Rachael Shapiro

learner. teacher. maker.

Cooper, Marilyn. “The Ecology of Writing.”

by Rachael

Published on: February 21, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1986, ecologies, ecology of writing, marilyn cooper, writing as social

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Cooper, Marilyn. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English 48.4 (1986): 364–375. Print.

Summary

In this 1986 article, Cooper offers the ecological model of writing as a way to attend to its (previously overlooked) social nature. She begins by naming it the moment to rethink the limits and consequences of a cognitive model of writing, pointing to its advancing our thinking about grammar and revision, but limiting our abilities to understand writing as an exercise that begins and ends with the social, rather than the individual writer (365-6). Noting some exciting socially oriented pedagogical practices going on at the time, Cooper celebrates what she sees as:

a growing awareness that language and texts are not simply the means by which individuals discover and communicate information, but are essentially social activities, dependent on social structures and processes not only in their interpretive but also in their constructive phases. (366)

Cooper acknowledges that there have been interpreting and important contextual models in the past, such as the Burkean Pentad, but that these models curiously manage to leave out the social, describing a context as an isolated and static event to which the writer must respond. In contrast, what Cooper seeks to “propose is an ecological model of writing, whose fundamental tenet is that writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems.” (367).

Ecologies, for Cooper, get at nuances such as “how writers interact to form systems;” they are “dynamic interlocking systems which structure the social activity of writing” and how they are dialectically composed through the actions of each agent therein–agents who respond to the instantiation of that ecology from within which and to which they write (368-9). Purposes, for instance, “like ideas, arise out of interaction, and individual purposes are modified by the larger purpose of groups; in fact, an individual impulse or need only becomes a purpose when it is recognized as such by others” (369). The interconnectedness of the ecology suggests that any impact ripples throughout the system. Though there are certainly many, the implication of the ecology model Cooper most focuses on in the final sections of her article is how we might reconceptualize audience. Entire new pedagogies and practices might emerge when we move from a vision of audience as imagined or constructed from the consciousness of the solitary author to an understanding of “readers as real social beings” by whom any writer is prompted and to whom they are accountable (372).

Cooper concludes by noting that writing is a means through which we interact with and shape and respond to our world; noting in the end that this model is idea, we have to remember the ways in which discourse is wrapped up in the material, is negotiated, and is shaped by power.

Quotes

In contrast, an ecology of writing encompasses much more than the individual writer and her immediate context. An ecologist explores how writers interact to form systems: all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the systems. An important characteristic of ecological systems is that they are inherently dynamic; though their structures and contents can be specified at a given moment, in real time they are constantly changing, limited only by parameters that are themselves subject to change over longer spans of time. (369)

The systems are not given, not limitations on writers; instead they are made and remade by writers in the act of writing. It is in this sense that writing changes social reality and not only, as Lloyd Bitzer argues, in response to exigence. (369)

The system of textual forms is, obviously, the means by which writers com- municate. Textual forms, like language forms in general, are at the same time conservative, repositories of tradition, and revolutionary, instruments of new forms of action. A textual form is a balancing act: conventional enough to be comprehensible and flexible enough to serve the changing purposes of writing. Thus, new forms usually arise by a kind of cross-breeding, or by analogy, as older forms are taken apart and recombined or modified in a wholesale fashion.

The metaphor for writing suggested by the ecological model is that of a web, in which anything that affects one strand of the web vibrates throughout the whole. To reiterate, models are ways of thinking about, or ways of seeing, com- plex situations. If we look at, for example, a particularly vexed problem in cur- rent writing theory, the question of audience, from the perspective of this model, we may be able to reformulate the question in a way that helps us to find new answers. (370)

By focusing our attention on the real social context of writing, it enables us to see that writers not only analyze or invent audiences, they, more significantly, communicate with and know their audiences. (371)

The vari- ous roles people take on in writing also arise out of this social structure: through interacting with others, in writing and speaking, they learn the functions and tex- tual forms of impersonal reporting, effective instruction, irony, story-telling. In the same way they learn the attitudes toward these roles and toward purposes and ideas held by the various groups they interact with, and they come to under- stand how these interactions are themselves partly structured by institutional procedures and arrangements. These attitudes, procedures, and arrangements make up a system of cultural norms which are, however, neither stable nor uni- form throughout a culture. People move from group to group, bringing along with them different complexes of ideas, purposes, and norms, different ways of interacting, different interpersonal roles and textual forms. Writing, thus, is seen to be both constituted by and constitutive of these ever-changing systems, sys- tems through which people relate as complete, social beings, rather than imagin- ing each other as remote images: an author, an audience.

It is important to remember that the image the ecological model projects is again an ideal one. In reality, these systems are often resistent to change and not easily accessible. Whenever ideas are seen as commodities they are not shared; whenever individual and group purposes cannot be negotiated someone is shut out; differences in status, or power, or intimacy curtail interpersonal interac- tions; cultural institutions and attitudes discourage writing as often as they en- courage it; textual forms are just as easily used as barriers to discourse as they are used as means of discourse. A further value of the ecological model is that it can be used to diagnose and analyze such situations, and it encourages us to di- rect our corrective energies away from the characteristics of the individual writ- er and toward imbalances in social systems that prevent good writing; one such analysis by my colleague Michael Holzman appeared recently in CE. (373)

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work.

by Rachael

Published on: January 20, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2005, agency, articulation theory, datacloud, information economy, interfaces, johndan johnson-eilola, stuart hall, symbolic analytic work

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Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2005. Print.

Notes and Quotes

Def of Datacloud, page 4

Seeks to combine symbolic analytic (SymAn) and Stuart Hall’s articulation theory to understand interfaces as a reflection of how life and work have changed with the development of the new information economy.

Chapter One:

technology as “contingent, multidimensional, fragmented, and constructed…” (9)
meaning in the seemingly trivial, the everyday
the possibility of agency
There’s a gap between new and old systems of knowing/doing, but the gap is where the possibility is!
datacloud is a way of thinking in the knowledge economy (11)
ubiquity/invisibility of technology! (12)
vision, pomo, the subject (15)
WE CANNOT BE FULL SUBJECTS UNTIL WE UNDERSTAND (16)
rhetoric and technology articulate each other (16)
agency and localized technology (18)
“articulation theory offers a way to represent the possibility of resistance to dominant cultural foundations”
- allows for agency on the spectrum btw marxism and postmodernism (18)
SymAn—>the manipulation of symbols (18-19)
I see why this is so important to locating this project in rhetoric, given Burke’s symbol-using creatures…
“technical rhetoricians working in a datacloud” (19)
Rationale for articulation and symAn
reflection of cultures, attitudes, theroies, daily events, articulations
“interfaces are cultural constructions” (20)

Chapter Two: Tangential forces: Review of Articulation Theory and Symbolic-Analytic Work

Articulation is ideological, SymAn is material (24)
Resists vulgar Marxism, articulation is a way to break open access to the symbolic-analytic
Articulation: Foucault, Gramsci, Althusser, Lacleau
it’s multiple and conflicting
ideology is like language
meaning is rooted in the local
26- conceptual objects
27- 1. conceptual objects are contingent and open to change, 2) change involved struggle among competing forces, 3) conceptual objects as articulations are never separate from the forces that construct them, 4) different concrete contexts necessarily construct articulations that vary in different aspects and degrees, 5) fragmentation and rupture are not necessarily debilitating
def syman, 28
- they’re both geek and shrink, lol
How to educate the syman worker: collaboration, experimentation, abstraction, system thinking (29)
Lyotard in PoMo condition–> innovation is trumping originality
systems thinking: beyond problem solving to understanding and remaking systemic conditions (30) functionalism sucks (30)
rearticulation!!! 31-2 breakdowns are opportunities for remaking!!!!
- does Twitter as an interface allow for articulations?

Indeed the inherent contingency and possibility of fragmentation requires socially active participants who are able to work for both stability and change. What is remarkable about this process is that meanings are possible for all” (28).

on 51, J-E says “Where previously work was enmeshed in a social context- and learning how to work involved a process of education over time–work now is increasingly fragmented and flattened. Learning how to work is shrunken and decontextualized so that only the most functional aspects are visible at the surface.”

In the end, the computer is not capable of supporting the amount of information necessary for contemporary work, either at the macro- or microlevel. As a networked device, the interface offers a portal for users to connect up to other users in a virtual collaborative object, the interface becomes enmeshed with a functional information context–one that denies exclusively on- or offline information. (68)

In such contexts, users tend to apply a process of trial-and-error to achieve minimally acceptable results within one application, but have little experience learning a new system, let alone advancing their learning beyond he novice level. Sometimes (too often), students do not learn to understand that information is not neutral, but needs to be looked at critically, challenged, and transformed–used rather than simply received. (101) [also- programs should offer users hybrid production/consumption/transformative experiences]

On Information Architecture: Whereas traditional architecture (and information architecture) would deem contingency and chaos as negative aspects, deconstructive architecture recognizes the productive and creative potential in those characteristics. Just as important, deconstructive architecture frequently involves social commentary on ways commensurate with the social project of postmodernism in relation to articulation theory–not a rejection, but a recuperation and reclaiming of terrain and power. The fragmenting impulses contained (and exploded) by these gestures do not obliterate opportunities for meaning; they make new meanings possible. (126)

The symbolic analytic worker should…. 1. “emphasis on breaking down artifacts…is an important work habit in the information age. Breakdown opens up possibilities for recombination.” 2. “symbolic-analytic workers require support for maintaining and organizing large volumes of data (and facilities for moving data around).” 3. “texts are participatory and contingent, rather than passively received” 4. “choices about information–how it is combined, filtered, and arranged–have moral consequences; the symbolic-analytic worker should not strive to be neutral and invisible because that stance ignores that artifacts have politics…. Users should, occasionally at least, be pushed to consider their relations to the technology, to the culture around them. (126-7)

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think”

by Rachael

Published on: January 20, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1945, before computers, history of technology, vannevar bush

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Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think” The Atlantic (July) 1945. Web. 25 September 2010.

Summary

This 1945 Atlantic article poses the question of what scientific knowledge might produce now that it need not be consumed completely by war efforts. Bush points to the problem of ever growing human knowledge, worth considerably less if it can’t be sorted and accessed in a manner timely enough to allow for further development. From this point he moves on to imagine developments in photography and other technologies that might facilitate knowledge sorting, predicting digital cameras, credit cards, and computers.

Quotes

In the outside world, all forms of intelligence whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness.

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.

Gee, J. P. “The Legacies of Literacy: From Plato to Freire through Harvey Graff.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 20, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, diss, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1989, eric havelock, harvey graff, james paul gee, paulo freire, plato, politics of education, politics of literacy, raymond williams, the platonic dilemma, walter ong, william labov

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Gee, J. P. “The Legacies of Literacy: From Plato to Freire through Harvey Graff.” Journal of Education 171.1 (1989): 147–65. Print.

Summary

In this review essay, Gee builds on Graff’s The Legacies of Literacy to put forth some of his own questions about literacy. Following an excellent recount of what Graff terms “the literacy myth,” Gee returns to Plato who was the first to combat writing in writing (149). Via Socrates, Plato argues that writing is detrimental to memory, supports a false kind of/concept of knowledge that is external to the self, and is mostly incapable of the dialogic method to which he is so committed for its pursuit of pure, beautiful knowledge. Gee points out Plato’s hypocrisy, however, and demonstrates how Plato’s is the first in a long line of theoretical and actual moments of literacy endorsed and controlled by the state. He writes that “Plato’s contradiction is real, and the literacy myth can be seen as a response to it” (154).

That literacy can be liberatory, but can also be an ISA is demonstrated through a look at pervasive literacy in Sweden by the end of the 18th century where poverty was still rampant, but the Church and state had considerable control over the masses. Similarly, Gee/Graff look at Scribner and Coles’ 1981 The Psychology of Literacy, wherein a study of literacy among the Vai in Liberia reveals that literacy and education share myths that are actually undermined by material reality (getting jobs is less about literacy or education and more about how those things are valued). Through these and other examples, Gee explores the side of the Platonic contradiction that shows literacy to have the effect of uncritical acceptance of hegemonic values as natural.

Turning to the liberatory side of the Platonic literacy dilemma, Gee cites Freire’s emphasis on “correct thinking,” and concludes that “Freire has his Republic too. There is no way out of Plato’s dilemma. Literacy always comes with a perspective on interpretation that is ultimately political. One can hide that perspective the better to claim it isn’t there, or one can put it out in the open. Plato, Sweden, and Freire–each has a perspective, and a strong one” (162).

In his concluding section, Gee poses the question: “Can truly emancipatory literacy and literacy education evolve in a society without a prior or concomitant social revolution, the sort of revolution that has rarely in history been seen without violence and major social upheaval?” (164). He goes on to reason out the nature of literacy (or interpretations serving as proof of literacy) as always a matter of social construction, and hence, literacy is a social practice more than an autonomous entity that can be studied in and of itself (164-5). Thus, he concludes in answer to his question that literacy is not the thing that needs to be changed so much as the social institutions that define it: schools.

He ends with a quote from Raymond Williams via Michael Apple:

It is only in a shared belief and insistance that there are practical alternatives that the balance of forces and chances begins to alter. Once the inevitablilties are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for a journey of hope. If there are no easy answers there are still available discoverable hard answers, and it is these that we can now learn to make and share. This had been, from the beginning, the sense and the impulse of the long revolution. (Williams, 1983, pp. 268-9). (165)

Quotes

The most striking continuity in the history of literacy that emerges form Graff’s book is the way literacy has been used, in age after age, to solidify the social hierarchy, empower the eliters, and ensure that people lower on the hierarchy accept the values, norms, and beliefs of the eliters, even when it is not in their self-interest (or “class interest”) to do so. (159)

Nonetheless, the fact that these national norms more closely match the local or community-based behavior of the middle class than they do those below them on the social scale favors the former against the latter. Futhermore, the process whereby lower-class speakers condemn their own comminity-based behaviors as compared to these national norms undergirds the myth that these norms are somehow natireal and God-given, when in fact they represent merely the historical empowering of one set of localized, comminity-based conventional behaviors over other sets. The concept of hegemony argues that this mdel applied to a range of behaviors and attitudes well beyond language. (160)

In the end, we might say that, contrary to the literacy myth, nothing follows from literacy or schooling. Much follows, however, from what comes with literacy and schooling, what literacy and schooling come wrapped up in; namely, the attitudes, values, norms, and beliefs (at once social, cultural, and political) that always accompany literacy and schooling. These consequences may be work habits that facilitate industrialization, abilities in “expository talk in contrived situations,” a religiously or politically quiescent population, radical opposition to colonial oppressors, and any number of other things. A text, whether written on paper, on the soul (Plato), or on the world (Freire), is a loaded weapon. The person, the educator, who hands over the gun, hands over the bullets (the perspective), and must own up to the consequences. There is no way out of having an opinion, an ideology, and a strong one–as did Plato, as does Freire. Literacy education is not for the timid. (162-3)

Anderson, Virginia. “Supply-Side Dreams: Composition, Technology, and the Circular Logic of Class.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 20, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2010, charles moran, class, critical digital divide, cynthia selfe, digital divide, political economy, stuart selber, virginia anderson

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Anderson, Virginia. “Supply-Side Dreams: Composition, Technology, and the Circular Logic of Class.”Computers and Composition 27.2 (2010): 124-137. Print.

Summary

Drawing on literacy and digital literacy scholarship that sees both as situated and constructed, Anderson critiques claims that composition educators and scholars are obligated to learn and teach critical digital literacies due to the class-based access divide found among teachers (not just students).

Retelling the story of a shoddy course management system update, in which the developers–to save money–put out an under-tested product whose costs in faculty time and energy helped highlight the relationship between usability, digital literacies, economics, and class/power differences within a university faculty.

Concerned with the ways in which OSS and usability demand resources that are unequally distributed among faculty, Anderson argues that we must step back from the rhetoric of “trailblazing” and “pioneering,” having those in computers and writing think of themselves instead as representatives who can think critically about and advocate for material affects of technology development.

Quotes

Unlike many discussions of access, this article does not focus on the need to make technology more available across socioeconomic boundaries. Rather, I address a central assumption of the “dominant discourse” on computers in composition (Ellen Barton, as cited in Moran, 1999, p. 208): that keeping up with and exploiting technological innovation will benefit literacy educators. I argue that a too-exuberant embrace of this assumption can blind scholars to the effects of small but meaningful decisions on the everyday practice of teachers. [...] Living through the imposition of more and better technology at Indiana University has made visible to me in concrete terms the impacts such blindness can have. The experience gives presence to the material barriers to agency that many literacy educators face and the costs of surmounting those barriers. Most importantly, it suggests that, contrary to a thread of the dominant discourse that contends that technological change is an unstoppable train, composition as a field need not be a breathless passenger as these material challenges accumulate. This case study suggests that composition scholars on the bright side of the divide not only should, but can, address this inequality. Our celebration of their leadership casts such scholars as pioneers who break ground that those of us who follow can settle and civilize. I contend that they can better serve composition, and the community of faculty and students it comprises, by resisting this self-identification as “pioneers” and “visionaries” to choose instead the role of “representatives” for others who are differently situated in the field. (125)

What has emerged from this challenge to my status is a sense of actually living the theoretical postulates about class that have occupied composition scholarship. Locating the embodied experience of being “down-classed” in this larger discussion allows me to explore how changes that may seem trivial from the theoretical outside can have measurable effects. Before this experience, I had not fully considered the implications of composition’s insistence that literacy educators must, as a duty, enter the competitive, unstable environment in which technological innovation typically thrives. This article attempts to highlight those implications for my technologically adept colleagues in composition studies, some of whom may have inadvertently exacerbated these problems through small but surprisingly meaningful decisions, and many of whom, if aware of the power inherent in their roles, might more effectively champion those whose practice they impact. (126)

My experience as a classed user of IU’s Oncourse CL supports this warning that composition’s revision of its mission to make compositionists players in the fast-moving world of futuristic innovation can too easily, if not undertaken with the utmost self-consciousness, serve as yet another instantiation of the class divide Harris described, an instantiation that the pioneers in the process of creating it may not fully recognize. (126-7)

Thus, for a faculty member to go elsewhere like a disgruntled customer requires not only more time investment (and therefore de facto submission to the power relation), but also deliberate resistance—and being driven to resort to resistance to assert one’s needs is again to acknowledge the power differential and thereby accept the naming of one’s class.

Clearly, usability testing, the process of learning how web tools will work in the actual situations in which users will employ them, is an important way designers develop their relationships with users and clarify what power differentials exist. (130-1)

It is possible that decisions meant to liberate students in fact privilege a certain kind of student; they certainly privilege a certain kind of faculty member and a certain kind of teaching. [...] The ethos of composition, and of humanities studies in general, does call for a critical examination like the one composition scholars promote, in which students and faculty alike examine the social, economic, and cultural implications of the technology they use—but not the examination that is usually intended, one that uncritically relies on every department’s getting someone “out there,” ready to recognize what’s coming down the pike and sound the alarm if things go wrong. There seems to be little recognition of the material realities that mean that not every department in every institution of higher learning can meet this demand. (135)

Stuart Selber. Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication.

by Rachael

Published on: January 19, 2012

Categories: exams

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Selber, Stuart. Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Print.

Cooper

In Cooper’s chapter, “Being Linked to the Matrix: Biology, Technology, and Writing,” she works to describe writing as a process of interactions between humans, tools, and the environment, reminding us that we are embodied–”the animal who writes.” That writers are animals helps us to visualize ourselves as existing within and negotiating with a complex ecology. The trope of author as isolated intellectual whose autonomous thoughts are transcribed through the vehicle of writing is overturned as Cooper argues that writing is response to the world, a way of and result of interactions. Curiously, her argument is very similar to McLuhan’s, especially in talk of extension of ourselves through technological prosthetics, but she never cites him.

“In this essay I argue that writing is an embodied interaction with other beings and our environments. As a result, writing is as much a biological as a cultural practice: the practices that are writing emerge as people respond to others and to their world; they are not the product of minds somehow separated from bodies nor of innate technical or linguistic abilities. Furthermore, I argue that writing and technology are cognate practices” (18).

“The discovery of tool manufacture and use in human ancestors who had yet to acquire the proportionally giant brains of Homo sapiens argues against the development of technology as a conscious mental achievement, a matter of inventing a tool for a particular use. Instead, tools seem to have arisen out of physical and kinetic coordinations between agents and their environment–they result from actions of shaping rather than being instruments designed for shaping. (22)

“Writing is always an interaction with other beings and objects in our surroundings, an interaction that we habitually misconceive as autonomous action that begins in our minds” (22).

“Understanding the acquisition of writing skills as a matter of gradual attunement of movement and perception that comes dominantly through practice, a lot of playing around with stuff, helps us remember that what students lack most when faced with audio and visual essay assignments is any experiences—and practice—in producing such texts” (28).

Understanding writing as a complex system in which human interactions elaborate cognitive ecologies allows us to understand words and tools as Ingold suggests we should, as mediating our active engagement with our environment rather than asserting our control over it. Far from alienating us from the world and our own natures, words and tools connect us inextricably to others and to our environment and make us what we are, the animal who writes. (29)

Johnson-Eiola: “Among Texts”

In this chapter, J-E projects how workflow and more in our daily lives may change as texts become smarter, social, and conscious agents called spimes.

What happens when our texts become actively social? It is one thing to read a multimedia, networked text with leaky boundaries; it is another to read a text that itself has intentions and agency that do not so much leak as roll like a river and babble like a brook. I am not suggesting that writers and readers have no agency, but only saying that the whole issue gains an extra level of intractable complexity when texts themselves are not merely out there, as objects, but also in motion, gathering other texts around them, responding to their environments in ways both simple and complex, making connections that their authors or readers are participants in, rather than simple agents of–intertextuality with teeth. (37)

“Spimes are simply objects that are aware of their own contexts and communicate about those contexts, usually relatively cheap, wireless, networked sensors” (38).

“What spime texts might offer to this work environment and work flow is at once very simple and very powerful: an informational bridge across the spaces separating these disparate bits of information” (48).

Readers of spime texts would also be involved in a more explicit ecosystem of textuality: Reading is no longer the invisible consumption of text but a semipublic performance, a form of distributed applause of hissing, less active than actually voicing a response, but still an indication of something. Reading becomes transmissive and performative rather than simply privately receptive, at a functional level. And reading itself gains a new status: a social action in addition to a cognitive one. (51)

Sirc: “Serial Composition”

Taking issue with the static object of composition over the last 120 years–the expository essay–Sirc reflects on three moments from the 60′s (a time when change seemed most possible) to see why we have “missed the boat” while other fields have developed and progressed with the times. Minimalist art helps him draw the conclusion that “new materials needed to result in new forms” (60). Along with the essay as product of FYC, Sirc challenges our goal of “quality,” to which he would prefer a sort of creative aesthetic bliss experience (my words). The final moment–the invention of the cassette tape–allows Sirc to extract the preferable compositional strategy of seriality or parataxis. He claims that “a serial composition of short, staccato bursts seems essential as a compositional strategy for our age…”and that “the effect of serial style—short, well-chosen bricks of meaning combining to form a rich whole—means we do not need to value brevity at the expense of that complexity of meaning traditionally thought to be available only through the studiously inflected part-to-whole thematized exposition of the essayist prose” (70).

Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 19, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, diss, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1985, bernard de mandeville, jonathan kozol, monopoly capital, political economy, politics of literacy, richard ohmann, walter ong

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Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English (1985): 675–689. Print.

Summary

In this prescient essay, Ohmann takes on the task of reminding us that though computer literacies might be new and exciting, they need to be thought with regard to the same political and economic contexts that have historically complicated literacy in general. He reminds us that literacies and their technologies are often developed, touted, and distributed from above, systemically and cyclically affecting citizens along the same axes of race, class, gender, etc. that allow maintenance of the status quo. He concludes that computer literacy, like any literacy, is not inherently liberatory and will only serve democratic purposes if we actively intervene to help it do so.

Quotes

I claim that exhortations about the need for “computer literacy” have much in common with longer-standing debates about literacy itself; that both kinds of discussion usually rest on a serious misconception of technology and its roles in history; and that we can best understand the issues that trouble us by situating them within the evolution of our present economic and social system-a very recent historical process, going back little more than a hundred years. The whole discussion presumes that questions of literacy and technology are inextricable from political questions of domination and equality. (675)

Once the lower orders came to be seen as masses and classes, the term “literacy” offered a handy way to conceptualize an attribute of theirs, which might be manipulated in one direction or the other for the stability of the social order and the prosperity and security of the people who counted. (677)

All of this-the analytic division of people into measurable quantities, the attempt to modify these quantities, the debate among professionals and political leaders over what’s good for the poor-all this legacy still inheres in the discourse of literacy, even now, when almost everyone takes it for granted that literacy is a Good Thing, and when it would be hard to find a Mandeville to argue that the poor should be kept illiterate in order to keep them content. (677)

The technology developed over a century and more, in ways far from accidental. Those with the vision, the needs, the money, and the power gradually made it what they wanted-a mass medium. (I exaggerate only a bit.) Technology, one might say, is it-self a social process, saturated with the power relations around it, continually re-shaped according to some people’s intentions. (681)

Perhaps I can make the point another way by entering a friendly objection to some characteristic formulations of Walter Ong, one of our most stimulating and learned writers on these matters. In Interfaces of the Word, for instance, he writes of “technological devices . . . which enable men to … shape, store, retrieve, and communicate knowledge in new ways” (44). Again, “writing and print and the computer enable the mind to constitute within itself… new ways of thinking. . . .” (46). And, “the alphabet or print or the computer enters the mind, producing new states of awareness there. … the computer actually releases more energy for new kinds of exploratory operations by the human mind itself .. .” (47). My objections are, first, to phrases like “the computer,” as if it were one, stable device; second, to these phrases used as grammatical agents (“the computer enables the mind .. .”), implying that the technology somehow came before someone’s intention to enable some minds to do some things; and third, to phrases like “man,” “the mind,” and “the human mind,” in these contexts, suggesting that technologies interact with people or with “culture” in global, undifferentiated ways, rather than serving as an arena of interaction among classes, races, and other groups of unequal power. (681)

I am suggesting that, seen from the side of production and work, the computer and its software are an intended and developing technology, carrying forward the deskilling and control of labor that goes back to F. W. Taylor and beyond, and that has been a main project of monopoly capital. (683)

Graduates of MIT will get the challenging jobs; community college grads will be technicians; those who do no more than acquire basic skills and computer literacy in high school will probably find their way to electronic workstations at McDonald’s. I see every reason to expect that the computer revolution, like other revolutions from the top down, will indeed expand the minds and the freedom of an elite, meanwhile facilitating the degradation of labor and the stratification of the workforce that have been hallmarks of monopoly capitalism from its onset. (683)

Seen from this side of the market, computers are a commodity, for which a mass market is being created in quite conventional ways. And their other main use in the home, besides recreation, most likely will be to facilitate the market-ing of still more commodities, as computerized shopping becomes a reality. Thus our “age of technology” looks to me very much like the age of monopoly capital, with new channels of power through which the few try to control both the labor and the leisure of the many. (684)

Now, none of these developments is foreordained. The technology is malle-able; it does have liberatory potential. Especially in education, we have some-thing to say about whether that potential is realized. But its fate is not a technological question: it is a political one. (685)

Literacy is an activity of social groups, and a necessary feature of some kinds of social organization. Like every other human activity or product, it embeds social relations within it. And these relations always include conflict as well as cooperation. Like language itself, literacy is an exchange be-tween classes, races, the sexes, and so on. Simply recall the struggle over black English, or think on the continuing conflict over the CCCC statement, “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” or the battle over generic male pronouns, for times when the political issues have spilled out into the open. But explicit or not, they are always there, in every classroom and in every conversation-just as broadcasting technology is an exchange which has up to now been resolved through control by the dominant classes, and participation by the subordinate classes in the form of Neilson ratings and call-in shows. That means that we can usefully distinguish between literacy-from-above and literacy-from-below. (685-6)

Technique is less important than context and purpose in the teaching of literacy; and the effects of literacy cannot be isolated from the social relations and processes within which people become literate. Enough. The age of computer technology will bring us some new tools and methods for teaching literacy. I hope we (or rather, those of us teachers who are on my side!) will manage to shape that technology to democratic forms. (686)

But this age of technology, this age of computers, will change very little in the social relations-the class relations-of which literacy is an inextricable part. Monopoly capital will continue to saturate most classrooms, textbooks, student essays, and texts of all sorts. It will continue to require a high degree of literacy among elites, especially the professional-managerial class. It will continue to re-quire a meager literacy or none from subordinate classes. And yet its spokesmen-the Simons and Newmans and Safires and blue ribbon commissions on education-will continue to kvetch at teachers and students, and to demand that all kids act out the morality play of literacy instruction, from which the mor-al drawn by most will be that in this meritocracy they do not merit much. But then monopoly capital will also continue to generate resistance and rebellion, more at some times than at others. I hope many of us will find ways to take part in that resistance, even in our daily work. Apparently we must learn to fight mindless computer literacy programs, as we have sometimes fought mind-less drills in grammar and usage. We should remember that most programmed instruction, in addition to being mindless, builds in imperatives other than ours and other than those of our students. (687-8)

We should be critically analyzing the politics of all these tendencies, trying to comprehend them historically, and engaging our students in a discussion of literacy and tech-nology that is both historical and political. It’s worth trying to reconstitute liter-acy as a process of liberation-but also to remember that work for literacy is not in itself intrinsically liberating. The only way to have a democracy is to make one. (688)

Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.

by Rachael

Published on: January 12, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1999, digital democracy, diss, hypermediacy, immediacy, jay bolter, marshall mcluhan, remediation, richard grusin

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Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999. Print.

Summary

In this work on new media, Bolter and Grusin explain remediation as a contextualized process born of the relationship between immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is the effect of representations whose media become so convincing as to become invisible, or “transparent.” Hypermediacy, on the other hand, is the achievement of near-reality through an overabundance of media that create a rich environment. In their assessment, all mediation is remediation, and all mediation seeks to get as close to reality as possible. Remediation also shapes reality, even as it attempts to emulate it.

Quotes

In addressing our culture’s contradictory imperatives for immediacy and hypermediacy, this film demonstrates what we call a double logic of remediation. Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them. (5)

Furthermore, media technologies constitute networks or hybrids that can be expressed in physical, social, aesthetic, and economic terms. Introducing a new media technology does not mean simply inventing new hardware and software, but rather fashioning (or refashioning) such a network. The World Wide Web is not merely a software protocol and text and data files. It is also the sum of the uses to which this protocol is now being put: for marketing and advertising, scholarship, personal expression, and so on. These uses are as much a part of the technology as the software itself. For this reason, we can say that media technologies are agents in our culture without falling into the trap of technological determinism. New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt an unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media, which are embedded in the same or similar contexts. (19)

It is important to note that the logic of transparent immediacy does not necessarily commit the viewer to an utterly naive or magical conviction that the representation is the same thing as what it represents. Immediacy is our name for a family of beliefs and practices that express themselves differently at various times among various groups, and our quick survey cannot do justice to this variety. The common feature of all these forms is a belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents. (30)

Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as “windowed” itself–with windows that open on to other representations or other media. The logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience. On the other hand, hypermediacy can operate even in a single and apparently unified medium, particularly when the illusion of realistic representation is somehow stretched or altogether ruptured. (34)

In all its various forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a “real” space that lies beyond mediation. (41)

Again, we call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old. (45)

Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real. They are not striving for the real in any metaphysical sense. Instead, the real is defined in terms of the viewer;s experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response. Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation; digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality. Both of these moves are strategies of remediation. (53)

It would seem, then, that all mediation is remediation.

*Remediation as the mediation of mediation.

*Remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality.

*Remediation as reform. (55-60)

Remediation can also imply reform in a social or political sense, and again this sense has emerged with particular clarity in the case of digital media. A number of American political figures have even suggested that the World Wide Web can the Internet can reform democracy by lending immediacy to the process of making decisions. When citizens are able to participate in the debate of issues and possibly even vote electronically, we may substitute direct, “digital” democracy for our representational system. Here too, digital media promise to overcome representation. Even beyond claims for overt political reform, many cyberenthusiasts assert that the web and computer applications are creating a digital culture that will revolutionize commerce, education, and social relationships. Thus, broadcast television is associated with the old order of hierarchical control, while interactive media move the locus of control to the individual. That digital media can reform and even save society reminds us of the promise that has been made for technologies throughout much of the twentieth century: it is a peculiarly, if not exclusively, American promise. American culture seems to believe in technology…(60)

“In an effort to avoid both technological determinism and determined technology, we propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic facets.” (77)

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

by Rachael

Published on: January 12, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1964, cool media, extensions of man, hot media, marshall mcluhan, medium is the message, self-amputation

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McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994. Print.

Summary

In this seminal work, McLuhan provides an analysis of electronic media as the extension of human consciousness. Where in the mechanical age and with early media we extended our physical capacities, electronic media represent an extension of our central nervous system. This has the result of our being more open, more accountable to each other, more responsible as we are part of the global village, while at once also less potent. He distinguishes between hot media and cool media: hot are those media that are intense and deliver massive amounts of information directly to an individual, while cool media requires participation in order to build content. For McLuhan, that the medium is the message has only just become visible. That we attend to and understand these media and how they change us is McLuhan’s ultimate goal.

Quotes and Notes

The electronic age represents the extension of “our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man–the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be ‘a good thing’ is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex” (3-4)

The mechnical age and literacy allowed Westerners the ability to detach themselves from the products of their social actions, but: “In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the while of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner” (4). This aligns well with Jenkins, et al, but the whole drone thing combats the notion a bit… though global reaction reinforces it…

Global village: “As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social nd political functions together in sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree” (5).

From “The Medium is the Message”: That we can see the medium as the message is the result of a conflict brought on by electronic media: literacy as a technology shaped man to believe in sequence and rationality as appropriate sequence. But the ways in which electronic media expose and shed light on sequence, at the same that they compress time and space (and hence, confound it), bring us back to the understanding of the medium as the message. When we can look past it as vehicle for content (or other mediums), that is. (pp-14-17)

24: “Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.”

30: “Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool culture.”

35: We think in terms of explosion, but this is due to the implosion brought on by electronic media which has made us more aware of and involved in each others’ lives.

38: Critique of Marx: While Marx reduced everything to the factory, he missed the opportunity to think in terms of media. “Marx based his analysis most untimely on the machine, just as the telegraph and other implosive forms began to reverse the mechanical dynamic” (38).

46: “To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the ‘closure’ or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. … Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology.”

47: “The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have ‘social consciousness’ presented to us as a cause of guilt-felings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we weal all mankind as our skin.”

49-51: Literacy was the most explosive technology.

51: Hybridity of technologies allows us to see media where before they were invisible, as we have come to understand language as a medium, for example.

56: “The technologies are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into another mode…”

57: “The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outer senses. They are a technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.”

58: “Under electric technology, the whole business of man becomes learning and knowing.”

61: “If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lived into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?”

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

by Rachael

Published on: December 12, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1994, death of literacy, digital literacy, eric havelock, historical continuity, literacy and culture, ludditism, marshall mcluhan, sven birkerts, walter ong

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Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Faber and Faber, 2006. Print.

Summary

Throughout this collection of essays, Birkerts juxtaposes (in often reductive binaries) the impact of print culture’s shift to electronic media, essaying his way through what he sees or foresees as the consequences of that shift. His primary concern has to do with the ways in which a decrease in reading and attention span will effect our collective ability to share a sense of values that follow historical continuity. Paradoxically, he is also concerned that people will be less able to form themselves as individuals (27-9). Ultimately, what Birkets seems to lament is his shifting place in history, given the displacement of many (privileged) traditional values with the proliferation of web technologies, an expanding canon, and shifting linguistic norms and practices.

His primary concern is that the material practice of reading print books has been an integral part of shaping the world and our culture, and ourselves, as we have known them, and that the ripple effect of media and how it reshapes each of those things are dangerous and should be held suspect.

Quotes

What this meant was not, narrowly, that a large sector of our population would not be able to enjoy certain works of literature, but that a much more serious situation was developing. For, in fact, our entire collective subjective history–the soul of our societal body–is encoded in print. Is encoded, and has for countless generations been passed along by way of the word, mainly through books. I’m not talking about facts and information here, but about the somewhat more elusive soft data, the expressions that tell us who we are and who we have been, that are, in effect, the cumulative speculations of the species. If a person turns from print–finding it too slow, too hard, irrelevant to the excitements of the present–then what happens to that person’s sense of cultural continuity? (20)

We can think of the matter in terms of gains and losses. The gins of electronic postmodernity could be said to include, for individuals, (a) an increased awareness of the “big picture,” a global perspective that admits the extraordinary complexity of interrelations; (b) an expanded neural capacity, an ability to accommodate a broad range of stimuli simultaneously; (c) a relativistic comprehension of situations that promotes the erosion of old biases and often expresses itself as tolerance; and (d) a matter-of-fact and unencumbered sort of readiness, a willingness to try new situations and arrangements.

In the loss column, meanwhile, are (a) a fragmented sense of time and a loss of the so-called duration experience, that depth phenomenon we associate with reverie; (b) a reduced attention span and a general impatience with sustained inquiry; (c) a shattered faith in institutions and in the explanatory narratives that formerly gave shape to subjective experience; (d) a divorce from the past, from a vital sense of history as a cumulative or organic process; (e) an estrangement from geographic place and community; and (f) an absence of any strong vision of a personal or collective future. (27)

As we now find ourselves at a cultural watershed–as the fundamental process of transmitting information is shifting from mechanical to circuit-driven, from page to screen–it may be time to ask how modifications in our way of reading may impinge upon our mental life. For how we receive information bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret reality. (71-2)

We are experiencing in our times a loss of depth–a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth. A sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness. Its apotheosis is what was once called wisdom. Wisdom: the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life. But swamped by data, and in thrall to the technologies that manipulate it, we no longer think in these larger and necessarily more imprecise terms. In our lateral age, living in the bureaucracies of information, we don’t venture a claim to that kind of understanding. Indeed, we tend to act embarrassed around those once-frightened terms–truth, meaning, soul, destiny… We suspect the people who use such words of being soft and nostalgic. We prefer the deflating one-liner that reassures us that nothing need be taken that seriously; we inhale the atmospheres of irony. (74)

The order of print is linear, and bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax. It requires the active engagement of the reader, for reading is fundamentally an act of translation: ciphers are turned into their verbal referents and these are in turn interpreted. The print engagement is, further, private. While it does represent an act of communication, the contents pass from the privacy of the sender to the privacy of the receiver–writer to reader. Print also posits a time-axis; the turning of pages, not to mention the vertical progress through the page, is a forward-moving succession, with earlier contents at every point serving as a ground for what follows. Moreover, the printed material is static–it is the reader, not the book, the moves forward. The physical arrangements of print can be seen to accord with our traditional sense of history. Materials are layered; they lend themselves to rereading and to sustained inquiry. The pace of reading is variable, with progress determined by attentiveness and comprehension.

The electronic order is in most ways the opposite. Information and contents do not simply move from one private space to another, but they travel along a network. Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness. It can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. Contents, unless they are printed out (and thus part of the static order of print) are evanescent. With visual media, impression and image take precedence over logic and concept. The pace is quick, and the movement is laterally associative rather then vertically cumulative. The presentation prestructures the reception–the viewer absorbs a steady wash of packaged messages.

Further, the technology–visual and non-visual–in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. The now. It works against historical perception, which must depend upon the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the world, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.

Transitions such as the one from print to electronic media do not take place without rippling–more likely, reweaving–the whole of the social and cultural web. And we don’t need to look far for evidence that this is what is happening. We can begin with the headlines, and the millennial lamentations sounded in the op-ed pages and on talk shows. That our educational systems are in decline; that our students are less and less able to read and comprehend their required texts, and that their aptitude scores are falling like the index of consumer confidence. That tag-line communication, called “bite-speak” by some, has destroyed the last remnants of discourse in our public political life and made spin-doctors and media consultants our new shamans. That as communications empires fight for global hegemony, publishing itself has fallen to the tyranny of the bottom line, and that the era of the “blockbuster” is upon us. That funding for the arts is being cut on every front, while the arts themselves appear to be suffering a deep crisis of irrelevance. And so on.

Every one of these developments is, of course, overdetermined, but there can be no doubt that they are profoundly connected to the transition that is underway. (122-3)

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