Lauer, Claire. “Contending with Terms: “Multimodal” and “Multimedia” in the Academic and Public Spheres.” Computers and Composition. 26 (2009). 225–23

In “Contending with Terms,” Claire Lauer argues for a settlement of definitions between multimodal, and multimedia. Her paper claims to enumerate, through examples how the terms, multimodal and multimedia are used interchangeably (although, I have never heard multimodal used outside of academic discourse), “their use is contingent upon the content and the audience to whom a particular discussion is being directed.” (Lauer, 225) Lauer looks at the terms use in college program course descriptions and titles, professional organization position statement, and uses of the terms (or absence of use) in industry. Her observational findings are few and hardly poignant.1) their use is more contingent upon the context and audience. (I ask if this observation can be applied to many terms outside composition of multimedia production?) 2) The terms multimodal and multimedia are valued by which stage in the design continuum the user finds her/his self. 3) Composition instructors need to continue using both terns because they each have their rhetorical purposes and descriptive powers. This statement probably raises more questions than it settles. Namely, does multimodal/multimedia instruction belong in the composition classroom? Most institutions of higher education have departments entirely devoted to the teaching of multimedia design and production.
In order to get a better handle on the confusion between the definitions, Lauer offers a brief history of the terms. She finds that “the difference between multimodal and multimedia is largely a difference between “modes” and “media.” (227) Accordingly, she borrows heavily from Gunther and Kress, and states that modes are a way of representing information, and media are “the tools and material resources” used to produce and disseminate texts, (227) which make me question her intentions for the paper, if she fails to offer up new and different definitions.
Finally, Lauer offers up some examples of different contexts when multimodal is used rather than multimedia, and vice versa. Lauer finds that “multimedia is used to describe texts whose worth is determined by the successful production and distribution, not by the process the author took to compose them.” (236) Now I find, obviously, that if I use a variety of media, such as magnetic tape, film stock, etc., (the physical media for message transmission/carrying) that the process helps to determine the multimedia product. In fact, many multimedia producers are specifically process driven, where, as Kress and Van Leeuwen note, the limitation of a medium and not the mode, i.e. technological, can very much determine the process as successful within the limitation of the media choices available. Additionally, Lauer finds, largely by taking Kress and Van Leeuwen out of context, that modality is faxed to design, whereas production, that is, the product is entirely the realm of multimedia. This is a bit myopic of an interpretation.
Example: Absence can be a modal form of design; however, if I choose to represent, physically manifest that design – absence of sound as blank piece of paper, muted film, or blank, perhaps white-noise filled audio tape, then I have addressed the mode of absence in multimedia design, because there is only one represented in a variety of medium. Moreover, contrary to her earlier claims, the design process is both multimodal and multimedia because the consideration of the media used can never be separated from the design process passed the stage of conceptualization.
Finally, Lauer claims that “distinguishing between the two is useful in an effort to explain the prevalence of certain terms being used in certain context.” (236) Does this satisfy the “ so what caveat?” Aside from denying all agency to the user of the terms to determine when and when not use multimodal or multimedia, Lauer claims the context entirely determines terminological acceptance or denial. Given to wider understanding of the rhetorical traditions of contextualized/historical uses of the signified, one can easily imagine that the term are as interchangeable as she indicates at the beginning of her article.