digital digs

Public and Private Course Blogs

There's been some discussion of this issue on Blogs discussion list. Generally speaking, I think the sentiment is to encourage public blogs. I am not entirely sure what a "private" blog would mean. On Typepad, private means they do not list your blog in their recently updated list. However, it doesn't mean that a blog is password-protected or anything like that. I suppose one could create a password-protected blog, but what would be the point? One might as well use WebCT or some other CMS.

Some have raised the issue of FERPA (the federal law that, among other things, establishes a degree of confidentiality between faculty and students). Because of FERPA, a professor cannot discuss a student's grades or work with a parent (without written permission from the student) and cannot leave graded material in a public place (e.g. outside an office door) for a student to pick up. However, FERPA doesn't protect students from making in-class presentations or sharing their writing in a workshop or participating in an online discussion in Web CT. It would protect them from having such work graded publicly, but sharing work in public is not prohibited by FERPA (which would make the law fairly idiotic, wouldn't it?)

More interesting is the issue of copyright. A student's post to a blog or WebCT is copyright protected. I would presume that the student retains all rights to whatever they publish. However, if I have a blog that I pay for and I require my students to post there, who owns the posts when the course ends? I assume they do, but I assume I have the right to delete messages. Ultimately the issue is a minor one as there is little commerical interest involved.

In any case, I am in agreement with the majority on the list. For me, the educational value of blogging, particularly for aspiring professional writers, is its status as public writing. One of the primary purposes of writing is to engage in a conversation with the world. Even if few read it, imagining an audience has a significant effect on writing...or at least it should!

I've had students blogging for a couple years now. Blogging collectively on a course website and blogging individually on free sites like Blogger. Their Blogger sites can be fairly anonymous and usually I allow them to write on whatever they want as long as they post regularly. The purpose is simply for them to have the experience of blogging like the rest of us. On the course website they are identified by name and so there is more accountability.

I suppose a student might complain about sharing their work online. I have had colleagues who were reluctant to put their syllabi online out of fear someone would steal their work. I've had students who didn't want to workshop their drafts because they suspected their peers might take their ideas. These are isolated cases, but I would tell them the same thing. The purpose of writing is to produce and communicate knowledge. Yes, there is a risk of theft and other risks as well, other consequences and judgments (see my recent post on academic blogging). That's part of the deal. That's what makes rhetoric interesting and important.

Writing has consequences.

Teaching "Writing Fiction"

First off, I should say that I came into graduate school as a "creative writer," writing poetry. And I've written poetry and fiction, and I still have some notion of doing so seriously...maybe, but my attention for the last decade has been in rhetoric and theory. During that time, I've taught creative writing probably five or six times, though not in a few years. Reading over the texts I might use, I am reminded again of the general antipathy writers seem to feel toward theory. Now I've met many writers who don't feel this way, but this general sense does seem to come out in texts (e.g. Gardner's Art of Fiction).

Despite coming into the field through creative writing, I never had this reaction to theory. I suppose b/c my intertest in poetics was in how language functioned--

• as a cultural, historical, and technological mechanism imbued with ideological power


• as a rhetorico-aesthetic practice that is beautiful, persuasive, instructive, etc.


• as an embodied-material, evolutionary, non-"human"/unconscious adaptation, a human quality akin to beaver dams, spider webs, beehives, anthills, etc.

It is this last that continues to interest me the most as unexplored territory. The danger is to "naturalize" language in some form of naive realism (again this is what Massumi discusses). However, beyond that is the investigation of language/writing as materiality constituitive of thought/consciousness, rather than ancillary to it.

In my opinion, the best writers--philosophers, poets, novelists--of the last century have recognized and explored this issue through stream of conscious, surrealism, drug-use, experimental and aleatory methods, meditation, and other means. I suppose if there is a thread running through my work of the last dozen years or so, it is thinking about how these explorations impact teaching writing, particularly in the context of new media.

Anyway, I'm going to have to figure out a way to present this all to students.

Professor Blogger

A recent article in Slate once again recounts the woes and dangers of academic blogging. I just want to make a few points on this.

1. If an academic is blogging about daily life or hobbies or politics or popular culture, then these things mostly likely have nothing to do with his/her job. Of course, this doesn't mean that one's colleagues or potential colleagues might not read it and come to some negative conclusion. A blogger can try to be careful, but if you say what you think, someone will inevitably disagree with you or come away with some negative opinion of you. That's not just the nature of blogs; that's the nature of writing. Blogging just means one of your colleagues is likely to read what you wrote, whereas conventional scholarly publishing is probably a surefire way to ensure that you write something no one in your department will ever read.
   
   BTW, I don't think this situation is any different outside academic circles. The lesson here, for all professionals, is that blogs are public (no kidding!). Write about something trivial and risk your audience considering you a lightweight. Write about something substantial and risk angering your audience.
   
   Rhetoric is risk: ask Socrates.
2. If you blog about professional-scholarly issues, as I generally do, the danger is in your colleagues wondering why you are blogging instead of doing "real" writing. The Slate article discusses this in a thoughtful way. I think this is primarily an issue in the humanities and perhaps some social sciences. Despite their political tendencies, these are not progressive entities. No one should expect that the academy will ever accept blogging as an activity on par with conference presentations, let alone publication.
   
   That said, I think the underlying technologies of blogging (e.g. database-driven web publication, comments/trackbacks, folksonomic networks, RSS, etc.)--or what follows on them--will form a basis for the future of academic communication. Based on this premise, I see two key challenges:
   
   a. Building an academic discourse that takes advantage of the rhetoric and epistemological characteristics of the technologies. Most online journals are simply the electronic delivery of conventional print essays. True, some folks experiment with hypertext, Flash, or video, but what these Web 2.0 technologies represent is a quite different side of new media. While these experimentations are valuable, Web 2.0 applications are more about how information gets distributed, organized, and connected in a more dynamic fashion.
   
   b. Establishing ways to talk about the value of blogging right now. For example, I give a presentation at a conference. I've submitted a proposal and had it accepted, so I suppose that might represent some level of vetting of my work. However, I don't suppose anyone would think it was substantial in any way. Then I give my paper to 10 or 15 or even 50 people. I probably get some feedback in the form of an observation or question or two. Maybe there's one or two folks in the audience with the knowledge and interest to actually help me.
   
   On the other hand, I publish that conference paper on my blog. The same number of people might read it over a six month period. However, I'm far more likely to reach an audience of interested colleagues than I am at a conference. So maybe I do both. Conference and blog.
   
   In either case, I look at my blog like I might look at a conference paper. It's something I write on my way to writing something else; it's part of the process of developing an idea. True, I could just keep my ideas to myself, but writing for this public space forces me to explain myself (to myself) more fully. For example, some recent comments on my previous post about professional writing and cultural studies has me thinking more about how I might better explain my thinking (again, to myself first and then to others). I'll likely blog about it again some time.
   
   Bottom line, I would say I blog to develop my ideas for future scholarly work (and to develop ideas for my teaching) but also to participate at the ground floor in shaping how academic discourse might develop online.

If only we had seen the end of these articles about the dangers of academic blogging, but I'm sure that we haven't. Just as I am sure that we haven't seen the end of the academic blogging incidents that spawn the articles. Clearly what is needed here is some education about what the various reasons academics blog, and, for those who blog in a scholarly way, some explanation about the role we see blogging playing in scholarship.

Cultural Studies and Professional Writing

I was discussing the role of the cultural and political in professional writing courses earlier today and thought I would expand on some ideas.

1. There is at least a tradition, if not a current practice, of perceiving profesisonal writing as apolitical. In technical writing, it is the articulation of writing as transparent communication of information. In more "creative" genres, it's about finding your individual voice and being "true" to yourself.

It's not so much that I would suggest that technical writers are not trying to communicate or that in some sense writers don't have particular "voices" or styles that need to be developed and explored. It's just that this is a rather simplistic way of understanding writing. I'm not sure if you could say that it is a "left" or "right" wing understanding; it certainly is a common understanding. It should hardly be surprising that most people, regardless of politics, understand very little about writing. Certainly, some argue that conservatives, in general, prefer to see the world in black and white, in simplistic terms, moreso than liberals. Maybe so. I will say that seeing writing (or anything else) in a complex way requires a willingness (and a capability) to do some intellectual work.

And, btw, we don't just invent complexity for the fun of it. We investigate writing practices, uncovering their complexity, because we discover that our more simplistic understanding is incomplete and often misleading.

2. Cultural studies has a long association with rhetoric. Both, at least in my view, study the construction of meaning in communities. Both study how individuals and groups use language and other media to develop and share knowledge, to create and resolve conflicts, and to plan, enact, and review individual and collective action.

Cultural studies offers professional writing methods for understanding how the conventions of discourses are established, maintained, and disseminated; how and why different communities interpret texts differently; how ideology functions to shape the cultural roles and practices of writers and audiences; how technologies interact with meaning-making; and so on.

Simultaneously, cultural studies also uncovers how conventional discursive practices work to maintain the status quo, naturalize mainstream ideology, and marginalize non-dominant voices. In doing so, it woudl suggest not only that our conventional, "simplistic," ideas of writing are not only simple but are also political and in service to the dominant ideology.

3. In doing so, cultural studies politicizes professional writing in a way that makes the job of teaching writing much more difficult. Students must not only learn to write professionally; they must also learn to negotiate the ideological mechanisms of discourse. Also, by insisting on dealing with the ideological undercurrent of discourse, cultural studies draws professional writing to the left in a context where it is impossible to be apolitical.

Here, it becomes necessary to deal with racism, sexism, all the familiar mechanisms of ideological control. However doing so also politically charges the classroom as conservatives and liberals act out the roles they learn from watching the network news. In all this conflict, and in the context of the deeply conservative mainstream media slandering higher education, how much is accomplished here? And how much of this type of conversation will help students to negotiate the difficult ideological terrain of professional writing?

4. Thinking about my students as writers helps me to keep these concerns focused. For me, this focus brings me back to the issue of authorship and composition itself. At the heart of our simplistic conventional understanding of writing is the author-in-control-of-the-text. When the fiction of authorship is deconstructed, we are left with insight into the network of symbolic relations with which the writer interfaces and the process of ripping material from the network, mixing it together, and burning it into a new composition: a recursive process that blurs the distinction between writer and network.

This does not obviate us from responsibility for our productions, but it does help us understand that we do not simply "author" our texts. As authors, students become the target of critique: "your text is racist" implies "you are racist." I am not interested in this tactic of bad conscience. I don't think anyone really is. However, by understanding the network of ideology and composition more complexly, we move into viewing the writer as logged into an ideological-symbolic information system.

Subject positions, such as "the" author or "the" college student or whatever mix'n match identity of various sexual, racial-ethnic, gender, class, and consumer categories, constitute, to use a rough analogy, a network protocol for how one is identified in the system. We are these things, more or less, or more accurately more and less: we are more than these categories suggest and we are also less than all that might be attributable culturally to these categories.

In giving up our identity as the author, we can depersonalize our relationship to the texts we produce while remaining responsible for them. Similarly, in recognizing our subjecitivity as ideological fiction, we open an impersonal space for investigating ideology, without attachment. I should not that the fact that identities are ideological fictions clearly does not mean that they do not have a material impact upon us or our culture, or that we can simply step away from them. They are sticky; or better put, they have a strong gravitational pull.

What has interested me about writing, from the very start of graduate school, is how writing practice might offer a line of flight, escape velocity. Writing's very materiality; its pluridimensional insistence on being other than one's thoughts; the cracks that open in the VR of ideology through experimenting with the other virtual, the unfolding of thought in the network.

virtual dis/locations cont.--practices & pedagogies

The previous post ended by suggesting that the challenge of new media rhetoric is to develop strategies (or perhaps tactics is a better, more mobile term) that draw on the singular, material encounter with media as a counter to the cybernetic, gravitational pull of a dis/locating virtual that categorizes and generalizes (i.e. our conventional epistemological practices).

I want to amend/extend that and delve into what some tactics, compositional and pedagogical, might be.

First, this critique of conventional epistemology is all-too-familiar in postmodernism and cultural studies. Ported into new media, it is specifically a critique of the will to transparent communication (e.g. usability, human-computer interaction, search engine optimization, database management etc.).

It should be noted that the logos and its devices, such as the concept and the category, have proven to be immensely powerful cognitive tools. That should be obvious. The error lies in mistaking the concept for the real. For example, we have a real-time, lived, experience that we call "freedom." By the time that affect reaches our consciousness and is put into a word, it has been apprehended by ideological cybernetics; the affect has been drawn into a concept, a culture, and a history.  Being idealistic about it, one could say we develop a concept of freedom to better understand this experience, to discuss it with others, and to seek to reproduce it. More critically, we might say that our actual, cultural-historical use of the concept does not nothing like this, that it is just an ideological mechanism of subjective control.

So, as the familiar argument goes, the defenders of humanism decry that postmodernists want to strip us of our "freedom," our free will and agency. Perhaps it does seem like that in some cases. But here, I am suggesting that the problem is that the categorical concept, as a cogntivve-epistemological technology, is insufficient to the task of understanding embodied affects.

What does this have to do with compositional tactics for new media?

Well, usability, for example, is also a concept, a way of trying to understand users' embodied encounters with web sites. A site is "usable" if its design allows users to quickly perceive the purpose of the site and use the site for its predetermined purpose. (If users don't want to use the site for its predetermined purpose, then that's a different kind of problem.)

Like the problem with freedom, usability fails to incorporate the richness of our encounters with media. Furthermore, it simply cannot do so; it cannot reconcile itself with the unusable, the non-communicative, let alone the singular event of our encounter. To the contrary, usability seeks to reduce or eliminate these elements through its cybernetic-ideological processes so that user experiences become codified and predictable.

So, to bring my examples together, the extent to which we can say our experience of "freedom" is codifiable and predictable is the extent to which our experience of freedom exactly resembles "not-freedom." To talk about the usability of sites in this manner immediately begs the question, "who is the user and who is the 'use-ee?'"

However it's not necessary to get all paranoid about this. Nor is it necessary to go in some radical, experimental, counter-direction from usability (though experimental practices are crucial to unfolding the potential of media). Just b/c usability and related concepts of media and communciation are lacking does not mean that we should give up on trying to communicate. Similarly, while the concept of freedom sucks, we can still try to engage the embodied affect it sought to apprehend.

That is why I would suggest that new media composition pedagogy needs to engage not in the concepts of new media communication and design but with the singular, embodied encounter with media. This post is getting long (again), so I'll give one example of how this works.

I touched on this in my earlier post on Web 2.0. Sites develop a richness and value (and yes, even usability) through trusting the collective intelligence of their users. Conceptually, usability might suggest that folksonomy practices like tagging muddy the usability of the web by not providing clear, categorical usage. However, what folksonomy demonstrates are records of the singular encounters users have with media; we don't experience the web categorically and even folksonomy itself is only a shadow of a deeper, more varied richness of singular, affective encounters.

In thinking about composition (and composition pedagogy), this suggests a few things:

1. Authorship is multiple, even when it is one person. That is, composition need not be about a single author mastering a text and directing readers/users to a predtermined destination. This is also about the way we evaluate texts as teachers.
2. Pedagogy must also consider its relationship with "usability," particularly if it claims to be "student-centered." Trusted student-users developing a folksonomic encounter with disciplinary structures and knowledges, potentially through the digital apparatus of the web.
3. Shifting composition from its focus on the organization of discrete elements to a realization that we are composing dynamic networks. This was always-already the case with print; it's just that the fixity of the media deluded us. Revision is not about re-fixing a text until it is "done." It's about the ongoing generation of media in a network in which the "author" participates but does not control.

In short, each singular encounter with a piece of media constitues another layer of composition, another affect, another folksonomic connection, which, as with the rhizome, holds the potential to radically mutate the network.

That's composition. It is that rich communal network of symbolic behaviors, with its resevoir of affects, that we try to use when we speak of usability, that we conceptualize in our concepts, that we engage and add to in our singular encounters with media.

dis/location and embodiment: notes from some presentations at SU

Attended some presentations by Jenny Edbauer, Jeff Rice, and Anne Wysocki. It was good to meet some folks I had only known previously by blog or text. I won't attempt to account for each of their presentations, which were quite interesting and have got me thinking about a number of things...some of which are the subject of this post.

A theme that ran through their work, and through much of new media rhetoric, is the issue of dis/location, particularly as it surfaces in the tension between virtual and embodied encounters. So, for instance, we experience dis/location culturally in the generic nature of malls and franchises across America, if not the world. One Starbucks is much like another; everyone reads from the same script at McDonald's, etc. In a related sense, we are often asked to consume images as dislocated and decontextualized, such as the way products appear on Amazon.com. These examples come from Jenny's and Anne's presentations respectively. Furthermore, as Jeff suggested, we are asked to process images by category, reasserting their generic qualities: what is this a picture of? It is a picture of a house, a tree, a person, etc.

So one of the questions of the day was how does one move beyond this generic, dislocated experience of media (if not culture in general) to a more specific, indeed singular, encounter which resists the ideological pressure for closure and categorization and challenges our unconscious acceptance of the ways in which we process the visual?

Part of this issue is the collapse of (our experience/perception of) distance, as identified by Virillio and others.  First, this collapse problematizes what it means to be local. If I can watch a live camera on a screen and then press a button and interact with the scene in real time, am I "local" to that context? This is the difference between computer networks and television. TV lets me see around the world; the net lets me be (tele-) present. Second, it rearticulates our experience of the visual as a material event, as in Deleuze/Guattari 's use of the haptic (a visual experience without an external field of reference, thus a more proprioceptive sensory experience).

Of course, on a computer, information is primarily text, image, and video and thus processed visually. Obviously there is also sometimes sound, as well as the tactile response of mouse and keyboard. However, this does not mean that our affective response to text and image (to cite the two dominant elements of the net) occurs solely through a visual framework.The information enters the brain through the eyes but within the body becomes non-visual messages that might trigger a range of potential, embodied responses. Likewise, on the other side of the screen, information is also non-visual. The visual is simply the site/sight of interface (btw, this is where Ulmer goes in articulating an interbody instead of an interface).

Ideologically, in our conventional epistemology, we might seek to conceptualize/categorize our experience with media onto a taxonomic, optically arrange grid. There is a horizon against which experience is located. This apprehension of experience is ideological and often unconscious. Certainly, consumer culture attempts to delocate and virtualize us, to insert us into (and insert into us) a cybernetics of desire and identity.

While one may respond to these attempts through an insistence on the local or embodiment, this becomes difficult as these concepts are collapsed and our insistence upon them props up the notion of a disembodied, delocalized virtuality as a dialetical opponent. Alternately, one might respond by insisting upon virtuality as local and embodied, as material, though doing so requires some substantial rethinking of what locality and embodiment might mean.

For example, one practice that was discussed today was the use of documentary video-making as a classroom assignment that insisted upon the local and particular and denied the adoption of simple, pre-fab answers to rote problems that one might typically see in a FYC research paper. So, if one did a documentary of local dairy farmers in Cortland, one would have to deal with the actual material of the video, of the unscripted dialogue with these families, and the material backdrop of the farm itself.

What one has in the raw footage is not the locale of Cortland or a farm, but the locale of video itself, as a kind of material production. The material represented in the footage is rife with the virtual-ideological (e.g. the farmers' discourse is ideological, the material practices of dairy farming are ideological, the division of labor on the farm is ideological, the choices of camera angles, visual subject matter, and interview questions are ideological, etc.). The camera and its processes are also ideological. However, simultaneous to these ideological apprehensions is the singularity of the video's materiality. It is that singularity that allows the video to be encountered.

In the editing process one encounters another layer of ideological apprehension. Typically there is a desire to create cohesion (or a deliberate choice to deny or oppose that urge). As Kittler discusses, early 20th-century psychiatrists filmed their patients' and screened edited documentaries of them b/c they felt it allowed them to best represent their patients' pathologies to their colleagues. (This has been going on for a long time.) A documentary might be edited to portray the "truth" of an experience or to make people look foolish or to achieve some other rhetorical purpose. In an FYC class there may not be enough rhetorical or technical skill to pull off a cohesive video, but that does not mean that the editing process is not informed by that desire.

The resulting video constitutes its own locale, connected affectively, materially and rhizomatically to the locale depicted in the video. It also is marked by its apprehension by ideology, just as every locale is, whether that location is a suburban home, a city street, a car, or the middle of the desert.

OK, this is getting to be a long post. I suppose what I'm getting at is that the local and the body persist in conjunction with the virtual, which has rewritten the space of the local and the extension of the body. Ideologically, there is the desire of capitalism to delocalize and commodify--to virtualize in this sense. However, the virtual is always already singular and is always encountered on those terms. Becoming aware of that aspect of the encounter and developing rhetorico-aesthetic strategies in relation to that aspect is the challenge.

Anyway, an excellent set of presentations. Thanks to everyone.