So I will be doing my thing at CCCC. I believe I have the honor of being in the final session. I signed off to make my presentation more accessible, but the only way my presentation is going to be accessible to anyone at that time is if I do it in the airport terminal. What are you going to do, right?
Anyway, here's what I'm going to be looking at how mobile, computational-informational networks operate to establish the conditions of composition. I'm planning on doing a series of mobile phone composition experiments in my classes with the idea of articulating compositional computation, a heuristic for using networks to encourage invention.
Here is part of my proposal. It mentions some material familiar to this blog.
In a 2006 cTheory interview, N. Katherine Hayles remarks that postmodernism ends in April of 1995 with the development of the Netscape browser, contending that "the sense of shock that accompanied postmodernism... has now just become mundane reality." In "Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere," Hayles writes that what follows postmodernism is a post-human regime of computation: "the penetration of computational processes not only into every aspect of biological, social, economic and political realms but also into the construction of reality itself" (161). Hayles fundamentally suggests here that computation has become a metaphysic where we are no longer individual cyborgs (as in Haraway's manifesto) but rather nodes in an extensive network.
Though this description of post-humanism may be chilling, an understanding of how networks function as part of our cognition is necessary for any investigation of composition. Building on Hayles work, Byron Hawk writes in A Counter-History of Composition (2007), "in the context of composition pedagogy, teachers need to build smarter environments in which their students work... These environments are constellations of architectures, technologies, texts, bodies, histories, heuristics, enactments and desires that produce the conditions of possibility for emergence, for invention" (249).
The issues here for composition are two-fold. First, both Hayles and Hawk investigate composition in the broadest philosophical sense, in terms of the construction of reality and emergence. Here I ask, what does it mean to see composition as computational? What does the computational metaphysic mean for composition? Second, composition functions in a more familiar register when Hawk addresses the issue of pedagogy. These pedagogic spaces must be composed to produce the conditions of emergence, what I call a compositional computation. Here it is possible to discuss the strategic use of networks.
I will discuss three compositional experiments undertaken in a course titled "Writing for Online Publication." The purpose of the assignments is to call special attention to mundane networked conditions that often go unnoticed. The first is an individual composition of a mobile phone essay that follows upon the mobile phone novels popular in Japan. Students write a series of brief messages to a microblogging site such as Twitter that produce a kind of essay. The second assignment examines simultaneity and real-time coordination of activities as students work collectively to document a large public event, such as a popular annual football game with a rival college. The third assignment incorporates photo and video as students investigate campus mobile media practices during a 24-hour period.
[Sounds good in theory. Now I just have to do it!]
These experiments cast a spotlight on computational composition by foregrounding the constraints and possibilities of composing through a mobile network on a mobile phone. They demonstrate quite clearly one way in which computation mediates our interactions with the world and our efforts to communicate. However, these experiments also represent a particular compositional computation where the heuristic elements of projects seek to produce conditions for emergence. Thus students not only have the opportunity to investigate how technologies shape compositions, they can also develop strategies for using technologies to establish good conditions for invention and creativity.
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