You, Talking to Me

No apologies for the pun in the title.  Ok, maybe a small apology only if you promise to keep reading.  You see, my viewership numbers are down, so I really need you to keep reading this and to like it and to share it.  Please!

            Neediness not too different from this exists across the Internet without question.  Why is that, especially when neediness and shameless self-promotion are usually viewed as negative characteristics in the “real world”?  The answer to this question, imaginary reader, forms the basis of the biggest hole in Xiaoye You’s Cosmopolitan English & Transliteracy: if you build it, they won’t necessarily come.  What do I mean by this, you ask?  Allow me to explain at what I consider to be “A”-worthy length/depth.  This is, after all, an assignment.  And my blog, after all, is read by precisely no one outside the small confines of our Spring ’17 ENGL 651 class at CSUN (so far as I know, at least).  After all, I have to be constructing these sentences for a reason, right?  If you’re still reading, that means you’ve trusted me this far, so I urge you to hang on just a bit longer.

            Returning to the hole in You’s argument, I just want to say (type) that I agree with most everything he says.  However, the problem with “new media” technologies is that the intended interconnectivity can backfire as equally and oppositely as it can “fire.”  In my own experience with blog-type class assignments, they work only under a set of necessary circumstances: 1) the posts must be graded for accountability purposes, 2) the grades should come from a clear rubric and/or set of expectations, 3) the professor/teacher must respond promptly (even if that response is only the assignment of a numeric or letter grade), and 4) students must be held clearly responsible for responding to one another’s posts.  Like load-bearing support beams on a wobbly building, if any one of these four pillars is missing, the structural integrity of the classroom’s blog environment will collapse like Barad-dûr after Frodo drops the Ring into Mount Doom.

            (Still hangin’ in there, reader?)

            You spends a great deal of time discussing how these digital media can work well, but what about when they don’t?  What about those classes where Barad-dûr has fallen but the professor (perhaps not unlike a heavy sleeper aboard the RMS Titanic), has no idea?  You does a great job of highlighting the benefits of “direct experience,” and discusses at length the importance of “establishing an infrastructure for exchange.”  However, as I said (typed) before, “if you build it, they won’t necessarily come.”  There are certain instances where I feel like I’d be equally well served to deposit my blog post on http://screamintothevoid.com/ than on a legitimate blogging website because the result will be the same either way: no one will ever read my writing, and the same sense of power and agency that new media purports to create will inevitably crumble.  Or, to reference the metaphor I began parenthetically at the beginning of this paragraph, maybe I’m just the sleeping passenger on the RMS Titanic who wakes up always already underwater.

            Regardless, “real” social interaction in the classroom is often sacrificed at the altar of the Internet, and the issue of whether our English is “cosmopolitan” and fluid enough deserves to be considered only after the issue of ennui, of Screaming into the Void, is settled.  In short: You's talking to me, and I'm talking to you.