Summer Reading

I know it is a bit late to be posting my summer reading list, but here's the things I have or will be reading this summer

• Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost
• How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost
• Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy, Jan Rune Holmevik
• Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal
• Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, Thomas Rickert
• The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Ken Robinson
• Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, Ken Robinson
• Toward a Composition Made Whole, Jody Shipka

I've spent the last few weeks re-reading disciplinary essays on Levinas, particularly the JAC and P&R special issues. That project is (finally) almost over. The Bogost, Robinson, and Holmevik readings are for a piece on sf0, the real world-mmo community gaming site (I'm still working on language to describe exactly what this thing is). I collected research on student participation with the project last semester, and will continue that research with a graduate class in the fall. I came across the McGonigal looking at Alex Reid's syllabus for a summer course on games and the title is enticing for that project.

I've heard a lot of good things about the Shipka; I am interested in the book's emphasis on multimodal education and placing the impetus for rhetorical decisions on students. The Rickert is more for fun- I hope it is out so I can include it in my graduate Contemporary Rhetorics seminar in the fall of 2013.

Among the Republicans

Prepping for my role as a blogger during the upcoming RNC, I read Among the Republicans by V.S. Naipaul, a reflection upon the 1984 Republican National Convention. Interesting is the extent to which Naipaul focuses on the rising New Right religion, in a sense that resonates with Burke's identification:

The invocation was being spoken, by a rabbi; and the piety seemed correct. The occasion, with its magnification of man, had a feel of religion. Not religion as contemplation or a private experience of divinity; but religion as the essence of a culture, the binding, brotherhood transcending material need. That, rather than political debate, was what people had come to Dallas for.

Of course, the "transcending material need" anticipates Thomas Frank and Andrew Gelman by a few decades. And what does this new religion offer? How to explain its success?

The fundamentalism that the Republicans had embraced went beyond religion. It simplified the world in general; it rolled together many different kinds of anxieties—schools, drugs, race, buggery, Russia, to give just a few; and it offered the simplest, the vaguest solution: Americanism, the assertion of the American self.

This echoes what I wrote in my essay on the 2004 election; that Bush's rhetorical success rested on his ability to reframe complex problems in simple terms, and especially on his ability to draw on a powerful notion of a beleaguered but stedfast "us" righteously opposed to a debase, highbrow, and/or polyvocal them (a bunch of sophists, really).

Health Care Passes

I'm sitting in a meeting, prepping to be a live Blogger during the RNC (scheduled to be held in Tampa). And, during the meeting, I've been following the anticipated Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Healthcare Act (its being covered live here). It looks like a win for the poor, tired, and yearning to be healthy.

It is a good day to be an American.

UPDATE: A Plain English Interpretation by Anne Howe:

Amy Howe: In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn't comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.

Twain on Writing Ecologies (err, Plagiarism)

I stumbled upon this today over at Letters of Note, a letter from Mark Twain to Helen Keller after he learned she had been accused of plagiarism.

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men—but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

Leahy and I have been finishing revisions on a piece that focuses on using technology to teach writing as an ecological, community practice. This resonates.

Kevin Smith on Digital Economics

So I just discovered Reddit's series of interviews, IAMA. There's one with Kevin Smith, in which he responds to a question on digital copyright. His response reminds me of the argument forwarded by Lessig years ago in Remix:

Here's my approach...

I try to give away as much as possible. At SModcast.com, we've got thousands of hours of my best work, as well as the funniest shit you'll ever hear: My true life's work. And we give it away free.

Tomorrow, we celebrate the First Birthday of S.I.R. - SModCo Internet Radio. http://smodcast.com To celebrate, we'll be launching S.I.T. on YouTube - SModCo Internet Television. All of it is free.

So when I do present my audience with something that requires payment? I try to make it more special. That's why I toured with Red State, rather than simply stick the movie out there in theaters alone. Anyone can access any movie digitally once it's in theaters; I accept that. But they can't digitally access me unless they're in the room.

Instead of trying to fight change, I like to adapt and figure out how to thrive in an ever-changing global economy. And as much as I like to head where the puck is going, you sometimes have to play the ball where it lays.

Cooper and Edbauer

My undergrad semniar in rhetorical theory is coming to a close--it has been a great semester, even if it involved more lecturing that I would have wanted. My students are currently working on research projects; the following is a quick response to a student question on the relationship between Marilyn Cooper's essay "Being Linked to the Matrix" (an amazing survey of how ecological and network theory is surfacing across disciplines) and Jennifer Edbauer-Rice's essay "Unframing Models of Public Distribution":

Cooper is working against what we call an anthropocentric tradition that tends to conceptualize power purely in human terms. To simplify: do guns kill people or do people kill people? The traditional answer to this question is the latter, that people kill people. Guns are just a convenient tool.

A more ecological, or networked, philosophy would argue otherwise. It would argue that the tool impacts the way the person considers their options. Thus, while the ultimate "decision" to kill might reside in the individual, that decision has been shaped by contextual factors beyond their power/knowledge. Think of the Staples floorplan discussion in Weinberger--the store is organized in such a way as to unconsciously influence a shopper's decision making process (for more of the guns vs people argument, see Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope, 174-215; for more of the Staples argument, see Sunstein and Thaler, Nudge). In academic terms, this is a debate over agency.

Why is Cooper bringing this up in a book on technology? Because historically humanists have been suspicious of technology (see Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology"). Technology often operates as a scapegoat for social problems. Cooper wants us to realize--like Walter Ong--that writing is a technology, one that profoundly enables yet "nudges" our thinking in rational, individualistic, and anthropocentric directions. These directions have been amplified by Platonic/Kantian/Modern philosophy. If we begin to move away from these philosophies, if we being to rethink on individualistic orientation in favor of an ecological one, then we might be able to produce agents more connected and concerned with their surrounding world. Digital communicative technologies afford us a medium to implement and practice these changes.

You've got a handle on the Edbauer essay, she is interested in how publics are constructed through rhetorical activity.Think of splicing Cooper and Edbauer across this passage (from Cooper):

Writers are never separate from the rhetorical situation in which they write. They do not study the situation as something apart from them and then create in a vacuum a text that will change the situation; instead, they fully engage in the situation and respond to it. (27)

This gives us a starting point. Texts are responses to environments, not just isolated problems. Do you begin to see where I am going with this? The problem with Bitzer's model is that it freezes time, and isolates "exigency." Edbauer is interested in how things move, not what things are. Or, to be more exact, she is not exclusively interested in what things are. Rather, see is trying to trace down the complex, networked pathways through which things become--transforming/transformed by the other things they encounter; mutating and attracting, repulsing and inspiring. My best practical example for this is the 99% meme on Facebook. What started as a single photo quickly became a series of photos that, of course, inspired the conservative 52% counter-meme.

To rip Cooper and Edbauer together quickly: Things become by circulating through networks. There is no pre-relational essence that determines what something is.

Sojourner Truth and the War on Women

From "Ain't I a Woman?" December 1951:

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.