Looking to the Future: Electronic Texts and the Deepening Interface

Barbara Warnick
University of Washington

TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY, 14(3), 327-333
Copyright © 2005, Lawrence Associates, Inc.

This article by Barbara Warnick may not tackle “writing and technology” exactly, but it does tackle important rhetorical and technological advances that will affect many angles of education. These include: texts, teachers, and methods of teaching, thought processes, vocabulary, and the entire ideology of rhetoric (which will involve English and Language Arts teachers.) “Looking to the future” is about studying this new media called digital rhetoric. The article touches on online discourse, authorship, credibility, persuasion, and many other essentials to rhetorical practices. Warnick offers four trends of online discourse: (1) shifts in the nature of persuasion, (2) individuation of content to meet user’s interest, (3) increased use of all forms of interactivity, and (4) changes in our conception of text and authorship.
Basically this article focuses on the growth of the digital age. We used to be able to define author as the person who wrote a text. Warnick complicates this idea with examples from the internet. Wiki’s, Facebook, blog posts, corporate Web pages; who is the author of these texts? Let’s look at Web pages for example, is the founder of the company the author, do customer reviews count as author, the Web designer who created the entire layout of the page; are they the author? You can see where this area turns slightly gray.
When we consider texts, as students, we think of textbooks. You flip them open read front to back and take notes. Sometimes there is one author; sometimes it is a compilation of authors. However, Warnick points out the difference with online texts, she says their “tendency to essentialize the work- to view it as an integral finished object- is problematic when we think about electronic textuality.” Possibly the most important point this article makes is about the interaction between the user and the machine. Texts and readers have low interaction. But when faced with online text, the links to other places never end; each page is created to be “sticky” (to draw the user in and keep them reading and clicking.)
Now I will try to take what I have learned from “Looking to the Future”, and relate it to education and writing. This semester I am in two classes that use blogs as a means of information flow and communication, as well as for graded assignments. Five years ago, this method did not exist. Because of tools like blackboard and the wide availability of computers, a great majority of my texts are only available in PDF format; for me to retrieve and read in whatever fashion I choose. The use of 3G phones and computes has changed the vocabulary of young adults and teens; how will this affect standard writing years to come? If class is cancelled, we meet over the internet… we are really living in the future now.