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.
Friday, January 29, 2010
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...
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...
Thursday, January 28, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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