"Listening is an art, a conscious process of observing and defining sound. And like the art of writing, it is affected by one's place in and knowledge of a particular sonic environment as much as one's previous experiences with sonic forms” (Comstock and Hocks 2). How often do we ask students to listen? Yes, we expect them to listen to our lectures, our podcasts, etc., but how do we teach (and do we teach) our freshmen how to dissect spoken discourse? How can we expect them to develop this skill, unless we ask them to create arguments in spoken discourse? Just like subliminal messages, our students listen to types of music that do in fact over time change the way they think and feel about certain issues. Our students can say, “Man, that Wyclef song is tight!” But do they really know what Sweetest Girl means? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PxBGHjABnU) [Or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zryvBnCaShc, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aj1sznTdLM, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2dbprtZFE&feature=related] They may listen to the nightly news, or a politician’s speech, but can they really decipher the rhetoric and manipulation of language? Would they be able to do it if we taught them how to construct multi-media texts that included sound? Plus, we have to take into account that visuals lend to meanings (as in music videos as displayed above). Each time we construct new sounds as a composition, we are redefining what we believe to be our own “truth,” and we are revealing a part of who we are as individuals because of the choices we make in constructing the compositions. Simply put, “our ideological location regulates the relationship between what is audible and inaudible, imaginable and unimaginable” (Comstock and Hocks 2).
“illusion of realism” (Comstock and Hocks 3). This is yet another concern with written texts and the ability to transfer our notion of rhetoric from what a student sees on paper to being able to transfer those ideals to other types of media discourse. Students cannot yet (usually) listen to a song, or watch a segment of news, or listen to a speech and decipher reality from illusion (this may be due to the staged reality TV that has become ever so popular). One of the struggles we face as composition instructors is trying to get our students to not only decipher fact from fiction in the research they do (what is a good source to use in a paper) and make that lesson true to life. We can’t just say, “politicians are sneaky, don’t believe them.” or “all news casters are biased and stretch the truth.” We have to somehow get our students thinking about dissecting written, spoken and visual literacies. My philosophy is, if a student can do it, they can recognize it—so I think that teaching multi-media discourse and rhetoric certainly has a place in general education.
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