“It’s like a musical wiki!”
Week 9 Reading Response (Prompt 1):
When I attempted to explain to my husband how Rickert & Salvo described The Flaming Lips’ experimental concert methods, he said, “It’s like a musical wiki!” That one statement pretty well encapsulates my view on the relationship between these articles on sound and the field of rhet/comp.
Rickert and Salvo describe The Flaming Lips’ “Parking Lot Experiments” and “Boombox Experiments” as “overcoming the limitations of the concert form by recapturing the experience of a happening” (308). In a similar way, Levy describes the iPod as a device which (as stated by Steve Jobs) caused a “plate-tectonic shift” (252). Like The Flaming Lips’ experimental concerts, the iPod overcame the limitations of the typical form of audio interaction between musicians, broadcasters, and listeners, making it so that “everybody could be broadcasting” (254).
The force behind Rickert & Salvo’s discussion of “musical worlding” (as illustrated by The Flaming Lips) as well as the iPod’s use in podcasting, is one of audience involvement. In both Levy’s iPod discussion and in The Flaming Lips example (and also in the other examples Rickert and Salvo provide), technology has made possible the interaction of composer and audience to the point that the roles become intertwined. The audience is now part of the composition process. I have seen the same take place in many collaborative writing environments, from things as simple as peer reviews (where the feedback from the peer “audience” is integrated into a revision of the written piece) to more obvious collaborative applications such as wikis or even group-authored text (I have made it a point in my classroom to sample this at least a bit, including a collaborative short story written in sections by multiple students, and a collaborative paragraph written in-class in a dynamic style which involves students calling out phrases which are then voted on and revised or added to by the rest of the class). In a more basic sense, as students receive teacher feedback on writing and proceed with revision, they are employing Rickert and Salvo’s feedback loop as they integrate teacher suggestions into their writing; and as students participate in open forums and online blogging or wikis, they are becoming self-publishers in the same way the iPod’s podcasters became individual broadcasters; in fact, the integration of media is clearly seen in blogging, as it is now common for bloggers to include sound or video in their online publications.
As technology continues to develop and to offer more opportunities for easier integration of media, written media and sound media will continue to interact and intertwine as new forms of multimodal communication emerge.
–Crystal Crawford
