The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition

by Alexander Reid

In THE TWO VIRTUALS, Alex Reid shows that to understand the relationship between our traditional, humanistic realm of thought, subjectivity, and writing and the emerging virtual space of networked media, we need to recognize the common material space they share. The book investigates this shared space through a study of two, related conceptions of the virtual. The first virtual is quite familiar; it is the virtual reality produced by modern computing and networks. The second, less familiar, virtual comes from philosophy. It lies in the periphery of more familiar postmodern concepts, such as deconstruction, the rhizome, and simulation. In drawing the connection between the two virtuals of philosophy and networked media, Reid draws upon research in computers and writing, rhetoric and composition, new media studies, postmodern and critical theory, psychology, economics, anthropology, and robotics. ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALEX REID is an associate professor and the director of Professional Writing at the State University of New York College at Cortland. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between writing, pedagogy, and emerging technologies and has appeared in journals such as Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, Theory & Event, and Culture Machine, as well as in collections such as Culture Shock and the Practice of the Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric And Composition, and Techknowledgies: New Cultural Imaginaries in the Humanities, Arts, & TechnoSciences. He maintains a blog, Digital Digs, on the issues of new media, writing, and higher education at alexreid.typepad.com.

224 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2007

Reviews

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone teaching writing in the digital age. What Reid reminds us of in The Two Virtuals is that technology is not a new beast. What is new is the type of technologies we're dealing with and the ways in which we use them. Scholars like to talk about paradigm shifts in education but that phrase is misleading. A paradigm shift implies the transition from one path to another. In the material existences of daily living, what is more likely to occur is an overlapping of one path onto another that leads to two or more paths operating at the same time until one or more paths stops being relevant to our daily needs. Just like pen and paper, digital technology is as much a way of producing knowledge as it is a way of recording knowledge. For those old school writing instructors who think the computer is destroying writing (and yes, there are many of you), Reid makes a poignant case for the virtual as an extension of reality and so a material component just as tangible as a notebook.

[DWRL Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here Alexander Reid addresses a gap between the study of new media technologies in education and the more traditional humanities roots of composition studies by exploring the virtual spaces of the computer and Internet in terms of philosophical ideas of materiality. Through multiple examples of writing technologies past and present as well as websites and classroom projects, Reid shows how this philosophical tradition can help us better understand these ever-evolving technologies and their impact on writing processes, making it particularly great for teachers and scholars in rhet-comp and communication studies.