So, if text is a transmitter of culture (which incidentally I totally agree with) is it possible that as teachers of text we are teaching/producing cultural receptors that will propagate the beta cultural model? In other words, on top of the dreaded gate keeping function that we have all heard about, does required writing courses teach forms of and embedded ideas about culture in ways that teach students how to recognize these forms so well that they internalize them to the point that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate out the old from the new? I guess this is more a question about education in general rather than just writing, but it is interesting. The next question, of course, is -- is it ever possible to break the chain? Or maybe would we even want to?

I think it is possible, even probable, Jen, that a whole lot of teaching is the actual practice of reinscribing beta culture. It calls to mind that all teaching is implicated in cultural propagation. Recognizing cultural transmission comes up just short of actually inventing culture (this, I think, is the omega distinction, but I might be off). And I think that's what Urban pushes us to think about. It is possible to *make* (in order to break) the cultural chain, devise new channels for cultural flow, exercise agency over received cultural patterns. But as I think of it, these efforts require us to shelve some of the old, systemic anchors, which makes a whole bunch of folks uncomfortable (for good reason?).

In the context of Brown and Duguid's discussion of fixed and fluid texts (the correlation, for me, is the print paradigm=fixed and the digital shake-about, network literacy maybe, depending on how it's taken up=fluid), we talked in class last night about the commonplace of credibility, for example. Many of the students in WRT205 accepted the idea that fixed texts are inherently more credible than fluid texts. It's not an uninformed position; heck, formal schooling harps up and down on this point, ad nauseum. As teachers, we can open this up with questions about what situates credibility in/with a text--the expertise of the writer(s)? peer review processes or mass consent about a text's right-ness? material investment (leather-bound books are *especially* credible)? I'm overgeneralizing just a bit, but fluid texts confront us with a choice between reproducing the cultural obsessions with paper or letting go of some of the safeties we've enjoyed in having a fixed texts so deeply, culturally systematized. My answer to students last night was that no text is inherently credible because of its interface, but some of us are more comfortable with fluid texts (not just reading them, writing them). We should, therefore, prefer ways of thinking about credibility as dynamic (ahem...fluid).

For what it's worth, toward the end of their chapter, Brown and Duguid give us this: "In pointing to these various interests in fixity, we are not attempting to minimize the significance of the new fluid technologies. We are suggesting, however, that social and institutional pressures that favor fixity will also have a say in the outcome of current transformations" (205). And so it's not surprising that fixity gets its fix; form, after all, is (maybe only) somewhat necessary, useful.

To Jen's point "does required writing courses teach forms of and embedded ideas about culture in ways that teach students how to recognize these forms so well that they internalize them to the point that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate out the old from the new?" ...

Yes and no. Yes, I think teaching forms of and embedded ideas about culture can help students recognize the "power" and rhetorical aspects of certain ideas. I don't believe that doing so makes it difficult to separate the old ideas (or forms for that matter) from the new.

I like the evolution and organic nature of the "thought contagion" (such as memes) as described by Lynch. Memes are only one vehicle through which meta culture is extended. As these memes and other contagions are "recorded" into texts -- particularly digital texts that would appear to have a greater affect on a given population -- we are creating artifacts that contain and validate "the" preexisting idea.

From this foundational set of artifacts, I think it is possible to break the chain because the chain will ultimately break (or transforms) itself.

Though contagions [memes embedded in particular genres, forms, etc.] have an impact on thought creation as new ideas that seem spontaneously created often derive from preexisting ideas. Frequently, this happens by either altering, building upon, or fusing earlier notions... Thought contagions therefore shape creative output at the population level. ~ Lynch (10)

If we accept the gatekeeper role, we should recognize that there is a whole lot of "population" in which we plant the precursor belief(s), "increasing the odds that someone will make that creative leap" (10).

Two ideas are evoked for me here. One is a harking back to Weinberger's discussion of the Web as a series of documents and a dissolution of what "document" means (Small Pieces 37>. He refers to them as places on the Web that can consist of images, sounds, and movies. I'm not clear on exactly what Brown and Duguid would consider a "fluid" document, but this would put some technological spin and maybe more far-reaching implications, on their definition of the functions of a document.

Second, the idea that teaching in some sense invites a move from alpha to beta would be modified in the case of the composition classroom by the fact that we are not strictly addressing the replication of specific forms and artifacts, but teaching a practice. The "rules" of a practice are bound to yield some mutated memes, I'd say, as individual practitioners work within their varying horizons of knowledge. It's an interesting problem, though, because it leads us to ask exactly what cultural movement is involved when it comes to the reproduction of genres and generic conventions in contrast to something like the conventions of punctuation. How analogous to ceramic pots are these? There seem to be varying levels of specificity, as in the three things I've mentioned: practices (which could include writing rituals, for example), generic forms, and specific markings.