GPACW 2007: My Session

My session turned out to be just me, with John Nelson responding. I marched through the similarities among hot and cool, immediacy and hypermediacy, and film and database as terms for describing the formal features of media. I need to keep strengthening the "so what?" I admitted in the Q&A that my interests were primarily formal and not social and rhetorical, but I made the claim that we in rhetoric and composition never did really hammer out the formal properties of media. I got thinking later that the social and rhetorical dimensions of media are harder to describe in general, and perhaps that is one reason why I keep coming back to formal qualities, and/or am interested in the social-rhetorical dimensions of media use and reception in specific instances, but not in general.

I also think I need to separate out the qualities of media more effectively. I think hot and cool can be applied to "objects" (images and text), and that hot and cool can be applied to "narrative strategies," and that hot objects can be assembled in cool way--using some of the principles Jeff Rice covers in The Rhetoric of Cool, for example. Cool objects can also be assembled in fairly hot ways. I was recently introduced to Home Videos, a visually simple (even strange) animation with intensely, uncomfortably real narrative elements.

Maybe I don't need to run through the history, connecting M., B&G., M.; maybe I just need to work on refining hot and cool, updating with / through other scholarship, not worry so much about the "mapping" concept. What I really need to make sure I do is stick with this writing project, and have some sort of product by Jan. 1, 2008.