Romanticising the Digital

Victor Hugo noted Romanticism as "liberalism in literature". Generally, Blake, Byron, Colerdige, Shelly, etc were tryting to break away from traditional restraints in regards to poetic verse and form, seeking to free the artist. None more so noted this ideal as William Blake, who said "I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans". Blake, an extremist, even by romantic standards, went so far as to create his own unique form of printing using copper plates and acid baths. For the romantic, creativity and imagination were prefered over traditional and formal values.

New Media and Multimodal Composition are the children of romantic ideals. The advent and acess of new software and technology allows for writers to publish their work, while working in non-traditional forms. The ablility for people to incorporate all forms of visual and audio media breaks from culturally accepted and dominant forms of composition. For Blake's vision, using standardized software would still be too limiting; however, the acess and simplicty of composing in these forms, even he would agree, allows for more freedom of expression compared to formal standards.

Viewing 'New Media' and 'Multimodal Composition' as neo-Romantic forms, we can try to place opposition to these new forms of composition in the cycle of tradition and revolution. If, as I believe, we are in a period that values tradition; then it could be that these new forms of composition might usher in a new wave of revolution, of liberalism in composition--a liberalism of the forms of composition.

As observed by Stanley Cavell, in Bolter's Remediation, "[to] speak of our subjectivity as the route back to our conviction in reality is to speak of romanticism" (234). This return to our conviction--our subjectivity--is another romantic value: placing value on the individual and individual creativity. This move is contrary to beliefs that writing does not happen in a vacume; that writing--and the writer--cannot be seperated from the social space in which they occupy. The divergence of social-constructivist and romantic ideals become blurred in the pop-up, hypertextual enviornment.

This blurring occurs in the mediums of multimodal composition. Using images, audio, video and text from varried sources allows the individual to develop a sense of self, which is singular and is constructed from societal and virtual artifacts. By using these artifiacts, the individual is returning to subjectivity. And by returning to subjectivity, the individual becomes more aware of societal impacts on the self and, also, how the self impacts and creates the world around it.