“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Justin Hodgson”
Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018
Technology and Rhetorical Consciousness
Xchanges: In the past, you’ve talked about social media and online/digital culture studies and the dawning recognition that even hard technical activities like coding, programming, and algorithm creation are rhetorical.
Do you think we as multimodal and digital composition instructors should be calling students’ attention to the rhetorical nature of hard technical communication and ethical considerations technical authors have? If so, are there specific ways you do this in your teaching?
JH: Of course, ironically, I’m a screen-up kind of guy. I don’t really care so much what’s going on the bottom. So much of what we’re doing now is drag-and-drop technologies. You no longer need to know HTML5 to build a dynamic website. But coding can have dramatic impact in a way that is both rhetorical and beyond rhetorical. It’s really critical to understand what happens below the screen because you can very well be manipulated, shaped, positioned, or pushed in ways without even having any awareness of what’s going on.
I use this example in my class all the time: photo filters. To actually make a sepia photograph is ridiculously labor intensive. You need the ink from a cuttlefish, you need a dark room, the right materials, the right light exposures. Now I can do it in the blink of an eye. These algorithms are automating the master techniques—taking the advanced aesthetics of the master class and just giving it to you in the click of a button. That radically transforms how we think about mediating practices, production, and interface interaction.
The more you really start to understand how the algorithms are being applied in the programming, the coding structure, and how the program and code itself shapes or controls or enacts, the more you can become critically aware or attuned to what the technology is doing and how it’s setting upon you. I think anytime you use a technology and you want to allow students to work with it, you have to balance between how much knowledge I need to give them to be able to produce what I want them to produce, and to what extent should I make them aware of the operating conditions that are the underbelly for this technology.
When I teach my class in rhetoric and games, we talk about the procedural mechanics of a video game, as well as the fact that in most video games, you cannot have access to the code or the assets that make the game go because those are either patented or copyrighted or both. For teaching writing, when students compose primarily in Microsoft Word, I have students write with Google Docs once or with Scrivener on a trial account and see how radically different their writing is, and it’s just simply switching interfaces. They all do the same basic thing, but they do it differently with different assumptions.