Networks and New Media

When we ask What should college English be? I want to respond, College English should be new media. I make that claim in order to begin a discus sion regarding how English studies might consider the problems and de mands new media pose for the work done in literary studies, film studies, cultural studies, composition studies, or other areas associated with college English, principally as these areas engage with writing. Making that claim is not a rejection of current work but rather a desire to draw attention to one aspect of new media, the network, whose role in shaping and sharing information continues to increase within the media world we inhabit. In particular, the network manifests itself online on the via social software in stand-alone and Web applications, through e-mail, within databases, within marketing, through public policy, and among other related new media applications and experiences. Our culture's practical engagement with such digital forms as the World Wide Web, Jay David Bolter writes, may compel us to rethink the relationship of media theory and practice in the humanities (16). For the question of what college English should be, I want to narrow Bolter's claim by imagining his call as one for networks.