Final Draft...

Hi, all.

You can view my final draft here. I accidentaly over-wrote my earlier file so the earlier links will also bring you to the final!

I wish you all a wonderful summer!

My seminar paper draft...

Here it is, folks. Enjoy!

my drafty-draft

Here it is, folks. I hope you can begin to tell at least, but in my project I'm interested in addressing how the current interest surrounding the concept of "re-mix" in our field is actually not that different than earlier views on using imitation to teach writing. Eventually, I'll look at how and why imitation fell out of vogue in composition (namely, I'll attempt to trace the death of imitation in our field as critical pedagogies emerged). I'm interested, too, in what imitation and re-mix allow us to think about (form and, most importantly, the form-content relationship). I see this project, tracing the relationship between "re-mix" and "imitation" as significant to the broader work I'm trying to do in understanding our current attention to form through multi-media work within our field without addressing past challenges to similar work. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or thoughts thus far. I worked hard on the "roots." Oh, and please view the project in "full screen" mode if you can. I think it does matter.

Reflecting on Prezi-making (most of this week's work)

Oddly enough, even though the Prezi that I made of this week "The Roots of Remix: Back to Imitation, Back to Form" was my first Prezi, it wasn't the first Prezi I've helped to compose. Four of my English 201 students are doing Prezis for their final projects this semester, and I've assisted their work by scrambling along side of them to figure out how to embed non-YouTube videos (YouTube vids are quite simple in Prezi; just paste in the link and there it is!) and how to create frames. However, after being quite surprised at the relative struggles my four very bright and savvy students experienced, I could completely relate early this week when I felt like pulling my hair and jumping up and down at the same time. I experienced three main struggles that I want to talk about here, struggles that display how my usual composing process has been shifted and thus made more visible: 1) the composing process (especially creating paths) and how that relates to reading your work aloud; 2) the tools for composing (working on different computers); and 3) an issue that relates very much to the first two: the scale/size of a Prezi--its physical location on the computer screen.

Firstly, when I write, I re-read my work back to myself so many times I could easily recite it. Seriously. This, I think, is what makes me the worst editor for my own work but, I think, it also usually strengthens my writing in other ways. This re-reading process was practically impossible on Prezi simply because of the ways in which Prezi doesn't allow you to delete paths very easily. That is, as I was writing, I either had to link all of my ideas up or leave them unlinked, which makes editing order very strange. Anyway, I have found ways to adjust by constantly linking and unlinking and relinking and...but it has been quite frustrating at times.

Another issue I had was that I found working on my Prezi on my tiny notebook to be near impossible. When I first stared experimenting with Prezi I though, "no way can I do this...this is way too clunky;" yet, oddly enough, I had much less trouble working on my desktop. I'm wondering if this experience has uncovered what I don't know about the slight differences between mac and pcs...hopefully I'll figure this out as I continue to work...

Lastly, my Prezi, right now, is all over the map (canvas). Seriously, it is pretty crazy. I've even lost some pieces of text. This will definitely take some work in thinking in new ways about presenting arguments spatially.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you've all created over the weekend! That's all I have for now...

Derek Mueller's "Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom"

In searching for some relevant articles for my final project, I came across the article, "Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom" by Derek Mueller. Given our heavily reflective and "pulling-things-together" mid-term week, I thought this would be an interesting article to blog about even if it may or may not be able to feed directly into my final project idea (you know, in the spirit of underlife and all...)

Essentially, this article details the geneaology of this concept and how it might be a more useful, sustainable and, ultimately tolerant way of being in a networked classroom. Muelller defines this in the following ways:

Digital underlife encompasses both an ulterior field for illicit communication and the elusive, underground discursive activities proliferated therein with the aid of digital technologies; it evokes an inexact sphere for extraneous, hyper-threaded interchanges between pairs of individuals or among crowds of users, as often asynchronous as transpiring in real time. Like more traditional conceptions of underlife, new and emerging variations of digital underlife greatly push the limits of institutional rules and roles. More frequently than ever before, transgressions of institutional rules and roles manifest in writing—in the digital packets of discourse that are no longer confined by the physical space of a singular institutional scene. And so it is a crucial concept for us to understand as teachers of writing, particularly when the students we work with are multiply and simultaneously engaged in the production and circulation of writing related to any number of disparate,contending subjectivities (241).

Here, Mueller seems to be stating that the digital underlife occurs when unsanctioned institutional activities (texting/IMing between students in the classroom) occur. Mueller suggests that instead of thinking of these activities as unnecessary or unproductive, we could instead think about these as somewhat generative. One of the main premisely for Mueller's argument is that demands on our attention have shifted as thus teaching in ways that make use of the recognize these varying demands on our and our students' attention will serve both us and them better.

I find Mueller's ideas intriguing because, as an instructor, I have always found it difficult to ask students to do particular kinds of things with their bodies (sit in circular arrangements, get up and stretch, sit in new seats each time). I often find it patronizing to make these kinds of requests of students (although, of course, I have learned to deal with this). Technology, then, is a logical extension. I never ask students to put phones away simply because I don't really feel like they've been a problem in my class. Similarly, when I taught in Curtin 108, I would sometimes see students on Facebook or other sites. Although I think I've found ways to "deal with" these kinds of moments productively (talking about this use of the technology with the class, asking students to email friends notes from class that day or text them regarding a conference sign-up time), I I know that I'm not seeing these spaces in the same generative ways that Mueller suggests...at least not entirely.

Further, I wonder about what the "digital underlife" might look like in a classroom that is online, such as ours. In this case, would the "digital underlife" take place in ways that transgress the expectations of the course by relying too heavily on f2f conversations or context that we've had outside of the course?

Carruthers' The Craft of Thought and Implications for the Composition Classroom

In this post, I'm going to trace out, Carruthers' foundational ideas on memory and invention and then place those in juxtaposition with how memory's relationship with invention seems to play out in central theories within our field (such as critical pedagogy). Ultimately, I want to suggest that Carruthers provides as way for us to complicate how we understand memory in our society and suggests that memory's role in creation is both downplayed and flattened in theories of writing such as those evident in critical pedagogy.

In Chapter One, "Collective Memory and memoria rerum," Carruthers suggests that memory is the "mother of all muses." By this, Carruthers means that memory, although it appeared near the end of the "five" parts of rhetoric, actually comes in much earlier as invention, Carruthers suggests is contingent on our memory. Carruthers traces classical Greek teachings on memory to suggest that memory was not taught for the purposes of mindlessly repeating information on exams but rather instead to give students a way to invent from memory. Memoria, Carruthers suggests, "is most usefully thought of as a compositional art. The arts of memory are among the arts of thinking, especially involved with fostering the qualities we now revere as 'imagination' and 'creativity'" (9). The distinction between how we currently think about memory in our teaching of composition was interesting to me because much of the earliest writing in critical pedagogy railed against teaching techniques that relied upon memory.

Of course, the cultural place of memory has now shifted so we might raise a question whether or not the Greeks' notion of cultural memory is relevant for us--would work for our means of teaching critical thinking or invention; yet, after reading Carruthers, I'm wondering if we can't better make use of a notion of memory as a means to invention within our own curriculum as we certainly seem to hold the parallel values as those lauded by Carruthers. How, though, would/could we draw from these without bumping up against the flattened vision of the role of memory now more pervasive in our culture. And one other quick point before moving on further in Carruthers' book: I've always been curious about how memory, in our contemporary contexts, is dealt with much differently in other disciplines. I remember in linguistics, for example, a professor who once gave a lecture on memorizing all of the information in our area within our field. "You'll need to do this to be a professor," he'd say. At the same time that I took that class, I was also enrolled in 701 and so I struggled with what he said; yet, I don't disagree that learned material or "memorized facts" are indeed deeply interwoven with "subject matter" classes such as linguistics or history, etc. I think Carruthers' text gives us a way to see this learning as having important and cultural outcomes and that's why I'm wondering about how we might hold onto some of this today even given the cultural shift in our sense of memory.

In her next section of Chapter 1, "Locational Memory," Carruthers details this shift in how we think about memory in our societies. She states that the Latin word, inventio, has come into English in two ways. The first of these ways means "to invent" or "to have an inventive mind" (i.e. to be creative) yet, the second is "inventory". Carruthers posits that this etymological relationship reveals something important about how the Classical Greeks thought of invention: you must have inventory to create and invent.

Again here, we can see how this idea present in Classical society could be used to trouble some of the current approaches to teaching composition in our field. If we choose to "wallow in complexity" or present texts to our students in ways that highlight their ambiguous nature, I'm afraid that we're losing some rich potential for a shared sense or "memory" of this text as a tool for invention. This is not to say that we still don't use memory to invent; I think Carruthers would say we perhaps always are. Yet, it suggests that because we are not attuned to this relationship, because we don't value it, we can't make the best use of it even given the way that memory has culturally shifted in our culture.

In the next two sections of her text, Carruthers distinguishes her sense of locational memory from a different sense of memoria that centered on memories that only referenced what had happened in the past. She then goes on in the next section of her text, to tie the concept of inventio with that of intentio (15). Here, Carruthers explains that the concept of intentio was bound to a sense of "charity" in monasteries and that this notion then bound emotion to facts in our mind. Intentio was bound to location and we were only able to access these in tandem with one another. This then leads Carruthers fourth section "Like a Wise Master Builder" where Carruthers explains that architectural features of buildings served as a means of invention and not simply retrieval. Carruthers argues that at the same time as locational memory and our inventions of them are private in that they are built in the networks of our minds, they are also public and civic due to the fact that all buildings contained similar building materials (21).

The importance of locational memory is interesting here not only because it demonstrates how our material conditions shape our thoughts but because it, as Carruthers' chapter aims to, displays that concepts which we in our field have thought of as dangerous or opposed to critical thinking actually have a history that is aligned with it. That is, although the notion of locational memory isn't in use today, perhaps we should attempt to re-think some of these historical relationships as a means to push our thinking about concepts like memory in different directions that could support the social aims of composition. But then I wonder about the actual possibility of this given, as I mentioned before, our differently situated place of memory.

Week 6 Reflection

I really like the way our discussions on the forums are unfolding with the exception that I wish there were more time in the semester and that these could be unfolding throughout the week. But even though these happen mainly at the week's end, I really appreciate the great questions people ask and the careful responses I've received to my concerns. I also really like the new forum this week in that it allows us some space to begin to pull things together from past weeks and to push forward in our thinking about how the digital spaces we are using relate to the readings we're doing.

Besides simply running short on time this week and not being able to attend to things in a way I would be happier about, I think things are generally going well. As I mentioned in my other post, the reading (particularly the Lauer) for this week are really providing me with a greater sense of context for these ideas and giving me some useful background of the field of rhetoric more generally.

A brief overview of invention...

As promised, all of the readings for this week seemed to complicate our sense of invention in some interesting ways. For me, one of the most useful purposes of the readings for this week is that I am beginning to see how these readings are inter-linked more clearly than before. For example, Hawhee's discussion of the middle seemed to capitalize on our earlier discussions around audience and Lauer's chapters discussed the ways in which Toulmin and P & O-T's notion of argument helped lead up to the renaissance of discussions of invention in our field.

While Lauer's text complicated our sense of audience through offering a historical overview of the many different ways to see invention's nature, purpose and epistemology, and tracing the ways in which these have been present or absent in our field, most interestingly since the 60s, Hawhee's writing troubled the ways in which we have come to see invention and works to discuss this through her concept of the "middle" and in light of postmodern theories. Hawhee's idea of the middle, as stated above, trouble the ways in which we see invention happening in relationship to the inside and outside and thus her writing has some relationship to Arabella Lyon's notion of rhetoric, which is coming from a feminist position. Lyon offers us the idea of negotiating rhetorical approaches to invention with hermeneutic approaches to invention. By tracing the ideas of Gadamer and Mailloux, Lyon suggests that rhetorical reading is one way in which we can see distinctions between the rhetor (or speaker) and the reader. Whereas Hawhee's work seeks to clarify then, where invention comes from and to trouble and loosen these divisions through the notion of a middle, Lyon seeks to look at the process of invention itself to complicate traditional divisions between production and consumption; writing and reading. For Lyon, who is engaged in revisionist dialogues, this notion of invention becomes one that lends itself to more inclusion.

I know that this is not an exhaustive overview by any means, but for this sake of moving on, I'll have to come back to these ideas in more detail through and in relationship to other concepts.

Lauer, Lauer, Lauer and more Lauer

While Invention in Rhetoric and Composition certainly wasn't the most compellingly written text for this week, it was the text I chose to focus most closely on because it was, in many ways, the text I needed to read and a text that I would like to do some writing on. What I appreciate about Lauer's book is its (seeming) comprehensiveness which helped me put some of the ideas I've been thinking about in greater historical context.

Lauer's main project in her book seems to be to historically trace the history of invention and to see that history in ways that speaks to crucial differences in the nature, purpose and epistemology of the concept. She notes the notion of invention is one that has been contested in ways that extend back to the Sophists and, for me, some of the most interesting discussion in Lauer is in regard to divisions between heuristics and hermeneutics and between debates over inventional pedagogy. What is useful for me in Lauer's work is the way in which the complicated history of "invention" itself helps to clarify what exactly is being highlighted in current work on invention and how we might more clearly understand pedagogical disagreements, for example, through considering the varying notions of invention at play between pedagogies.

After laying out some of the major contestations over the term "invention" in the first chapter, Lauer goes on to offer some broad definitions and a bit more contextualization for the study of invention in Chapter 2. Here, she explains classical terms used by the Greeks. Lauer explains that, "inherent in the notion of invention is the concept of process that engages a rhetor (speaker or writer) in examining alternatives: different ways to begin writing and to explore writing situations; diverse ideas, arguments, appeals and subject matters for reaching new understandings and/or for developing and supporting judgments, theses, and insights; and different ways of framing and verifying these judgments" (7). This definition of invention, though, becomes complicated by where in the composing process invention gets most heavily situated. Lauer introduces the concepts of kairos and dissoi logoi to discuss the ways in which the context of situation to determine the truth or falsity of a particular kind of claim. Most interestingly in this section, Lauer discusses Aristotle's work on topoi, "lines of argument and categories of information that were effective for persuasion, listing and grouping these topics so that they could be taught to others. Aristotle distinguished between common topic types that could be used universally and special topics that related to specific discourse. In contrast to these heuristic views of invention, Lauer also briefly lays our hermeneutic ways on seeing invention proposed by Burke and others who have, since the 1960s, shifted to looking at invention in ways that highlight its context-dependence.

In Chapter 3, Lauer throughly traces out the shifts in notions of invention throughout the times of the Greeks and throughout the Roman period and into the Renaissance. She argues that the importance of invention was lost (with the exception of in Greek society and in the Renaissance rhetorics taking up those Greek ideas) and that notions of invention were replaced by intuition and imagination, logic and discovery. I need to go back and read this chapter a bit more carefully, but I am confused at this point about how replacing invention with logic and discovery would remove the onus from invention since logic and discovery are related to invention. However, I do see how placing importance on intuition and imagination/creativity would stifle a serious attention to work on invention. As Lauer moves into her next chapter, she argues that invention remained dormant through most of the 20th century until, most notably, the 1960s where there was a major shift to hermeneutics and epistemological senses of invention seem to have taken hold.

After reading Lauer's chapter, I'm interested in looking more closely at how a shift from a heuristic approach to invention to a hermeneutic approach has relocated how we identify the work that invention does and where it happens. Although Lauer does explore this, I found her text to be too broad to see how this happens in a specific context such as, for example, pedagogical disagreements. Additionally, I would like to look more closely at the implications for Burke's work on invention. Most importantly, though, I'd like to look at theories of composition that are prominent within our field and trace out how they are defining invention and where they locate it and to use these observations to think about how each of these theories might successfully (or not) provide a way of shifting social structure by operationalizing (and teaching) invention in the ways that they do.

A Beautiful Portrait without directions: A reading of choice

One of the things I've been interested in this semester, is how the institutionalized splits between analysis and production situate us in less than useful ways for working with texts. This is a split that was central in the readings for this week on invention and so I decided to take a look at http://www.eliterature.org to see how digital literature was doing things that could trouble this split in interesting ways. While I was on the site, I heard a digital poem . And while listening to this poem by Thomas Swiss and animated by Motomichi Nakamura, I couldn't help but think about how even the split between writing and animating worked in some ways to reify this split. How could something "born digital" be written and animated by two different people? What would/could this kind of collaboration look like? This is yet another example, I think, of new forms not guaranteeing radically different ways of thinking.

While this poem, then, didn't help me gain many new insights into disrupting institutionalization of this split, I was interested by a feature on the page: the directions for reading digital works.

As I went to the sample texts page, I noticed that the narrative and game pieces offered directions for reading the pieces as a separate text. I was interested in how these directions work and how, in instances of "invention" this meta-textual information is provided as a way to help move and re-shape what our expectations for a text can be. While many of the links of other sample texts appeared to be broken, I was also interested in how certain texts, such as A Beautiful Portrait, didn't contain a link to this meta-text. I wondered why these texts were able to function on their own or even if and how they might benefit from a meta-text/directions like the other examples. These meta-texts are, of course, a form of invention in and of themselves as they, in ways, help us to invent interpretations of these texts, to identify them within their contexts and make meaning in ways that feel more comfortable and pleasurable.

Two *great* stories that I've read this month...that happen to be on the internet...

1) Great Experiment
2) Family Planning

Week 5 Reflection

Well, this week has been an insane week for me and, thus, it wasn't the best week for my work in this class. I really enjoyed, though, reading the Wells' article and I found myself wanting to spend more time with the readings from this week that I certainly didn't last week.

In terms of the wiki work, I mainly engaged in minor revisions this week. I really want to see us add more to the wikis, to make them something else and, although I've added new pages, and even inserted multimedia links, it seems difficult to unsettle them at this point.

I continue to see Twitter as mainly a tool that allows social cohesiveness to our class--which is great. Yet, I don't really see it as a tool that is allowing us to discuss the texts in any sustained way. Again, though, providing a social sense to our class is definitely valued work.

The discussion questions and my participation on the discussion board this week was definitely postponed. By now I usually have replied to at least two or three more questions than I have. However, I plan to keep active throughout the weekend to engage other late posters in some dialogue on the texts.

Not much else, I guess...just trying to look ahead now to next week...

Persuasion in a Peanut Shell: Burke, Gearhart, Rak and Wells

This weeks readings all focused, in one respect or another, on ways of complicating the traditional ideas about persuasion (for example, the ideas advocated by Toulmin and P & O-T). Burke's notion of identification achieved this complication by focusing on how utterances are always partial in their relationship to truth and to reality (some of these ideas were present, for example, in last week's notions of rationality, perhaps). Anyway, identification, for Burke, is always a product of the surroundings, the context, the positioning from which it emerges and, therefore, one cannot index Reality but rather reflect and these reflections are always subject to change. While I read Burke, a lot of the ideas that I'm familiar with from social constructivist works and phenomenology/ethnomethodology seemed to be present so as I re-read Burke, I'd like to figure out where the overlaps and distinctions are between these sets of ideas.

Gearhart, directly citing her objection to the traditional views of Toulmin and P & O-T instead suggested thinking about traditional forms of persuasion intending to change others' opinions as a form of violence. Gearhart relates these ideas to pedagogy by suggesting that models of teaching that insist on imparting knowledge are a form of violence. Gearhart is suggesting a form of dialogue that provides listening and mutual support and tolerance of others' ideas without the intent to change others' minds; however, Gearhart seems to imply that if we put ourselves in these kinds of contexts, we will inevitably be changed through the process. In connection with Burke, I certainly saw a higher degree of relativity and tolerance for plural and multiple truths in Gearhart than I recognized in the readings for last week (as these, even when flexible, seemed to rely on fairly rigid taxonomies); however, the one caveat to Gearhart's argument as pointed to in our discussion forum, is that Gearhart's way of seeing persuasion itself could be read as fairly inflexible.

In a similar strain, Rak's article makes a case for blogs as liberal kinds of spaces that move beyond a simple diary format; however, that are nonetheless often enacting privileged statuses by using untroubled notions of queer identities. Rak argues that blogs could have the affect of re-creating group boundaries and distinctions. In this sense, Rak's article, like some of the other things we've read, warns against the over-emphasis of assuming that newer, digital forms simply erase the baggage carried around in our other social contexts.

Finally, Wells' article take up issues of invention and form and the relationship between these two and political and social progress. Wells argues that the narrative features in the MOVE Report work against traditional narrative conventions of commission reports and, therefore, the HOME report is able to invent a new kind of narrative commission report with fragmented bullets which (re)create a (lack of) responsibility in that political, cultural and civic climate. Like the other readings for this week, Wells' work does focus on the local but in a different sense: instead of asking us to nuance persuasion by looking at local contexts, Wells' article seems to be asking us to look at the very local and structural formal elements of texts and a means to think about the broader political relations that we are enacting, creating and responding to through these texts.

Susan Wells's "Narrative Figures and Subtle Persuasions: The Rhetoric of the MOVE Report"

In "Narrative Figures and Subtle Persuasion: The Rhetoric of the MOVE Report," Sue Wells traces the ways in which a commission report on racial violence (as per the title, the MOVE Report) makes use of narrative structures in ways that frame this violence in politically benign ways--mitigating the responsibility of those who participated in senseless violent acts. By utilizing form toward particular ends, the report (and writers/reviewers and readers) are able to (re)structure a narrative of racial violence by relying upon formal features such as the fragmentation of narrative, the naming of characters and a specific use of hierarchy and subordination. These structures, Wells argues, allow for incongruous and problematic politics of such an event to preside comfortably, pleasurably, within a text pointing to and underscoring the political imperatives of paying attention to the importance of form, not simply as means to push forward with social justice in rhetoric and composition studies, but also to provide insight into how structures, if we do not carefully and critically attend to them, can be used to rationalize violence and injustice.

Wells states the following regarding the MOVE Report and the main project of her article:

This essay reflects upon that failure of both ideological and narrative coherence, seeing it as an expression of the commission's political and discursive situation, a situation that was difficult and contradictory. I will examine how this situation marks the element of the text, moving from relatively formal questions-How are characters named? How are episodes connected?-to a discussion of what counts as a good reason within the bounds of the text. My interest is to show how provisional are the boundaries between formal questions and political questions in this text; here, nothing is more deeply political than the text's representation of subordination (Wells 209).

Here, Wells writes about the bind between the formal and the political and how those are bound up in constructing reason within a text. As Wells moves through her chapter, she argues that along with attending to issues of form and the ways in which form implicates us into political situatedness, our analyses could benefit from the theoretical tools of the Frankfurt school and of literary critical theory. Before introducing Horkheimer and Adorno's notion of 'instrumental reason,' Shes states:

The creation of such a subject, the repealed proffering of multiple solutions, and the definition of the discursive situation as a problem are not accidents of production. The system of reason articulated within the report is neither universal nor transcendent; this piece of administrative writing articulates the maxims and rules of evidence of instrumental reason (Wells 220).

Here, Wells is suggesting that the MOVE report is simply not an accident of generic form but rather instrumentally and strategically makes use of textual aspects of narrative such as hierarchy, chronology, naming and causal relationships to assert particular politically multiple and situated bullet-ed narratives that resist assigning cause or blame. Although Wells is not suggesting that the report is the result of the fully conscious actions of any one writer, she does stress that the report specifically rejects conventions of commission reports in order to maintain the necessary fragmentation. On page 223 she writes:

The conventional report format, then, is subverted to the demands of narrative. The formula of segmentation, which could have fragmented the audience, here allows the document to recreate a new audience at each finding. A hierarchical report organization allows the Commission to present narrative movement as logical support, to lend the force of events moving through time to the movement of its own argument (Wells).

This section, for me, post compellingly points to one of Wells' central claims: that the structure of the narrative itself creates logic, creates reason to a situation that otherwise struggled to gain a narrative due to the social, political and cultural complexities that surrounded it. Here, Wells is claiming that their is a direct link between invention and social structure and, although Wells' example tends to show how social structure can certainly be maintained through the invention of new forms, we can also imagine how we might make similar arguments that social structure and inequalities could be shifted through invention/play with like narrative features or textual forms.

Although Wells' work was most interesting to me because of the implications regarding invention, form and shifts (or lack thereof) in social structure, I was also interested in a more marginal point that Wells makes toward the end of her text regarding pleasure. She writes the following:

Second, contemporary narrative theory raises the issue of pleasure, which is perhaps the most valuable prize that the rhetoric of inquiry could take in a raid on the arsenal of theory. Taking pleasure in a text is not the same as liking it, or identifying with it, or thinking that it is correct. It is an act of the reader, and a rhetorician who raises the question of pleasure has left his privileged spot at the speaker's elbow and taken an anonymous place among the audience. There, relying only on the intensity of his impolite whisper, the rhetorician addresses to whomever stands nearby an urgent and inconvenient question."Why do you want this to go on? Why do you want it to end?" In the case of the MOVE report, the pleasures of continuing and ending are local pleasures of containment and explanation. They arc ways of placing a disturbing event securely in the past, and of guaranteeing that it will not be repeated (Wells 228).

This notion of pleasure seems particularly useful because it gives us a way to think about why experimentation, when it is working well, can provide a sense of pleasure in allowing us to achieve particular aims; yet, it also, I feel, provides a way of thinking about why new forms of invention are needed. If we are seduced or persuaded into texts that provide us with pleasure but feel the need to make other kinds of arguments that may not be as easy to make with available forms or arrangements, then we need to gain a better sense of form and audience to make new kinds of texts that also are pleasurable for readers as a means of providing alternate social possibilities.

Arguments on the Internet: Three "How to Win" Guides

Because I'm running really short on time this week to post about anything more substantial, and because I've found the "10 Golden Rules" piece so interesting, I thought I'd post some examples of some popular "How to Guides" on winning social arguments.

Below are three examples of popular media/blog "How to Win Arguments on the Internet" pointers that I found interesting in the assumptions that are made regarding argument, "rationality" and audience.

Click here or here or here.

These three examples, I think, raise a tension for me in this week's readings which, of course, are prescriptive ways that we should see argument. These sites/posts, for me, echo a question that Nic asked in the discussion--what if people are arguing for the sake of "winning"? How does this change what argument is and the extent to which we can engage in it more "rationally" and mindfully? We had an extended discussion about the structures of argument in f-2-f environments versus online environments and I think these lists raise some interesting questions as to how many of these strategies have offline equivalents and which exist solely in online spaces. Additionally, I find the fact that I ton of these lists exist interesting in and of itself because it indicates that people (even those who don't have what some might consider "rich" or "deeply engaging" arguments online) seem to be fishing for the tacit rules, or the ways in which power in created in these spaces.

Lastly, I'm interested in what these three pieces assume about audience that sort of goes unspoken. How can the audience assumptions in these pieces be challenged by the either of the texts this week?

Week 4 Reflection

Here are some updates regarding my thoughts about the various "spaces" in our course along with new goals for continuing to be engaged in meaningful ways:

1) Twitter
I tried taking notes on Twitter but found it too challenging to take notes in ways that were meaningful enough (and not completely boring) to others. They did help me trace my online reading, but because I don't want to be "hidden" by my colleagues, I think I'll just stick to plain old paper and pencil. I currently see the function of Twitter as more of a "social" aspect of class; yet, I think we could be doing more with it. This week, I'm going to try and create just a few "Twitter" notes about the readings that will (hopefully) be much more appealing to read but will offer a early-week reminder of what I found interesting.

2) Wiki
This week, I started another new page on the wiki (that I haven't had time to write much in) and also worked a lot on actually restructuring the writing that was there. This was challenging, but things are shaping up (and loosening up) just enough now that this arrangement work didn't feel too terrible. I hope next week I can continue this work and shed a bit more of my wiki-arrangement-shyness.

3) Discussions/Reading
I totally put myself at a disadvantage this week by starting the readings later than usual and having a really difficult time (like crazy difficult) becoming engaged in the arguments. Ugh. I really need to finish the readings by Monday and work through the rest of this post-Monday slowly and throughout the week. I notice that we all seem to cram our posts in at the last minute and, obviously, I'm sure that greatly impacts the quality of discussion. However, one interesting consequence of this is that I feel we are all pretty much online for most of Friday so, in some ways, it feels like we are together in our space on Friday! Another week of hoping not to be working up until the last minute...!

An Overview of Audience: Working to Complicate Trait-Views of Audience

Jack Selzer's article focuses on the notion of discourse communities as a ways to disrupt more traditional notions of "audience" often associated with what Julie called on our discussion board, the "pipeline" approach (this is what we often see in market and statistical research). Selzer accomplishes this by locating the composer within the discourse community. In other words, while traditional theories of audience have often situated the audience and the rhetor in separate spaces, Selzer blurs this relationship and therefore encourages us to acknowledge this more dynamic sense of composing and viewing/reading texts.

While Selzer's work blurs the boundaries between audience and composer by locating the composer in the discourse community of the audience, Porters work accomplishes this by focusing on the relationships between production and consumption in a temporal sense. That is, by privileging the spaces in between production and consumption, Porter is able to, like Selzer, focus on consumption and production as two sides of the same coin.

Bennett also extends the critique of statistical senses of audience by critiquing opinion polling. Bennett proposes three active audience views of readers.

Ang's piece moves in a similar direction as the Selzer, Bennett and Porter in that Ang writes against the assumption that market research methodologies aren't adequate to gauge a sense of audience as complex. Ang offers contextualizing methodologies such as ethnography as a way to work against the flattened senses of audience that exist when audience merely becomes a list of traits. Yet, Ang is aware that ethnography, too, is bound to miss complexity as it offers us so much contextual data to grapple with. A contextual sense of audience, for me, doesn't blur the boundaries to the same extent as the work by Selzer and Porter.

Sundet and Ytreberg, for me, made the most compelling argument in that they suggest that despite the convergence of producers and consumers in our contemporary society, participation or the blurring of these lines don't necessarily guarantee the kinds of positive associations that we link with activity. Additionally in Sundet and Ytreberg, I thought that technologies themselves were used as a means of complicating senses of audience. In the rest of the texts, I felt like the end goal was to focus on audiences as active rather than passive and that this seemed like a positive end in and of itself; yet, Sundet and Ytreberg complicated not only how we conceive of audiences but also were successful in complicating the social and cultural implications of new ways for thinking about audience.

Week 3 Reflection

This week has been a very odd week for me thus far. I feel like I'm finding my way in (and realizing the limitations of) Twitter. Also, I feel like I was able to be more of an active presence in the discussion this week. As I stated in one of our meta-forums, the questions style of discussion helped me to generate ideas in a way that I thought would be useful for others to deal with. However, my engagement in that forum sort of leaves me burned out for the night and I'm seriously trying to gain momentum to post by blog post on the readings...my brain seriously feels deadened right now!

I'm still struggling with the wiki. I did add a page today but I'm feeling reluctant to make changes to pages that feel like they belong to others. I know I have to get over this but it just feels so strange.

Another aspect of the course that I need to work on is being able to post brief synopses of the articles we've read and make connections. I want to engage all of the material in more depth and my desire to do so, I know, is holding me back from just taking from the readings what I can. So, mainly, I still think I need to continue working on my goals for last week because, although I think I was able to jump in a bit more this week, there is still a lot I could do better.

One strategy I think I'll use to meet my goals more fully this week is to attempt to log on every day (even if for some days I can only be on for an hour). This, I think, will help me in increasing my interactions with others.

Ah, so much meta-stuff involved in this class and still I feel like I'm leaving something out!

Using contemporary notions of audience to dispupt the division between textual analysis and production...

Lately, I've been working on sorting out, making connections between, and making arguments about the connections between the "analytic" work that I do and the "creative" work that I do. Of course, unlike the Miller blog that we read earlier this semester, analytic work always involves creativity and creativity, I believe, either consciously or subconsciously involves an element of critique/analysis (even if this is really implicit). Things that are beautiful and moving are also doing other kinds of work and things that are doing consciously analytical work still have "forms," no matter how seemingly neutral those forms are often taken to be by many people within our society.

Because I've been thinking a lot about these issues, I've been struggling with why people who do more "analytic" kinds of work don't acknowledge the forms they choose for doing this work and why people who do creative work don't like to talk explicitly about their work as doing something critical, especially something theoretical. Personally, I understand (for the most part, anyway) the histories of Western culture that have developed that allow us to believe that these two acts are divorced from one another. Distinctions between the mind and body where made early on in Greek societies and these examples can still be used to account for differences in how we treat texts that are beautiful and moving and those that engage us intellectually. I've seen very smart people rely upon these distinctions and even though I care deeply about combining these, folding them upon one another, I often find myself tempted to fall back upon these culturally prevalent age-old distinctions.

I believe that there is something immensely valuable from moving toward spaces where we recognize the convergences of these two kinds of seemingly separate work. This, then, is where I see the work on audience as so potentially valuable because analysis, like audience, isn't merely passive. Analysis is a form of creation, *is* creative, just as production also necessitates situating ones self as an audience member (thinking about how ones text will be received).

One interesting side effect of the split between analysis and production is that people who do analysis don't think very much about why they are able to create what they create. They often attribute their desire to participate and become a part of things with learning a series of textual conventions, entering into a discourse community, etc; however, creative work often privileges an inherent "drive" or creative impulses. Hence, this split between analysis and production has led to two very different ways of thinking about the impetus to create different kinds of texts. For creative works, we often don't see this drive framed as something explicit or explicitly political (although these texts certainly often have these effects or resonances). For analytic works, we often see explicitly stated political motives and agendas but little detail for how these works are crafted or shaped through process. That makes me wonder, what these two areas could say to one another if we looked, side-by-side at their ways to approaching creativity. How might we use approaches to audience to help bridge our thinking about textual production and analysis? Because audience studies--especially those for this week--tend to disrupt the idea that there is such a thing as "an" audience or people who merely consume or produce, it is a key idea that I hope to thread through these questions.

This week, I listened to this talk given by the author Elizabeth Gilbert, an author that I would probably never read. I listened to the lecture because it was recommended to me by a professor whom I very much respect and who claimed the lecture, even in its relative simplicity, was helpful for the ways she thought about creativity. In the lecture Gilbert argues that the notion of "a genius" removes the pressure from individuals who create and mitigates this pressure because of the ancient belief that a force, god, or deity is responsible for the production as well. Of course, for many reasons, this lecture goes against the sensibilities I've acquired in my training in sociology, linguistics and rhetoric and composition about creativity and notions of "genius" and responsibility; however, I'm wondering about how, when we are converging creative and analytic work (not in actuality as they are already entangled, but as they exist as fields) how we'll contend with interesting differences like notions of "creativity" as they arise. In terms of Gilbert's notion of "a genius" as an outside force that speaks to someone would be a useful construct; however, I question to extent to which this notion disrupts creativity as something that belongs ultimately still to an individual (after all, Gilbert claims that a dialogue with a genius (i.e. spirit of some sort) is a dialogue between that spirit and the author.) This notion of "a genius" along with the social baggage that it carries, is one that tends to prevent creators from being encouraged to think about their composing consciously, or state it explicitly.

It is true that I take issue with notions like Gilbert's but I also think that this notion of creativity does capture something that ideas of acquiring a discourse in composition, or learning to produce analysis, fails to recognize. And that is desire, and pleasure. I think that often we talk about acquiring discourses from institutional and social critique purposes; yet, we often fail to motivate students to engage in these processes of critique with enthusiasm (even when I succeed at this, I feel it is less of my doing than a students pre-realization of their situatedness and their preparation to engage in the work of critique. In that way, I wonder if the kinds of critique that happen in creative works are more available to students in some way...they certainly seem more engaged in this kind of work, even when it becomes co-opted by for-grade assignments in the classroom. So, I guess my final question here that I'd like to keep thinking about is how might a convergence of these notions of creativity offer us something richer? Is it possible for these to re-converge, to put these in dialogue? I hope so, and, for now, I'm going to keep trying.

Week 2 Reflection

Goals for next week:

1) To use twitter as a kind of note-taking as I read
2) To discuss earlier and more often on the reading (at least 7 posts)
3) To address people in the course that I don't know as well
4) To work on the wikis by thinking more about re-arrangement

Not much else at the moment except hating myself for finishing the work right before the deadline. Ugh.

Weather bracelets and Ponoko and the teeming void and the social of DIY making ...

A lot of people have a mother that made cookies. Mine did, too. Sometimes. She might make them in between sewing an entire collection of gigantic dinosaurs for a window display or painting large canvases with 3-D objects protruding out of them. When I was seven, my mother learned to use power tools and, for much of our youth, she was out in our gararges (we moved a few times) making furniture or reworking huge objects made of metal or wood. Even today, because she can't use a computer, she will often ask me to "look on the internet" for large metal grommets or a particular kind of hardware or stain or upholstery fabric. My mother, in short, is always making things, has always made things. She has made a some (but very little) money off of the things she's made, but she doesn't stick with anything long enough to develop a "product" or a static style. When Etsy came about, though, I really thought that my mom would finally have a market for the things she made. For a while, she had hope, too, I think. But the more I learned about Etsy and like sites, the more I saw it shift and, for the most part, come to value a particular kind of aesthetic (one, I might add, quite in line with commercial tastes), I realized that Etsy was, like any face-to-face community, not as tolerant of variances in style or taste. Don't get me wrong, I like the things on Etsy, and I like that I can supposedly "feel good" for not supporting corporations. But I like Nordstrom, too, and corporations have become, it seems, increasingly savvy at letting you know that if you spend so much you are helping kids in Africa with AIDS get medicine or, more recently, feeding the hungry in Haiti. What is the difference, then, between buying things from Etsy to do "good" or things from Nordstrom to do "good"? This is a question that always comes up for me and one, that, is more complicated to answer than what it may seem.

The blog I read for today, then, was the teeming void blog, and after reading a few entries, one that caught my eye was an entry on a 3-D printed weather bracelet that reflected weather patterns. This post fit into the overall project of the teeming void because the posts their are largely regarding a data aesthetic.

Although the idea of data as aesthetics is quite interesting to me, what impressed me most about this post is a link I followed to a site called Ponoko where, apparently, you can have 3-D objects printed for you and laser-cut. There was another post on the teeming void, where the author tested this out by ordering some laser-cut wood pieces.

What interests me about Ponoko, then, and the ability to custom order these kinds of things, is it gives the common person access to a kind of technology that was once only available to the owners of the means of production. (It is also interesting to note that the aesthetic on Ponoko is one that is less commercially polished, unlike Etsy or Nordstrom). This gives me a sense, then, that is technology (even though it is still a consumable product) has some interesting potential for allowing people to make things that were not formerly possible. My mother, for example, would often search for industrial materials but be impeded in her projects by what was on the shelf at Ace Hardware or K-Mart.

As interesting as the weather bracelet idea is, though, I think it points to another issue that came up in our discussion this week: access. Even though Ponoko is on the internet and, in theory, accessible to a lot of people, this certainly doesn't guarantee its accessibility in other senses of the word. A person who is savvy enough and has enough cultural capital to consider "data aesthetics," for example, can experiment with the making Ponoko provides; yet, someone like my mother cannot. Even more so, the raw technologies would perhaps have made it possible for someone like my mother to mass-produce her work by standardizing 3-D, lazer-cut parts; however, that process would likely shape her craft work into something else, something more co-opted and less clunky, less hers.

On Politics, Power and Persuasion: The New Roles of Rhetoric

Because it is difficult for me to do a quality synthesis of all of the texts in one post, following some of you, I'm writing my response this week in pieces so that I can do a better job of responding for my own archival purposes of thinking about these texts. In other words, when I write with many texts in mind, I often find that I write in ways for the purpose of folding in all of the texts, rather than doing each of them justice and making connections that are more meaningful to me and, I hope, for others.

***

So, in this post, I'll start by discussing the Crowley and Miller & Charney texts and discuss what I take to be a tension between their their notions of rhetoric and, more specifically, the role of persuasion. While Crowley's text is written as a critique of a particular notion of rhetoric as conservative, I'm interested in how Crowley imagines the function of rhetoric and how that may be cutting across some of what Charney & Miller suggest about the role of persuasion and how me might most usefully understand persuasion's role in rhetoric.

In her article "Communications Skills and A Brief Rapprochement of Rhetoricians," Sharon Crowley responds to Nancy McKoski's claim that rhetoric is regressive. McKoski's claim that rhetoric is tied to conservatism is troubling to Crowley because she rejects the evidence pointed to by McKoski (that rhetoric is tied to New Criticism, Neo-Thomism, Neo-Humanism, etc.) to support this claim. Crowley also finds McKoski's valuing of the social sciences as relatively more progressive problematic because she states, "rhetoric can be put to all sorts of political uses. It is true enough that for most of its history rhetoric was deployed by members of elite classes as a means of preserving their economic and social privilege. But it has also been used, as it was by Mary Wollstonecraft and Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr., to dislodge oppressive political and cultural practices" (99). What Crowley goes on to do, then, is to juxtapose McKoski's claims that rhetoric is conservative and a supporter of the status quo with the institutional and disciplinary positioning of rhetoric and rhetoricians as marginalized or subordinated. Crowley seems to be doing this work in an attempt to get rhetoricians within both English and Communication departments to see the importance and mutual dependence of each others' work despite the disciplinary divides and to, in an analysis that seems almost Marxian, urge rhetoricians to look to the places in their own departments where rhetoric is being constructed with disciplinary baggage that is not necessary. For Crowley, rhetoric, a field that gives us access to critique of power structures through being able to "determine when and how an argument is fishy," is in danger and this danger stems, in part, from the ways in which rhetoricians are being positioned and positioning themselves within institutional and departmental apparatuses.

In their chapter, "Persuasion, Audience and Argument," Miller and Charney frame their insights with the concept of persuasion arguing that all texts, of course, are persuasive. What was most interesting for me in this chapter, was the break down of approaches to persuasion that occurred from pages 591-592. This breakdown was interesting to me because I've seen these approaches in various texts I've read and embedded within the kinds of arguments that people make; however, considering Crowley's text, I'm particularly interested in Crosswhite's rhetoric of reason or what Miller and Charney term, "descriptive approaches to rhetoric" and how those fit within Crowley's stance on the place of rhetoric within English and Communication arguments.

Let me back up for a moment to discuss how Miller and Charney seem to be fleshing out prescriptive versus descriptive approaches to rhetoric. Firstly, Miller and Charney describe "truth-seeking theories of argumentation...which have traditionally had a strong prescriptive bias". While many "truth-seeking theories" seem quite dated, there are also ethical standards, for example, focusing more on "empowerment and justice than on truth (591). Feminists, in a different strain, can argue that any form of argument or persuasion is "an act of violence" (591); yet, not all feminists hold this position. After discussing these (and other) prescriptive approaches to persuasion and argumentation, Miller and Charney go on to offer descriptive approaches (those of Crosswhite, for example). Descriptive approaches to evaluating argument seem fruitful because the evaluation of the arguments is based in the audience. I'm interested in descriptive approaches to rhetoric; yet, I wonder about their potential to fold out into relativism (although I won't go into that here).

Given Crowley's position on the role of rhetoric and the function of and place of it in the university, I'm interested in how what she asserts seems to be hinged upon an ethical notion of argument that is more closely aligned with truth-seeking rhetorics than descriptive rhetorics. To be clearer, Crowley seems to be suggesting that there is an emancipating function of teaching rhetoric; that rhetoric can be used to subvert oppression and that, like she says in her concluding paragraph, to be able to "determine when and how an argument is fishy". Despite the appeal of descriptive rhetoric, then, is there something about the ethical ways in which rhetoric functions within contexts such as the university that seem to be less context based and connected to universal-ish kinds of ideas about ethics (although universal isn't the right word because ethics, of course, are also hinged on context)? I guess my point here is that although thinking about rhetoric in descriptive ways seem most appealing to me sometimes, because it seems to afford more nuances, I can see the necessity of holding on to a sense of ethics as Crowley does.

I'm interested, too, in what sense of persuasion seems to underpin the other articles we've read thus far and how that all factors into the history of rhetoric as it is so often narrated to us.

Week 1 Reflection

Firstly, I am absolutely exhausted. I am tired of sitting and reading on-screen and, at this point, Carr's argument seems just a little too compelling.

In terms of this week, I want to spend more time going back over the wikis and not just adding but forcing myself to actually shape and move around some of the text.

Additionally, in terms of the readings, I feel like I need to go back and focus on the places in the arguments where there was some break down of the distinctions I wrote about and focus there. As I read the Miller piece, I thought about how it was, in essence, a performative contradiction: he called for more creativity but did so academically, in an blog using mostly acadmemic prose.

I realize that we are all doing the same and, so, if I ever get enough time, I'd like to try and remediate (or think about how I might remediate) some of my responses to these texts in other ways.

False Distinctions?: Pulling Apart and Weaving Together...

The readings for this week all seemed to speak to, in one way or another, the kinds of possibilities for subjects and for acting subjects in our world of "global" technologies.

The overriding concern in these texts for me this week, though, are regarding how these texts seem to package the changes that have occurred in our societies and how those changes have impacted who we are able to be in our worlds. In some ways, I felt compelled by arguments that claim that we are in a new age, an age that has never had the same kinds of impacts as the internet will bring about. Yet, I think this is because I want to be compelled by these arguments. I want to believe that I am living within a time of great change, a time where revolutionary things are happening and where new possibilities are constantly emerging. In my own academic work, though, I have stressed the importance of looking to the places where new technologies simply reproduce or perpetuate social structure in the same ways (or worse, in ways that seem as if new possibilities are emerging but, really, the same old inequalities are just made more covert).

I'm worried because, in all of these texts, I see a strive for an almost-too-clean break from the past. And whether theorists seem to lean on the side of technology as damning or technology as liberating, I see all of these texts striving to create these distinctions that I'm not quite sure I'm comfortable with. These distinctions are distinctions between old and new; productivity and waste; sharing and selling; good ethics and bad ones. Yet, when we create these divisions, as admittedly, it is so easy to do with technology, I think we are losing out on something that is most valuable: we are losing out on understanding technology as it is used...always (or almost always) in conjunction with other technologies--technologies as old as writing systems themselves and as new as the iPad.

Carr's piece on Cushings, for example, centers on the distinction between those whose brains can work harmoniously with computers and those, like himself, whose brains are better circuited to read books. Although Carr has a sentence near the end of his piece that states, "A great many will likely be somewhere between the extremes, thankful for the Net's riches but worried about its long-term effects on the depth of individual intellect and collective culture". Here, although Carr acknowledges the dichotomy he is working within, he still holds it up by presenting "many" of us as stuck between two poles. I certainly don't deny that often books and more contemporary technologies are *presented* as extremes; yet, I'm worried that focusing on these as extremes will undercut the ways in which *both* of these technologies (books and computers, for example) can be used to do particular kinds of work. I guess what I'm saying is, I think Carr and other technology theorists spend a lot of time looking at macro trends instead of considering how books and computers serve different purposes and can be used toward different ends.

Another one of these distinctions exists in the way Miller distinguishes between the creative and critical. In this case, my concern is that Miller seems to be forgetting how the creative and critical are always in relationship with one another. To say that he values the creative over the critical, I think, is forgetting that the creative is always in relationship (whether directly or indirectly) to the critical (even if this is happening subconsciously).

He states:

I’m more interested in creative thought than in critical thinking. I think work in the humanities has been both stimulated and paralyzed by the race to expose the flaws in the conceptual foundations of this or that hermeneutic system. And I might as well admit that I also have difficulty with the larger claim that the primary aim of work in the humanities is to generate knowledge. If one is dealing with work that is either nonfalsifiable or inconsequentially falsifiable, then one isn’t involved in the generation of knowledge. Rather, one is moving between the realms of belief and subjective experience, tracing the inner landscape that defines our humanity. Finding the limits of what we know is an abiding activity of higher education and an essential part of clearing space and time for future endeavors to better understand the human condition. But equally important are the efforts to get to work in that newly cleared space....My interest in pedagogy is an expression of my desire to find ways into the spaces that have been laid waste by critique, analysis, argumentation. How, for example, to build a model for education once the university has been declared a ruin, branded irrelevant, yoked to the dead carcass of the automotive industry and sent careening off a cliff? How to create a classroom where students are asked to sit with real world problems, to engage with multiple variables simultaneously, to plunge into the bottomless sea of information that has been unleashed by the World Wide Web? (Miller).

Although I can certainly empathize with Miller's desire to see something in the "newly cleared space," I guess what troubles me most is the notion that these things work apart from one another. And, although this separation is one that is probably correlated with technology, last time I checked, it is a separation that pre-dated the computer (literary analysis/creative writing). I think that technology, in some ways, *can* but will not always help us facilitate critique and production. But we need both of these just as we need to read to write and write to read. These are mutually dependent.

The video we watched, despite claiming that we are the machines, that machines are us, which was probably the lesser of the dichotomy arguments, still claimed that form and content can be separated out on the internet. I have to think about this more, but I guess it is something I am highly suspicious about. As I've said in the discussion space, doesn't re-packaging mean re-making?

Among the most troubling distinctions, though, is the distinction made regarding the "spirit of the net" as collaborative and not for profit. While the net does encourage participatory and democratic action in certain spheres, I think to assume that it is anti-corporate and anti-profit at its spirit creates an, again, too-easy revision. It is particularly irritating to me because these are the kinds of claims that end up equating online action as participatory without think about the extent to which this "spirit" existed prior to technology.

It is stated:

Since 1995, I’ve been writing about and talking about what I call the “Spirit of the ‘Net.” The Internet was not meant for marketing and selling but for communication and connection to people and information. Understanding this, even today, can flip your marketing and selling strategy on its head, but you’ll have far more success respecting the spirit of the ‘Net, rather than throwing money at hard-sell tactics.

Here, we are asked to believe that connecting and communicating are better ways to use the Net than "hard-sell tactics;" yet, ignores the fact that communicating and connecting are often co-opted by those in power to create more supposedly "ethical" positions for those that are simply using technology in "better" (i.e. more savvy ways). To be clearer, there is nothing inherently better about communicating or connecting, rather, it is what that communicating or connecting is doing or enabling that is important.

Ah, there is so much more to say (and I don't have time to edit this right now)...but I will revisit this all soon...

On ownership and authority and wiki writing...

One of the first things I clicked on when Anne sent us the link for this course was one of the wikis. Already, smart ideas had been added, and the wiki looked--as all beginning wikis do--like a giant jumble of ideas, priorities, tones and understandings. Between responding to emails and knocks at my office door, I simply couldn't read the wikis, I could barely follow an edit before it would get changed. Wikis, I think, despite their many advantages and collaborative potential, are just difficult that way. Always shape-shifting from one entry to the next, always shifting even within one entry. Despite their "collaborative" possibilities, then, wikis also make it difficult to want to collaborate. Their is definitely a rather high price of admission: being willing to, or at least tolerating, others' edits to your own work. I want to respond here, then, to the experience of having our work be edited or revised and what that means. As one of you pointed out during the discussion this week, as we compose texts like wikis, there is perhaps a greater potential for us to learn from others. Yet, I think this "learning from others" aspect, which is often thought of as a "benefit", is deeply linked to one of the more difficult aspects of using a wiki--the discomfort. It seems to me that when we give up our own "I," we are also giving up some authority, authority of something that is collectively owned. And when we do that, we probably just remain a bit unhappy with what is collectively produced, as Kristi pointed out. However, I think this whole process also changes or shifts a bit what our notion of our own "I" is in the first place. It is this idea of the shifty "I," of the the possibility for thinking about our relationships with text--our very personal relationships with texts--in a new way that interests me.

The idea that writing is linked to character is certainly not a new idea, although it is an idea that, for political reasons, has not always been popular in rhetoric and composition. In John Gardner's 1991 edition of *The Art of Writing Fiction* he states, "Diction problems are usually symptomatic of defects in the character or education of the writer. Both diction shifts and the steady use of inappropriate diction suggest either a deep down bad taste or the awkwardness that comes from inexperience or timidity" (101). Obviously, Gardner's assumptions seem deeply problematic to many of us that have studied the correlation between language and social position. As someone with a background in linguistics and sociology, this statement seems absolutely shocking in that it seems to assume that language that is unconventional or non-standard is deficient or lacking in some way. While there are many theories in rhetoric and composition that take strong stances against deficiency models in writing, I sometimes wonder exactly how far we've moved away from Gardner's stance because many of us seem very uncomfortable having writing that looks different than our own representing us, even collectively representing us. Yet, I also know, that we all--at least I think we all do--believe we are doing good social work, that we are working toward a better world, a world more honest, generous and just. I know those sound like some Big Ideas (and even a little fluffy); however, I guess the underlying questions for me this week are these:

1) What is at the heart of our discomfort with letting others' work represent our own?
2) What features of texts are we most fearful of losing control over and what do those fears suggest about what characteristics or values we want to convey to others in our writing?

This is just a start but hopefully we'll discuss issues of writing and ownership and authority more as the semester proceeds.

Polysyndetone and 753 and another introduction...

I know I already introduced myself on ning, but I'm not used to that space yet so I'm going to re-introduce myself here and talk a little about how I've envisioned my work in this class and on this blog.

I should confess: I'm a multi-blogger (this is the fifth blog I've started in two years--I erased the first one, and deeply regret it). Every time I need a blog space for a class I'm teaching or taking, I start a new one. I was also one of the last people on the planet without a Facebook account. I guess these things, for me, are connected because I often resist bringing things (or people in my life) together. I like to connect things in a controlled way in my mind, slowly understanding the relationships between ideas or people and, then, carefully bridging them or simply deciding not to. I named my blog "polysyndeton," then, because it means using a series of conjunctions to bring things together (things that might not otherwise be brought together in such a way with equal importance often created through the repetition of conjunctions) and, in a sense, that is what I would like to do in this class...I want to pull stuff together, stuff that has been with me for a while now, stuff that I've left separated out into tidy packages by courses I've taken or spaces I live in or the contexts in which I know things.

Firstly, I'd like to get better at moving between the multiple platforms that we'll rely upon in our class (which are currently freaking me out a bit). I'd like to make them work better with each other and to sharpen my sense of what each is good and not so good for. Also, I'd really like to use contemporary rhetorical theory to begin to pull some of my previous coursework together, to force it to come together.

So bringing things together, bringing things together that have, for me, sort of resisted coming together is a main interest of mine in this space as I approach next year, the third year of my doctoral work.