Introduction

MODULE:
Introductions allow readers to be more efficient. A small summary can be examined by many readers, convincing them that the project merits their review (or not). Its brevity makes it easy to read while its summarizing effect mimes the work of the larger piece.

1. How might critical work understand new media on its own terms? Scholars may, perhaps, use the technology itself as one map by which to explore new media objects and artifacts. Working from the premise that new technologies "think" in new ways, this project uses the central concept of modularity to stride through multiple disciplinary conversations, moving from one to the next in order to (hyper)link them together.

2. The notion of modularity has played a role in the thinking of many works in cultural studies: Judith Butler expands on the Derridian notion of iterability as a component of gender performance; Janice Radway sees readers poaching parts of works and using them for their own purposes; Michel de Certeau describes a similar process of bricolage in which people re-configure media to "make do." In Richard Dawkins' landmark work of popular science, The Selfish Gene, he suggests that elements of culture are reproduced and imitated as individual units. These memes survive and evolve just as genes do. Dawkins writes, "Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution on their own"(193). In other words, memes will take over, given the chance. It fits, then, that "modularity" surfaces as a meme for so many cultural scholars. My discussion here will embark upon a similar quest, using "modularity" to structure and guide my path through multiple conversations; among the discussions I engage directly:

3. Film Studies. This piece examines Hollywood's use of specific tropes and genres in (re)constructing films. In particular, I suggest that monster movies function as modular texts, entertaining audiences by mixing familiarity with surprise. I also suggest that the modular techniques used at the level of narrative also emerge at the levels of shot-construction and marketing. [Film Studies]

4. Grammatology. The study of the history of writing suggests that human culture is entering a third age of communication, the age of electracy (to use Gregory Ulmer's term). Grammatologists study the historical shift from orality to literacy and work by analogy to understand the emergence of electracy. This project suggests that the rhetorical possibilities of new media (such as modularity) might allow for different types of argumentation. [Grammatology]

5. History of media technology. What relationship does the development of media technology have with the rhetoric of that technology? How do the physical requirements of the modern era influence the construction of new media? [Media Tech]

6. Academia. Academic writing, grounded in argumentative thought, begins to adopt modular characteristics. (Perhaps these Do new methods of argumentation stem from new technologies of writing? This project begins to consider how academics should explore such new rhetorics. [Academia]

7. The project uses modularity to guide both its subject and its format. It suggests that modularity—a concept at the heart of new media—influences many aspects of new media production. It also suggests a method by which scholars can use technology to drive inquiry, gleaning new ways to construct arguments from key technologies.