CCR 711: Network(ed) Rhetorics

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February 28, 2005

Casting a Wide Net

Although I am still slogging through Watts, Collin's invite prompted me to begin thinking of our discussion on Network lingo last Thursday in light of other conversations. Here are my initial, and very rough, thoughts about common threads (or paths) I see myself following.

First of all, I really like the idea of the network as a sort of heuristic tool. This is not to say that it is not a "thing" as well. But its thingness seems to be systemic, always moving and changing depending on what is coming into it through what we, as part of the network, are putting out. (Minds out of the gutter, please.)

Therefore, I see the works we have read thus far functioning in part to get us to a place where we can begin to re-imagine how language, power, social structures, information, knowledge move systemically, rather than dialectically or linearly. In other words, network theory gives us a new way to think about the relationships between the things we encounter.

So we began with blogging as new means of research, a way to begin to think of how writing and the construction of arguments and researched scholarship can change because of the new technologies of the web. This is a new way to think about knowledge production, and as PhD students, that is kind of our business -- a part of our identity. Then we moved into the pedagogical implications of blogging -- again another part of our identity, but we kept circling back to the previous discussions on scholarship. So these two clusters of texts, or affiliation networks - teaching and scholarship -- begin to weave together, much like Tyra noted (And I can't find it now. It was her entry on fingers weaving together. Quite a nice image for my point here.), creating multiple identities for us that are both individual (as teachers or scholars) and collective (as teachers and scholars) both individually and collectively.

Those identities can be disciplinarily, writing, knowledge, rhetorical theory, teaching, or any number of activities and actions we commit to in our lives. The network becomes the framework through which all of our different identities, time commitments, and knowledges interact. So, when Collin began by talking about how blogging could change the rhythm of of our scholarly pursuits, I think he may have also been hoping that it would change the rhythm of our thinking -- at least where this course is concerned.

Rhythm becomes an essential part of all of this because in the network, traditional rhythms of scholarship and communication seem to become part of the larger rhythms of the network. So we have terms like sync and affiliation that incorporate our traditional ideas of linear time and community. It seems as if these concepts don't go away, but they are mediated through the network, so that they do not become the sole means of understanding our patterns of thought.

So that's my big schtick. I hope that others come in here and challenge and/or extend all of this. Thanks.

Posted by jlwingar at 07:14 PM | Comments (1)

February 27, 2005

Visiting Days

For Marcia's and Krista's benefit: every year, we hold an event in our program where we invite our top several applicants for the grad program to join us for a couple of days. That event is fast approaching, and the students in question (six or seven of them) will be visiting our class on Thursday.

As much trouble as Watts presents to us, imagine how lost those students are going to be. So one of the things that I'd like to ask us to do between now and Thursday is to do a little mid-term review. Think about the ways that these fairly disparate texts might connect and overlap, and exactly what we've accomplished so far. Think about how you'd describe the course to people who are "in the field" but who have likely never seen anything quite like it. We've still got a ways to go, but maybe Thursday will give us a chance to take stock in how far we've come?

I'm going to keep the reading for next week relatively low, so that if we don't cover Watts to our satisfaction in class this week, we can pick it up for part of the class on the 10th.

Posted by cgbrooke at 04:08 PM | Comments (1)

centri-mixing

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the possibility of setting up some pages in the wiki in order to work on the ideas that have been emerging in class over the past few weeks. That page (or set of pages) is now up. Go to the wiki sandbox page, and you'll see a link to a page that I've set up with some initial "inputs." My plan is to work on something that might be submittable to an electronic journal by the end of the semester, centered around the distinction between centrifugal and centripetal, and the implications of that distinction for blogging practice and pedagogy.

That's the plan anyway. Need I say that this would be an acceptable option for fulfilling the course project requirement? Well, I did anyway.

Posted by cgbrooke at 04:04 PM | Comments (1)

Does better late than never count on a blog?

Based solely on a review of our terms, it seems that Watts is coming to the topic from an applied mechanics and mathematical perspective. Without defining “the network” as such, he’s talking about the action of forces on material and non-material bodies.

I think I’m enjoying the read so much because it’s so well grounded in the physical sciences and engineering. (Disclaimer: I’m not an engineer; I just play one on TV). A lot of Watts’ math has me scrambling for the dusty undergrad texts, but there’s more statistics (principles and procedures) to his reasoning than there are applied mathematics, which isn’t to say it’s less impenetrable on some level. It’s just that Watt’s has found a creative way to combine those statistical principles and procedures with a unique treatment of what I see as themes of applied mechanics.

For a few years now, a lot of systems design work has tried to deal with the properties of macroscopic or bulk systems. I’m only accidentally familiar with systems design practice and theory, but I see a lot of it in what Watts is doing. As happens in the early phases of bulk systems design, Watts is considering the average behavior of a large number of nodes and the behavior of individual nodes. And this is where I think he’s moving into a unique space because he’s considering these behaviors by drawing on laws of probability to explain (predict?) the measurable properties of the network – the macroscopic system – on the basis of the properties and behavior of the microscopic constituents (nodes, clusters, etc.).

Again, just a preliminary impression.

Posted by mfrascie at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

Rusesabagina and Network Externality

We walked two blocks over to the Westcott Movie House last evening to catch an 8 p.m. showing of Hotel Rwanda.  The Westcott is a single-show, old-style theater with only mildly graded seating so part of the view includes half-head silhouettes from the people one row up. Westcott picks up a few arts-cinema runs, shows them once each weekday and twice on weekends. 

Hotel Rwanda is full of events and scenarios suited to our developing vocabulary of networkacy, especially related to crisis and adaptation.  I'll keep it brief, considering that some folks probably haven't seen the film.  Because it's based on the Hutu-Tutsi clashes in Rwanda during the early '90s, the tragic premise of mass genocide is, perhaps, familiar enough for these connections to seem plausible.

Very much a connector, Paul Rusesabagina--the lead character played by Don Cheadle--navigates a series of variously constituted networks--from failed communications channels to unconvinced or indifferent international political structures and their agents.  So while I don't want to reduce network theory to a simple device for analysis and critique, I was struck--throughout the film--by the application of many of the notions Watts works through in Six Degrees. In one scene, for example, Rusesabagina urges the refugees to exercise their connections, shame their ties (weak or strong) into action. What of it? Enough visas to help some of the families. I wonder if we could call this some sort of rhetorical externality, a slight variation on information externalities (211).  I guess this could be read as a grand leap, so I only want to suggest one other connection. Watts says, "From a scientific point of view, therefore, if we want to understand what might happen in the future, it is critical to consider not only what happened but also what could have happened" (245, emphasis in original). In terms of Hotel Rwanda and the complexity of networked roles moderated by Rusesabagina, we might agree that just one of the compelling dimensions of network studies involves sorting through the "could have happened" questions.  And it reminds me, too, of Milgram's research on agency in "dispensing brutality" (131), which, through his Obedience to Authority research, sought to come to terms with Adolph Eichmann's part in genocidal crimes.

Posted by dmueller at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)

how i win at kevin bacon

i'm starting to catch up with the class in watts' six degrees, and while i'm not holding on to as much of the math as i'd like to be (i spoke this language once, i swear, but it's been so very long), i'm seeing the impressions emerge, & digging the already-dead metaphors of streams and currents, webs and handshake-associations, even (although i'm glad i'm almost through that chapter) viruses--i knew about melissa, but i didn't know the simpsons had anything to do with it! & i'm finding a lot of kernels like that in watts, more, certainly than i expected: it turns out that all those years i spent as the only humanities major surounded in a social network of CEs & CivEs & double-Es & programming inclined nerds who dropped out but kept geeking anyway have paid off & informed my thinking & ability to grasp things that ought to be outside my realm in really fortuitous ways.

when he says, on pg 156, "just try playing six degrees of kevin bacon without the computer," though, i have to laugh at him.

geeks watch a lot of movies; i don't need a social scientist to tell me that. & while my geeks weren't at uva designing oracles for the purpose ("the university" has actually been the sworn nemesis of every school i've been at until now!) we were certainly familiar with the kevin bacon game. watts' initial treatment of the game as he knew it intrigued me enough that i went to the oracle (which despite my vast experience with the game itself i hadn't heard of until watts explained) & spent an hour-long aim chat with a friend in florida trying to find anyone in the movie database with a kevin bacon number of 4 or higher--we failed, & had to admit defeat & get back to work. part of what frustrated us, though, was the rigidity of the criteria. tv didn't count, bollywood didn't count, stage productions didn't count--and none of the tricks we used were even vaguely admissable. another thing that got old quickly was that the same movies that we'd never heard of kept coming up over & over. the computerized version lacked the resonant associations that mattered to us. it didn't even notice the movies we'd seen & enjoyed remembering, because they weren't significant enough as hubs for the purpose of the game--which wasn't creating interesting chains, at that mathematical level, it was just to minimize the number of steps. kevin bacon has been in a lot of heavy-hitter movies. watching the computer win just for the sake of winning wasn't fun for long.

the latter link above actually describes a much more accurate version of the game we used to play in college--only and always without a computer: whereas the oracle admits only hollywood actors & only collaboration on a film as legitimate associations, we'd take any connection at all, & in so doing, played a game much more like the kinds of multi-group, multi-path-type associative networking watts describes later on. for starters, our connections were relevant to us. if a movie came up in the game at all, it was because one or more of us had seen it (which often led to recommendations and movie-night selections)--it was a conversation, not just a fact. it was a genuine connection, the kind with multiple meanings, not just a binary data-blip flipped to "on" on both sides of the question.

more importantly and far more interestingly, though, we had fewer restrictions on our associations. any connection to kevin bacon was... a connection to kevin bacon. it was that simple. my friend in florida has a kevin bacon number of 3, because he dated a girl who had thanksgiving dinner one year with julia roberts, who was in flatliners with kevin bacon. & me? my kevin bacon number is 1: he & i share a birthday.

(x-posted to c&a)

Posted by ttobryan at 09:08 AM | Comments (1)

February 26, 2005

Desire and Synchrony

In thinking about Six Degrees, I keep coming back to his question, "how people end up creating a network structure out of a social structure (and vice versa), what can they do with it once it's there?" (Watts 129). When I think on this, the words that keep coming back to me are desire and synchrony.

When I write blog posts, I have a desire to makes sense of things, to connect with others, to record things for future use, to figure out how stuff works, to see what connections I can make between ideas, and even to just engage in random word play,

especially in the beginning to see where it gets me. Did anyone else notice the "s" alliteration on the first page of the preface?

In poetics and in lots of other things there is rhythm or synchrony. When we blog, we form connections (or try to)--between ideas or between and among people--that reflect our interests, thinking and/or learning process at a particular moment in time. Other bloggers pick up those thoughts and play with them--turn them over in their minds to see what sense might be made of them. But we need to be talking about these things at relatively the same moment in time. For example, when we do a keyword search and find a blog post on the subject that is several months or years old, how frequently do we comment on that post? We may choose instead to simply link to it. If the other person notices and is interested (desires) in conversing, then a conversation may re-ignite because of a desired synchrony.

I'm trying to circle back to network structure and social structure. We toss ideas out there to join an intellectual community (social structure) -- to see what we and others might make of these random musings. I think this might have something to do with our desire to make connections (construct social identity) -- be it with people or with ideas--and have something to do with synchronicity. Is this then a function of who we are as academics and our quest/thirst for knowledge (context) as a function or exponent of distance? Signed: term-inally-boggled.

Posted by mhansen at 06:28 PM | Comments (4)

February 24, 2005

Disciplinary Networks

I'm going to pick up on a few posts and comments here, by way of offering one possible way of getting into Watts' descriptions of networks and their properties. One of the themes that he regularly returns to is the idea that his models aren't big on details, and yet, when it comes to making sense of them, that's typically where I find myself turning. As Henry notes, what Watts provides is an "asbtract rationale" for things that we may already intuit.

As I work through Watts, then, I start from the idea that our discipline is a small-world network, which is an idea that both Jen and Derek are thinking through in their posts (and the comments). It seems to me, though, that we have to step back for a moment, and ask ourselves what we're talking about when we use the word "discipline." Are we speaking of a body of knowledge (a network of projects, to borrow Dianna's term), of a "community" of practitioners, a curriculum, a particular institution, etc.? For me, this is where the messiness begins. What we call a discipline is actually a pretty complicated set of overlapping and evolving networks, one that raises the issue of first questions.

In other words, where to start?

For the moment, my advice is to isolate pieces, and use them to understand the concepts that Watts is generating. For example, on page 98, Watts explains

Any network can be a small-world network so long as it has some way of embodying order and yet retains some small amount of disorder.

Okay. Fair enough. Order is provided by clustering, and disorder by those rewirings that connect one cluster to another. One really nice example of this is the role that graduate programs play in the field. On the one hand, they provide an intensive clustering experience--many of the people we take courses with will be our colleagues, even at a distance, for much of our careers. And yet, there's an unwritten rule that programs don't hire their own graduates. That means that as we take jobs at other institutions, we form those paths that collapse the "distance" between people in the field, and as our program hires new faculty, it does the same by bringing in people from other programs.

And if you think about it, this makes sense when combined with Watts' discussion in Chapter 5, about small-world networks functioning well when people identify themselves along two dimensions. What are those two dimensions for faculty?

• Where are you now?
• Where'd you get your degree?

If there's a third dimension, it probably has to do with disciplinary specialization, and for senior members of the field, it supplants the question of where your degree is from.

Of course, not everyone (nor even most) is hired by a school with a graduate program, but that doesn't mean that they vanish from the network. One of the ways that those faculty feed back into their program is by passing along students, another way that disorder is introduced into individual programs.

This tells us very little about our discipline specifically, but it does give us a way to think about the sociality of disciplinary networks, and for me, it both helps to clarify Watts' ideas and to start breaking down what it means to speak of the discipline in terms of networks...

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:47 AM | Comments (9)

research/community/network

I can’t help reading Watts in light of work I am doing with my WRT 209 class. In this course, I mix our research work with three other considerations: rhetoric, argument/controversy, and community. All of these combine very powerfully when we look at something like the controversy over sociobiology in the scientific, academic, and other communities. Students often see data as artifacts to be gathered and assembled, but data take on a furious amount of spin when examined within fields of theories and counter-theories, as participants argue for the validity of their descriptions and interpret findings in different ways, something that is true of all research communities as well as the public sphere. I also try to show students how political and ideological motives can be at play both in the gathering and use of data, even in science. So we have been looking at the theoretical and political morass that is the debate over sociobiology, and a

few days ago we watched a video of the work leading up to the Watson and Crick discovery, some of which put the fruit fly in high school bio books and created the collaborative lab team.

Since I was primed in this way, I found myself constantly reading Watts as a third description of how the scientific enterprise works, through observation; analysis; theorizing; and criticizing, reviving and building on others’ work. And, as Derek points out, Watts himself weaves this constantly as a sub-theme into his discussion by pointing out the inter-disciplinarity of the network theorists. In fact, he brings it to a climax at the close of Chapter 5 by claiming the main point is that the small-world problem shows “how the different disciplines can help each other build the new science of networks” (160), naming off Kochen, Pool, Milgram, White, Bernard, etc.

To bring this fully around, I also noted a number of moments when research communities themselves enter the discussion as examples of social networks. Early on, Watts was trying to get hold of the Scientific Citations database (92), and later Mark Newman provided them with the LANL e-print archive, the pre-publication archive of physics papers (123), as well as the MEDLINE database of 2 million biomedical papers (124). The study of the cross-links of citations, to help define network phenomena in what are really textual worlds, brings us very close to our home world of blogs, comments, and trackbacks as examples of social networks. However, in general, the first five chapters of Watts presented themselves to me as a story of theory-building and methodology, an abstract rationale for things I already feel and intuit about the small worlds I inhabit.

Posted by hjjankie at 01:00 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2005

Connections: Inter and Intra

For a while now I've been intrigued by the work of Fritjof Capra, particulatly when his theories on complex systems and networked ecology move towards theories of human cognition and interaction. From my creative sitting "perch" (yes, the sciatica is better, but still annoying me) I've been poking around looking for relevant essays and connections i can make between Fritjof's work and the thinking we're doing in class.

Visiting Capra's homepage, I found a description of one of his books that I didn't know about--The Hidden Connections:

"A Science for Sustainable Living, the author extends the framework of systems and complexity theory to the social domain and uses the extended framework to discuss some of the critical issues of our time -- the management of human organizations, the challenges and dangers of economic globalization, the scientific and ethical problems of biotechnology, and the design of ecologically sustainable communities and technologies."

I'm wondering if any of you would like to read and talk about these ideas? I have Capra's The Tao of Physics as well as The Web of Life, and I'd like to get The Hidden Connections--BTW, I'm NOT suggesting that I'll read all of any of these books, just poke around in them and then read some work that uses them.

I have already found a couple of interesting articles useing Capra's ideas that I think are worth reading. Michael Crozier's essay is a bit dense in the academe-eze department, but I think it's worth looking at. I also found Jeff Bloom's piece, "Patterns that Connect: Rethinking Our Approach to Thinking and Learning." (I haven't included the link here because he has a permissions request on his site...which I am requesting as i write this---interesting extension of our authorship and ownership discussions, eh?)

Posted by dwinslow at 01:07 PM | Comments (3)

Moving About

Well, if I'm not moving about very well with this sciatica, at least I've found a way of sitting with it and moving about on the web. Tripping around and following my interests I came across David Weinberger's earlier (1999) work in a collaboration called Cluetrain (practicing my del.icio.us posting, I've also bookmarked it there )

This site seems like a great site for anyone teaching business majors, whether in writing courses or business courses. I can easily imagine putting it into dialogue with other folks like Adbusters or orgs that traditionally challenge corporations like Consumer Reports Reading some of the letters from Cluetrain readers, I got to wondering what the Bus.Man. folks might say about this. At any rate, check it out!

Posted by dwinslow at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2005

Network insights

Sometimes you get insight in unusual ways, so since Collin suggested that this blog be kept related to the course but not necessarily be limited to the readings, I'm experimenting with a lesson in understanding with this entry about the December 6, 2004 issue of The New Yorker (yes, I'm a little behind in reading that isn't Due This Week). If you'll bear with me on this tour, I promise there is a point that relates to class:

First, there is an article by George Saunders (and yes, that is SU's own creative writing professor George Saunders) called "Flooding the Zone," in which he proposes a wild shift of populations during the creation of Plisraelistine. In this process, all the Americans go to Iraq and adopt Iraqi families. This means about 12 Americans for every one Iraqi, which Saunders suggests would cut way down on insurgents and violence because, hey, it's pretty hard to sneak out for an attack with 12 touristly curious Americans attending your every move. Then the Palestinians move to the Western US and the Israelis go to the Eastern US with the Mississippi River as a DMZ guarded at every crossing by armed UN guards. The folks will be so busy enjoying the joys of space and glitz, goes the thinking, they won't worry about fighting anyway. Then the Canadians move to Palestine and Israel to do the actual construction of the new country, which will have mansions alternating between Jew and Palestinian down every street. Integration if ever there was such. Finally, the folks in Kosovo get Canada for awhile, soaking up the space and the beauty. With construction complete, everyone returns home.

Next article: "God Doesn't Need Ole Anthony". This is the story of a Norwegian man living in Minnesota who served in the Air Force and eventually had a religious experience that sent him to Texas and increasing levels of poverty while taking on the televangelists - the big ones, that take millions of dollars from ordinary people with the lure of prosperity for their faith. Anthony has a network of insiders and infiltrators in the major televangelical organizations, and uses this information, along with material retrieved from garbage, to bring down corrupt ministries.

Finally, an article by Atul Gawande called "The Bell Curve" which discusses the potentials for patients if doctors, clinics and hospitals were really open with their information, including patients in internal quality or assessment committees and so forth. The case study is about clinics that treat Cystic Fibrosis. It's a really interesting article, and what it suggested to me was how much medical advancement might be possible--really possible--if the medical field wasn't invested in ownership of knowledge, if patients weren't numbers (commodities), if insurance companies hadn't forced the issues of networks and those boundaries hadn't been created that gave us "centers of excellence," a term which necessarily requires a proprietary knowledge base.

So what does this all have to do with this course? Well, in the first story, whole ethnic/national communities are separated from their "land" but not from each other. In the Iraqi example, real US people encounter real Iraqi people in their own homes and lifestyles, an idea that could build worlds of understanding and friendship - or at least pure relief when the Americans left. But it would greatly improve the situation over the present violence just by the getting-to-know-you method of networking.

In example two, Anthony uses a network inside of the structure he fights in order to bring them down. He is not doing it for personal financial gain, although he does admit to a certain amount of ego and scheming in his makeup. He's acting on what he believes to be a true spirit of Christianity, and he's doing it through a network that is not a mainstream communication channel.

And finally, the medical example really connected with me, with my extended background in health insurance/benefits and the changes I've seen in the delivery of health care because of HMOs and other third party payer systems. I wonder what it would take to transcend the idea of ownership, knowledge as property and patient count as a measure of success and really pool the wisdom and knowledge within the medical community toward a real solution for real patients, like children with CF.

A network of doctors in the story were able, finally, to determine where the best treatment for CF, based on patient life expectancies, was to be had. The effort it took to find that out was a bit unnerving. The degree to while the medical field has a "bell curve," that it is "graded" prevents real breakthroughs that networks of shared information could change.

In class we talked a little about the breast cancer site that stopped taking comments because of the false information that ended up there. But at some level, that sharing has to happen. and it has to be an informal network that is willing to transcend the exclusionary notions of property and ownership.

Seeing network in this way, understanding blogging as a way for this communication to take place, registered for me in a way some other examples haven't, so although this is quite long, thanks for letting me have my say in public. :)

Posted by cageyer at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)

Derailed Moment

I've been trying to work up a response to Watts and Six Degrees for two days, and it's not really happening for me. I'm finding the anecdotal quality of his writing fascinating as he patches together a field of inquiry that just sort of popped up. I'm intrigued by Derek's comments on interdisciplinarity, but also by something Chris often says as we read other histories/accounts of modes and methods of thinking. Specifically, Chris often productively reminds us how much of the history of rhetoric and composition (together and separate) resonate in these texts.

When I started reading Derek's post, I thought he was headed off on something about the network of the writing classroom, so maybe that's a tangent that I'm off on. Particularly and it's intersections with technology as I extend the web of my classroom out to news stories, Web sites, e-mails, and other ways of connecting outside of the space of the classroom.

(my train of thought has just been derailed by Maggie Estep)

So, as I'm reading Watts and having difficulties synthesizing ideas, I'm struck by how difficult the task of writing about something as amorphous as networks is. What I'm left with is a general notion (my early inclination is to respond in the language of Foucault's discourse, but I'm not sure that would clear much up) of the myriad of ways we are influenced. Network theory isn't exactly a mathematical problem, though it can be effectively described in mathematical terms. It seems to hover in that vortex between science and humanities, and this is likely why it is so attractive to so many disciplines.

I am intrigued, I suppose, by Watts' descriptions of graph theory and how they can describe for us how networks get formed. There certainly is a center/periphery model that we can use to explain some networks. Certain spheres of influence grow from a dominant (or louder) voice. On some level, our perceptions of a concert are shaped more by the band on stage than by the crowd around us. After all we gathered to see that group and they are, after all, exerting influence over the audience. When the lights go down, the crowd, hushes. So the stage director also has some influence, and when that first chord is struck, and the crowd recognizes the song, we all go nuts. However, while the band is the focus, this model doesn't always do a good job of explaining the exchange (for example the calls for encores), and it certainly doesn't do anything to explain the networks that form outward from the event.

I feel like I never found the tracks again.

Posted by trobryan at 12:19 PM | Comments (1)

Is Academe really such a Small World After All?

I have been following the Ward Churchill controversy, not as closely as I should, but fairly closely nonetheless. Today I finally got around to reading the cover article, "A Free Speech Firestorm" by Scott Smallwood in last week's Chronicle of Higher Education. It laid out the story fairly succinctly, but the warning bubbling underneath the surface of the article was watch out for weblogs because they are gonna get you. In fact, Smallwood states quite clearly in his introduction in answer to why this controversy happened now over an article written almost 4 years ago:

The answer lies in the power of Bill O'Reilly, Weblogs, and the families of September 11 victims.

But as the article continues, it becomes apparent that for Smallwood, it was the Weblog that really got the ball rolling.

The following are his topic sentences in a section titled Faster Than A Speeding Blog, and I include only those because I think they set the tone for the underlying message of this article.

In the Internet age, that report in the Syracuse newspaper quickly reached far beyond upstate New York. Eleven minutes later a reader posted a comment, saying Mr. Churchill deserved to be shot in the face. Linking to a simple article from Syracuse had unleashed the power of hundreds of individuals, all using Google to add little bits of information. The blogs reached beyond the water cooler. Two days later, on January 28, as the story continued to gain momentum, readers of Freerepublic.com, another conservative Weblog, continued to talk about Mr. Churchill. That night the Churchill saga became a prime-time event when Bill O'Reilly led his talk show on the Fox News Channel by calling Mr Churchill "insane" and saying that Hamilton had no justification for giving him a public forum.

So bloggers, according to this reporter, were the catalyst that brought these "chickens home to roost." It was the rapid speed at which information could travel that brought so much backlash against Hamilton. And without the weblog traffic, this story may have never caught the attention of Bill O'Reilly, and therefore, it may have never received the public attention that it has. It seems as if Smallwood believes that the mass distribution of information, within this particular context, is the sole reason for Churchill's vilification. And the article ends with Mr. Klinkner, a professor of Political Science at Hamilton, stating:

You can forget about the notion of the ivory tower and that we can keep all these things in-house. Any piece of information that exists will get out. I don't think that's a bad thing. This was not good for Hamilton, but we need to acknowledge that we can no longer say, "No, we are going to play by our rules."

This brings me to Watts. The description of the dissemination of information here seems to be an example of a "group interlock network." The one article from The Post-Standard was taken to the web where it was broadcast for a specific readership to see. Yes, there is the possibility that others can read and comment on the information, but the information moves from one site to another through other bloggers (or nodes) that have to come in contact with the information at a particular place on the web. It may seem as if the presence of O'Reilly in this disrupts this reading, making this an example of a broadcast, where information is circulated to all at once. But I think there is something in this idea of context -- who will watch O'Reilly, who will be spurred to action by him -- that is important to note.

The use of the word "conservative" to distinguish the types of blogs where these transmissions were located, makes this system of an "affiliation network" because the readers of these blogs choose to participate because they share the context of being conservative with the author of the blog. (And yes, I know this is a bit reductive and others may go there too, so I am making this more cut-and-dry than it really is.) Therefore, it seems as if this presentation of the power of the web supports Watts' description of "bipartite networks" because their are actors and groups at work here. Bill O'Reilly is an actor who called Churchill "insane" but he belongs to a group of people (called conservatives in this article) who listen to him and spread similar sentiments.

So when Klinkner comments that the ivory tower is not an isolated space, he is correct, but his indecision about the good versus bad nature of information transmission is an interesting one. Yes, the transmission of information is a good thing -- in general, AND no, it was a bad thing for the specific group known as Hamilton College. Because of the differing levels of network affiliation, he can personally believe in the freedom of information transmission, but he recognizes as a member of the group that this particular instance was harmful.

Additionally, his claim that any information can be found at any time is true, but in the same sense, who is finding it and where it is being disseminated seems to be essential in deciding if the outcome is good or bad for anyone group. Therefore it is not just the "mass distribution of information" via weblogs that got Churchill into trouble, it was where that information was dispersed and how it was mediated that really matters.

I suppose this is not really a big TA-DA kind of post because I am still grappling with Watts' definitions. But I think that this article shows the complicated way in which information, context, and group affiliation weave together making it difficult to fully articulate how specific networks move. I also think it shows how technology is often seen as the harbinger of change without recognizing just how complex it is. It is not just the mass distribution of information that created this controversy. It was only when specific groups got hold of specific information that a conservative versus liberal drama ensued. But to look at this in terms of networks, instead of the power of the internet as a uniform thing, could possibly allow us to see just how integrated (or not) the academy really is.

Posted by jlwingar at 11:13 AM | Comments (2)

February 20, 2005

Randomness in Universality Classes

They're sprinkled throughout the first half of Six Degrees, but the references to classes and interconnectedness reminded me that network theory gives us useful premises for rethinking disciplinarity.  On second thought, these terms might simply give us a richer vocabulary for making sense of disciplinary formations, if, that is, we can accept that disciplines behave like the small-world networks.  I'm pitching this tentatively more than forwarding it as a decided position, but I'd really like to know what others think about the overlap(s).

First, the idea of universality classes (65) reminds me of Emig's epistemic court--the sense of disciplinary inner-circle (sphere?) or the stances we entertain when attempting disciplinary gestures (to behave as if one is a compositionist or rhetorician).  Watts writes, "By knowing all the universality classes for a particular kind of model, physicists can make some very powerful statements about what can and cannot happen in different kinds of physical systems, again by knowing only the most basic facts about them" (65).  I know Watts is referring to something slightly different, and as I write this, I feel that tug of reluctance to post such sprawling, provisional stuff.  But I like what happens when we swap "physical systems" with "ideational systems."  What then? 

Let me try another:

Academics are a fractious bunch, rarely inclined to step across the boundaries of their disciplines for more than a polite hello. But in the world of networks, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, computer scientists, biologists, engineers, and physicists all have something to offer each other and much to learn.  No one discipline, no single approach, has a stranglehold on a comprehensive science of networks, nor is that likely to happen. (67)

Granted, Watts doesn't note the specific bearing of network science on the fields many of us in this class identify with, but he does point out the intriguing disciplinary mixes brought about because of emergent thinking about networks.  

Also, with the example of Harrison White (114), theoretical physicist turned sociologist, Watts mentions the interesting tensions and convergences between fields long-considered polar opposites.  And there's more when he works through the idea of segregated disciplinary communities and any degree of randomness (125).  So all of this is less to share a eureka! than it is to say I was prompted over and over to think about interdisciplinarity in relation to network theory.

Posted by dmueller at 10:45 PM | Comments (7)

February 19, 2005

the quiltmakers

i'm making sense of weinberger thru the quiltmakers of gee's bend, alabama. this band of women have been sewing quilts with small, disjointed pieces of fabric and cloth. in one quilt, it is not uncommon to find the lining from an old winter coat, the sleeve of a sunday dress, and a baby's blanket. i learned about these quiltmakers after stumbling upon a documentary on the local pbs station.

it's easy to see the symbolism. i mean the quiltmakers use small pieces, although they were joined more tightly: the web is small pieces, loosely joined. but the quiltmakers, and weinberger's look at the web, represent something more significant, more hopeful..."like a world, it is an abiding place where we can accomplish together whatever it is that our caring natures put us up to" (193).

in the same way that the web is beyond time and space, the quilts are equally free from such constraints. for generations, quilt-making traditions have been passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter; many of the depression-era quilts are still around. the threading of time and space, much like the process that connects patchwork pieces of cloth and fabric, allows individual readers to making their own meaning. so, when i look at those quilts from my 2005 perspective, they will have a different meaning than that of my 1997, pre-graduate work self. in my mind, i'll arrange the shapes and patterns according the whatever cognitive frameworks exist. i "order" the quilt in the same way that i "order" my web experience.

in his preface, weinberger asks: "what is true to our nature and what only looked that way because it was a response to a world that was, until now, the only one we had?" (xii). i think about that quote as i make my way thru this blog-mediated environment and continue to look at quilts from gee's bend, alabama. it is reductive to say that the quiltmakers were simply making the best of the merger resources they had. instead, i situate them alongside the web makers, web thinkers, and web users. i'm not concerned about whether or not a community of poor, uneducated african-american women have read saussure, foucalt, bourdieu, or burke. instead, and what is most productive for my reading and understanding of network theory, i choose to focus on how this discourse community was "true" to its nature. if you look ath the quilts hard enough, you will see reflections of racism, oppression, domestic abuse, economic and political powerlessness, and triumph, love, hope, laughter, and strength.

"most of all," reminds weinberger, "the web is a more honest--because unguarded--reflection of what we are like when we seek one another without the limitations the real world imposes on us. it's not always a pretty picture, but it's a hell of a lot more fun than posing in your prom outfit all your life" (194).

Posted by emnorris at 11:49 AM | Comments (6)

February 18, 2005

do I blog? or delicious?

Ok, maybe a dumb question, but one I think I have an answer to (for me):

When I come across something I think fun, relevant or important to our discussion, I have to decide: will this be a post to delicious? Will this be an entry on the course blog?

Two things I consider: how much time do I have? If I only have only a small moment, I'll throw it over on delicious, because there I can easily fill the one-line-field for "extended" in a small moment.

If I have more time, I may consider blogging it. Or I would have considered blogging it at the beginning of the semester. But I'm noticing that the course blog has evolved into a discussion for the readings (inward?) toward our readings.

Were we asked to make this blog into an extension of the readings discussion? I can't remember, but if I had to guess, I'm thinking we weren't. There has been a kind of unstructured but systematic segregation of voice, of information/idea, of topics: if it's not "official" course business, it doesn't make it onto this blog. Stuff that is marginally-related gets blogged in our individual blogs or gets posted to delicious (or will get taken up in the wiki, maybe).

Is this a function of our studentness? As rhetoric peops, we are hyperaware, kairotically obsessed, with making sure our statements are apropos.

Our network is so homogenized that the product of our interaction is similarly homogenized. I don't mean this as a criticism. I mean it as an observation. And I mean it to show myself that *I* still, even if I joke about it in class (about wanting to change things), I still am not cursing on this blog. Dang.

Posted by mryonker at 08:37 AM | Comments (7)

February 17, 2005

The short version of Small Pieces disjointed

Am I the only one who noticed (or found notable) the many references in Weinberger to Heidegger? Am I the only one who noticed that really cool Star Trek moment of talking-to-the-energy-being-at-the-edge-of-the-galaxy-about-the meaning-of-being-embodied? Maybe because I'm more of a Trekkie than a techie I glommed on to this aspect of the work, one that I can more easily relate to.

Weinberger sees the Web as a body-less space, a space where identity can be constructed and connections made that are freed from the physical limits of embodiment. But as Tyra so eloquently observed, blogging is writing.

There is a physical materiality to the act of producing the components that make up the web - words, the machinery and software and communication devices than enable the transmission of words, or the placement of words, into the web space. Some physical limits, like two objects occupying the same space at the same time, are transcended, but others aren't. Bodies are still required, bodies that carry identities and values shaped by relationships.

The energy being at the edge of the galaxy may be body-less, but that is not the same as omnicient. The fact that I have access to the web and a certain understanding of how to navigate it and add my words to its content does not mean that I know it or all that is within in it. Sometimes I go point by point, systematically through the many ends that touch one another until I am somewhere completely on the far side of the sphere. Other times, because I know a shortcut or two, I cut through the hollow core directly to that far place. I tend to jump to places with content that matters to me, but in that direct leap I may miss information that matters to others, that could matter to me, if I knew it was there, which I don't unless I invest the time to link my way step by step through the possibilities.

Time boundaries restrict the number of things the embodied I can care about, that matter to the mind in this body in this limited temporal space.

(the longer version of this post can be found here.)

Posted by cageyer at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2005

Adding up

I'm having a bit of a problem adding some things up while I'm reading Weinberger. I posted a rather scathing critique (Mike I think called it, appropriately, a rant) about some of the issues I take with "World of Ends" over at kubernetes. Tyratae has been coaching me into more producting styles of reading what Searls and Weinberger's collective stance is, but I perceive ("problematize" is the current lingo I guess) many differences from their brief account of the Internet/WWW.

To move along to the actual point, I'm having a problem seeing connections between two very specific streams of thought. On the one hand, the Web is being described as a "world of ends." On the other, Weinberger states that the Web "can be understood only within a web of ideas that includes our culture's foundational thoughts, with human spirit lingering at every joining point" (25). A "joining point" is a very different metaphor than an "end," at least for me.

As such, I'm having some trouble reconciling these two views from the same writer. I am much more inclined, based upon how I interpret and perceive people interacting with the various pieces of the Internet, to support the description of a series of joining points and all that this implies. As I sit here, I am joining into a conversation. At the same time, I am connecting, or joining, two or more distinct circles of friends. And the webs of joining continue on from there as I bring to bear whatever experiences happen to resonate for me and as you read and respond (or don't).

Posted by trobryan at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

What's the Real Deal?

I'm going to riff a little on what Madeline already wrote about Weinberger's distinctions of "real and more-real" in connetion with the web. I guess I want to trouble what Weinberg is saying a bit, too. His distinctinos seem a bit too neat, too clean , but as I write this I don't really want to disagree with Weinberg or take him to task, but rather, I want to illustrate what his work is reavealing to me about the nature of the real and can/should we ever get out of it.

I have been thinking specifically about The Gates while reading Wineberger. At first, they seemed the perfect example of the redefining of space and the movement between the part and the whole that Wineberger was discussing. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in fact, have a very specific statement about how each part individually would only be a relic, and the whole of the project, where and when it is placed, each individual gate, their placement in relationship to the park and eachother, and the weather is the work of art. The exhibit is time and space bound, but that is in order to free it from the bounds of time and space, history and representation.

This reminded me of Weinberger's statement:

Because the linked pages come from many people, the Web turns into a place larger than we are. It is a public place, a place we can enter, wander, and get lost in, but cannot own (56).

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work is the attempt to physically enact the ephemeral quality of linking on the web. The art was not merely about the arches and the curtains, but about how they all moved together in the weather. The specific part to whole relationship. But soon I found myself watching people across the park, or the very large dog who sat calmly while four small children circled and pet it for several minutes. I was quick to note people on cell phones, the castle in the center of the park where people stood looking over the park. I wanted an arial view, but I also wanted to just be in this moment -- the one that was a whirlwind of input and stimuli.

I took no pictures while I was wandering through the park, but here are many places you can see them . These pictures to me are quite telling of the whole experience. They show not only the gates as a whole, but single gates, and people (and dogs) moving through them. So like Christo and Jeanne-Claude say:

The work of art in The Gates is the entire environment, in this case Central Park and its surrounding environs. To experience the artwork, one immerses oneself into that environment. Each separate "gate" would be merely a relic of the artwork and not a work of art. Seven thousand, five hundred structures together in Central Park IS a work of art.

But all of this discussion leaves out the people because they become merely a part of the environment. A part of the structure, but not significant enough to place as a defining part of the art itself. What if no one came? Would The Gates have still been a work of art? Presumably for Jeanne-Claude, the answer would be yes because as she said to an NBC reporter the day before the gates were unfurled: "I don't care if you like it. Like it or don't. We do this because we like it, and that's enough for me." So The Gates then becomes part of a story of the artist whose primacy of vision is what matters. No matter how much the piece may disrupt time and space, it is the solitary vision that we seem to come back to -- the individual, the person.

According to Weinberger, however, this is not so much the case with the web. If we follow his argument, the web is driven by interest, but interests vary so you may not have the interest of many but you should always have the interest of a few. And it is this idea of smaller, more focused, and ever changing social groupings that makes the web seem more-real (or at least more human) to Weinberger. And if we leave it at that, it does sound like a pretty utopic and revolutionary space. BUT the people who participate, navigate, populate, and show their interest across the web have not changed.

So when Weinberger writes about Mahir, and how everyone loved his website because it was an example of human imperfection, he misses something crucial in this telling. The reason that this website was imperfect was its imperfect use of English. Thus we are confronted with our biases (be they racist or not) for standard English, or at least we notice something when it is not that way. This example, at least for me, shows how people bring their already preconceived biases to their interests, and therefore, we need to take care when we begin to sing the praises of how the web restructures human relationships. Just like my initial reaction to The Gates where I believed that this art was a new way of encompassing space and time all the while forgetting that it is still in contained space -- Central Park. So it is more useful for me to begin to see it as an illustration of the relationships that are often mystified by our concepts of time and space, instead of a replacement or remediation of them.

The more I read Weinberger, the more I see his text as doing just that. There are moments where he seems to be producing a utopian vision of the possibilities of the web, but then his choice of examples and the stories he tells disrupt that vision. It is the interplay between the real and more real nature of the web that interests me, and I believe that it interests Weinberger, too. It's not that the web will restructure human relations in totality, but it is that the web will help us understand our own humanity and systems which contain it more readily. And for me, that's plenty.

Posted by jlwingar at 12:29 PM | Comments (7)

a failed attempt

andrew cline at rhetorica.net carries out this echo-driven act of potential piracy: the newspaper complained that the blogger was quoting from/linking to them without their permission; cline picked it up & quoted the complaint (& linked to the paper, also without permission); do i get an eyepatch for inserting the link here (without permission), for mentioning the story, only for quoting the story (also without permission), the paper (with even less permission, since i didn't even read it), the...(list goes on & on & on)?

i believe (the book's at home & not in front of me) it was ticketmaster david weinberger laughed at regarding a clearly (at least retrospectively) misguided lawsuit wherein the recipient of free advertising & customer traffic complained & insisted the helpful navigation-links stop at once, & when i first read cline's post, i thought "oh, isn't that quaint, the little paper makes the same big-corporation mistake." then i read dianna's post about outward gestures, & collin's encouragement that we dig a little deeper into that, & realized that somewhere in here is what i hadn't yet articulated that i was getting at with all this talk about piracy:

(this is an unordered list on purpose. i can't pull it together. but with this handful of cards, can anybody else?)

♥ there's a total confusion here about who's stealing what from whom. the complainers are upset because they're being given-to--customers, advertising, attention--not taken-from. the complainees aren't so much pirates in this picture as robin-hoods--& robin-hoods robbin' nobody & giving to the rich as well as the poor. but because what they're doing wasn't anticipated, authorized, run through the proper collection of committee-channels, it looks... roguish. dangerous. unruly.

♣ i started this intending to point out that perhaps we're just confused because of telephones: we don't give out our phone numbers, so we think at first perhaps we should guard our urls as well. but the reason we don't give out phone numbers is because we don't want to be intruded-upon by telemarketers--we don't want anything--in this example our time--taken from us. if all the telemarketers in the world stop by our websites, or visit the nervous newspaper above, or consider buying tickets from ticketmaster, not a single dinner will have to be interrupted. nothing's being taken.

♦ we don't know how to punish unruliness when nothing's actually going wrong. our default is to complain categorically, and i think maybe our categories have gotten away from us. while skateboarders crashing into little old ladies is certainly something we want to avoid, persecuting skateboarders for skating at the mall after all the little old ladies have gone home seems just... silly. but they're unruly. rogueish. they're not doing anything wrong, but they're doing something that could be wrong, & maybe that's bad enough?

♠ we're used to being gatherers, & to being very protective of who gathers near us, because we're used to countable objects. if i have three apples, & you take my three apples, i'm hungry, dammit. but if i have a pretty picture of three apples on my website, and you take it, and you share it with six thousand people, there are six thousand people with three apples on their websites & i still have my three apples. we're used to scholarship & learning & self-enrichment/enlightenment being about gathering. read this, keep these notes, make a folder for that, make sure that book is in yourcarrel & not someone else's. no one's ever asked me before--as a student, that is--it's most of what i do as a teacher--to contribute to the class by putting things out--by commenting on others' ideas, by leaving half-formed thoughts lying around to be commented on rather than hoarding them until the end of the term.

it isn't working. i'm out of cards. i mean something here, but i'll be damned if i can figure out what, at the moment.

Posted by ttobryan at 11:29 AM | Comments (2)

Weinbergian thinking

A few years ago I read Michael E. Gerber’s The E-Myth. Gerber deflates a lot of thinking about entrepreneurism and what it takes to create and run one’s own company. He does this by profiling three types of people all organizations need: 1) The Visionary/Leader, 2) The Manager, and 3) The Technician. Gerber then asks the reader to locate themselves within these three profiles. Who are you?

I was stuck with this sense of profiling as I worked through Weinberger. His description of the physical topography of the web (more precisely, the Internet [is that a capital “I”?]) as a false representation of the web’s space had me thinking like a technician – and reacting to his more “visionary” proposal that web space is boundless. The technician views the web through the infrastructure, understands the document-based network from a file-management perspective – from a very physical, real, and “fixed” space.

Through The Manager’s lens I was struck (but not surprised) by Weinberger’s notion of what the web is teaching us (I wondered a lot about who his “us” was) about management.

”[The web] is the most complex network ever created … It is far more robust than networks far a smaller, yet it was created without managers.” p. 23

Now while I understand Weinberger’s purpose for this statement, again my Manager persona wants to argue this point vehemently. Yes, the web is about egalitarianism and freedom (as well as inequality, suppression, and exploitation) precisely because it is not “managed” in a traditional sense. But there is a level of management that makes Weinberger’s limitless playground of expression possible.

Specifications like SGML, HTML, XML, ODBC, CORBA, etc. are about a specific type of “management” in the same way that teachers “manage” their classes. You want students to play in your wide open playground? Who(some individual, group, or GASP! Company) will establish the standards for playing. As a consultant, Weinberger’s position will cause a lot of heads to nod around a board of directors table. But I don’t think he’s being overly genuine or original in continuing to forward the notion that the web is about individuals doing things their own way without any sense of oversight or, well… management.

I really think Weinberger’s most important comments come when he moves out of trying to define the web as something and into describing what the web creates. His term “social clearing” is truly in the spirit of the web, a place where

”… associations are being created with a rapidity unequalled in our history … The Web is a hotbed of experimental couplings. In fact, the Web sometimes seems to consist of 300 million monkeys chained to Web software development tools and randomly creating new ways for us to be together” p. 113

I’ve worked with some of the same monkeys who produce those software development tools and found them to as creative and expressive as the monkeys expressing, communicating, and discovering on the other side of the glass. And maybe that’s what underlies Weinberger’s narrative. He comes to the web with a business background and a hippie groove, which is both refreshing and a little forced.

More later over at my house.

Posted by mfrascie at 11:18 AM | Comments (3)

Wiki Entry Nomination

Working off the idea I started in my recent entry , I want to add the term "centri-mix" to the wiki. I realize that I can just go on and put it there, but I have to work up to these things :)

The term comes from an entry of Collin's that Madeline suggested, and I really like the images it brings to mind--not just for thinking about blogging, but also for comp/rhet as a discipline that regularly has conversations about our appropriation of interdisciplinary theories, methodologies, and methods. Looking out? Looking in? And in what mix? And with what kind of awareness? BTW, is it too obvious that I'm learning how to/practicing linking codes?

Posted by dwinslow at 10:22 AM | Comments (1)

The Web is words

Weinberger’s project to contrast the Web to what he calls our “default philosophy” of realism and modernism (154, 181) reminds me of similar projects within the realm of rhetorical theory. I’m thinking of Burke’s assertion that rhetoric’s concern is with “the state of Babel after the fall” (think the voices and languages of the Web); of Toulmin’s reaction against analytic logic by developing a theoretical framework for understanding practical reasoning, along with Rorty’s emphasis on the social justification of belief over the accuracy of representation (think the cases for knowledge made by Web users); of Kuhnians and sociologists examining science as a collective human enterprise; and of rhetoricians’ interest in the social construction of knowledge and community-based proof over absolute truth. In another sphere, I’ve just been reading articles in which tech comm scholars argue for social praxis (centered in shared human values) over the pure, objectivized techne of technical writing.

In short, Weinberger is using the Web as an argument for “richer and better human activity” (Rorty, “Science as Solidarity”) in exactly the same way that scholars have appealed to rhetoric to argue against modernist values in favor of a richer, more situated human enterprise. And much of the

vocabulary is the same. For instance, here is Michael C. Leff in 1987 describing the new strain of “neosophistic” rhetoric:

Sophistic gives priority to the unity of concrete experience as it is filtered through our interests rather than to the theoretical coherence of the varieties of experience as they are ordered according to an abstract, rational calculus

This is almost an exact counterpart of W’s claim that the “bodiless Web reminds us of the bodily truths [concrete experience] we have always lived” (142) combined with his idea that the space of the Web is defined by interests (55). Similarly, without saying as much, W speaks in many places of the Web as a locus of rhetorical activity. He alludes to its fundamentally textual character (163), to its purposiveness (52), to problems of ethos and credibility (121-124) and probabilistic argument (140), and to the shared construction of moral values (190).

So I think we can add to his conclusions that the character of the Web is rhetorical. And perhaps one of the reasons it seems so familiar to us, and feels like a return, as W . claims (180), is that it returns us to our rhetorical sensibilities as symbolic animals, and in that way, too, makes us feel more authentically human.

Posted by hjjankie at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)

network as unnatural? public ownership, then, unnatural?

Two passages I'd like to highlight from _Small Pieces_:

The first:

Our every social act implicitly conforms itself to the geographic and material facts of the real world. But the Web is an unnatural world, one we have built for ourselves. The facts of nature drop out of the Web. And so we can see reflected in the Web just how much of our sociality is due not to the nature of the real world but to the nature of ourselves. The Web confronts us with a different sort of brute fact: we are creatures who care about ourselves and the world we share with others; we live within a context of meaning; the world is richer with meaning than we can imagine.

Sorry that this is long, but the whole thing is necessary. I'm squirming because his first sentence allows the web to be a constructed place/space (unnatural), and the "real world" to be, well, "real." And while I'll grant that the web is "artificial" in that it is an artifact created by humans, I'm also clinging to a (possibly out-of-style) epistemology that says that *everything* we experience (geographic, material, whatever) is a construct.

And while I agree that the existence of the web is a direct reflection of humans-connecting-to-humans, I'm not sure that Weinberger needs to butt this up against (I mean juxtapose, or contrast) the notion that the web is NOT a reflection of the way the real world behaves. I guess I just don't want the web to be "unreal."

What he means, I think, is that the web actually allows us to exist and interact as humans *should*: with an implicit reverence for one another and to operate on a model of OPEN-NESS that the "real world" (capitalism? survival of the fittest?) rejects. OK, so maybe he does need the comparison. But I would then posit that the web is more "real" than the "real" real (real "real")--that the web is actually MORE natural an existence, closer to what humanity would look like if we could shed the trappings of physicality, geography, materiality--all things we claim to be superficial at best.

And the second snip:

The Web couldn’t have been built if everyone had to ask permission first. In the real world, we assume privacy and need permission to enter. On the Web, that flips. The politics of the Web, by its very nature, is that of public rights and public ownership.

Again, the distinction between the webworld and the realworld. And the notion that the web offers an open model where rights and ownership (which are both tied to corporeality/materiality) don't exist. Yes, I said *don't exist.* He says they're public, but if the model is free exchange, and equal rights and true communal ownership thrive, there isn't any purpose or point in distinguishing things like rights and ownership. If everyone is the owner, there is no owner. If everyone shares the same rights, there is no need to determine rights. The concepts of rights and ownership are results of exclusionary systems. The web doesn't exclude. At least, I want to believe it doesn't.

Posted by mryonker at 12:01 AM | Comments (1)

February 15, 2005

Ends and Means

Tyra raises a nice issue in her post when she notes that Weinberger is very careful and conscious about the language he's using to describe his vision of the web, and I want to encourage us to push at it further. Small Pieces provides many explicit answers to the questions of network literacy that we raised last week. As you're making note of these, give some thought as to the intensities in his terminology.

Are there places where his themes are more elaborate than others? Places where his descriptions resonate with your own experience? For my part, I'm a big fan of the idea that the web enables (or affords) places without space, but this taps into my abiding interest in spatial theory and particularly in the way we generate space socially. I suspect that this connects, too, to Dianna's thoughts about outward gestures. If the web is made up of places with no space to contain it, then the only way we move from place to place is through that outward gesture, yes?

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)

The Direction of the Gesture

[Talking with Derek this morning, he dropped a pearl before me, and I assure you it wasn't wasted. Thought I'd share my take on it...]

The blogging Gesture is not one I intuitively execute. I am much more familiar with the reflective turn, the naval gaze, the reflexive move towards self-evolution. I keep looking through my blog, the class blog, and my other classmates' blogs for inspiration, for fresh ideas, for insight. Now, I realize that what I have just said sounds like these sites lack those things I mentioned, and that this could seem insulting. Not so. They do not; they certainly have ideas, information, and insight for me, but they are the sites of what I would call my inward-looking circle of influences--and moving centripetally denies the the Direction of the Gesture.....

Derek's description of the blogging gesture this morning woke something up in my brain and made a connection I had either not made, or had not articulated: the blogging gesture is an outward gesture, a look around, beyond the inner circle of our everyday material lives. The ideas of those of us sharing the same coursework in the same PhD program are already heavily imbricated because of our shared foci. So for us, it seems to me, blogging provides an outward look at what isn't located in our daily culture. Not only will this bring a wealth of perspectives into our inner circles, it will also help to keep our gaze light, moving, and curious, rather than fixated where we're sitting with each other.

I have not yet begun (in earnest, anyway) to source out and link to ideas in other blogs. Hell! Embarassingly, I've barely begun to read other blogs. My goal this weekend: find at least three new blog sites that fascinate me, and link to them. Pretty humble, but it's a start.

Posted by dwinslow at 10:40 PM | Comments (2)

Affordance and Manipulanda

What does a network afford?

I'm setting out with hopes that I can wrap together a few thought-strands running through other coursework this week. It tracks through Weinberger, as well, so the application here isn't out of the blue.  In his chapter on Space in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Weinberger says, "Our space is full of opportunities, obstacles and dangers, or what the psychologist James Gibson called affordances (e.g., the chair affords us the possibility of sitting) and the philosopher Martin Heidegger called the ready-to-hand" (32).  I can't remember if I'd learned about affordances before this semester; seems like a basketball coach once hollered something about the affordances of the game:  playing through potentials and opportunism constantly responsive to in-game context, or something.  But maybe not.

Whatever the case, affordances came up in other reading this week. This succinct bit comes from a 1974 essay from Bransford and McCarrell, called "A Sketch of a Cognitive Approach to Comprehension," and it matched up nicely, I think, with another term--manipulanda--and, as well, some of our conversation last week about characterizing network literacy (whatever you call it):

The notion of a nonarbitrary relation between what something looks like and what it means is related to J.J. Gibson's (1966) notion of affordances.  Certain objects and their properties provide visual information for the activities and interactions they afford.  So, for example, sharp objects afford piercing, certain extensions (e.g., handles) afford grasping, hardness affords pounding, and roundness affords rolling.  Even surfaces afford activities since they are 'walk-onable,' 'climbable,' and the like.  Tolman (1958) presented similar notions in his essay on 'sign-gestalts.' These are not simply information about 'the larger wholes in which the perceived configuration will itself be embedded as one term in a larger means-end proposition [p. 79]." Tolman further introduced the term "manipulanda" which he defines as:

properties of objects which support (or make possible) motor manipulations of the species...One and the same environmental object will afford quite different manipulanda to an animal which possesses hands from what it can and will to an animal which possesses only a mouth, or only a bill, on only claws...grasp-ableness, pick-up-ableness, throw-ableness, heaviness (heave-ableness) and the like--these are manipulanda [p. 82].

Basically, I'd like to propose the inclusion of these terms in the network(ed) rhetorics glossary (wanna second it?).  I'm finding these terms/concepts helpful for understanding many of the paradoxes Weinberger works through and many of the tensions surrounding the assignment of genres to weblogs (or weblogs to genres).  It's as if we have available to us an abundance of digital manipulanda--affordance-ness with the network and with our related involvements. 

What does a web(log) afford?  A link?  A network?

Posted by dmueller at 03:14 PM | Comments (2)

February 12, 2005

"an insane flowering"

searls & weinberger in world of ends:

When Craig Burton describes the Net's stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends, he’s painting a picture that gets at what’s most remarkable about the Internet’s architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.

some part of me knows that "value" here in too many ways only means money, but i'm stubbornly holding into believing that that isn't all (& if it were, anyway, the "wai-wai-wait" flag everybody threw at EPIC wouldn't always land at the "& everybody contributing gets paid according to the (popularity?) consumer-value of his or her contribution" point). because when people write metaphorically i fall in love with the pictures clusters of words make, and i'm seeing this great sparkling empty sphere surrounded by a tight-weave of contagiously rippling buds bursting into bloom.

no wonder people (i'm thinking of a few of my marketing majors in particular) get sucked into the rhetoric of "market" & "potential" "optimize" & "opportunity," when it's set up this way.

the flower metaphor continues: "the internet's value grows on its edges" like weeds on the garden-wall; but we all, like gardeners, have the power to "grow value on its edges"--to plant & nurture roses instead? like weeds (& roses) the flower-net is "outside," "open," "unowned," "not in the...hands of," "connective," "resiliant," "natural," "transporting" "bits" like water wicking up a stem, encouraging users to "flit" like butterflies.

& the metaphor's enemies are rigidly inorganic: "artificial," "barriers," "ownership," "propriety," "control," "force," "censorship," "permission," "private," "exclusive," "authorized," & "hate[fully]" resistant.

do i think the elaborately thematic rhetoric here might be a little over-the-top in an effort to jam an idea brightly down a reader's throat? i do. but i don't mind, & not just because i want the organic model & the laughing piracy of "hah--take that, recording industry!"--to win over those steely-grey words in my second collection above every time. it's a way of looking at the internet that we'd do well to listen to, & spread around perhaps like fern spores, even while also listening for some of the warnings i'm sure less effusive models offer.

Posted by ttobryan at 02:53 PM | Comments (4)

February 11, 2005

Network Literacy via Technorati

network + literacy = network literacy

Posted by mhansen at 07:35 PM | Comments (2)

In the network

via Alex Halavais

In the Detroit News Lifestyle section, January 31, 2005, there is an article by Kimberly Hayes Taylor on iPods: iPods set off iMania.

Such niches -- incomprehensible to the uninitiated, especially the technophobic -- lead to a basic question: Are iPod people sort of weird?

"Yes," Halavais says. "The iPod people are also serious Macintosh people. That's already a cult.

"They were weird already. Once they built them in a little white case they could carry around and wear like jewelry, people say, 'I have to have them.' That's the social part of them. They are in the network." (my emphasis)

First, let me admit, I didn't realize people who played music with an iPod were called "iPod people," and I also didn't know this label could be used as a perjorative.

This wearing of technology and the distinctive white ear buds and tangly white lines disappearing into a pocket marks a person as being "in the network." What network? Mac lovers, iPod people, music lovers, ... Halavais says they are "serious Macintosh people. That's already a cult." If iPods go mainstream, would they still be as popular with Mac people? Or, will there be a revolt as the article hints at?

From all of the accessories an iPod person could get, this reminds me of when the Palm was first released. This wave feels bigger than the one with Palm. Now it seems some Palm users are moving away from technology to a Hipster PDA. Not being "in the network" on this iPod craze, I'm not sure what it could spawn next. It doesn't seem likely to me that it would spawn something less technical, but perhaps something more techie or musical?

The socially insulating aspects of wearing an iPod do concern me. As Douglas Raybeck, a professor of anthropology at Hamilton College in New York, points out: "They isolate us," he says of iPods. "More accurately, they insulate us." I think they do both depending on whether one is using or observing. This is really problematic, for I think we already spend far too little time talking with people we don't know. Taking down time and talking with strangers is worthwhile. Being female and riding a motorcycle alone has given me the opportunity to interact with a lot of people that I don't know. When I stop for gas or food, strangers are always coming up to me to chat. One of the things I've learned from this is that there are a lot of really nice and very helpful people in the world. Do iPod people get a similar kind of social charge from simply seeing another person with an iPod?

In addition to the social concerns, there are also financial concerns as well. There are some people that are spending thousands of dollars on music. So in addition to this being a "shop-alcoholic" tendency for some, I worry that personal music consumption is going to leave many in perpetual credit card debt.

I don't own an iPod. Sure, I would like to be able to play more music from different groups, but it seems to me that there are exorbinate time, social, and financial costs to pay as a result that might indeed outstrip the gains. There are many costs to being "in the network" on this one. And it's one more example of increasing passivity -- from passive TV viewing, to passive music listening, to ...?

I've rambled on in this post, but to bring it back around -- as rhetoricians in the network, what are our responsibilities to ourselves and to our students? Should we encourage passive technology consumption (if that is what you want to label it), should we embrace technology as a learning tool, and/or should we question what it's doing to us as a culture to be "in the network?"

Posted by mhansen at 10:46 AM | Comments (2)

February 10, 2005

Rhetoriki :)

OK, I've been messing around at Rhetoriki. I wanted to give everyone a mini-how-to so that we can get started. I'm still figuring out some things (like how to REPLACE the Main.HomePage with Main.Rhetoriki), but for now we can at least start making entries. Here's how:

Go to: http://writing.syr.edu/wiki/pmwiki.php

Select what sort of entry you'll be making (terms, people, texts). For this example, I'll create an entry for a term.

Click "edit page" in the upper right.

In the Editing Main.Terms box, add (under any already existing terms) your term in double brackets, like this: [[rhetoric]].

In the author field, put your initials.

Click "save."

You will return to the Main Terms page, and your new term will appear as a link with a question mark following it: rhetoric?

Click on the question mark, you'll then be able to create a definition for the term.

Once you enter your definition, or commentary, or description or whatever, put your intitials in the author field.

Click "save."

You will be returned to the Main Terms page, and your new term will now stand as a link to your new definition. If you want to edit your entry, click on the term and then select "Edit Page."

I'm just learning myself, so please post any discoveries you make about how the wiki works here (hope that's OK, cgb?). I've created a category for it (wikiwork) as well.

Lots of fun, guys. Fun fun fun. :)

Posted by mryonker at 09:24 PM | Comments (4)

network literacy and the manifesto

I want to know more about the “creative industries” noted in the manifesto. I think I get what they’re describing in regard to “distributed IT skills”, but I’m wondering about the “self-developed” comment. At what point does a technical skill translate into a network literacy, particularly if we use the last definition Collin provided: “… the network/net/matrix/cyberspace that has emerged in the past decade or so.”

At its simplest, being “literate” means being able to read and write. But I think we’re all working through the more complete definition (adjectival form): of being knowledgeable in several areas (fields) or in a particular area. For me this complicates the context of the manifesto because knowledge does not necessarily translate into skill. I can have knowledge of how hypertext works, but lack the skill to build a hypertext.

So when we are talking about network literacy, are we talking about more than just the ability to read, write, and communicate within the network / net / matrix / cyberspace? Are we thinking about literacy as knowledge of and ability to navigate and generate using specialized skills? The manifesto cites mutiliteracy:
"Creative computing requires computer and network literacy. This literacy is analogous to, and as significant as print literacy,"
and yet goes on to note that computer literacy is not the same as knowing how to use professional software. It seems to me that if one even if one “knows” how to use software, they could still lack the skill to use the software to be “creative with a computer/network.
Where do “doing” literacies fit in? To simply say they are “learnt by doing” diminishes the role these literacies play in one’s overall ability to exist and grow within a network. It seems that being literate (able to read and write) doesn’t cut it in this more advanced network paradigm we’re defining.

Posted by mfrascie at 01:32 PM | Comments (1)

February 09, 2005

break, glean, assemble

I want to pick up on Mike's provocative suggestion of a 19th Century network literacy. One of the potentially productive ambiguities about networks is the fact that it can mean at least three distinct things:

• we speak of all sorts of technologies, from computers to television to transportation to telecommunications, as being linked together in networks
• we speak of networking (or schmoozing) as a social, professional activity--sometimes opposing "who you know" and "what you know"
• finally, there's the network/net/matrix/cyberspace that has emerged in the past decade or so

Now obviously, I'm asking primarily about this last one, but Mike's right, I think, to observe that these other networks are part of the "bundle" that we bring with us as we think about contemporary networks. And perhaps one answer to this week's question is that a network literacy can help us look both forward and backward.

I'm thinking, for example, of Clay Shirky's essay on the Dean campaign, "Exiting Deanspace." Although there's certainly more to it than this, one of Shirky's themes is the contrast between Dean's massive fund-raising and buzz-generating network, much of which took place online, and the geographical networks (primaries, caucuses, etc.) that accord a disproportionate amount of political clout to Iowa and New Hampshire, to say nothing of the media networks that emplotted his campaign in a particular way.

And that's a tension I see operating in Derek's thoughts on the increased overlap between his physical, interpersonal network (aka CCR) and his more distributed blog network.

Part of my advice is to avoid jumping to the conclusion that there is a (single, monolithic, given) network that you either know or you don't--that yes/no threshold is one of the problems that I have personally with the idea of literacy, and I hope that we can get past this threshold tomorrow during discussion. That's all for now...

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:23 PM | Comments (1)

Evocations of net literacy

The “network” of blogging as it might be abstracted from the term “network literacy” is elucidated by Jon Udell (thanks to Ty):

. . . we understand the basics: a network, a message-passing protocol, nodes that aggregate inputs and produce outputs. The blog network shares these architectural properties. Its foundation network is the Web; its protocol is RSS; its nodes are bloggers. These ingredients combine in ways that are not yet widely appreciated.

I think one of the reasons the ways are not appreciated is that no one yet has a grip on how this network works, since mapped upon the architecture of the Net are the capabilities of various applications allowing connectivity (e-mail, weblogs, listservs, chat boards) as well as systems of social relations that permeate from real space and time (“we are the nodes”—Udell).

If we entertain a broad sense of literacy as our “being conversant with X,” operating as a bona fide

citizen of a social context, then “network literacy” would mean that one is able to solve problems and contribute in “acceptable” ways to the environment outlined above. One would know what a network does, how to enact purposes on it, how to be in and of it. One would know its requisite skills, its rhetorical situations, and the etiquette and conventions of its communities. One would be a Good Node.

Without trying to outline the full scope of what network literacy might entail, I have five items to offer that evoke rich possibilities for me:

1
Jill Walker writes about blogging as a form of hiding:

Blogging is about hiding. It’s about partial truths and a voice that is binding as well as freeing.

When my partner tells me he’s unsure about our relationship I write about protesters rallying for peace. When I don’t know whether we’re partners or not I write that I’m tired. When he leaves me I write about civilian casualties and how untrustworthy and partial reports of a war can be.

This sounds to me like the insight of a literate blogger, one with a sense of the rules for the construction of identity and how public/private binaries work in the blogosphere.

2
In Marcia Hanson’s post to the course blog on February 5, “Going inside the network,” follow the links in “it’s as if we’re talking about apples and oranges." A very literate move, I think. Funny, too.

3
John Taylor Gatto (thanks to Ty again) writes about the six things he is really teaching (that is, the oppressive shadow literacy of institutional controls he is really teaching) when he teaches public school. What dark and soul-numbing literacies might we be learning when we sign on as network citizens in online communities? (E.g., is this all part of the logos of Westernized male rationality--or of something else?) What shadow literacies bind us while the network is liberating us in other ways?

4
Greg Ulmer seems to be describing a bundle of literacies when he says
“Composing online is similar to curating an exhibition.” Assemblage and display suggest themselves as two of the most obvious.

5
From an abstract for the paper “Network Literacy and Network Citizenship” by Ezawa Yoshinori et al.:

After the Internet has been popular not only in computer experts but also in network citizens, we are able to enjoy world wide communications using our own personal computers or work stations on the desks. Therefore, the constitutions or international treaties that are called as 'local rules,' are out of sense when real problems happended on the Internet. In this short note, the Social Ethics on the Internet by Netwrok citizens is discussed . . . .

I’m not sure exactly what this means, but it points to another bundle of literacies: (1) the mapping of social relations in the form of “local rules,” (2) scenarios of network problems, requiring skills on the part of participants to solve, and (3) attention to systems of ethics associated with network citizenship.

[On second glance, I believe that the "local rules" statement is pointing to the fact that local laws are challenged by more distributed problems in the net community, like a posting from one state or country and violating the decency standards in another.]

Posted by hjjankie at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)

Tweening

This morning, I thought I'd have time for three blog entries.  I told myself that today would be the day I posted thrice.  Hmph.  Never written thrice before.  I'm having a bit of "dogfish in the dissection pan" with hyper-consciousness about post-literacy, studying the network, tweening the EWM-style blogging I know and love with more academicky smelting--dutifully dumping into whatever contrivance, as assigned.  Of course it is my own sense of what happens that flattens all of this out, rolls over it again and again.  Scalpel, glassine envelope....

A thought-splice:  I signed up for thefacebook.com this semester.  Built a profile, uploaded an image, listed a set of tags to cross-reference me with the thousands of others--mostly undergrads--who dig the same stuff I dig. I did it because I wanted to start the semester in WRT205 with some talk about social connection, self-identified tags, and mediated connections all as buildup into McLuhan, Barabasi, and writing critical research.  I was clear with students that they didn't have to keep profiles; turned out all but one or two of them already kept extensive listings in thefacebook.  They knew more about it than I did.  They were already doing creative computing, in one sense, making themselves into data, encoding other (small) worlds with discriminating presences.  It was fun; and I told them, shortly after I built a profile, that even though I didn't have any facebook friends, none of them should feel any obligation to list me.  But two did anyway.  In this space, I am, categorically, friends with my students. I've kept it perfectly centripetal, never listing anyone else as a friend of mine, but just standing still, checking things out, welcoming pulses. 

In the past two weeks, I've been listed by three students from last semester's WRT105.  I get emails, "such and such has listed you as a friend."  When I click on the link from the email, I'm transported to a site where I can confirm the friendship, and I have in each case, although other options (reject, deny, wait a minute?) are available to me also.  I've also joined the "I Hate WRT105" group.  It's the only group I belong to, and I really should do something about that since I teach the course and I'm doing doctoral work in the program responsible for devising the curriculum.  And, what'd'ya know, I happened across the profile of a familiar student or two in there.  Thought, heh, what're you doing in here?  Same to you.  Hate, the acerbic cousin of critical (the mask of doing).

Thought-splice: Miles and Yuille's Creative Computing manifesto sets out to define "how we use computers in teaching and learning for creative industries" in IT contexts.  They offer a thoughtful list, but it leaves me feeling ambivalent about the think treatment of some of the grander concepts included. Perhaps that's how it's designed to work; its gross under-development invokes a busy array of associations.  Seems more like a move to stimulate rather than define.  Even in its simplicity, the list teases out a few useful distinctions about with-ness rather than working "on the network," and about "learning by doing."  Indeed, "these literacies are learnt by doing." Which literacies aren't?

We could describe literacy not as a monolithic term but as a cloud of sometimes contradictory nexus points among different positions.  Literacy can be seen as not a skill but a process of situating and resituating in social spaces. (Wysocki 367)

Jill Walker's talk at Brown and, just as much, the comments following her account push me to consider the reversal of network and representation (composed, in writing or otherwise).  I don't know how to put this, but maybe Walker's title will help me find a grip.  Rather than writing in the network, it's rather more--in my thinking--like writing the network. The network is written, I mean.  It materializes in language (oftentimes language that is not written, but otherly, I suppose, oral, imagistic...dunno about all of this, though).  Cripes, I'm slogging....  I'm trying to say that the sociality of the network is an enticement/motivation to writing (for people who've never had a care for Composition, I mean). Beyond the academy, lots of folks are compelled to write because of the sociality of the network, and this seems like an interesting turnabout of motivation, one that ought to interest teachers of writing.

Posted by dmueller at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

Network Literacy ?

Over on kubernetes...

Derek's having monitor trouble. Clany's having browser trouble. What's it got to do with Network Literacy? I'm wondering how dependent that literacy is on the technological components of the network?

I want to deconstruct the terms "network" and "literacy" and consider them as mutually exclusive. I'll work on that this week. In the mean time, consider the way news was read and disseminated in the 19th century. Men (and some women) would stand around a news print. One would read, the others would discuss, all would break up and go on to share that information with others. A network literacy?

Posted by mfrascie at 10:35 AM | Comments (3)

February 08, 2005

Explore adjacencies?

Another recent discussion over at Crooked Timber about scholarly blogging. Step #1, of course, involves reading the post, which is something that you can do through Bloglines. Step #2, if it's something that you want to follow up on, is to visit the page itself, and read through the responses.

What's the next step?

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)

Incomplete Manifesto

Via Creative Computing: An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.

The peops over at CC reference this manifesto as an "example of the sorts of things that network literacy also needs to be able to think about."

I like these sorts of neat lists; especially when they encourage me to "drift," "begin anywhere," and "don't be cool." And applying some of these to network literacy is fun.

I'm operating on a half-baked idea from Duncan Watts's Six Degrees, which I know I'm reading early (but I got my copy in the mail yesterday and I couldn't wait) about the relationship between networks and individuals. This half-baked idea is that individual behavior is somewhat predictable. But when many individuals connect, the end result (network) behaves in quite unpredictable ways. I assume that individuals operating within a network also behave unpredictably as the network influences and shapes the individual as much as the individual shapes the network. In other (hopefully clearer) words, once an individual is part of a network, a recursive, iterative dynamic-thing occurs between the two, changing each. And to try to find causality (which came first?) or relationality (what connects and changes what) is nearly impossible.

Network *literacy*, then, might find some of its components in Bruce Mau's manifesto on growth. To boil some of what he's got down:

• Action moves multi-directionally, and sometimes without apparent agent; this can be generative. Here, action might be scholarship, social change, capital.
  
• Working outside the comfort zone (ie, out of control) can be generative.
  
• Engagement with the means is by far more important than getting to an end. A network is not a static entity; an "end" does not really exist anyway.
  
• "Explore adjacencies." Look around to see what's connected. And connections might not exist for an apparent, or for what appears to be an obvious, reason. Look to see where you've been.
  
• Improvise; enact praxis; reflect-in-action a la Donald Schoen; have fun.
  

Network literacies might be the ability to apply such tenets to the relationship of individual-to-network.

To bring it 'round to the real world: as a blogger, my ability to embrace and enact such approaches to work and scholarship (and to everyday life) determines my access to success.

Awright then. Hack away. :)

Posted by mryonker at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

Pleasures and pains of cultural assimilation

I'd like to consider a richer, more flexible, and conceivably more benevolent approach to the term literacy than Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola lead with in “Blinded by the Letter.” Clearly, literacy initiatives are linked to destructive culture and power regimes, but this problem occurs in situations where a colonial impulse is at work (e.g., Eurocentric Standard English vs. Ebonics), and I would suggest that this does not exhaust the possibilities of understanding literacy processes. Wysocki and J-E ask us to consider a conception of literacy that defines a political problem--a fairly unexamined popular (policymakers' and filmmakers') conception of literacy as a transparent set of skills. I support

their analysis of the implications of this particular conception, but I wouldn’t want to let it shut down other possibilities.

For instance, consider parsing “literacy” this way:

1. In its initial, tight association with the letter, reading and writing, book and print culture, such as Ong’s work elaborates.

2. In an analogic application of #1, carrying the analogy of reading and writing to other symbolic contexts, such as visual literacy, television, and Mark Twain’s learning to “read” the river in Life on the Mississippi.

3. In a very diffuse sense to mean simply “being conversant with the ways of X,” and this includes not only skills but adaptations to the ways of a community and the rhetorical situations of performance.

So I would say we could look at Wynton Marsalis teaching his sons to play jazz and how to function in the jazz community, and figure this as literacy education, but not of any especially virulent sort. The third construction tends to break away and simply point to a healthy process of cultural reproduction among a people. This suggests to me that the issue of oppressive power relations plays across several possible meanings of literacy, and arises specifically in situations involving cultural boundaries, intentional or unintentional (even good-willed) assimilation, identity compromises, and cases like the dysphoria we as skeptics often feel about our own culture.

I’m still thinking about how these ideas might apply to computer and network use.

Posted by hjjankie at 02:18 PM | Comments (1)

February 07, 2005

examples of shifting blog identities

It occurred to me that a real-life example of the ‘shifting blog identities’ topic I’ve been rattling on about is Jeff Ward*. He’s been blogging since 2001, and has made a practice of completely redesigning this Public Address every so often to reflect his shifting blogger identity. Each release is treated as a new version - hence the current tPA 4.0. The old versions keep their designs and go into a separate archive, rather like books. (You don’t see this often on blogs, since most folks just apply their new template to all previous posts.)

He recently wrote this brief reflection on how he felt when he began and why tPA 1.0 looked the way it did. 1.0 was much more elegiac and silly than future versions. 2.0 had a different feel and headed toward more consistently academic posts. 3.0 isn’t publicly archived yet, but it moved into a completely different design format and was almost always a chronicle of a master’s thesis. The current version was triggered by moving across the country to a new program and a new life. The posts so far deal with history of photography and authorship, once again reflecting shifting academic identity. Still the same blogger, but one who’s moved in time and space and interests.

*Full disclosure: Yes, Jeff is the elusive Mister Boyfriend who gets occasional references on my blog. He’s so going to get me when he finds out I’ve used him as an example here. Too bad - it was worth it.

Posted by kkennedy at 12:38 PM | Comments (2)

Notes for New Bloggers

I was remembering what it was like to be a brand new blogger, and the things that people told me and the things I wish I’d been told. So I hauled off and wrote a post about the five things I was most ambivalent about at the beginning and the advice I would offer on them now, two years in. If you find youself interested in that sort of thing, check over here.

Posted by kkennedy at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

grokking network literacy

Network literacy is individual: I develop my own connections in my own way along my own particular patterns of interest. When I read and write (a.k.a. literacy) about "Electracy and Pedagogy," it is an interaction between me and the "page."

Network literacy is social: "Me" is never singular, but the plurality of experience I bring to the "page." "Me" is also the relation of "Electracy and Pedagogy" to you and the sharing of ideas as you perform the literate acts of reading, writing, responding, discarding, etc.

Network literacy is elitist:

At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world – deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at it’s worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia. Much of it untrue, all of it narrow shallow and sensational. (EPIC 2014)

Not only will the savvy write the present, but the blog will be policed. In addition, as per the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an estimated 7% of Internet users have blogs which are read by 27% of Internet uesrs. The other 63% of Internet users, not to mention the population at large, are not participating in this knowledge production.

Network literacy is democratic: Just as it is impossible to treat anything but the symptoms of a viral infection, so too it is impossible to squelch blogs in specific, and the Internet at large, and homogenize ideas presented. Once someone has access (which is a big step, admittedly) there is nothing that inherently privileges one person's ideas over another. However, some people's ideas may be easier to find. The network grants everyone who can get on it space.

Network literacy is ironic: Did it occur to anyone else while reading "Electracy and Pedagogy" how static that page is? A greyscale, structured, linear outline to explain the complex dynamics that complicate our notions of literacy when they intersect with a network.

If I actually grokked network literacy, perhaps I could do more.

Posted by trobryan at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2005

flappy little wings

feel free to ignore this fledgling (networking) effort to master the (shouldn't be this) confusing trackback ping (that keeps giving me error messages)...

tangentially on-topic thought(s) of the day

edit (9:42pm): (there's me making that ethics decision) test results = i can't make it work.
edit #2 (10:22 pm): persistance (or is that procrastination? about those teaching journals...) pays off!

Posted by ttobryan at 09:31 PM | Comments (0)

Blognition

I am increasingly fascinated by what blogging does for (or in my case to) cognition. These last three weeks have been a jumble for me as I attempt to rewrite the ways in which I organize my thoughts around a semester of academic work in order to accomodate the rhythm of blogging. I have to admit that it hasn't been an easy task....

...most of my highly developed study habits have been thrown out the window as I search for new ways to think about information acquisition, retrieval and delivery. I know it may sound goofy, but I feel like I am having to switch channels between my courses that operate in and out of the classroom in traditional patterns and the two that are blog-o-centric.

I can't but help think that some of what I'm feeling is a type of code-switching between "languages" of knowing. I feel like I am working from two different epistomological positions. The crazy thing is that it is the material reality of the forums that is driving my sense of how to come at my work, not necessarily the information content--the content of my coursework is really all fairly familiar. But I am having to read and respond in very different media than I am used to, and keep track of multiple strands of information from multiple sources, and the sources themselves have varying degrees of import requiring me to vary my responses, perception of audience, and archival procedures for storing and reusing that information later.

I mean, in a traditional classroom, I am required to look at readings that I understand are important because 1) they are in a book, 2) my instructor assigned them, 3) they seem relevant to my field of study (hopefully!)
I am also required to focus face-to-face with speakers, some who are my peers, some who are my mentors, and usually it's pretty clear to whom my comments are directed.
I've been sitting in classrooms in school buildings for 20 years or so, and the smells and sounds and desks and lights and paper, and chalk all but disappear any more. I can "read" the classroom "page" with out even knowing it's there. Now, I get onto the blog and I have to "read" every little visual to figure out where I am and reorient myself on this new "page." This takes more time, more effort and feels fumbley. And slow.

Having raised a couple of kids, I'm familiar with what it looks like for a child to get new levels of motor and mental skills on board. My kids were funny to watch just before ramping up with things like walking, running and climbing, talking, writing and reading. Motor or metal, just before something got familiar enough to go well, they would trip on stuff, get super frustrated, lose their balance, forget simple things they had already incorporated, rebel by refusing to try anymore, cry more. In a way, I feel like a two-year-old trying to talk--and yes, I've been crying a bit too :)

But I think, I think, I'm getting better at thinking in blog-think. I'm not sure, but I think I'm overwhelmed less often, and my willful rebellion at having to learn in this way seems to be phasing out. Does any of this make sense?

What is this multiphasic medium doing for my multiphasic thinking abilities? How has traditional education taught me to hone in and focus, singularly in small time blocks, and then move on to another, separate task, for the next class, the next book, the next audience? Does blogging require multiple foci, or is it only a condition of being all new for me? What new ways of knowing come from this medium that aren't, or can't be, developed in traditional pedagogical modes with classrooms, teacher, blackboards, and little desks?

Posted by dwinslow at 07:15 PM | Comments (4)

you are what you is

(Excerpted from a longer entry at Areté)

This week’s NetRhets topic is network literacy, which inevitably leads to some discussion of identity. Miles and Yuille list it as #5 on their Creative Computing Manifesto:

5. inside the network
Network literacy is the ability to engage with and represent yourself within the network.

With my static professional site, I have a fairly good idea of how I’m representing myself to the world. Representation on this blog, however, is far more problematic to me. One of the wonderful and confusing things about blogs is the fact that they’re one of the only documents that permit shifting identities within the document itself. Print is fixed; the author/originator/creator's identity is fixed with it, at least within that volume. An author's identity may shift over the course of their ouvre, but once an individual work is fixed, things don’t change within it. Not so for the blog, which as a dynamic digital document is much more of a living thing. As the blogger changes, the document changes with it. This demonstrated, public change is part of what makes long-term blogging and blog reading so worthwhile - Dorothea, Bobbi, and AKMA have all grown and changed since I began reading them three years ago, and their blogs don’t look or read the same as they did then. The problems have more to do with external researchers than they do with the bloggers themselves (although Bobbi may disagree, given the process she’s gone through lately with hers). How do you categorize something whose identity is constantly in flux? How do you account for the changeable nature of the document? We can work with the larger genre of blog, but what particular identity does it present, and when is it which identity?

If you’d like to read the rest, which contains a certain amount of navel gazing, check over here

Posted by kkennedy at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

thinking thru miles and yuille

i visited the miles/yuille blog and read their manifesto to kinda get an idea of where they are coming from. as i read over the 13 statements, two words stuck out most: creative and literacy. i guess that's right on time since our class discussion this week will address (post)literacy. so, let me get started.

number one in the miles/yuille manifesto is "creative computing is being creative with a computer/network, not being creative on a computer/network." the preposition change from with to on is key, and it articulates a concept that i've been struggling with for a minute. in my other life, outside of grad school and writing instruction, i fancy myself a poet. but i never compose on my computer. instead, i brainstorm/draft/revise the poems in my notebooks, and once i'm satisfied, i type the poem in word and save it to my hard-drive. so the computer becomes nothing more than a storage device. i recognize that my difficulties with working in tandem with the computer/network stems from my dedication to the old-school print culture. or perhaps my stubborness. in the history and power of writing, henri-jean martin asserts that "even in periods of apparent stability, however, traditional texts were ceaselessly revised, adapted, translated, and changed in their physical aspect to bring them into line with the spirit of the times and make them appeal to a specific public" (313). in other words, and as the great sam cooke used to sing, "a change is gonna come." computers are bringing about that change.

miles/yuille "teach students who work in the creative industries." does our field count as a "creative industry?" i'm thinking yes. but i'm wondering how does one work with a computer/network and not merely on a computer/network. if i'm doing online research about the quiltmakers of gee's bend, alabama, does the ability to quickly access information from a variety of sources tap into my creativity? it seems to me that, first, i have to accept that texts can be more than just a combination and formulation of abstract alpha-numeric symbols. let's be honest, there's only so much one can do with different kinds of fonts. but if we start from the premise that texts can be represented with visual images and such, i can better understand the difference between with and on. and with this new understanding of creativity, i'm seeing a new kind of literacy emerging. according to miles/yuille, it is a "multiliteracy."

how do we make room for "multiliteracies" when so much of our field, even in its attempts to re-define itself, is wedded to archaic notions of literacy? i'm not completely giving up on traditional literacy. however, "it's been a long time, but I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will."

Posted by emnorris at 03:46 AM | Comments (1)

February 05, 2005

Net Working?

Network Literacy for me is like trying to explain all of the pops that are going off in my head right now. I'm reminded of so many things, but I'll cover the more pressing ones here (others will appear at kubernetes

I'm struck most by something Collin said in class regarding community, and as I consider meanings and definitions of network literacy, I can't help but look at the juxtaposition of ideas that link to community

Writers such as Liz Lawley (thanks Marcia) define community as a social network in which the blogger has masterful control over the structures that form the network. She writes about friends and colleagues, relationships.

On the flip side is the discussion of using blogs in classrooms to facilitate student writing. Jill Walker's philosophy seems to hinge on the idea that "What’s more important to teach our students is network literacy: writing in a distributed, collaborative environment." While on the surface this idea seems to mirror Lawley's concept of networks, I'm distracted by the forced nature of classroom communities in general. Lawley is finding people with mutual interests, looking outward as a node in the Web. Many times, when we talk about using technologies to improve classroom community, it is for the 15 weeks that we are in class. Maybe some of the cool factor of blogs will rub off, emerge as genuine interest on the part of students to really move their writing beyond the classroom and beyond the semester. It certainly appears that is one of the pay-offs for Walker's and Lawley's students, but I'm still too aware of the politics of the classroom, and if a blog is part of a classroom activity, it seems to me it will carry some of that baggage with it. John Gatto's The Six Lesson Schoolteacher is a pretty good analysis of the baggage.

In the end, I'm very hopeful for blogs, but so much of their potential is extra-institutional for me that I choke on trying to make it part of the institution. And I do see it that way. While it may break down some barriers, the institutional structures of education, publishing, genres, etc, seem to be able to absorb and modify new technologies, generally not for the better.

There is something profound in Derek's idea about writing alongside students, but will they truly see past the power structures that they've been locked inside for 12 years or more? Will we?

Posted by trobryan at 08:11 PM | Comments (4)

Going inside the network

Jon Udell makes a good point when he says, "The dictionary definition of “blog” is correct, but it says nothing about the network in which the blog participates. The bloggers I read and especially those whose posts I value define my social network, but it doesn't say much about my network literacy until I do something inside the network.

Liz Lawley's post on Many to Many, it's the social network, stupid! illustrates a necessary component of network literacy when she talks about folksonomies, "I don’t want to know what the average eight-year-old calls an image. I want to know what my friends and colleagues call an image. Or a link. Or a photo". Network literacy includes knowing a common language.

Critical blogging approaches network literacy because critical blogging requires succinct writing of critical thoughts as an outcome of research expertise. But network literacy is more than that. It's what Jill Walker says in her talk at brown post: "it's learning to think and write with the network" (para. 1). That is what I'm trying to do with this class when I try to think critically, write something intelligent, and link to things I think the rest of the participants might find useful or informative.

But one thing Lawley and Walker don't specifically mention is rhythm. I think 'learning to think and write with the network' requires and should emphasize rhythm, for it's not just knowing what your social network thinks, the right language to use, as well as thinking critically, linking, and writing intelligently. For example, if Will Richardson is answering the question Why Weblogs?, but I am still having to answer, Why Teach Writing in a Computer Classroom?, then it's as if we're talking about apples and oranges even though both posts happen to be be about computers and writing. It's in the rhythm.

Maybe I'm just stating the obvious. But now I get it even more. Snowballs anyone?

Posted by mhansen at 03:13 PM | Comments (0)

...and a precap?

A quick note about how I'd like everyone to spend their week. In addition to the site from Adrian Miles and Jeremy Yuille and the post by Jill Walker, I'm asking you to read an essay by Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Anne Wysocki. Our theme this week is an issue that Tyra brought up in reference to last week's readings, namely the question of post-literacy. More specifically, we're going to be thinking about what a "network literacy" (which may or may not be a post-literacy) might look like. Feel free to do your thinking in different ways--rather than writing a specific entry on the subject, I'll probably content myself with dropping hints over the next week.

Hint #1, for example.

Here's the link to the pdf for the article, which I'll leave up here for a few days, after which I'll drop it. For the locals, I'll leave a copy of it in a folder in the grad office if you'd prefer to simply Xerox yourself a copy.

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:13 PM | Comments (1)

Recap, week 3

I'm going to stick most of my recap under the fold here, and predate both this entry and the next one, so that they make a little more sense. First, to the recap.

Part of what we tried to accomplish this week was to cover some of the keywords and topics that have come up over the past couple of weeks: genre, remediation, audience, public, etc. One of the problems we encountered, I think, was that the tendency to take fairly established terms from the discourse of composition and attempt to use them in our descriptions of weblogs.

For example, our understanding of audience is well established for the print-based genres that we teach in traditional classrooms and/or compose ourselves. But there really is no single "audience" for weblogs: on the one hand, we are writing here to the other people in the class; on the other hand, there are interested visitors who are also following the course; on the third hand, the weblog itself may attract visitors years from now, in conjunction with any number of searches or link-trails. It's an audience that is both invoked and addressed, immediate and long-term, transitory and permanent.

Are any of these true of every blog, though, enough so that we might generalize about the medium? Similar problems emerge when we try and pin down things like genre or motivation--there are times, it seems, when there are more exceptions than rules.

We also spoke some about identity, and I think that the general conclusion was to approach blogs as spaces that produce identity rather than reflecting it. (I may be doing a little "producing" myself here.) For my own part, I wonder if the same might not also be true of these other terms--it's hard not to see blogs as spaces where the production of audience is also taking place. I'd also add that this production is not always something that we can exercise control over (and I don't see that as a bad thing). It's hard to predict how blogs will enter our information ecologies--while some of their energy comes from our own input and effort, there's always more to them in the forms of comments, trackbacks, traffic, links, etc.

As I read back over this, it sounds a lot less like a recap, and more like my own editorialized account of what class made me think about. Ah well. As always, if there's anything else that anyone would like to contribute, either here or in another entry, please feel free.

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:08 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2005

moveable (really) type

update your links, please! my "academic blog" (see spot make a generic distinction. make a generic distinction, spot, make a generic distinction!) is now here: cinnabar & alabaster. if you're like derek, & you've already spread connections to my writing-life all over the web, please send those connections here instead? & while i'm linking, if anyone wants anything else to read, my scattered cadre of comp-rhet friends maintains a group blog that you're free to visit here: compositionism.

Posted by ttobryan at 05:02 PM | Comments (4)

Pros and cons of blogs in the writing classroom

To a paper delivered at Computers and Writing 2003, George Pullman appends some pros and cons of using blogs in writing pedagogy.

Pros of Blogs

Personal ownership
Public presentation
No spelling or grammar checker
Easy cut n paste n link for teaching and encouraging citation practices
Encourages regular writing and thinking about writing
Commenting feature permits collaboration or at least conversation, commiseration
Form of writing that is not the research paper
Form of writing that might encourage the development of writerly habits: note-taking, sorting, organizing, a modern day commonplace book.
Window on the invention process if used as a note book
Kind of cool

Cons of Blogs

Kids have trouble thinking of things to write about just as with a paper journal
Can create animosity when people express unpopular views
People who donÂ’t spend much time online are mystified by the practice of blogging
Dependence on Word tools makes people cut n paste Word code that creates cyber junk code

Posted by hjjankie at 12:47 PM | Comments (2)

Choosing classroom technologies

One thing I became aware of through the 1990s, as new app after new app offered itself as a possibility for writing pedagogy, is that the rhetoric in the scholarship about new technologies had a trajectory. It would start with a “thesis” of enchantment and advocacy, followed by an “antithesis” pointing out reservations, limitations, and catastrophes, followed by a “synthesis” espousing a wiser, more tempered view. I noticed in the articles this week that, as technologies seem to have proliferated, and as writing teachers have become more saturated with new products and more savvy as users and consumers, the rhetorical trajectory seems to have narrowed, and users have learned to be more skeptical, and sooner. In “Why Weblogs?, for instance, I see writers, not only advocating for blogs, but also critically comparing them to other technologies like courseware and discussion boards.

What surfaces as the issue for me, after fidgeting with various technologies, is learning to clarify one’s pedagogical goals and analyzing carefully the potentials of a technology (like the word processor, or

the hypertext authoring program, or listservs, or Blackboard, or the blog) and its payoffs. A number of reservations were expressed in the readings about web page authoring in the comp classroom, based on the fact that the pedagogical yield was not sufficient for the amount of technical manipulation and instruction one had to put in. I think Mike complicates this point about matching to goals in a particularly thoughtful way:

What theories or practices support your decisions in regard to using technology in a classroom? If you answer that question from an Instructional Design, Development and Evaluation perspective, your thinking is likely to be influenced by learning and instructional psychology. If you answer from a Comp/Rhet/English perspective, you're likely influenced by communication theory. And if you’re answering the question from a Tech Com perspective, you’re most likely struggling with all that and a good dose of systems theory.

However, I also feel one should experiment freely with new technologies and set aside preconceptions, simply because one cannot arrive at their new possibilities through established pedagogies. The new medium changes the possibilities in ways one might not understand unless one plays in it.

Consequently, I feel an impulse to try to get a handle on a technology like the blog in ways that might be useful for teaching. One key feature that emerges is the blog as an expressive and personal writing space that is organized around some plane of the identity of the writer. Lowe and Williams suggest very clearly how to leverage this dimension of blogs in their comp classrooms. I think there are other implications to this feature—but nuff said for now.

Posted by hjjankie at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2005

Teacher as Locus

I've been thinking this week about how weblogs productively blur audience relationships for both students and teachers.  Lowe and Williams give us plenty of examples of what this means for students.  They critique, for example, the "artificial rhetorical situations" of the sealed-off classroom: "The problem with such artificial rhetorical situations is that ultimately, the real audience is still the teacher--and students know this.  As a consequence, some teachers have students work with real audiences outside of the class" (para. 8). "Outside of the class" is a lasting theme in composition, from Anne Ruggles Gere's talk in 1992 on the "extracurriculum," to extensive community-based projects and, simultaneously, expansions into widely readable web-based projects, many writing teachers have strained to disturb the pedagogy of teacher as monolithic hub, or locus in a restrictively walled space.  Undoubtedly, blogs give us another way of doing this. 

Out of this, I've been wondering whether--in weblogs--teachers ought to be writing alongside students, engaging in dialogue with their writing, and offering links to other conversations that might do any number of things to shape, guide and coach.  These questions coincide with a few of the points made by Janet Emig in her essay "Non-Magical Thinking: Presenting Writing Developmentally in Schools," which some of use read this week for another course.  Emig makes two points that seem to connect with what I'm trying (clumsily!) to bring up.  First, in the interview notes preceding the essay, she distinguishes between teaching as performance and teaching as "getting out of the way" (133).  In many of the course weblogs I've looked at, teachers tend to prefer "getting out of the way."  Is there an ethical dimension to this?  What are the risks of "getting in the way," performing the writing and linking with students? Commenting openly?  Emig's other related point: "Persons who don't write themselves cannot sensitively, even sensibly, help others learn to write" (Emig 141).  Well, there it is, speaking for itself.  Agree?

Another thread in this is that we seem to value the "getting in the way" of a public--a variously understood assemblage of readers who may or may not read regularly, and who may or may not leave comments.  But this privileging of a real (as differentiated from imagined) audience makes me think that blogs force something on the teacher's role, just as it forces something on the students' roles; with blogs, the teacher is confronted with hard decisions about "getting in the way/getting out of the way" and/or "performing as teacher/performing as writer/performing as..."--these are never innocent, and they're less transparent than when we could seal the writing vault with a closed door.  Would you mind shutting the door?  What for? Too much noise?

This entry wound up as a spill, so let me try to put it another way, succinctly reduced: For all that weblogs re-form about the relationship of students' writing to broader audiences, what exactly comes along with this move for the teacher as one who 1) makes a choice to use weblogs 2) influences the circulation and attention drawn to student writing in weblogs (enable a Google key, Technorati key?) 3) must decide how to write relative to class spaces devised for more broadly circulated writing.  I'm still not saying it exactly like I want to, but I have to stop (that pile on the corner of the desk is starting to quake). I'm going to post and hope that this makes a pinch of sense.

Posted by dmueller at 03:03 PM | Comments (9)

a post-what WHAT?

brooks, nichols, & priebe characterize their students responses to using blogs in a variety of ways to extend classroom work into other writing opportunities as follows:

the generally positive response to weblogging that emerges despite these differences suggests that as the genres and motives for weblogging are understood more clearly, the practices has sufficient cultural and pedagogical appeal to encourage and motivate student writing even in a post-literate age.

i hit the end of that paragraph like the titanic on that infamous iceberg. a post-literate what? a post-what age? i'm beyond confused, but i think first that maybe i'm missing something; maybe this is one of those terms that seems transparent but in usage has come to masquerade as something else.

so i "google" "post-literate age,"--an activity, i hardly think i need to add, that involves a several-tiered process of textual negotiation requiring a great deal of print literacy (what i assume they're referring to) in addition to what others variously call "computer literacy" or "technology literacy"--and found two dominant explanations of the term. one distinguishes between a "scientific" & literal conception of language and a more poetic, fluid conception, applying the term "post-literate" to the latter; the other, which i'm assuming is what brooks, nichols, and preibe had in mind, can be exemplified by the following explanation in a 1997 essay by brian rotman:

We are at a juncture when computer technology, a medium as awesomely powerful, transformative, delimiting and invasive as writing once was, is changing the world forever; we've reached a point when 'writing', as the linguist Roy Harris put it, has 'dwindled to microchip proportions' [The Origin of Writing: ]. We are living in momentous times: the inventions spawned by computing and the digital logic that goes with it are gobbling, at an accelerating pace, ever larger chunks of human culture and rendering obsolete practices that have lasted for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. As the medium of writing displaced orality and changed forever how humans encounter, respond and imagine each other, so the medium of computing, just as totally and relentlessly, is displacing literacy.

say what? i'm no less confused. everything i do with relation to computers is textual, literate, screen-print (most of it easily transferable to print-out). my geeky (no offense, anyone) coder/programmer friends spend all day writing--sometimes documentation in sentence form, sometimes memos and briefs in paragraphs, sometimes, yes, code, in a different language than the one i'm using now, but it's still a writen language system--it's still writing. it still requires literacy, where literacy = the ability to decode/make meaning from (theoretically definable as two very different things, i know, but i'm leaving that be for now) a visual collection of symbols representing word-based information.

how can that possibly be post-literate? when has any civilization ever in the history of the world made literate practices--reading, writing, whether on paper or on screen, usually both--more fundamental to its functionality? if anything, i'd call us uberliterate--but "post"? or is there something about what these writers mean by "computing" that's eluding me completely here? or is there some theoretical association with "post" not actually meaning "after b/c instead of" that i'm missing?

i've spent long enough looking for the context of the harris quote rotman's working with; i don't expect 1997 = 2005; i'm out of disclaimers. maybe instead of missing something i'm missing a lot of things. but... post-literate?

Posted by ttobryan at 12:21 PM | Comments (3)

February 01, 2005

The "Blog Fiasco"

I'm curious: What's this blog fiasco I've been hearing about? I take it this discussion occurred f2f? Would someone mind giving me the gist of it?

So...I'm Clancy, and I'll be here for the next couple of weeks. As you already know, I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota with Krista. My research is in gender and computer-mediated communication, specifically gender and blogging practices. I'm still trying to work out the kinks of my disseration prospectus (am defending the prospectus in a month), but this post should give you some idea of what I'm doing. My theoretical framework, as I envision it now, will consist mostly of Habermas/public sphere theory, previous work that has applied and extended Habermas' theory to the internet, and feminist critiques of the concept of a public sphere, particularly Nancy Fraser's notion of counterpublics. Hopefully I'll end up making some innovative, useful, much-needed, and insightful interventions, syntheses, and contributions, but right now it's an inchoate mess, or, rather, "in its nascency." Yeah, that's the ticket.

Posted by Clancy at 04:34 PM | Comments (5)

Remediation of What?

I, too, felt Derek's unease with the Brooks, Nichols and Priebe article. But after reading Clancy's article, I began to piece the ideas of remediating print genres and remediating the classroom into the question of remediating how we, as writing instuctors, think about writing.

The more I read about blogging in the academy and classroom, the more I begin to question what is writing? In most required composition courses, we ask students to do a very specific kind of writing that will presumably serve them throughout their university career, and no matter how much we change the space of our classrooms -- to be a safe, or communal, or discursive one -- the bottom line is that the writing students do is autonomous and requirement driven.

It seems as if blogging can challenge that form of writing only if we conceed to change our definition of what we think we are teaching. In other words, is it enough for students to just to write -- no matter the form -- in a writing class. It seems as though the answer there is not really because of institutional and disciplinary lines that become drawn around what kinds of writing we do in composition.

Madeline's question about vanity seems to play into this as well. Clancy discussed how blogging made her more accountable to a wider audience, and made her a better writer through writing. This has been echoed time and again in the articles we have read for the past two weeks. For me, I began blogging to do just that -- work on my writing so that it was not as tightly wound as it is in my seminar papers. For that it has worked, but I find myself sheepishly concerned about the things I commit to the blogosphere because y'all are reading it now. So, blogging has remediated my own expectations about blogging making me more aware of audience and tone than I had originally intended. Does this mean I am vain because I worry about how my audience will take me? I suppose in a way it does, but I also think it makes for a savvy writer. (Or perhaps that is just me blowing smoke.) My point is that something that was for me -- blogging -- has become a site in which I am very aware of how others will receive it.

How does this all change how I see writing as a teacher? I am not sure yet. But I think that there is something about what writing is for, who it is for, and what it means to teach it that becomes very visible within this practice (or genre).

Posted by jlwingar at 10:40 AM | Comments (1)