First Day, Fall 2012

Somehow it is already the first day of classes for 2012. I am not sure where my summer went.
I am excited to teach a new grad class this semester, New Media Production. The course differs from the other grad courses I teach, where the focus is on traversing and networking a complex set of readings and ideas. This course emphasizes production--learning how to use tools to do new things. If I am nervous about anything, it is that the class has over 20 students in it, with different comfort levels regarding technology.

The course also seeks to historicize the term new media, defining in light of the convergence of postmodern theory and network technology. We're opening with two staple essays for me--Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" and Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology." The Heidegger sets up our early work with Ulmer; I frame Ulmer's concept of electracy as an attempt to wrestle with Heidegger's provocation of technology/logos. (I flush out this strain of thought more in the syllabus' course description, "The Becoming of Electracy"). I've taught Ulmer's Internet Invention with undergraduates before, but I am really excited to teach the MyStory genre with graduate students.

I am also teaching an undergraduate Expository Writing course. Leahy and I completed a manuscript for Computers and Composition that outlines our rationale for teaching web writing. The abstract to that article reads as follows:

Collaborative digital tools, online communities, and the evolution of literacy create opportunities in which writing for an English class and writing for the "real" world no longer have to be two separate activities. We believe seizing such opportunities requires rethinking the desire to teach writing—a move toward what has been termed postpedagogy. We align the interactive and collaborative affordances of web writing with a postpedagogical model of learning focused on inventive practices grounded in kairotic interactions.

I'm going to give the students the article to read in preparation for our next class--the first half of the article is fairly theoretical, focusing on why institutions insist that writing (narrowly defined as academic essays) is "teachable." To rephrase Heidegger: "the correct instrumental definition of writing still does not show us writing's essence [...]" ("QCT" 313). The second half of the essay argues for organizing a class dedicated to the idea that writing cannot be taught, but can be learned. Learning writing requires attending to writing outside of the instrumental-institutional expectations. The dynamic, participatory web affords us opportunities to discover writing in the wild.
Working on the syllabus for both courses reminded me that I have a blog, and that it has been very lonely. Sorry blog.

Productive Mess Hits the Airwaves

Here's some shameless self-promotion: the new issue of Kairos includes my article with Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber "Productive Mess: First-Year Composition Takes the University's Agonism Online." The article has two main arguments: first, it discusses how to better integrate CMSs into FYC. Briefly: increasing interaction and productivity requires careful, well-planned structure (arguing for heuristics)--going digital doesn't necessarily mean more engaged students. And the article provides one particular structure that we found effective.

Second--the article questions the purpose of FYC, and, in greater scope, of University education. I believe I will be writing/publishing on this more in the future. Essentially, I think the growth of digital technology will increasingly move us away from the Enlightenment University (as a center of knowledge production) and more toward the university as a center of civil discourse and engagement. Those who know me know my appreciation for Bill Readings' University in Ruins; I want to spend some more time with that book. I believe Readings' themes permeate the entire article, even if there is limited discussion of his work.

Obama goes to work

As I recently mentioned, I primarily voted for Obama based on his stance toward net neutrality. Obama has decided to appoint our nation's first Chief Technology Officer. User Voice, a social aggregator, has set up an interesting forum to discuss the priorities for the new appointment. Very interesting, but it is unclear whether Obama knows the site exists. The site details that "official reviews" are coming, but doesn't say who the officials are...

Regardless, take a minute to read through some of the excellent suggestions, vote, and ponder whether the previous administration would even consider for a milli-second the idea of digital public opinion.

And, Mxrk, don't waste a vote on the guy developing sharks with "lazers."

Notes on Of Grammatology

It took me a bit to get started, but here we go...

If, as Derrida suggests, writing threatens language, then digital technology extends this threatening, by engaging so many more people in the “play.” As the actors gather, as the stage widens, the stakes increase. In 1968 Derrida suggested:

The advent of writing is the advent of this play; today such a play is coming into its own, effacing the limit starting from which one had thought to regulate the circulation of signs, drawing along with it all the reassuring signifieds, reducing all the strongholds, all the out-of-bound shelters that watched over the field of language. (7)

Forty years later, what better sign of this coming (change for Derrida is always a specter of the future) do we have than wikipedia? Wikipedia realizes much of what Derrida refers to as the death of the book, “the death of the civilization of the book, of which so much is said and which manifests itself particularly through a convulsive proliferation of libraries” (8). Rather than further replicate the logocentrism of language through a further proliferation of libraries, we are witnessing a transformation- a transformation incited by digital writing. Writing not as a noun, not as objects proliferated across places, but writing as an action "collected" in placeless spaces. We have a proliferation of writers, many of whom are alien to the traditional strong-holds of language and Thought. There work appears, but it does not multiply or collect arithmetically. It appears and disappears. It transforms. Dynamically authored and edited, texts transform. It is these new movements- especially the disappearance, that so differs from the culture of print, presence, and permanence. Rhetoric has long been the art of shifty wordsmiths; it is ready for a digital word in which words actually shift in real time. Digital writing, especially wikipedia, is a celebration of “the human and laborious, finite and artificial inscription” (15). Web 2.0’s open opposition to “expertise” is a rejection of a logocentric divinity that positions truth as external to humanity, especially to the masses. Rather than libraries, we have librarying (and, of course, LibraryThing).

A task that I will face: is librarying logocentric? This is not a question I as of yet feel qualified to answer. But my initial suspicions are yes... and no. Digital technologies are not an absolute break from print/literate culture. They are a transformation. Just as with the transitions from orality to literacy and then from literacy to print, the transition from print to digitality will retain much of what has come before: especially the desire to know, to learn, and to exchange. What will be different, I suggest, is that our knowing, learning, and exchanging will transpire with a stronger exposure to the Face of others. Our contact will knowledge (and others) will be tempered by the ethical encounter with the Face of the Other. Words will not be dead, but uncomfortably living.

del.icio.us (victory-is-mine)

Meg and I are preparing for our first real date since Rowan was born (6 months)- tonight's Ben Folds concert. I wish I saw him with the Five, but I'm still excited for the show.

I just sent of a webtext on the pedagogical dimensions of del.icio.us, the social bookmarking technology of social bookmarking technologies. Seriously, del.icio.us changed my life. I submit to any non-believer (i.e., non-user) the Firefox test- just try surfing the web wish del.icio.us for a week. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

As a bit of a sneak-peak, to celebrate the victory-is-mine moment of getting this off to the C&C special edition editor, I thought I would share a portion of the introduction that covers the theoretical implications of tagging. This works has a direct link to my dissertation in its focus on how digital technology contributes to the widespread, ongoing paradigm shift from Being to becoming, from product to process, from The Self to the group, from Truth to contingency. Here it is:

Beyond these benefits, the most significant advantage of del.icio.us concerns its method of cataloging entries: tagging. del.icio.us defines tags as:

...one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on del.icio.us. They're a little bit like keywords but non-hierarchical. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and easily rename or delete them later. Tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.

Tagging does not seek to replicate a physical organization system for information; there's no "files" being placed in "folders." In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson points out the ontological/categorical/strict-taxonomic organization of systems such as the Dewey decimal system, though effective organizational strategies for physical objects, fail to capitalize on the unique, non-physical properties of digital information (156-159). Such top-down, hierarchical systems are designed to properly "place" physical objects. Tagging represents a mode of organization that can only be realized once information becomes digital and is thus no longer tied to the limitations of physical place. Tagged data has no singular proper place- users in folksonomies such as del.icio.us can simultaneously tag data in multiple ways, allowing it to simultaneously exist across any number of spaces. Rather than attempting to organize information according to pre-existing, structured categories, Anderson imagines

a world of ad-hoc organization, determined by whatever makes sense at the time. That's more like a big pile of stuff on a desk instead of rows of items stringently arranged on shelves. Sure it may seem messy, but that's just because it's a different kind of organization: spontaneous, contextual order, easily reordered into a different context as need be. (159)

Thinking of del.icio.us, we can add "idiosyncracy" to Anderson's description of tagging as a mode of organization. Each del.icio.us user is likely to tag pages differently. Such a random system might not be as "neat" as the Dewey decimal system, but its flexibility and fluidity allow it to effectively capture what Suriowecki and others refer to as "the wisdom of crowds." To overstate the theoretical implications: del.icio.us can be seen as a collective attempt to explore, organize, and share the web underwritten by a spirit of enthusiasm and generosity ("Look what I found!") rather than one of mastery or colonization ("We must order this"). While an extended discussion of the impact of tagging and digitality is beyond my scope here, those interested should see Dave Weinberger's insightful Everything is Miscellaneous which ambitiously approaches a new metaphysics for digital information (see especially pages 92-95 for how del.icio.us and tagging contribute to this effort; see also his webtext "The Hyperlinked Metaphysics of the Web"). Interested parties should also give Clay Shirky's seminal "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags" some attention.

Reputation as Ethos for the Responsible Netizen

I picked up the quizercise from Karl Stolley (who, I am pretty sure, just adapted Janice Lauer's "writing opportunity"): every Monday, before we begin discussing the week's readings, I ask students some kind of question that calls on them to connect the reading to the larger goals of the class. This week, I opened with a discussion of the importance of MLA citation (since I had caught a few students liberally borrowing material without proper citation). We had read from Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs for class that day, and I asked them the following: focusing on a specific passage or idea from Smart Mobs, explain why an English teacher might discuss the importance of MLA citation before discussing Smart Mobs. Circular? You betcha! But I like giving them these kinds of meta-questions, just to see how well they are beginning to understand my underlying aspirations for the course.

Often, I write answers to my own quiz questions--though I give myself some liberties to stray off-topic (I give my students the same liberties, essentially they have ten minutes to prove to me that they have done the reading!). Here's what I wrote in response to my own question:

In Smart Mobs, author Howard Rheingold suggests that the most productive social networks develop "bottom-up" measures for establishing authority and filtering out free riders. He writes:

Self-monitoring is part of successful grassroots collaboration, a kind of many-to-many surveillance by mutual consent. If governance is to be democratic rather than Hobbesian, maintenance of social order requires technologies of mutual control."

We can think of citation as a kind of surveillance system constructed by the mutual consent of scholars and researchers. Through citation, scholars pay respect to the intellectual work of others, acknowledging contributions even as they criticize oversights. And, although MLA standards might at times come off as Hobbesian, we should remember that these standards change in response to new technologies through grass-roots practice (right?)

The digital world makes it quite easy to bypass such grassroot intellectual systems. As such, many Universities and academic institutions are turning to more top-down, rigid structures to ensure reputation (such Turnitin.com) or outlawing the use of digital environments altogether (such as the movement away from Wikipedia and digital sources).

I strive for a different solution. Rather than ignoring the pitfalls digital technologies engender, I seek to face them heads-on, discussing the epistemological and ethical challenges digital environments place on our intellectual traditions. Specifically, I believe that citation of web sources encourages students to be responsible, reputable net-i-zens.

End response. That's been sitting in a text-edit file on my desktop for a few days now, I figured rather than saving it to a corner of my hard-drive, I'd just shoot it out on the interweb. I've got to write my letter of application for my job market group this weekend, so perhaps I can revisit some of those ideas...(the current draft I have, which is terrible, discusses my dissertation, approach to new media, and approach to teaching in terms of fostering cohabitation and linking classical and contemporary theory to practice).

ZeFrank interview

Just found a Cecil Vortex interview with ZeFrank shortly before The Show ended February 2007. In addition to gems such as "morphological synthesis" (an inventive approach) and an interesting discussion of how audience provides generative boundaries benefitical to the creative process, he offers this conclusion:

With The Show project, I've also been thinking a lot about this culture of authorship that we're entering into. You've got so many people that are making things now, whether it's emails or instant messages or uploading images to Flickr, making movies, creating audio on cheap prosumer technology. What's really interesting to me is that, as anyone knows who's gone into a creative discipline, the second that you start doing those things, the world around you changes. If you draw, you start seeing the edges of things, and you start seeing the deformities of their shape when you move around them. When you start playing guitar, you start noticing notes in all the music you play, and in fact, the music that you listen to never sounds the same from that point on. I think that a lot of people are focusing on the content that's being produced right now. And I think it's the wrong thing to look at. It's actually the pursuit and the perception change that I think a lot of people are experiencing about the world -- that's the thing to focus on and the thing to celebrate.

Amen.

This dynamic he mentions is to me the McLuhan or the Ong factor: the idea that the communicative media we use influence perception, thought, and expression. Medium is not invisible (though I don't go quite as far as to say that it is the message--its more murky than that. It influences the message. My argument is that when people engage in communicative media that connects them to more people, well, they'll start noticing those people differently. More positively? Perhaps. But I think an appreciation of difference has to be cultivated.

DIS iz crAZ

One technolog that I haven't adopted is text messaging. I must admit, I don't get it. Why not just call someone? O.k., enough grumpy old chat, but I came across an interesting post today by a secondary teacher who instructs students to write their marginalia nots in IM. And that makes sense to me (empowering them to use a "cool" language with which they are comfortable). But I, for one, would certainly need a translator.