Methods vs Theories

I was really excited for this Johnson-Eilola reading when at the outset he was talking about listing specific teaching strategies for dealing with this slew of new media. I thought in the beginning that he did a fair job in his ultimate consensus: we are "comfortable with postmodernism."

I have to admit that I was disappointed, however, that the actual strategies and teaching/exploration methods he lists really don't go out of their way to break any new ground or ever go beyond theory as far as what we could cover. His two main examples are symbolic-analytic work ("bringing together multiple, fragmented contexts in an attempt to broker solutions" (201), and articulation (which "situates itself within a postmodern context… (breakdown, fragmentation) as a cultural situation" and "provides a way for thinking about how meaning is constructed contingently, from pieces of other meanings and social forces that tend to prioritize one meaning over another" (202).
I thought the closest he really got to anything that would really have satisfied me was when on page 202 he says, "And would writing  teachers even recognize this text when they saw it?" I saw this as basically an admission that right now, all this exists almost exclusively as theory, and though we are getting more and more comfortable with that theory, we don't really have any new breakthroughs on specific practices, methods, or strategies that help us to apply these theories into truly fresh practices. It seems that, at the moment, the best we can manage is to use the same practices (writing, photographs, design, etc) in new forms (blogs, rich text documents, etc). But do these new combinations really count as new forms of expression, or just old forms of expression with new theories orbiting around them, especially when these theories don't seem to actually be influencing the forms much in ways that we can proactively control, only retroactively recognize?

In other words, it seems like down at its true nuts and bolts, all this "new media" we're working with isn't actually new. It's just new combinations of old tried-and-true methods of communication. By some definitions this is new of course, but even going back to Porter's Intertext, as Johnson-Eilola hints, doesn't completely line up here. This isn't so much 'making something new with old combinations' but 'applying new theories and ways of thinking onto the old recombining we were already doing'.  Even the Intertext still contains fragments of different texts in relation to a whole. It makes me think: if Johnson-Eilola and everyone else we've read so far don't have any truly tangible strategies, are we already actually using these recombined forms as effectively as we are currently able? In other words, maybe we're already more competent in the technical minutiae of New Media practices than we realize, since 'New Media' or 'New Writing' is nothing more than 'Old Media' or 'Old Writing' except with more and more possible combinations. In that case, the main tool we have, as Johnson-Eilola hints, is not 'new strategies' (we "wouldn't recognize them if we saw them") but instead what we really need to change here is our methods of thinking, or "be critical" of the system we've been participating in since cave-drawings, as he says on page 212.

I've been reading a lot of David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, and in it he writes "it is first the sensuous, perceptual world that is relational and weblike in character, and hence that the organic, interconnected structure of any language is an extension or echo of the deeply interconnected reality of the sensorial reality itself" (84). In other words, both reality and texts of all kinds have always been interconnected, down to the level of the molecule and beyond. It's just that we're starting to realize it more and more. It makes me think, more and more, that nothing's actually changing except for our Aristotelian philosophies of mind and body (and even that change, admittedly, is glacial). However, it's that change that we really should be focusing on here, as I think Johnson-Eilola's lack of any true 'techniques' or 'strategies' attests. Of course on a broad level yes, we need to be thinking about how we consume texts of different kinds of continually evolving texts, from rich text files to video to music. But is seems like, for now at least, "being critical" about our methods and theories is the best defense we have, and the closest we have to real strategy.