"The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same"

After reading Chapter 3 of Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, I was particularly interested in his claim that “we can use past practices as inventive heuristics for rethinking our contemporary digital pedagogies” (p. 88). Instead of panicking when new technologies or ways of doing emerge or feeling anxious in moments of uncertainty, the best course of action is to look at how other teachers or compositionists have responded to these “crises” or as Kathleen Blake Yancey calls it, “tectonic change.” (p. 87, 89). In my study of history as an undergraduate student and in my community organizing work, I have learned that change is hard and often resisted or in tension with people’s sense of stability, expectation, and familiarity. Change requires openness and vulnerability, and sometimes you have to adjust the doses of change depending on the individual or group you are working with. You can also help people embrace change when you connect it to past ways of being, knowing, and doing so that, in my opinion, it seems more like the uncomfortable growing pains rather than earth shattering “crises” or “tectonic change.” When Palmeri referenced Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree’s assertion that “all media were once new,” it does provide comfort for those ambivalent about change because there is really no way to move forward without somehow looking back. By looking back, we can see patterns that can inform the contemporary and that past technologies and pedagogies still have an important role to play.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

For some reason, this discussion and the idea of leaning on the past as a pathway to the future, made me think of the way some scholars in English, linguistics, and cultural anthropology have made connections between Egyptian hieroglyphics and emojis. Some people feel that the frequent use of emojis shows that we are somehow “evolving backwards,” while others contend that the use of emojis help offer more “clarity and understanding” in our communication (https://www.mabbly.com/how-emojis-are-like-hieroglyphics/). Emojis are those kinds of “…visual…images [that] have an immediacy, an intensity, a simultaneity about them that words strung out one after the other on a page can hardly achieve” (p. 92). While I would definitely not want a student to submit an assignment in entirely emoji form, I feel that emojis (or Bitmojis, which are a much more personalized and individualized version of emojis) can be juxtaposed among other modes and be an example of the innovative “remixing” and “reinventing” in composition that Palmeri discusses throughout his book (p. 15, 100).

Hieroglyphics vs. Emojis

Community Question (respond below): How do you respond to changes or shifts in technology? Feel free to respond in alphabetic text, meme, emoji, bitmoji, etc.

My range of emotions when dealing with new technology