Viewing+Composition+through+New+Media

= **Abstract **  = //“In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin”—Marshall McLuhan // ===New Media have altered the way in which people socialize through a remaking of what is possible in communication. As a direct result, those areas of educational institutions which attend to any discourse as an object of study face an unbending pressure to adapt. The common disparity between the modes of composition taught in the classroom and the modes of composition that drive students’ lives suggest that the deadline for changes has already passed; however, the staying power of institutionalized modes is not a new discovery, and steps are being taken to incorporate contemporary modes of composition—and the media through which they are expressed—into a new electric composition classroom. === ===Flourishing social media platforms—such as Facebook—have added strong dialogic and collaborative components to the transcendent perceptual-visual capabilities of the world-wide digital network. These components are also evident in other digital technologies such as wikis and electronic mail. These digital social media have permeated our society at all levels, filling the cracks and spaces within, without, and between the institutional and the non-institutional, the local and the global. As these forces strain to maintain specificity from the encroaching fringes of the other, the extent of dialogism allowed by the digital meaning-making spaces we populate become diluted, failing to approach a synergy which would allow for the optimization of the critical interpretation and production of meaning. Composition educators share a burden of responsibility for === ===Caught in the flux between establishment and training and innovation and adaptation, composition instructors often encounter difficulty in the appropriation of digital discourses for the writing classroom. In search of the means to address the increasing pressures of discursive evolution, I will traverse the space between theory and application to uncover the proverbial missing links between composition pedagogy and changing forms of visual and digital literacy. I hope to reveal an accessible perspective informed in the new mode of instructional literacy required of composition instructors: fluency in conversing with countless modes of meaning-making, a veritable diorama of multi-media, and the learning connections of students. === ===Working toward an integrated composition curriculum—inclusive observe the complex landscape of digital and visual I will apply several critical lenses from across several disciplines and mediums will inform the theoretical foundation I hope to construct observe the surrounding landscape of visual and digital literacies and their connections to our writing classrooms. The perspectives established in this process will serve as viewing lenses as I explore Facebook and other digital social media platforms with the intention of explicating and optimizing pedagogical tools for composition classrooms. ===