digital digs

after the scholarly monograph

This is a continuation of the last post and is, in part, an answer to Geoff Sirc's question about what happens next. When I say "after" the scholarly monograph, I don't necessarily mean what do we do after we no longer write monographs but rather going in pursuit of the monograph: I am going after the monograph.

First a few caveats. You can see my books in the sidebar. I have no idea how many copies they've sold. So when I talk about the situation with scholarly monographs, I certainly include myself. I also want to make clear that I don't think this is necessarily or strictly a technological problem with a concomitant technological solution. That is, ebooks or whatever, in and of themselves, are not the answer.

There were 525 attendees at Computers and Writing this year, the largest attendance on record I believe. I'm sure the field is slightly larger than that. Let's say it is 1500 graduate students and faculty who would look at a book in the field and say "Hey, that book is in my field. Maybe I should read it." Around 3500 people attend CCCC, the national rhetoric/composition conference. There are 30,000 MLA members, but that's across many disciplines and specializations. But those numbers should give you some sense of an absolute maximum audience that any scholarly monograph could reach.

To be clear, these numbers have only grown. What has changed is that there are more specializations and more faculty who need books for tenure, thus flooding the market with more and more narrow books.years. Plus there are more articles, blog posts, etc--more free (or free to me) stuff to read every year. So what should I (or you or we) do? Do we write 80,000+ words for 500 readers? In my last book, I tried to imagine an audience that would include rhet/comp graduate students. I hoped to make an argument that what I was writing was worth the consideration of those beyond those specialized in computers and writing. I'm not sure if I was successful, but that was the goal. 

At the end of this post, I'll through out some technological possibilities but I want to think as a rhetorician and writer a little longer. 

First, think about this as a reader. What do you read and why? I would say the bulk of my academic reading is twitter feeds, links from twitter, blogs I follow, and online articles and essays. I would say maybe 10-20% (to throw a number out) is "in my field" with the rest going from technology business, higher education news, philosophy/theory, new media/games studies, etc. I would also say, in terms of the academic books I read, that 10-20% are in my field. But then my work is not especially disciplinary. I would be curious if others have a more disciplinary focus. To honest, I would say that I generally only turn to journal articles when I'm doing specific research, though there are a couple journals where I will at least peruse the article titles and scan a few of the texts. 

By far, most of the interesting reading has sprung from social media. It isn't necessarily on the blogs themselves. All of the fascinating reading I've done in object-oriented ontology sprang from an encounter with it in the blogosphere and is renewed by the great ongoing conversation online about OOO. It's not just about marketing or promoting a book, though I suppose that's one way of thinking about it. It's about being part of a conversation where the reader is less passive (which of course is social media 101, right?). This is a point I made in the comment stream earlier and which I think is fairly obvious: it's difficult to have a conversation with a book or a journal article. We can invoke the Burkean parlor all we want, but we realize it's just a metaphor. On the interwebs we can actually converse, in real time if we wish. 

Now think as a writer. I think there are two valid approaches here. In the first case we say "Screw the audience. I am pursuing my interests." To a degree I think that's necessary. One can't (I can't anyway) just write what I think others want to read, will be accepted for publication, or will sell. So if you want to compose a book-length text (or multimedia of similar scope) that only 100 people want to read then that's ok. You'll understand, of course, if others don't read it and if it doesn't make sense to invest resources for traditional publishing in it. But it shouldn't be that hard for a discipline or library or professional organization to create a mechanism for turning your Word doc into a Kindle book/PDF/whatever and then make it freely available. No editing, no pre-publication review: just publish. 

I suppose the other extreme would be to pander to an audience. I won't go that far. But I will suggest that most writers, at some point, decide that they hope to communicate to somebody. Now if I'm going to write a book, it's going to be on some combination of the following topics: digital media, writing, higher education, and the particular cocktail of theory I mix-up here. It will likely draw in material from other disciplines, but those will be the central elements. Authors like Clay Shirky, Howard Rheingold, Steven Johnson and such have written very popular and successful books in this constellation of subjects. I'm not saying I could pull off a book like that, but it is not impossible to write a book for a large audience on subjects that interest me. The narrowest audience I would conceive of would result in a book that would be suitable for graduate students in an introduction to rhet/comp class. That is, I would like to think that a student like this could pick up my last book, The Two Virtuals, and read it. 

Now there is an in-between audience that would imagine academic readers across a discipline. Of course, my last book could easily be read by any academic in the humanities. The question is whether they would read it. I'm having a hard time thinking of a book that is like this though (other than the canonical Foucault, Derrida, etc.). I guess it would be like the popular book but with more footnotes? Fewer generalized claims (e.g. "experts say" "studies show" etc.)? I'm not sure if such a book is any eaiser to write than the mainstream, popular one. I am sure that writing a dissertation is no preparation to address this kind of audience and that most humanities professors have little or no professional preparation to write in such a way (which doesn't mean they can't or don't but only that our disciplines aren't set up with such writing in mind).

So let's say that we axe the book for tenure requirement as economically unfeasible and replace it with any number of other electronic publishing options. Ultimately you just want to know that your colleague has a sustained, focused research project (i.e. one that could produce a book) and that her work has been vetted by experts in the field. There's no need to kill trees to do that. I know, easier said than done, but still it must be done. Then those of us who want to write books for really small audiences can follow an e-publishing route. Maybe they can get small institutional grants to hire some professional editing and a little book design help. At the end, publishers would be absolved of any pressure to publish books except those that made economic sense.

I suppose all of that is to say that you can keep writing those books for small audiences if you want in electronic formats, which is what we already see. But if you are interested in having your texts do more work in the world than that, here's what I would suggest, and this is a somewhat hyperbolic model to push the limits of the idea.

Take four academics who have a similar research interest and have an existing relationship that could serve as the basis for collaboration. They get together and sketch out a collaborative book-length project. Not an essay collection but a collaboration where each other contributes to each chapter. Not turn-taking but genuine intermixing. They agree on this at the outset. Then they take their project into the public space. We get blogs, tweets, whatever about the ongoing project. Then in a digital Dickensian manner, we get chapters. Readers can respond to chapters and chapters get revised. At the end we have an open access web-based book, a purchasable e-book with some value added by publishers, and an actual book as well.

In doing this, we've accomplished several things:

• we have one collaborative book instead of four individual books, so maybe it is more valuable to us as readers and there are fewer books on the market
• we've generated an audience for the book through public, online discussion
• we've created invested readers by allowing them to comment on the book in progress
• hopefully we've created a better book

Now, yes, this could be done with just a single author, and I realize that collaboration often sounds better than it actually turns out to be. It requires a great deal of trust. I would require rethinking the way we work. Furthermore, admittedly, this is not some amazing technological discovery. As I said at the outset, I don't think this is a technological problem with a clear technological solution. I think it is a rhetorical, ethical, and disciplinary problem with technological dimensions. And I think it needs to be addressed on those grounds.

 

writing books, writing dissertations

Timothy Morton has some interesting posts on planning the phd and writing a dissertation. His central point is that a dissertation is not a book (even though some dissertations get published) and if you try to write it as a book you can encounter many problems. I particularly like this line:

A transitional object is usually scarred and a bit broken looking. It's had plenty of wear and tear. By the time I was finished with him, my teddy bear was covered in vomit, with stuffing coming out, he was bleached from being in the laundry and hung out to dry. That's what a good dissertation looks like. Now imagine trying to sell a vomit stained teddy bear. Now do you get the difference between a dissertation and a book?

This is an important point. Writing a dissertation is part of the journey toward expertise. Not surprisingly, I think of expertise as a rhetorical matter rather than an absolute one. That doesn't mean that you can just fake it with all fluff and no substance, but it does mean that expertise needs to be performed and if you can't perform then you don't really have it either. 

While I agree with Morton's characterization of English Studies dissertations as they currently are, I can't help wondering how they might be or should be. I agree with Morton that a diss shouldn't need to be a book. I also agree that it needs to be a mechanism of gaining expertise and professionalization. The question for me though is whether or not it needs to be this tortured, overwrought document. Specifically, the reference to transitional object brings home the psychological dimension of graduate school. It's the thing that you cling to as a comfort against other trauma, and, importantly, it's the thing that you ultimately need to abandon. 

A book is different rhetorically but not necessarily in terms of its composition. Consider, for instance, Junot Diaz's torturous 10-year journey toward writing his Pultizer Prize wining novel. He ends it this way:

in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn't until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am. 

It's simple really: a writer writes. It can also be damned near impossible. It's like saying a runner runs, so start running. I think we are all familiar with these kinds of stories about the artist's struggle. Diaz (re)tells that story well though. 

The difference between the book and the dissertation is not in its potentially torturous composition, but in its rhetorical function. The dissertation might claim to an a-rhetorical composition, but we don't let much get outside the realm of rhetoric in these parts, especially not texts. Even though the dissertation may appear to have little concern for audience in its almost paranoid obsession with establishing authority and myopic focus, it is a particular genre, where authors and audience (limited though it may be) are asked to play particular roles. With the book, academic or otherwise, we have less interest in the task of establishing authority. As readers, I think we assume the publisher vets the author, and as authors we don't need the obsessive demonstration of mastery to be visible in our text anymore than one has to pass a driver's test every time one gets pulled over by the police. Showing them your license is sufficient. Furthermore the book shouldn't be as myopic as the dissertation. It requires a much broader audience.

As this Inside Higher Ed missive indicates, there is some real struggle over what academic publishing is about. There is an obvious disconnect between the transaction of acquiring reputation (for jobs and tenure) and actually communicating. And nowhere is this more clear than in the dissertation: an artifact one trades for reputational credit that will communicate almost nothing (if for no other reason than that fact that you can count the number of people who will read it on one hand). Sadly, I think there is some implicit notion that dissertation writers aren't ready to communicate: a notion that is an extension of what we believe about our undergraduates. Admittedly it's an odd notion since they've all been communicating since they were quite young. 

So what if the rite of passage for doctoral students was an act of communication rather than a reputation transaction? I don't think it would be any less difficult. Writing, communicating, can be difficult. But it would be different. It would mean asking our doctoral students to do the thing we presumably expect them to do in their professional lives. At the same time I don't think it would be more difficult than writing a dissertation, but it would clearly be different. One could say that it would require rethinking graduate curriculum to prepare student to produce this new kind of document, but that would seem to assume that existing grad curriculum would prepare students to write a dissertation. An interesting assumption, but patently false. Why do you think there are so many ABDs?

What it comes down to for me is a greater focus on rhetorical education for humanities graduate students. As I have said here before, some faculty are scholars, some are teachers, and some are writers: some overlap these categories. Some are happiest researching in the library. Some excel in the classroom. Still others find their talents in writing. In my experience, most grad students arrive thinking of themselves in the first category. As TAs they might discover a true calling for teaching. Writing however is commonly a struggle. Most often, it's the writing that keeps people from getting degrees, finding jobs, or reaching tenure.

It's also the writing, from the humanities on the whole, that has led us to our outside position in our culture. At the very least, it hasn't helped the situation. So maybe we need to rethink this dissertation thing.

 

 

Daniel Pink's Drive, composition pedagogy, and program management

I picked up Pink's latest book yesterday. Essentially, the book takes up theories of intrinsic motivation and positive psychology and applies them to business management theory. Pink also has a TED talk that outlines the basic experimental evidence that underlies the argument he makes in the book (evidence that the book further expands upon, though always in a layperson's discourse). I've discussed this talk here before and the subject of motivation, pedagogy, and writing many times. But here I want to think through these issues more in terms of writing program administration.

Pink suggests that the dominant theory of motivation (that in academia we might think of as desire) has flaws that have become significant given the new types of labor we ask employees (and I would say students) to do. As he puts it, in simplistic terms, there's Motivation 1.0, which are our animalistic drives for food, safety, and procreation. Motivation 2.0 extends upon those more immediate drives with extrinsic motivators, which are basically carrots and sticks. As he explains, carrot/stick motivators work fine for simple, algorithmic tasks, where we ask students/employees to perform rote procedures. The important thing the research shows, however, is that when one asks people to perform heuristic tasks, tasks that require inventive and creative thinking, that the carrot/stick act can actually serve as a disincentive to performance.

Obviously the composition course is a place that calls for heuristic acts, though this is something that we have struggled over in various ways. Over the last century as a culture we have tried to turn education into an algorithmic procedure that can be incentivized with carrots and sticks from grades and detention to high-stakes testing for district funding. We have tried to turn composition into an algorithmic procedure as well, even if that wasn't what people originally intended in talking about the "writing process." Furthermore, the course is incorporated into a larger motivation 2.0 structure of grades and credits. But let me fold this back to a familiar composition scene, where the student asks "How can I revise this to get an 'A'?" And the koan-like answer is that your best chance of getting an A is to stop writing for the purpose of getting a good grade. The carrot of the A is actually limiting your performance. Of course it isn't that easy. Ironically, the whole system is designed to dissuade learning and creativity, and over time these motivational structures do lasting damage to students, as Ken Robinson has famously articulated. It isn't intentional, of course; it's just that the system is designed on a poor theory of mind.

According to the research that Pink cites, in order for people to be most successful at these complex heuristic tasks, they need to be intrinsically motivated, and he describes three key foundations to that motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In some ways, academia ought to be an ideal model for the kind of workforce and workplace Pink is describing. We have a very high degree of autonomy in the way we work. We generally work hard in the pursuit of mastery over our subject, while always knowing that there is more to know or discover. And we also tend to make strong connections between the narrow focus of our research and grander cultural and intellectual purposes. However, there are obviously general problems with the management of higher education and I think that infamously academics can be horrible managers of other academics (though that isn't true in every instance). In part, the problem is that sometimes academics end up in administrative positions for the wrong reasons, and they don't bring the creativity and passion they have for their research or teaching to their administrative roles. There is a long standing tradition of antagonism, generally, between faculty and administration, which I would hypothesize stems from the tradition of "motivation 2.0" with its carrots and sticks and its focus on controlled, routinized tasks. As Pink points out, these strategies are poisonous to the heuristic challenges of both research and teaching.

However, it's not all that simple. In UB's composition program, we have a long tradition of giving instructors a high degree of autonomy in constructing syllabi and assignments. While there have certainly been successes as a result, the practice has not been without problems. There are always limits and contexts for autonomy. As the director of composition, I can only loosen the restrictions that I put in place. For example, I can't alter the length of the semester or change the fact that students need to be graded at the end of the semester. A composition course isn't a course in auto repair or calculus. As Pink puts it, the autonomy here is over task, technique, time, and team. What you are going to do, how you are going to do it, when you are going to do it, and who you are going to do it with. Task is certainly related to purpose (purpose is a big picture task, I suppose). And technique might be one of the objects of mastery.

So here's how I see it. We start with the WPA Outcomes Statement. It's sweeping and fairly general, Many of the terms are open to interpretation and debate. And in my view, many of the outcomes themselves could be interrogated and others added. As Pink points out, extrinsically motivated people play within boundaries (in an effort to get carrots); intrinsically motivated people play with boundaries. So even if you view the statement as boundaries, we want to play with them. Similarly, our program has certain constraints and policies (which are themselves open to periodic review and change). We can and should play with those boundaries as long as we keep a larger sense of common purpose that hinges on professional ethics (and if you can't play in that broad space, that's fine, you just need to find a different profession). There are ultimately limits, but I think there's a wide degree of autonomy within that, particularly if you have a personal sense of professional purpose that is at all connected to the discipline.

Within those contexts, instructors ought to be able to define their own tasks (e.g. this semester I am going to focus on developing methods for teaching revision or digital composition or whatever); they can develop their own techniques or pedagogies; they can set their own time to work (beyond the constraints of course scheduling); and they might think about team as well (finding colleagues in the program to share ideas with and collaborate; this is not done enough!).

One of the things I think is underdeveloped, both generally and at UB, is the focus on the mastery of teaching. Since almost all of our composition instructors are graduate students, I look at the program as part of their education/professional development. Here Pink turns to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his concept of "flow." Fundamentally, the flow state is one where a person is engaged in a task that is ideally suited to just push his/her ability. It is not so difficult as to produce anxiety nor so easy as to be boring. It is in these flow states where our ability to grow is maximized. Of course we are not always in a flow state, but as a WPA, one challenge might be to maximize the opportunities for teaching to put instructors in these opportunities. Pink also points out that mastery is difficult (of course), and that it requires an ability to grind it out sometimes. The flow state can help us get over those difficult moments. Also, we need to recognize that mastery is developed not inherited and that it is ultimately unreachable: we can always improve. It is the journey that is intrinsically rewarding and motivating: not the extrinsic carrots one might encounter along the way.

Finally there's purpose. I don't think rhet/comp or academics in general have much trouble connecting their work to grand purposes like saving democracy or illuminating the Truth. In fact, I tend more to be skeptical of such claims. At the same time, I recognize the importance of having a larger sense of purpose (though maybe not quite that large). As Pink points out, one of the strategies here is to give employees the opportunity to connect their work to a personal sense of purpose. In a composition program, I think this works through giving instructors the opportunity to develop the content and assignments for their courses. If an instructor has a passion of the environment, then s/he can focus on that or maybe the passion is education or media or cultural difference. 

At the same time, it is important for instructors to recognize their own managerial role. Just as the program needs to create opportunities for instructor autonomy, mastery, and purpose, each course needs to do this for its students for the students are also engaged in heuristic work that requires intrinsic motivation. And furthermore, one might imagine that as writers we bear a somewhat similar relationship to our audiences where, rhetorically, we want to engage our readers, bring them into a state of flow, and interact with their own motivations. Certainly, to some degree, Pink's book did that for me. Hopefully it is a virtuous rather than vicious circle.

Social media, public pedagogy, and the end of private learning

I just found out that the Handbook of Public Pedagogy, in which I have a chapter titled "Social media, public pedagogy, and the end of private learning," is now available. I haven't received my copy yet, but there are a number of interesting contributors and chapter titles. I am a little curious to see how the argument I make there fits with others, particularly those who are discussing social media.

In the chapter, basically, I argue that the concept of "public pedagogy" relies upon an organization of public and private spaces. Public pedagogy typically refers to the instructional/ideological force of corporate media and discourses. It might also refer to any progressive, pedagogical activity outside of traditional schooling spaces. My point is that the extension of pedagogy into social media means that public pedagogy might transpire in traditional schooling spaces and vice versa. As such, if one wishes to investigate the public, pedagogical operation of any given space, one would necessarily have to account for the intersection of media networks with that space, the media devices available to people in those spaces, and the potential of social media interaction to shape pedagogical encounters with that space.

a thousand plateaus? meet wordle

  Made from a PDF I found here.

more on the book as playground and factory

I'm continuing a thread from my previous post here and picking up on some ideas from the conference on the Internet as Playground and Factory. The conference website makes the following argument:

The revenues of today's social aggregators are promising but their speculative value exceeds billions of dollars. Capital manages to expropriate value from the commons; labor goes beyond the factory, all of society is put to work. Every aspect of life drives the digital economy: sexual desire, boredom, friendship — and all becomes fodder for speculative profit. We are living in a total labor society and the way in which we are commoditized, racialized, and engendered is profoundly and disturbingly normalized.  The complex and troubling set of circumstances we now confront includes the collapse of the conventional opposition between waged and unwaged labor, and is characterized by multiple “tradeoffs” and “social costs”—such as government and corporate surveillance. While individual instances are certainly exploitative in the most overt sense, the shift in the overall paradigm moves us beyond the explanatory power of the Marxian interpretation of exploitation (which is of limited use here). 

I want to say, first off, that I largely agree with this analysis, particularly the notion that every aspect of life drives the digital economy, though I think that might be hyperbolic. There is, undoubtedly, an interrelationship between the expansion of capitalism, globalization, and the development of information technology: if for no other reason than that they coincide historically. In some ways I see this as a Foucauldian argument, as an extension of 19th-century biopower, or maybe even as a Deleuzian control society, but my sense from following the conference from afar and following the related conversations from the Institute of Distributed Creativity is that there is a stronger insistence on a Marxist-revolutionary perspective here, despite the recognition in the passage above that such explanations may be inadequate.

I suggested in my last post that the book, like the web, might be seen as playground and factory. The same might be said for pen and paper. It may be true that social media will represent a more effective means of expropriating value from reading and writing than books, paper, and pens did, but right now such claims are speculative. However, setting aside relative effectiveness, I think it is fairly obvious how the book is both a playground and factory.

• As I mentioned in my last post, reading a book takes work, usually unpaid labor, and, depending on the book, may require years of training.
• The book, particularly the novel, represents a cultural management of pleasure through the aesthetic experience, though there are certainly excesses there in the Barthesian sense.
• Arguably, the printing press enabled the formation of modern scientific disciplines through the expropriation and dissemination of the intellectual labor of individual laboratories in journals.
• Certainly, book publishing leads to the legal fictions of copyright and intellectual property that commoditize compositional practices.
• The tension between writing as play and writing as work is a central trope (a cliche even) in the world of the novelist, poet, playwright: do I follow my artistic vision? or do I "sell out"? Perhaps it even infects the scholar: should I research/write something I am confident will be published?
• Would it be going too far to say that print was the IT backbone of the Industrial Revolution? Certainly others have gone farther than that.

What we can say about the development of book is that it changes the relations between paid and unpaid labor. New professions emerged; old professions (e.g. scribes) disappeared. The book's impact was maybe narrow: unless one thinks about its role in recording and disseminating knowledge in science, industrialization, law, education, politics, etc. Then again, social media's role is perhaps narrow in the larger context of the Internet and other information-media networks.

Are we living in a "total labor society"? If we want to define reading a book as labor, then maybe. On the other hand, maybe we live in a "total play society." Now we have moved from the Marxist left to the religious right where we are collapsing under hedonism and rock 'n roll (and novels). In a Derridean sense, what would be the difference between total labor and total play? Living as a slave is not a total labor context as there is still an awareness of play out there (and even slaves find moments of play that is differentiated from their enforced labor). If play is our desire/objective, then the only way to total play is by making play create social value (i.e. making it also labor). Do you want to make a living playing video games? Do you want to make a living playing with your kids? Is one form of play morally superior to the other? Is it morality that is at question here? I am not sure what is gained, intellectually, from this totalizing gesture but I am always amused by the way in which Marxist moralizing echoes religious right moralizing. (Don't while away your days on the Internet. Lend your efforts to the judgment day of our revolution/salvation.)

If we begin with recognizing desire (pleasure, pain, labor, play) as network(ed) affects/effects, then we can begin to see the necessary role of technology as one that is not invasive but rather integral to desire. If we define labor as any human activity from which capitalism captures profit, then all acts of consumption going back to the earliest marketplace would need to be defined as labor. Certainly, there is a sense in Marx of the collapsing relations between production and consumption, but I'm not sure this is a useful direction.

As with the book, social media are altering our affectivity, our desires. Is it fun to grind away at repetitive keystrokes trying to level up in World of Warcraft? Is it work to blog or post a review on Amazon? Am I playing when I am messing around with Google Wave? Is it work to rate a show on Hulu or comment on an ESPN story?

In the end, I guess I'm not sure what we are after here. Are we afraid that we are being made fools of by social media companies who exploit us as dupes? Are we in search of freedom? From whom? And how do we define the subjects (or objects) that we are freeing? Is the concern more immediate/pragmatic in making sure human needs are met in a world where wealth keeps getting concentrated? All of these seem to be faithful sequels to the Marxist questions of industrialization. That doesn't make them unfair or unimportant questions, but it does make them more of the same. It's like the Marxist version of product repackaging. Maybe Marxism can change its name just like corporations that get bad reputations do.

I find the potential positive implications of playbor more interesting and revolutionary. As a writer, these intersections and confusions seem normal to me. Am I working or playing here? Are the nature and scope of my activity limited to a capitalist evaluation of value on this blog? Or are there excesses to that? The book shows us how capitalism might seek to expropriate media as factory and playground, but it also shows us the potential of network affectivity beyond the poverty of the marketplace exchange. And by this I don't mean simply the traditional aesthetic/humanistic value of reading a "good book" (though I'll let you have that if you like); I mean what I have gained here, writing this: the ways in which composition operates as becomings.

So for my labor (I guess), what I am after are tactics, mobile ethics, rhetorics that enable me to thrive materially, intellectually, spiritually, and sustainably in the larger changing context. I can see how the book/print culture and especially my disciplinary relation to it in English Studies are fading away as part of the "trade offs" and "social costs" mentioned above. So I am after the honing of writing as a weapon rather than a tool (vis-a-vis Deleuzian nomadology), where writing and rhetoric are no longer tools for labor, where they no longer fit into the collapsing dialectic between labor and play. A third space, then, as Vitanza suggests.

digital ethics and scholarship: more on Technological Ecologies and Sustainability

As mentioned in the previous post, some further thoughts on the recently released Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (free download). Admittedly, I am skipping around somewhat in the collection and writing today about two of the pieces in the final section on "Sustaining Scholarship and the Environment:" "Sustainable Digital Ecologies and Considered Limits" by Lisa Lebduska and "Sustaining Scholarly Efforts: The Challenge of Digital Media" by Cynthia Selfe, Gail Hawisher, and Patrick Berry. Clearly the notion of sustainability is at stake here. It's not only a question of can we build a lab, create a new course, start a new journal, or begin a new scholarly practice: it's a question of what does it take to keep such things alive. And I know from my own experience that bringing things like these to life in the first place can be such a difficult task that it is tempting to put off the question of long-term sustainability.

You might think that such a statement is a preamble to a warning about the danger of such an approach, and I suppose you can take it that way. However, anything short of legally-binding contractual commitments to sustainability (which you are not likely to get) are probably not worth much anyway. What I mean is that the bottom line to sustainability is access to material resources (money). There is really only one strategy for sustainability, as cynical as this may be: being successful in a way that can be communicated to, and valued by, the people who decide to give you money. In short, it is exactly the same strategy any professor employs in pursuit of access to that most important mechanism of sustainability: tenure.

Beyond that, I have never particularly felt the need to be an apologist or evangelist for digital media. Lebduska focuses part of her essay on the reasons why some faculty are skeptical or resistant toward new technology. In my view, some of these arguments are important and reasonable, some are poorly conceived, and others are just self-interested turf protection.

To put succinctly my own thoughts on this matter... if you have concerns about emerging technologies, that's fine, but for your concerns to have any merit in academic terms, they have to be based upon a disciplinary study of those technologies. In short, to have a legitimate academic concern regarding technology is probably as strong a reason for calling for studying these technologies as I can imagine. I mean, does it make any academic intellectual sense to say, "I think x is a matter of great concern for the future of our society, so it's my position that we should not study it."

In any case, in the big picture, 20 years down the line, one of three things will happen: most of the humanistic disciplines around today will be gone; most of the current humanities will have morphed into digital versions of themselves; or we will have reverted to print technologies and the humanities will remain largely unchanged. I wouldn't bet on the last one. What we do in the next decade might have an impact on which of the first two possibilities comes about. I suppose that is where this collection lies.

But I digress from my discussion of these essays!

In trying to move us forward, Selfe, Hawisher, and Berry identify three principles of feminist scholarship and sustainability:

Principle #1: The profession of English can retain its traditional value on scholarship that is original, innovative, intellectual and sustained, peer reviewed, and published, while acknowledging that scholarly fields, forms, and values change.

Principle #2: Scholarly models of production are not fixed. Rather, they are fluid, and socially and technologically shaped and contingent. Scholarship, increasingly, is created, maintained, and circulated in a range of electronic environments that can be used to extend the intellectual reach of ideas and the development of academic fields and subfields.

Principle #3: Social networks and collaborative scholarship—especially when informed by feminist values on sharing and connection—can multiply and leverage the innovation and contributions of new scholarly projects. They can also help increase the sustainability of such projects and the community at large.

This is certainly sound advice and, as the essay exemplifies, Selfe and Hawisher's careers as leaders in the field of computers and writing serve as evidence. I would expand upon this to note the importance of extending these networks beyond English, as organizations like HASTAC demonstrate. As reasonable as these principles sound, we know that strong objections remain to digital scholarship.

Lebduska invokes Lawrence Lessig's concept of rivalrous, non-rivalrous, and innovation commons in seeking to understand these objections. Though we can think of aspects of digital scholarship as falling into the non-rivalrous and innovations commons, along with other aspects of digital culture, inasmuch as digital scholarship draws on limited university resources, it is undoubtedly in competition with traditional practices, ranging from library budgets to hiring practices. It is perhaps not so easy to acknowledge that "scholarly fields, forms, and values change," even though change must be an integral part of any living, intellectual practice.

Setting aside the intellectual arguments, for those committed to traditional scholarly practices, for whatever reason, the primary advantages lie in inertia, bureaucracy, and the general conservatism of academic life (even if one doesn't otherwise share those values). For those interested in digital scholarship, the advantages lie in access to the nonrivalrous and innovation commons of digital culture, as well as all the external cultural forces that seek change in higher education (even if one doesn't otherwise agree with them). It does create strange bedfellows, where scholars who fought to open the literary canon now align themselves with the cultural conversative values that built that canon and scholars who critique corporate values find themselves in agreement on the importance of teaching "digital literacy" (or whatever you want to call it).

Taking the long view, the digitizing of the humanities seems inevitable, but it ain't going to be pretty. The only real, ethical question lies in what role one sees for oneself in the eventual shape those humanities take. The guidelines in these essays are not a bad place to start thinking about such things.

preliminary thoughts on Technological Ecologies and Sustainability

I've started read Technological Ecologies and Sustainability eds. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi A. McKee, and Dickie Selfe: the first book out of the Computers and Composition Digital Press (available here). This new press is an exciting proposition and it's great to see it come to life. Though I'm just getting into the text,  Technological Ecologies and Sustainability raises important new questions for us to consider. As the editors write in their introduction,

Why shouldn’t scholars and teachers of English studies once again envision a new institutional space for prioritizing propositions of compelling sustainable technological ecologies and establishing a temporary state of affairs? Why can we not imagine an institutional process that will eventually call that state of affairs into question, so that the process can begin again? We and our colleagues have brought to life unique and innovative institutional spaces before as we created (and continue to recreate) writing and learning centers or technology-rich labs and classrooms, as we create new techno-pedagogies out of each online space that leaps into existence (blogs, wikis, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.), and as we create new digital spaces for publishing online scholarly work. We are perfectly capable of creating institutional space for establishing temporary states of affairs on which we can base decisions in the service of sustainable technological ecologies. We are flexible and nimble enough to imagine policies and procedures that will, then, call a temporary state of affairs into question and begin Latour’s process all over again (collective gathering civil discussion  ranking of propositions  establishing yet another temporary state of affairs).

There's no doubt that we are in a challenging moment. It is nearly as difficult to figure out the questions that we need to ask as it is to seek answers to those questions. That process is not made any easier by the larger contexts of the economy and the changing nature of higher education (of which technological concerns are only one part). How should rhetoric and composition, or more broadly, English Studies, or even broader, the humanities, respond to the emerging practices of networked digital media? How should we approach the subject as researchers? How should we incorporate it into our curriculum? Into first-year writing? Into writing across the curriculum? Into undergrad and graduate degree programs?

Ideally the bottom line answer to these questions would begin with your degree of certainty in your understanding of where we will be in 2020. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone can have much certainty. As such it is imperative to move forward with a highly fluid and responsive set of tactics, which is something I see echoed in this collection.  The couple chapters I've already read all suggest that these tactics are heavily shaped by local, institutional forces. This is something I've suggested myself (so naturally I think it is a very astute observation ;-) ). That said, at some point, our disciplinary identity might shift so that the integration of new media would seem as normal as the integration of print texts, and then differences between local contexts will likely diminish as they have in terms of the expectations for English faculty in terms of books have. But that is quite a ways off, if it ever arrives.

In the first essay in the collection, Rylish Moeller, Cheryl Ball, and Kellie Cargile Cook, take up the question of tactics from the perspective of new faculty entering an institution. Specifically, the article recounts Rylish and Cheryl's experiences joining the Utah State faculty. As they argue,

One solution to this issue is to look at new English faculty as agents who manipulate certain pressure points at various times within a complex, political economic ecology—a social system demonstrated through material, measurable effects and affectations. These pressure points become more visible with the introduction of new agents and new technologies, both of which push the boundaries of a department’s constraints. 

This is an interesting perspective for me as I move to join the Buffalo faculty next semester. I think this is a useful essay for anyone in computers and writing entering a new position, or indeed any department hiring such faculty. Looking at the particular experiences of these faculty will likely give many readers new insight into what happens when digital media faculty are brought into a department. My own experiences at Cortland were not much different. At first I was given an office computer that was of little use to me. And it took a couple years to build a computer lab where I could teach my courses. The successes I did enjoy at Cortland came from building relationships with faculty and staff across the campus. This also seems to have been the experience at Utah State. It's really not surprising. And in the end, we might take comfort in recognizing the importance of good old-fashioned rhetoric and communication to these efforts.

In the end, it's not really anything new to reshape a department through new hires, but the move toward digital media takes this in a new direction. That is, making a move toward hiring faculty in a new literary specialization will make a difference internally to a department, but hiring digital media faculty changes the department's relationship to the material operation of a campus. Digital media faculty will establish connections and draw on resources that traditional literary faculty might never consider. For good or for bad, we shake things up.

So that's certainly one way to call the current state of affairs into question.

I'm looking forward to reading further into this collection.

reading is dead; long live reading

Steven Johnson writes for the Wall Street Journal on "How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write." Nick Carbone posts about this to the WPA list and a brief but instructive discussion ensues, particularly over this passage from Johnson about putting books online.

Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

What is seemingly lost here is that familiar, media-ideological experience of "intimacy" between the author and the reader. It is an intimacy that Kittler describes when observes that before the development of mechanical media, "handwriting alone could guarantee the perfect securing of traces... And what applied to writing also applied to reading. Even if the alphabetized individual known as the 'author' finally had to fall from the private exteriority of handwriting into the anonymous exteriority of print in order to secure 'all that's left of him, as well as his self-propagation'--alphabetized individuals known as 'readers' were able to reverse this exteriorization."

Perhaps it is too much to say, as Johnson does, that "Nobody will read alone anymore," except in the sense that no one has ever read alone, that reading has always been a social/cultural activity, that in order "to be a reader" one must enter into an ideological relationship with a text. At the same time, I think Johnson has a good point in suggesting that the user experience of the book has been forever changed by one's encounter with networks. Even if the words on a page are not literally linked, we can turn them into points of conduction with the flick of a Google search. In six months maybe you will be reading Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. You will read the passage I quoted above. Perhaps it will spark a brief flicker in your memory, leading you to type the phrase into Google. And maybe this post comes up. Who knows? But something will come up.

But of course no one really worries about such things for theory or scholarship or even most nonfiction. We all seem to realize that such texts are about community conversations. But somehow with novels, and maybe creative nonfiction, we fantisize a more intimate relationship. In some respects the novel is founded on this fantasy. We imagine intimate relationships with the author's mind, with the fictional minds of the characters. Is this something we will no longer imagine? Perhaps it will be as Ulmer suggests when he writes that "the ethical dilemma of self/other will not be solved in an electronic apparatus but simply that it will become irrelevant, just as 'appeasing' the gods, which was the problem addressed by ritual, became irrelevant in literacy, even if ritual form--in theater--continued within literacy."

So we will continue to read (of course!) but for different reasons. Just as we do not lament the loss of the desire to appease the gods, we will (eventually) not lament the loss of the desire for this intimate encounter with the author.

In the end it is certainly more complicated than all of that (as it always is). Perhaps we read novels for an intimate experience, but we also read them to be part of a literate club, to reaffirm some social/intellectual identity. Sometimes the latter desire may be more in force than the former. But if we come to see ourselves as part of a network then perhaps we cease to worry so much about the self/other boundary and the desire for the intimate experience with an other fades.

anathem and the consolation of rhet/comp

With the semester over, I finally got the opportunity to read Neal Stephenson's Anathem. If you like Stephenson's work, particularly his more recent work, I think you will enjoy this novel. It is science fiction, but it often reads more like a Platonic dialogue with extensive philosphical conversations about time, space, and consciousness, generally articulated in mathematical terms. The novel is also interesting for its alternate world take on academia. In this world, the work of intellectuals is carried out by monks, male and female, who live a seriously cloistered life. There are different orders. Some get to come out once a year (these are mostly students). Then there are those who are in for a decade, a century, and a millenium (yes, the last one is a bit of a mystery revealed through the narrative). The novel describes how the average folks, the extramuros, are not interested in the abstractions or even the complex technologies developed inside. As is articulated a couple times in the novel, some people burn with the curiousity to understand, to seek out the secrets of the world. Most people, however, have no such interests and are satisfied with pursuing more immediate desires.

Anyway, the novel resonated well with the In Our Time podcast I heard the other day. It was nominally on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy but was really a broader conversation about philsophy ranging from Plato to Camus (just about as far as one can go actually).Generally speaking, Boethius is a neo-Platonist who articualtes the Platonic ideal in Christian terms. The book is written while Boethius is imprisoned and awaiting execution and essentially explores the solace or consolation philosophy might offer one in such a position. Anathem pulls out a similar discussion with different orders of monks. Some believe in an essentially Platonic notion of a higher plane of ideal forms. Some might even attribute a divine quality to this world, in neo-Platonist fashion. Still others, who are termed Rhetors, view knowledge and truth as discursive and culturally constructed. Classically, we know that philosophy and rhetoric can be opposed, so all this got me wondering what the "consolation of rhetoric" might be.

Of course, when I hear the world consolation my mind leaps to consolation prize. FYC is often viewed as a kind of consolation prize... not as one's first choice. Philosophy is perhaps also a consolation prize, given to those who cannot find happiness in ignorance.

But as the In Our Time discussion addressed, philosophy need not (or in some view should not) be simply an abstract way to relieve sorrow. Philosophy becomes a means for engaging in the world. If, from a Camus-like, existentialist position, the world has no intrinsic meaning, then it falls upon the philosopher to produce value through action in response to one's cultural-historical conditions. In such conditions one can see the subordinate role the rhetoric has played since Plato in leading one's audience to the Truth or at least to a truth.

However I wonder if a different compositional consolation might not be available. Stephenson's novel speculates on the possibility of multiple universes, narrowly separated by quantum differences that lead us to spin off in slightly different directions. The characters speak of these as different narratives. I was thinking of choose-your-own-adventure or hyperfiction. The act of composition offers an affective encounter with this quantum-virtual-undecided experience. In the compositional event, many virtual possibilities exist. The potential for different worlds stand before us. Different verisions of ourselves stand before us. Yes, perhaps the differences are modest, but we encounter the potential for mutation.

Given the choice between the speculative contemplation of an ideal other world, the consolation of philosophy, and the meditative reflection on the virtual possibilities of the moment, the consolation of composition, I will take the latter. Of course no choice is necessary, so one might as well have both.