The Influence of the Interface Is Alterable: Helping Students Produce Writing in an Age of Content

Most of us can intuit the impossibility of the experience of one medium translating fully and completely to another medium. Even if we can’t quite put the difference into words, we realize that a video conference is not the same as speaking to someone in person. It’s also very different from speaking with that person over the phone, and even more different than sending an email, which is different from sending a text, which is different from sending a typewritten letter in the post (so needlessly atavistic!), which is different from sending a handwritten letter (so sweet and romantic!). Each of these media can do an adequate job of transmitting the same basic information. Each is also uniquely suited to convey that information in a very particular way. The point is, each is different.

This kind of realization—simple and inarguable but still oblique and intangible—is the sort that is best suited for humanistic analysis. It demands consideration and contemplation, even if no definitive answers can be gleaned from doing so. In this article, I hope to build upon this realization by synthesizing two discussions, both germane to the implementation of digital writing platforms within classrooms, that have taken place within digital humanities and rhetoric and composition scholarship. The first discussion has to do with the conceptual rise of content over writing. The two terms might be used interchangeably in the mainstream and in fact both can often by applied to the exact same piece of communication, but the use of one over the other tends to carry with it material implications. The second discussion, tied to the first, has to do with how the design, implementation, and use of digital platforms influence the manner in which communicative acts are understood, and how educators might aid students to understand their classroom writing as writing proper, not as producing disposable content, by encouraging a critical awareness of these platforms.

Both of these discussions pose clear implications for students writing in digital spaces. I do not intend to draw any definitive observations by engaging with them. Rather, I hope to encourage my reader to keep these discussions in mind when seeking to digitize their teaching and their classrooms. As anyone who’s ever taught an online course can tell you, moving pedagogy from the physical to digital realm— or even simply incorporating digital aspects in a physical classroom—is not a matter of simple transference. Undertaken without proper caution and consideration, shifting writing into the digital plane can result in unintended consequences. My goal is to help readers anticipate some of these consequences so that we may begin working to incorporate them productively into our classroom practices. Pointedly, I am trying to make this essay as accessible as possible to a wide variety of stakeholders. Opaque literary theory (my area of specialty) will be kept to minimum, and I will likewise take caution to avoid entering into any technical discussions that fall beyond my pay grade.

If you have done any freelancing in the last decade or so, you are familiar with the term content. One used to submit photography or prose to a magazine. Now, one generates content for digital dissemination. To most, this appears to be a harmless semantic shift. I first saw it problematized by John R. MacArthur, the prickly and very old-school publisher of Harper’s magazine. MacArthur had previously circulated a subscription solicitation within physical copies of the magazine promising readers that Harper’s would always remain content free. He expounded his beliefs in a speech (2012) titled “Internet Con Men Ravage Publishing.” The gist of his complaints was that regarding writing as content leads inevitably to a devaluation of the both the work required to produce decent prose and the product of prose itself. He notes that

MacArthur’s speech was largely dismissed. Even sympathetic media outlets like Gawker still referred to the man as “rangy and unhinged” (Nolan, 2012, para. 2). His tone, I must admit, comes across as combative luddism. But I could not help but remember his words of caution a couple of years later, while reading a New York Times piece by cartoonist and commentator Tim Krieder (2013). Krieder may not be a household name, but he has a fairly significant web footprint; has authored multiple books for large, New York-based publishing houses; and has scores of bylines from top-tier magazines and newspapers. Nonetheless, Kreider bemoans the fact that he is persistently asked to produce work for little or no compensation whatsoever. “People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you would not be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing.” Unlike MacArthur, Kreider’s career began in primarily digital spaces, and he’s careful to caution that “the web, if used properly, is great for writers.” The only problem is, the default stance of web publishers is a devaluation of the work that print media—still to this day— compensates much more lavishly.

The vast majority of digital humanists would agree with Kreider that technology by itself is ideologically influenced (by its designers and users) but not ideologically deterministic. Probably the most frequently cited work discussing as much is Martin Heidegger’s (19577) “The Question Concerning Technology,” which is well over a half century old. Heidegger conceives of technology not just as machines and procedures but as the way those interact with humans, nature, and social systems. In order to truly understand a technology, we must therefore analyze it within larger contexts regarding its use and implementations. “Even the power plant,” he says, “with its turbines and generators is a man-made means to an end established by men” (p. 5). A more recent and relevant discussion along these lines comes from the philosopher Bruno Latour (1994). Latour examines the now-infamous National Rifle Association (NRA) slogan that was popular in the 1980s: “Guns Don’t Kill People. People Kill People.” Latour explains how the National Rifle Association’s view is dishonestly reductive. They suggest that “the gun does nothing in itself or by virtue of its material components. The gun is a tool, a medium, a neutral carrier of will. If the gunman is a good guy, the gun will be used wisely” (Latour, 1994, p. 31). This may seem reasonable, but Latour points out that “the gun enables, but also instructs, directs, even pulls the trigger” (p. 31). The gunman still possesses human agency, but the capabilities of that agency have been radically transformed by his possession of the gun. Without a gun, he could not shoot anyone.

The lesson here is that technology does not dictate human actions, but that it does indeed influence and shape them, and that such influence is ideological. Applying this observation to technologically mediated communication, we realize that we cannot reasonably suggest that the form or content of a communicative act is determined entirely by the technological platform used to facilitate it. Instead, we must attempt to examine the ideological and material conditions surrounding the development, adoption, and implementation of these platforms, and try to discern how these conditions go on to influence the acts of communication produced by users who communicate via these platforms.

Here it may be productive to consider the ideological consequences of web writing becoming ascendant in classrooms. In a scholarly examination of the manner in which writing has become widely reconceptualized as content, Lisa Dush (2015) discusses how web publication has been standardized by a particular industry model. Dush notes that “content exists as digital assets that are full of potential, characterized not by being finished or published, but rather by their availability for repurposing, mining, and other future uses” (p. 176). Writing on the web differs fundamentally from print in that it is imminently shareable, open to immediate response and edits. This is unlike writing, at least as writing has been traditionally conceived of within classrooms. Broadly, classroom writing is considered something to be carefully contemplated (when students read the work of more established writers) or else to be delivered to an instructor in a finished state, upon which it will be given a grade. Even as instructors have moved toward understanding writing as a variegated process, not just a final product, that process must be undertaken with serious contemplation.

Unlike writing, “content is networked” (Dush, 2015, p. 177). Think of how web publications differ from old media. Old media would release relatively large bundles of writing in set intervals. Readers could respond to writing through a narrow set of channels. Printed works of writing were calificed, uneditable in their existing form. Publication was relatively scarce and therefore precious. If a reader wanted to effectively attempt a dialogue with a piece of published writing, doing so would require not only time but deep contemplation, an expert familiarity with a publisher’s expectations in regards to which sort of responses would be allowed entrance into this exclusive realm. Networked writing, however, “values surplus over scarcity and, more arguably, participation over hierarchy” (p. 177). This is at least partially a reflection of the manner through which web writing is effectively assessed—by receiving monetizable clicks, which come not necessarily due to the quality or value of a piece of writing, but from a writer’s ability to appease algorithmic ranking systems which are much more opaque than simply pleasing the desires of an audience or publisher. Ronald Day (2014) explains how this manner of valuation demonstrates a clear suffusion of particular ideologies into the writing process. He notes that “algorithms don’t simply run alongside ideology, but rather, they are designed into ideology, which is to say also, conversely, that ideology is enfolded into the logic and elements of calculative desires” (p. 62). This suffusion is recursive. It’s not simply a matter of a writer having to succeed by redefined standards, but of those standards having already permeated and altered the writer’s understanding of writing, which within web meditation means regarding the act of writing as nodal and written works as commodified content.

The obvious and much lauded merit of the web is that it allows discourse to become more democratized. Less discussed, however, is the fact that web mediation has led to press for a perpetual stream of interactive discourse, which in turn has altered the manner in which writing is valued and understood. Users do not typically read writing on the web; instead, they participate in the exchange of content. And in becoming content, writing is more obviously and fundamentally commoditized. The writer is no sort of authority or artist; they are merely one producer of content, among many others. Contentified writing is here rendered ephemeral and disposable, less a serious matter of inquiry and contemplation and more of an immediate act of participation in an always-churning slog. For so-called digital native students, an understanding of writing as a deliberate and consequential act may run counter to how they have regarded writing their entire lives. And this conceptual conflict can be easily compounded by the careless utilization of digital writing within classrooms.

Even if web mediation was not destined to make writing appear more commoditized and disposable, such conceptualizations are nonetheless widespread, due at least partially to the nature of web mediation and the manner that web writing has been monetized. Nothing about this is inevitable or inalterable, but it must nonetheless be engaged with. Here, we might begin to productively draw upon some observations taken from rhetoric and composition and digital humanities scholarship.

Scholars of writing have long stressed the difficulty student writers face in translating complex ideas into written form. This is not due to the students having nothing to say or even being ignorant of the subjects about which they attempt to write. The difficulty stems instead from a lack of experience in entering to specialized discourses—that is, the profound challenge of accounting not just for the expectations of an audience, but for the manners through which thoughts are transfigured through the act of mediation. Discussing the difficulties associated with printed writing, Walter Ong (1977) points out that

Ong explains that writing for the page is a fundamentally disconnected act, as space and time will almost always separate writer from reader. Conversely, verbal communication is immediate. A speaker can readily discern the engagement and reactions of the person to whom he is speaking. Once writing is introduced to the mix, that immediacy vanishes, and senders and receivers both become abstracted. Ong (1977) notes that

This fragmentation is unavoidable, but a skilled speaker or teacher manages to gather their audience back into a sense of connectedness once they look up from the page.

In an online classroom, an instructor faces the especially difficult task of summoning and resummoning this sense of collectivity without the benefit of physical immediacy. And even in a physical classroom that incorporates digital elements, students face the challenge of entering into and influencing discourses, which are by nature collectivities, through the use of media that are by nature fragmentary. For generations, teachers of writing and rhetoric have developed strategies for enabling their students to overcome this disconnect, helping them summon connectedness in the midst of atomization. But the advent and adoption of digital writing has complicated, perhaps even completely reconfigured, the manner in which a sense of immediacy can conjured into being.

The proliferation of digital media has literally transformed our environment, and “these environmental changes have significant neurological consequences” (Hayles 2012, p. 11). Catherine Hayles (2012) suggests these changes have wide reaching ramifications that “imply nothing less than a complete rethinking of the humanities” (p. 20). There is no single theory that explains how such a rethinking should transpire, especially in regards to writing classrooms, but a key strategy has emerged: helping students develop a deep and critical consciousness of the media they use to communicate.

Key to such discussions is not simply assuming that the strategies used in producing, reading, and/or assessing print writing can be tweaked for the digital realm, but realizing instead that digital communication differs fundamentally from print. Much fruitful work along these lines has come from the study of rhetorical concepts that were developed before the advent of print. Now, rhetoric gets a bad rap. The lay understanding of the term associates it with dishonest communication meant to unjustly influence people. Suffice to say, that is not how rhetoricians understand their field! As an area of inquiry and scholarship, rhetoric is understood as the study of what does or does not make communication effective and persuasive. The effectiveness of communication does not, unfortunately, hinge only upon its utility or truthfulness. Instead, effective communicators must possess a keen awareness of a multitude of factors surrounding the production and reception of communicative acts.

Most rhetorical theory from the last two decades has stressed a writer’s immersion within complex ecologies of communication. These ecologies contain human agents, of course (speakers and listeners, writers and readers, content producers and content consumers). But they also contain social systems, media, cultural mores, and even seemingly inert factors such as the shape and aesthetics of one’s physical environment. Rhetorician Thomas Rickert (2013) encourages teachers to conceive of our contemporary communicative milieu as resembling the ancient concept of the chora. The chora can be understood roughly as a set of “argumentation and narration strateg[ies] that use pattern making and pattern generation” (VanKooten, 2009). Print lent itself to communication based on deliberation and formality, which led to a valuation of unique modes of expression. The logic found within chora “isn’t a print logic” but is instead “based on connectivity, on identifying unexpected juxtapositions, on interlinking” (VanKooten, 2009). Effective digital communicators cannot simply regard themselves as senders producing work that will be conveyed in a linear manner toward a clearly defined receiver. They must instead locate the position of themselves and their work within a large and omni-directional ecology of communication. As Rickert (2013) notes,

Effective writers understand that writing is much more than putting words on a screen, and that it involves the successful negotiation of one’s position within a complex ecology.

This sounds quite complex, but there exist myriad strategies for relaying this understanding to students. Geoffrey Sirc (2006) understands one of his primary responsibility as a teacher is “to show my students how their compositional future is assured if they can take an art stance to the everyday, suffusing the materiality of daily life with an aesthetic” (p. 117). The point is to relay to students the fact that the writing is everywhere, and that writing successfully involves working within a complex system of exchange so as to alter that system.

Writers never stop learning their craft and honing their abilities. A student cannot emerge from a single classroom—or even from a 4-year program—as a fully formed writer. But writing instructors can help students develop strategies for developing the awarenesses required for successful communication. And a key component of these strategies is encouraging students to become aware of, and eventually challenge and even alter, the means through which digital mediation encourages them to regard their writing as commoditized or disposal content. Important work to this end can be found in Rebecca Tarsa’s (2015) interrogation of the design and utilization of digital interfaces. Tarsa recognizes that “the rise of the digital landscape has arguably made self-motivated writing more prominent than ever before, thanks in large part to the proliferation of digital participatory spaces” (p. 12). Indeed, students today undoubtedly produce and consume more text on average than students who attended college before the Internet. But what does this mean? “Existing research … hasn’t done much to explore how a site’s design and structure—its interface— influences participation” (p. 12). Digital natives are routinely induced to enter text into online platforms, but writing scholars have done very little to examine what that inducement entails. Tarsa surmises that “interfaces begin influencing decisions about engagement with a site even before its content does” (p. 18) that a user’s interaction with a digital platform therefore has much more to do with the platform’s general feel than with what it provides users. Upon studying the textual production habits of users on a variety of digital platforms, she notes that “I didn’t hear a single story about being turned off to a site by the quality of its content— what students remember most vividly about participatory spaces they no longer visit is how they looked” (p. 18).

Ask a student—or anyone else—why they tweet or post status updates on Face-book, and you’re very unlikely to receive a well-reasoned response. But a productive conversation can be had by encouraging students to examine why they feel drawn to some platforms over others, and how different platforms are generally perceived to be appropriate venues for some forms of communication and inappropriate for other forms. Why, for example, did the simple and clean interface of Google so quickly dominate the busier and more text-heavy search engine interfaces that were ascendant in the 1990s (as of January 2019, excite.com is still up, still looks very much as it did in 1999, and never fails to illicit surprised laughter from contemporary undergraduates). Some other examples: when filling out a form on an online questionnaire, how does the size of text boxes influence the amount of text we tend to input? Why is a single-sentence Facebook status update unworthy of consideration, whereas a multiparagraph update signals a sense of a poster being unhinged? For an example more immediately germane to our discussion: how does the design of turnitin.com or Pearson’s Blackboard make students feel? Are they intuitive? Inviting? (Several students have referred to a here-unnamed course management software suite as resembling a “digital prison.”)

In asking these questions, I do not expect students to come to any particular conclusions. Instead, I hope to foster within them a tendency to critically engage with the platforms they use to communicate. In time, this should lead them to routinely ask the questions that all writers should ask themselves while they produce text: Why am I doing this and what do I hope to accomplish? We cannot expect our students to dismiss the inducements and valuations found within digital platforms. We can, however, encourage them to question their participation within these platforms, and the objectivity or finality of the judgments issued by these platforms. A particularly useful exercise is having them discuss the success of a highly offensive tweet that generated enough engagement to go viral. Such a tweet was successful as content, sure, but was it writing? If it’s not—and it never is—then what should its author have done differently? And how can they do things differently, the next time they start to write?