ENGL 680M: New Media

This post has nothing to do with the reading or the project due this week. Instead, I need to pass along something that happened to me last Friday.

While you all were having a fabulous Serious Games forum (from what i heard), I was presenting a paper at a conference in Pittsburgh*. I presented on Friday. During the Q&A following my panel's presentations, each one of us got attacked my someone in the audience for various reasons. I'd never seen anything so hostile before. Then again, this was a conference on Adoption and tensions run high in that crowd. Anyway, MY attacker was a man who's known in the Adoption Research/History field. He's published. He's respected. He's an academic (not everyone at the conference was). First, he told me I was doing my research poorly AND that I didn't know what a rhetorical analysis encompassed...THEN he asked me why I was wasting my time looking at the Internet/Webpages/New Media because I could "go into a private, bricks and mortar establishment, pull a pamphlet and find the exact same rhetoric." He also said that he (personally) didn't find any use for the Internet, and that my research was essentially contributing to nothing. Those were just the comments related to new media. He said some other things about my claims being bogus...

Ouch.

ANYway, in my paper, I had explained that I'm interested in investigating adoption rhetoric as it manifests in new media, specifically on the Internet. I also explained that my reason for NOT going to bricks & mortar was to explore accessibility to information available to the "public"...blah, blah, blah...I held my own, I am proud to say (which is something I can't do well when my research is being questioned) but I wasn't given enough response time to explain to him WHY/HOW the rhetoric is different between new media spaces and printed paper spaces.

A few people in the audience (of about 30) seemed to get what I was saying and several came up to me afterward and said they liked what I had to say and that they thought Mr. History had been rude and out-of-line. That was nice for them to do that, but I still felt a bit defeated.

So I came away from the presentation thinking that I need to clarify some things in my writing (& even for myself), but also with a reminder that not everyone views new media as a valid thing to study nor do those who think that way see any inherent value in new media because it isn't the traditional paper-based method of transmitting information.

*Yes, I did get to the Andy Warhol Museum...and you should, too.