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.