre of “College Essay”–say “Research Paper,” “Literature Review,” “Lab Report,” etc. And depending on the subject that the class is in, we would typically use a method of citation common to a class in that discipline.

While the way that we attribute borrowed information changes depending on the genre we’re working in or the rhetorical situation itself, what’s important to keep in mind is that we must always attribute any borrowed information to the original author–this includes things that are directly quoted as well as those that are paraphrased. Equally,  it includes text as well as multimodal information (like images or videos).

While we might have a lot of experience using a citation method like APA or MLA, we may find ourselves increasingly working in online genres–like websites or blogs for example. As we’re likely aware, when we’re reading something online–like a piece of online journalism or a Wikipedia article–we typically won’t see things cited in the manner we use in our classes, which, depending on the citation method we’re using, often involves an in-text citation that refers the reader to a references section at the end of the work. Equally, not all websites cite things in the same way. For example, Wikipedia (see example) uses endnotes–superscript numbers that point the reader to a citation for a reference at the bottom of the article– while some sources of online journalism (see example) link out to the sources they’re referencing by attaching those sources as hyperlinks that are connected to words in the text.

How to Locate and Use Digital Resources Responsibly

Before delving into the nuances of this topic, please take a moment to watch this introduction to copyright and fair use best practices for images, videos, and audio from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s DesignLab

The following overview comes from the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. This resource not only explains how and to what extent copyright applies, but it also offers a number of resources that you can use to find digital content that exists in the public domain or under a Creative Commons license. An understanding of copyright law and fair use is essential in our digital world, but so too is a working knowledge of where to find usable content. This section represents a treasure trove of resources on both of these important fronts.