The watering down and gumming up of academic discourse

Here is my argument in relation to this book:

Overall, the book just seemed a worst case scenario for delayed publishing (and worst case scenario for bad stuff happening with online publishing): for some reason all the work was from 2008 or 2009 and the book was published in 2012, and the topic of the book was multimodal composition and new media literacy. Everything seemed wack and outdated, and all the chapters were made in multimodal texts, so the way all the chapters were designed also seemed wack and outdated and difficult to navigate. For example, you couldn't navigate back to the book from any individual chapter, and all the chapters were designed in idiosyncratic ways.

It generally arose this pet peeve of mine of scholars being multimodal for what appeared like no reason at all. Like it all reminds me of what Edward Tufte would refer to as chartjunk. Just random junk that you are including in visual displays that does nothing to enhance the message you are trying to make and just clutters it up for no reason. The video in symbolizing space was an excellent example of this. Random, confusing animations. The whole point of multimodal composition is you think about your rhetorical situation, then you think about the modes and medium that provide the affordances that work best for that situation. They aren't doing this at all. Its harder to read text flashing by on a video and the random animations only distract you from the meaning. You can't zoom in on that text as easily. You can't as easily reread parts of it. They don't abide by their own rules.

Useful_junk1
https://junkcharts.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341e992c53ef013480c7cba9970c-pi

Examples are weird, personal archival stuff, badly made videos of undergraduates having fun, and a Prezi.

Below, is a link to one of the chapters, which I think is a good illustration of all of this.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWf-KNbVXqc



Does this seem like an example of stuff that could only be published through a platform like a free open access online publisher? Does this water down academic discourse? Same question could be asked about undergraduates being included in this book. Is publishing of this sort detrimental? Should there be safeguards of some kind to keep scholarship of a higher quality?

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