Standing Under

Lost in translation?

2009-11-27T16:47:00.003-06:00

Speaking of translation (see below), I knew it would be difficult for me not to be able to speak Spanish, even though several people in past groups had gotten along just fine without knowing the language and most of the people in our current group knew little Spanish. I tried this Summer and Fall to learn as much as as I could through a "Speed Spanish" online class, and I did manage to fake my way through one-on-one conversations pretty well, but I was right: As a communicator by personality and profession, I had a very hard time not being able to fully communicate with the people I met, or forcing them to communicate in English (those who could) even though I was the visitor in their country (to be fair, many of them were grateful to practice their English skills...).

In some ways, I think this was good for me. Both written and oral communication are such bedrocks of my identity that it may have been God's design to strip those away from me. I became dependent on other people and on other forms of communication — mostly smiles and hugs, both of which also come naturally to me, thankfully. :) I was grateful for the Cuban tradition of kissing one cheek (just one, not two or three — it's different in every culture!) because it allowed me to make contact with each person without speech — although I was grateful to have gotten accustomed to using "Mucho gusto!" with my Costa Rican brother-in-law's parents. When I meet someone, I generally like to ask a lot of questions — to learn about their life and family and perspectives. I simply couldn't do this, so our simple conversations focused on how happy we were to meet one another and how we wished the Lord's blessings upon the other. Not a bad foundation to a relationship!

I definitely hope to return to Cuba, but I will work even harder to learn Spanish ahead of time. Love is a universal language, especially within the family of God, but it doesn't help you find your way around the streets of Havana! :)

Other means of communication:

Picture-taking: There are several little girls in Cuba who have literally dozens of pictures of me — they just kept wanting to take them! :) I'm grateful for their sweet welcome and the bonds we formed, even though we could hardly understand a word that the other spoke!

Lots of hand-gestures! (Yesdel, left, and Richard, center)

Gifts! (Beautiful handmade banner and stole presented to us on our last evening. We also brought several suitcases worth of gifts and supplies — everything from toothbrushes to yarn to medication to clothing — for them.)

Music! (More on this later.)

And finally, dancing! (More on this later.)

Jesus is enough

2009-11-27T16:00:00.001-06:00

When Luke had the privilege of preaching in our sister church during our time in Cuba (translated by Carmen, above), he encouraged all of us that "Jesus is enough":

... The faithful example of Bartimaeus is not just in the fact that he cried out to Jesus and came to him, but it is also in his response to Jesus once he was healed. He came to Jesus as a blind man wanting Jesus to heal him and make him see again. Once Jesus gave him what he wanted he could have gone his own way, turned his back on Jesus and said, “Thanks, see you later!” But Mark tells us that as soon as Bartimaeus regained his sight… he “followed Jesus on the way.” The life of faith has two parts that cannot be separated. We come to Jesus because we need Jesus to heal us, because we need Jesus to save us… but then we also must respond to the healing touch of Jesus by following Jesus along his way. That means for us to be available to those who might interrupt us on the way, those in need of help and healing. Those in our communities whom others might pass by, but Jesus would be sure to notice. It means taking the time to respond to those who are crying out around us. It means following Jesus in the way of the cross, the ultimate expression of God’s love for the world—a way of self-giving and self-offering for the sake of others.

And what do we need in order to follow Jesus in this way? Nothing more than Christ himself. Jesus is enough. Jesus is enough not only for our salvation, but the mercy of Jesus is enough to give us the strength to rise and respond to his calling. The grace of Jesus is enough to open our eyes so that we can see the world and see our brothers and sisters the way Jesus sees them. And the love of Jesus is enough to empower us to follow him and share his love with the world. We have no reason to wait and no reason to fear—Jesus is always available, and Jesus is enough.

Yesterday, Luke preached here in Libertyville at our Thanksgiving Service, illuminating Matthew 6:25-34, Joel 2:21-27, and Psalm 126. While "today's trouble is enough for today," he exhorted us not to let fear prevent us from living the lives to which God has called us. Here are just a few of his Spirit-inspired words:

We are to respond with gratitude to the great things God has done for us, and turn our attentions and energies toward doing great things for God’s kingdom in this world. This is why we are told “not to worry”, this is why we need to jettison fear. Max Lucado continues in his book, saying, “When fear shapes our lives, safety becomes our god. When safety becomes our god, we worship the risk-free life. Can the safety-lover do anything great? Can the risk-averse accomplish noble deeds? For God? For others? No. The fear-filled cannot love deeply. Love is risky. They cannot give to the poor. Benevolence has no guarantee of a return.” (Lucado 10). ...

Surrounded by all sorts of troubles, bad news, losses and the attacking forces of fear, may you remember today some glimpse of God’s goodness to you, may your eyes be opened to see beyond hovering troubles to the many ways God has provided “enough for today,” may you feel today God’s Spirit well up from within you and overflow with gratitude, may you experience the freedom from fear that comes from a faith-response to God’s amazing grace, and may you reach outward in that faith and freedom with simple, risky acts of righteous defiance of fear and courageous expressions of kingdom love, for “perfect love drives out fear.” In the name of Jesus, Amen.

I'm grateful that God prompted us to take the risk of going to Cuba. I was a bit concerned and fearful, but God provided all we needed to "reach outward in ... faith and freedom." And even more than being providers, we were the beneficiaries of "courageous expressions of kingdom love."

Discovering the Bible in community...

2009-11-27T15:21:00.001-06:00

I shared earlier the words of the pastor of our sister church, who said that "discovering the Bible in community is a gift."

The first half of our trip was spent in Havana at a conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of the partnership between the Presbyteries of Chicago and Havana, and the 20th anniversary of the partnership between the Presbyteries of Long Island and Havana. There were speeches and dancing and excellent food and much more, but one of my favorite events was an in-depth Bible Study led by Pastor Daniel Izquierda of Hosea 12:6: "But you must return to your God; maintain love and justice, and wait for your God always." This will be the theme verse for La Presbyteriana de Habana next year. Daniel exegeted each word (translated by Alberto), and then the Cubans and North Americans separated into groups to discuss a few questions. All our other activities mixed Cubans and North Americans together, but we separated this time to facilitate communication (translation takes a lot of time); when we came back together and shared our insights, it was remarkable how many similarities arose in answers to questions such as, "What keeps us from trusting God in the Hebrew sense?" (being tied together by a strong bond). It was also good to learn from the few differences between the perspectives of the groups.

I appreciated Daniel's emphasis on justice as restorative action and on love as the internal condition behind such action. He said, "To live in relationship with God means actions should be based in a logic of love" — for example, our partnership! Discussing this verse in Cuba while learning from and alongside our Cuban brothers and sisters invested it with so much more meaning than simply reading it here in my comfortable home or even in my home church.

About a third of the group that met in the Luyano Presbyterian Church for the conference. Pastor Daniel Izquierdo is standing in the red shirt. Everyone is listening to Pastor Ismael Maruda, always a character! (He reminded me of my dad. :) )

Two degrees of separation...

2009-11-25T14:05:00.000-06:00

Alberto was our amazing translator during the conference in Havana (first half of the trip). During dinner one night, I learned that three times in the last three months he has been called to Fidel Castro's house to personally translate for him during important meetings. One of those meetings was with the American director Oliver Stone; you'd recognize the other names, too, but I can't remember them now. Alberto said the 83-year-old Castro is still sharp mentally and is finally following doctor's orders to maintain his physical health. (Of course, his brother Raul is in power now.)

So I figure Luke and I are just two degrees from Fidel Castro, through Alberto. Hmmm ... maybe I shouldn't post this on the internet! :) Don't worry, U.S. Government, we did not meet him nor do we have any desire to meet him!

Hermanamientos

2009-11-18T23:01:00.001-06:00

In the last post, I shared the reflections of our amigos Cubanos that "our friendship has broken barriers." This is not just metaphoric. It is literal in the sense that very few Norte Américanos are able to travel to Cuba, and vice versa, because of the embargo and travel bans. So much political rhetoric surrounds the relationships between these two countries — which sit just 90 miles apart — and few of us are granted the opportunity to hear beyond the rhetoric, travel beyond the barriers, and see beyond the stereotypes to the people who are ... people. We were able to travel to Cuba on a religious visa, meaning we weren't supposed to be tourists, do any physical labor (such as building houses), evangelize beyond the church walls, nor bring anything back with us except for "information materials" (which, thankfully, include artwork). Most of these restrictions come from the U.S. and some come from Cuba.

While in Cuba, we learned what a crucial role partnerships between sister churches (hermanamientos) play in the relationships between Cubans and North Americans, and even between the countries themselves. These partnerships have opened up lines of communication and understanding, physical meetings, financial assistance, and mutual cultural and spiritual exchange that never would have been possible otherwise.

And in case you're wondering, yes — the Protestant Church is alive and well in Cuba! (When he asked what we had been doing in Cuba, the customs agent replied, "There are Presbyterian churches in Cuba?!" This has not been an uncommon reaction. Thankfully, he believed us. :) ) God has carried them through many difficult years, but they are thriving and growing and ministering to their communities in ways that teach us about the calling and great potential of the local church. Our sister church hosts such events as a movie night for teenagers from the community (and the church), where they watch films (not easily available in Cuba) and discuss the spiritual themes; a "Theological Café," where they serve coffee in their garden and bring in musicians, artists, and speakers (the space is always packed); fun Saturday morning activities for children that are specifically designed to teach certain values; much-appreciated English classes open to anyone and taught by highly-qualified church members; and much, much more.

(Picture above shows a rainbow over our sister church, La Iglesia Presbyteriana-Reformada de San Nicolas de Bari)

"Our friendship has broken barriers"

2009-11-08T14:57:00.006-06:00

Two of my new friends beautifully summarized my experience in Cuba: On our first evening in San Nicholás de Bari, we were discussing the story of Jesus' encounter with the woman at the well, and Pastor Alison Infante (above left) reflected, "Discovering the Bible in community is a gift." Then, responding to an observation from one of our group about the story, Elder Mildred (above right) said, "Our friendship has broken barriers." I am grateful that my sense of Christian community has been extended beyond any potential barriers to include my brothers and sisters in Cuba, and I am grateful to them for welcoming me into their homes and hearts.

30 years (or at least 1) in song and pictures

2009-01-07T22:07:00.074-06:00

Greetings from snowy Chicagoland! (Warning: Don't take a nap while shoveling. You might get buried by the snow plow ... or by your wife.)

In October, Luke put on a concert at our church ... 1 day before his 30th birthday and 5 days before mine. Appropriately, he covered an old song by Randy Stonehill called "Turning Thirty," and I put together a surprise slideshow to accompany the lyrics. I won't include all of the pictures here (I may not make it past 30 if I include the most embarrassing pictures of Luke) and I'll add a few new ones from Christmas in California, but here's our year (or 30 years) in review, compliments of Randy Stonehill, with a few edits and additions from us.

*I've got a house down by the ocean (well, a cute little lake)

*The rent is not too

high (actually the rent is nonexistent: we bought our first house in August!)

*And I love to watch the ships (paddleboats) come in

*And hear the

seagulls (geese) cry

*And lately I've been taking stock

*Of all that I've been through (such as Marla

graduating with an M.A. in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition)

*Oh tomorrow is my birthday

*Feels funny but it's true

*I'm turning thirty (how did that happen?!)

*Now I've got a wife who really loves me (even after 7 years of marriage...praise God!)

*She makes my life so sweet (and vice versa, especially here in Monterey, CA, on December 31)

*And a little baby god-daughter (Katie Rose, who's 5 years old! and visited us with her family during their

move to New York in December)

*Who plays games around my feet (along with 9 nieces and

nephews, including 2.5-year-old Isaiah and 3-week-old Mariana Barrantes)

*And my world is very different

*From those lazy bachelor years (such as those at Whitworth, where our oldest niece is now a freshman!)

*But if I had the chance to go back

*I'd rather stay right here (serving as Associate Pastor at First Pres. in Libertyville, IL)

*Turning thirty

*And I have friends that ("who," corrects Marla, the College of Lake County adjunct English prof) care about me

*They're the best I've ever had (we are so grateful for all of you!)

*And they always stood behind me

*Whenever times got bad

*And I love to play my music

*Though the road can be a trial (less so now that we're no longer commuting 125 miles a day...we moved from

Milwaukee to Illinois this summer after Marla graduated)

*But every time I walk on stage

*It's worth each dusty mile

*Turning thirty

*Now thirty ain't like fifteen

*And it's not like twenty-five

*My back's a little stiff (maybe that's because we joined a gym the week we turned 30)

*And they're some lines around my eyes

*But I've still got my energy

*And I've got most of my hair

*And I'm not too old to rock 'n roll (at least on Guitar Hero with the Parkers during our Spokane visit this summer)

*And I'm not really scared

*Of turning thirty (especially because we're doing it together!)

*Oh, the eighties look like tough times (ok, the decade's a little off, but the sentiment applies perhaps now more than ever)

*The world is turning sour

*So I'll keep on serving Jesus

*And await the final hour

*And though I've often failed him

*In these thirty rocky years

*His mercy brought me this far

*And His love has dried my tears (may we all experience Christ's healing and joy this year)

*I'm turning thirty

*I'll treasure these years

*I'm turning thirty

*And that's alright

*I'm turning thirty...

Happy New Year! May the light of Christ shine in your hearts and homes throughout 2009. We love you!

See below for more pictures (and the promised video) of family and cute kids (not ours, but we'll show them off anyway!).

Nieces Rebecca and Stacey Meekhof in Virginia

Hand family in front of the Chicago Bean ... can you find Luke and Marla? (Right-click or control-click the picture to view it larger.)

Marla's family (sans Mom and Luke) at Danielle's graduation in West Virginia, June 2008

Katie, Emma, and David Rose in our home, December 2008

Nephew Isaiah and Niece Mariana Barrantes in Fresno, December 2008

Best of all...

Before you go: The other entries in this blog probably won't be very interesting to you (unless you're into "Rhetoric, Writing, and Information Technology"), but please visit Luke's blog at lukehyder.blogspot.com for "cyber-processing" about "subjects including God, worship, arts and culture ... pretty much 'life, the universe and everything'"!

Oh, and by the way: Our email addresses remain the same (lukehyder@sbcglobal.net and marlahyder@yahoo.com), but our address and phone numbers have changed. If you don't have it and would like the new info, please email us. Thanks for all the great Christmas letters and pictures! Keep 'em coming! We'd love to hear how you are doing and how we can be praying for you.

Rose Bowl Parade float in Pasadena, January 2009

My project

2008-05-15T22:19:00.003-05:00

Thanks to the wonderful Mr. Florian, my website is up! One of the images didn't come through, but the rest appears to be there (best viewed through Firefox and probably IE; Safari did some funky things with the formatting).

It's on the UWM server, so the address is www.uwm.edu/~mlhyder.

Thanks, everyone, for a great semester! I look forward to looking more closely at your projects after graduation.

More resources

2008-05-13T12:31:00.003-05:00

FYI, if you're interested in the Freire stuff below (praxis as reflection and action), you might also want to check out "Becoming Symbol-Wise: Kenneth Burke's Pedagogy of Critical Reflection" by Jessica Enoch. Enoch uses Burke's theories to argue that "reflection is action in and of itself" (291).

Also, a plug for the MIT Press books available through the MacArthur Foundation: I've read a few more articles, esp. from Youth, Identity, and Digital Media and found them to be really useful.

Third Article

2008-05-06T12:41:00.006-05:00

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapters 1 and 2 (and a little from 3)
by Paulo Freire
(page numbers refer to this edition posted online because I don't have a copy of the book with me; to distinguish page numbers from the different chapters, I'll add the chapter number and a period before the page number)

Because my project is working with and intended to replace UWM's current 101/102 reflective essay assignments (see post below), I've been looking for readings that seem to have influenced these assignments. To that end, I decided to read/re-read part of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, focusing specifically on what Freire has to say about reflection.

For Freire, reflection is an extricable part of the struggle for liberation, and in this struggle, "pedagogy will be made and remade" (1.4). True reflection leads to action, and the consequences of action must in turn be subject to critical reflection (1.17). Freire argues that the oppressor (or the teacher) must trust the oppressed (the student) and their ability to reason, so that the oppressor doesn't "fall into using slogans, communiques, monologues, and instructions" (1.18) — that is, the banking method of education that dehumanizes both its subject and objects (ch. 2). Liberation, then, must be co-created by teachers and students; both are subjects and both must participate "not only in the task of unveiling...reality and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge" through common reflection and action (1.20).

Freire's insistence that "authentic liberation – the process of humanization – is not another deposit to be made" in students, and that "liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it" (2.7), means that the reflective writing assignment, if we want it to empower students to participate in their own liberation and (ultimately) to change the world (remember – what kind of world do you want to live in?), must not be a ''communique." This is tricky! My hope is that through the links I provide but whose content I do not control (e.g. to Facebook, MySpace, the students' blogs), the students will be encouraged to co-create the resulting knowledge, reflection, and action. Freire also emphasizes dialogue (2.8 and 3.2ff), so I'm trying to think about how I might build dialogue into the website, or whether that would be saved for the in-person class meetings.

Freire's explanation of what reflection is and what it can do resonates with Herring (below). Through reflection, he writes,

That which had existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper implications (if indeed it was perceived at all) begins to "stand out," assuming the character of a project and therefore of a challenge. Thus, men and women begin to single out elements from their "background awareness" and to reflect upon them. These elements are now objects of their consideration, and, as such, objects of their action and cognition.... In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as static reality but as a reality in process, in transformation" (2.10).

Finally, though I won't go into here, I want to mention that he begins chapter 3 by explaining that reflection and action are two inextricable and co-constitutive dimensions of "the word." If I have time, I'll investigate this more to see what it might say about the act of reflective writing. Also, all of this makes me wonder if and how we can ask our students to reflect without asking them to act. If we ask them to act on their reflection, I think we need to be prepared for students who, for example, choose not to submit a portfolio at all or who choose to blog their reflection or post it on MySpace rather than turning in a 12-pt, black-ink, Times New Roman paper with 1-inch margins.

Though I was focusing mostly on reflection, I noticed in these chapters many other resonances to our readings and discussions this semester. For example, Freire discusses the interdependent nature of subjectivity and objectivity (1.6); the relationship of "having" to "being," which reminded me of our conversations about access and the digital divide (1.12); freedom (throughout, but especially 1.13, 1.19, 2.9, and 3.2ff.); and control (throughout, but especially 1.13, 1.16, and 2.6).

Second Article

2008-05-05T22:35:00.003-05:00

“Questioning the Generational Divide: Technological Exoticism and Adult Constructions of Online Youth Identity”
by Susan C. Herring
From Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 71–92. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262524834.071

Read about Prenksy’s article (below) first.

This chapter does an excellent job of troubling and balancing out voices like Marc Prensky’s, which remind us that we need to be paying attention to the ways digitality has changed youth and should change the way we teach them but which run the risk of over-reacting. Susan Herring argues here that adults—Prensky’s “digital immigrants”—exoticize and rampantly speculate about the effects of digitality on youth, and “mainstream media commentators interpret new technologies and youth practices in normative, moral terms, a process that reinscribes youth as ‘other’” (71). In turn, these youth have been socialized into adult and media constructions of them. She suggests that we focus less on the technologies, which in today’s rhetoric are seen as deterministic of youth, and more on the young people themselves, and she includes some of their voices in her chapter. While I don’t think Herring cancels out Prensky’s observations about today’s students, I appreciate her cautions about adult discourses that over-react to and over-determine the relationship between technology and youth. In this area and others, I often worry about the ways “we” talk and write about “them.” Another article called “The Myth of the Digital Native,” written by M. Owen in 2004, further questions unproductive “sloganizing” with statistics showing how many youth spend very little time on the internet, playing video games, etc., and showing that the largest demographic for games and online activity are 20-35 and 35-44 year-olds, respectively.

A few points of interest from Herring in relation to my project:

- In addition to fulfilling the 101/102 goals, I hope my web-based reflective writing assignment will help address the “transparency problem” of technology, that is, the “challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world” (88).

- Herring suggests that today’s students are not the true “Internet Generation” but rather a transitional generation. Perhaps this project can “take advantage of the present transitional moment to reflect across generations about technology and social change” (72).

- Perhaps it might also involve young people in reflecting on the generational digital divide, in order to move beyond adults’ “exoticization” of youth media practices: “Any serious attempt to avoid cooptation of young people’s experiences must therefore consider the more radical possibility of collaborating with youth in an attempt to break down those hierarchies...” (87). How might I involve my students not only in the use of and interaction with this website but also in its creation/production/design? (Not possible this semester, but in the future?)

First Article

2008-05-05T21:52:00.007-05:00

“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” On the Horizon 9.5 (Oct. 2001)
“Do They Really Think Differently?” On the Horizon 9.6 (Dec. 2001)
by Marc Prensky

A number of other authors credit Marc Prensky with coining the widely used term “digital native” and, slightly less well-known, “digital immigrant.” Prensky is a speaker, writer, consultant, teacher, and designer of “software games for learning, including the world’s first fast-action videogame-based training tools and world-wide, multi-player, multi-team on-line competitions” (www.marcprensky.com). In this two-part article, he argues that “our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach” (1). Not only does he claim that today’s students “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” but that their digital upbringing may have physically changed their brains. As “native” speakers of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet, they require entirely new teaching methods from their “immigrant” teachers; in fact, he suggests, the two can barely communicate with each other until the immigrants learn the language. Natives are “used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to ‘serious’ work” (2).

Some of these characteristics certainly resonate with our readings: Weinberger described how random access has revolutionized not only the ways we order knowledge but the ways we create knowledge and the knowledge that gets created. Benkler and Chun emphasized the fundamental shifts—in the market, our understanding and enacting of freedom, etc.—caused by networking. Gee, Bogost, McGonigal, and others wrote about learning through games (Prensky calls this “edutainment”).

The ideas in these articles are pretty old hat by now (7 years later), due in part to this and other work by Prensky, but his conviction that “natives” are essentially and radically different and his zeal for educational reform are still notable: “It’s just dumb (and lazy) of educators – not to mention ineffective – to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach, and that the Digital Natives’ ‘language’ is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea” (6). See next article for a response and troubling of some of Prensky’s convictions.

There was a particular paragraph in the second article that caught my attention and inspired my project. In the section entitled “What Have We Lost?" Prensky writes:

One key area that appears to have been affected is reflection. Reflection is what enables us, according to many theorists, to generalize, as we create “mental models” from our experience. It is, in many ways, the process of “learning from experience.” In our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people. One of the most interesting challenges and opportunities in teaching Digital Natives is to figure out and invent ways to include reflection and critical thinking in the learning (either built into the instruction or through a process of instructor-led debriefing) but still do it in the Digital Native language. We can and must do more in this area. (11)

While I don’t completely agree with Prensky, I have seen (in classes and the Writing Center) what a hard time many 101 and 102 students have with the reflective writing we ask them to do. So for my project, I’m building a website that is itself a reflective writing assignment (designed to replace either the 101 reflective essay assignment or the 102 inquiry analysis essay assignment, or both).

Photo credit: Marc Prensky, from www.marcprensky.com, by Jim Allen

But it's so "natural"...

2008-05-03T09:34:00.004-05:00

Has anyone seen the new AT&T commercial where the phones and other technological devices are integrated seamlessly into and among beautiful blossoming flowers (doesn't appear to be on youtube yet)? Really interesting tactic for making technology appear "natural" and healthy and beautiful and living. Just as movies like "Minority Report" (Nakamura) and books like Rainbows End (Vinge) and theories of cyborgs (Haraway) work to break down the separation between human and machine, so does this commercial attempt to meld technology and nature together. This also reminds me of the Verizon "chocolate phone" commercials.

More Words

2008-05-02T16:35:00.004-05:00

If you identified with the sentiment underlying my video, you should check out this song by a friend of Justin Moody's. Click here, scroll to the bottom of the songs list, and click on the last song. It's very funny.

(By the way, I feel like I need to clarify that I feel very honored to work with all of my 102 students and I respect their writing very much. I genuinely enjoy reading the portfolios and having conversations with the authors. I also genuinely enjoy reading and discussing [almost] all of the books shown in the video. Obviously, I thrive on words and have/am trying to make a living out of them. But you know how it is at the end of the semester....)

Words, words, words

2008-04-29T17:07:00.004-05:00

By the time tomorrow is over, I will have spent about 45 hours in 4 days working with English 102 students and their portfolios. I love my students, but I'm sick of words. That's where this idea came from, as I lay in bed late Sunday night (Monday morning...) after reading the first batch of papers. And obviously, it was also inspired by last week's discussion of Chun.

Cinematography by me
Music by Kaki King ("Bari Improv" from the August Rush soundtrack)

Holding class in SL...

2008-04-20T20:25:00.008-05:00

Well, no one else was there, but "Mikey08 Market" and I had a lovely chat while sitting on our free bikes (mine was a gift from Mike). Since it was just the two of us, it felt a lot like your basic IM chat, except that we could see and hear when the other was typing, which was helpful, and it felt like I was actually talking with someone who was paying attention. Obviously, he could have been doing anything, but it felt like we were both more "present" for the conversation.

I saved the chat log, but it's five pages long with no spaces or line breaks, so I don't think I'll post it. Suffice it to say, we talked about surveillance, labor, self-determination, code, ethnography, and other stuff. And we wondered where Anne (and everyone else) was. Here we are!

P.S. Anne, I heard this evening that you were there on Sunday (with others?). I wonder why you didn't show up when Mike searched your name? I guess we should have looked around more...sorry! So just like in real life/first life/"meet space," we can miss each other by being in slightly different locations.

Attention Mac Users!

2008-04-20T20:21:00.004-05:00

If you're a Mac user and you've been having problems with Second Life crashing, go to this link: Guide for Improving Mac Performance. After making a few small recommended changes to my SL preferences, I went from crashing within seconds of every log-on to a full session with no crashes or other problems!

Questions and thoughts on Heverly and Lessig

2008-04-18T17:15:00.004-05:00

A few questions and thoughts in preparation for our Second Life discussion of Heverly ("Growing Up Digital: Control and the Pieces of a Digital Life") and Lessig (Code v.2):

- Heverly, Lessig, and Chun are all preoccupied with "control." In what ways do their notions of "control" converge and in what ways do they diverge? (Sheesh. Is that a 101 question, or what?!)

- How might Nakamura's discussions of subjectivity/objectivity be used to complicate Heverly's "active creation"/"passive object"? Heverly talks about some of the unintended ramifications of young people who "embed themselves in digital media...by choice" and who are embedded by others against their will or without their knowledge (204), but he doesn't theorize this dichotomy too deeply.

- For me, this was Heverly's most interesting point: "[W]e risk a future where the bullied remain bullied throughout their whole lives, where the space that children need to grow is wiped out by the permanence of the digital artifacts that are created when they err..." (216). We tend to emphasize the ephemerality of digitality (Wikipedia entries constantly changing, for example) and the ability to construct our own identities on the internet, but Heverly reminds us of both the potential permanence and uncontrollable nature of identity on the web. What does this mean for "digitizing race"?

- Lessig suggests that surveillance might be, in my words, a self-fulfilling prophecy: "[P]rofiles will begin to normalize the population from which the norm is drawn. The observing will affect the observed. The system watches what you do; it fits you into a pattern; the pattern is then fed back to you in the form of options set by the pattern; the options reinforce the pattern; the cycle begins again" (220). This reminded me of a point made by Robert McChesney in Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (from Dennis' class): In response to the notion that entertainment media "give the people what they want," he writes, "When people consume from options provided, the media giants then state that they are satisfying audience demand. If some find the offerings imbecilic, the argument goes, that is because the people are morons who demand such tripe. But this is a circular argument, since there is no proof that this range of choices conforms to something innate to the audience" (51). We could perhaps say this about any digital medium: We are so accustomed to working within the constraints of Word, or Blogger, or Web 2.0 — in other words, any code — that we assume it's "what we want" ... the constraints become invisible as constraints ... they seem "innate" (to us and to the medium). The ability to produce code on the web does trouble this, although the vast majority of us don't produce actual code (certainly not binary machine code, at least), so we have to work through translating programs that, again, provide us with a particular set of options.

- I was very interested in Lessig's suggestion that social hierarchies, which were diminished due to increased mobility, are being reinstated through digital profiling: "An efficient and effective system for monitoring makes it possible once again to make these subtle distinctions of rank. Collecting data cheaply and efficiently will take us back to the past" (221). Can/should we do anything about this, or is it a necessary evil?

Are video game makers squandering their cultural clout?

2008-04-14T18:09:00.004-05:00

Just heard a short NPR bit on video games as entertaining diversion vs. art/cultural critique. Ian Bogost was one of the interviewees. Among other things, Bogost says that the politically motivated game BlackSite is "giving the industry the finger."

"Inextricably Fused"

2008-04-10T14:59:00.005-05:00

While I have found great value in the blogging we have done this semester, this statement from Steve Anderson and Anne Balsamo really resonated with me:

"The uneasy hybridization seen in Web cast lectures and audience-response clickers demonstrates what is, in our view, a limited approach to integrating technology into education. Even some of the most promising contemporary technologies that merge the advantages of networked communities with social software, such as blogs and wikis, may in some cases simply function as high-tech updates of timeworn practices, such as classroom journaling and shared notetaking. Instead, we advocate a model that is genuinely organic in conception, centered on the development of pedagogical strategies that are inextricably fused with the technologies and social practices familiar to students of the born digital generation" (255).

Digital Natives in the Composition Classroom

2008-04-10T08:26:00.003-05:00

Since I first posted project ideas exactly a month ago, I have considered at least a dozen different possibilities. For some reason, I've had a really hard time settling on a direction that I found compelling and doable; or rather, settling on just one. Here's what I think I've decided:

I'd like to explore the pedagogical implications of "digital literacies" in the composition classroom. Most (though not all, and this is a matter for consideration) of our students could be considered "digital natives," born about the time I sent my first email and weaned on computers and the internet. In "Technology Learning and the MySpace Generation," Susan McLester compiled 30 characteristics of "digital natives," including less fear of failure, surface-oriented, thrive with redefined structure, instant gratification, all information is equal, extremely social, need a sense of security that they are defining for and by themselves, nonlinear, less textual/more modalities, and many others. I'm wondering, then, not only how do we (and should we) incorporate digital technologies into the comp. classroom, but how might we best teach writing to and with the strengths (and weaknesses) of digital natives.

I'm still not sure how to represent this in a non-seminar paper format (which I know is an option, but I would rather do something different), but perhaps this is exactly what I'll be trying to figure out as I explore ways to teach writing multi-modally. I'll post more of a "plan" soon.

A few potential sources:

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe. "Becoming Literate in the Information Age: Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology." CCC 55.4 (2004): 642-692.

McLester, Susan. "Technology Learning and the MySpace Generation." Technology andLearning. 15 March 2007.

Perkel, Dan. "Copy and Paste Literacy: Literacy Practices in the Production of a MySpace Profile." Dan Perkel. Blog.

(P.S. Anne, I know this is a far cry from thirdspace and Second Life. Even though I would have a strong theoretical background for writing about thirdspace and the internet/Second Life, I'm feeling a bit burned out on the subject and would like to focus on something different and something a little more immediately applicable pedagogically. We can talk....)

CI

2008-04-09T22:32:00.004-05:00

In composition pedagogy, we talk a lot about "collaboration" and "collaborative learning." Would it be possible to harness "collective intelligence" in the composition classroom? One of the problems with this is that there is no inherent "problem" to "solve" as a group.

This blog talks about, among other things, Collective Intelligence and Facebook. This blog has a post about Pedagogy for Collective Intelligence.

Writing in MMORGs

2008-04-09T21:05:00.003-05:00

Ok, fourth short post of the day:

I was struck in a few of the articles (I've read all but the Anderson/Balsamo at this point) by how much writing goes on between gamers, particularly the "beekeepers" in I Love Bees. This was brought out in the CCCC session I attended (see post below). Presenter Joanna Phillips uses the World of Warcraft fan site thottbot.com to discuss rhetorical appeals with her first-year composition students: Rather than learning to write just for a paper, she argued that gaming and game-related websites can help students transfer their writing and analysis skills to new environments. She asks her students questions like, "What can we learn from the writing activities in a World of Warcraft fan site? How do participants use ethos, pathos, and logos to acquire leadership in this arena? In your environments (including Facebook and MySpace, as well as physical ones), how do people use these types of appeals? What are the implications?" Another presenter, Christopher Ritter, discussed the amount of writing that goes into the actual play of WoW, especially at advanced levels when gamers must constantly communicate with each other to complete a mission. (The panel ended, by the way, with an amazing virtual presentation put together the day before by a member who was kept from the conference by a sudden family emergency; he used several different avatars to "speak" for him, along with charts, screen captures, etc. It was really impressive.)

As we know, our students are already writing in these types of online environments (as well as, of course, blogs and emails and text messages). Can/should we attempt to tap into this writing, to co-opt it for pedagogical use? Or perhaps it would be better to ask, can/should we tap into the exigence that motivates the writing they already do? Obviously, my students are more interested in writing on each other's "walls" and chatting in WoW than writing their research paper for my class. But isn't that only natural? Of course we're more motivated by and interested in our social, voluntary uses of literacy than in the literacies we're forced to practice in school. I think it's ok for school to be school. And yet, there's got to be something we can do to help students be more engaged in the work of school, or to help school be more engaged in the work of students.

Flowers and Puppies II

2008-04-09T15:36:00.005-05:00

One more quickie: What's up with the Second Life article, authored by a Linden Lab dude?? Advertisement-cum-scholarly-article? Good grief. Some of the background information was helpful to me, but this was worse than Weinberger's flowers and puppies!

(By the way, I haven't read anyone else's posts yet; I'm sure I'm not the only one to have commented on this.)

Addendum: Obviously Jane McGonigal is also writing about a game/project on which she worked directly, but her article foregrounds (and greatly benefits from) this personal involvement, unlike Ondrejka's article. I had never heard of I Love Bees, but I could have read about it all day. Fascinating!

The Rhetoric of Facebook

2008-04-09T12:10:00.005-05:00

This is going to be the week of super-short (or super short?) posts because I just have tiny gaps of time between classes, meetings, and conferences with students.

In "The Rhetoric of Video Games," Ian Bogost argues that instead of using video games as pedagogical tools, "supplementing and replacing lesson plans for concrete, factual learning, such as principles of chemistry," educators should "consider adopting video games as artifacts to be discussed alongside traditional media in subjects like literature, language arts, history, and art, teaching game playing as an argumentative and expressive practice alongside reading, writing, and debating" (136).

While I didn't do exactly this, and while I wasn't using video games, I led an activity today in my English 102 classes that begins to address Bogost's suggestion, I think. The class is having a hard time talking abstractly (and even with student sample essays) about the "critical" part of "critical inquiry." (For background, we have also been talking about—and troubling—the distinctions between "information-based" and "inquiry-based" research.) So I asked them today how they would describe Facebook to someone who isn't familiar with it (like their parents, although I told them my mom is on Facebook and they were properly horrified [not that I am...love you, Mom!]). We had fun with this, talking about everything from photos, to privacy settings, to the "What's your stripper name?" application. Then I moved to a different part of the chalkboard and asked them to begin asking questions about Facebook. As they began suggesting questions, I—and sometimes other students—worked to complicate them. So, for example, the question "How do you decide what friends to add?" led into more critical questions about constructing identity, discourse communities, constraints, and the long-term implications of online social networking.

Like I said, it's not exactly what Bogost is suggesting, but I think we were learning from the rhetoric of Facebook, rather than just using it as a pedagogical tool (although, of course, I was doing that, too). Whether a social networking site like Facebook would be considered procedural rhetoric is another question. Like video games, it does seem to call for a new understanding of persuasion, one that is not adequately accounted for by verbal, written, and visual rhetorics (125). But I haven't yet worked out how I would understand a site like Facebook in terms of process.

C's

2008-04-09T09:25:00.002-05:00

The very first session I attended at last week's Conference on College Composition and Communication was called "Reading and Writing Virtual Realities: Computer Games and Writing Instruction." I was excited about this session ("oh, good—I can get my homework for 709 done!"), but I hadn't yet read the rest of the 350-page conference program. Once I did, I realized that there was at least one session per time slot related to video games, Second Life, blogging, etc. I'm not sure why I was surprised; this is definitely the "sexy" topic in comp. studies these days, at least among certain circles. I wasn't able to attend any other sessions explicitly devoted to digitality—although a few of the sessions I did attend referenced it in some way—but when I get a little more time, maybe I'll list the names of some of the other sessions (so you all can see the work that others are doing) and report on the highlights of the one I attended.

Second Life Classrooms

2008-03-31T21:21:00.006-05:00

A few more observations:

I went looking for classrooms in Second Life, and after a few dead-ends, found an interesting ESL one, run by a guy who lists such qualifications as a Master's in Education (TESOL Concentration); over 3 years EFL teaching experience; published in several different venues including academic journals, education sections of national newspapers, and travel magazines; member of several professional teaching organizations. He's selling various grammar and writing worksheets and offering real-time conversation, grammar, and writing classes.

Anne said a few universities are offering classes in SL; I found some by searching, but I didn't see anyone in them or any other info. I imagine the active ones are probably protected somehow against non-students wandering in, although I don't know what SL's capabilities are in that area.

I'm fascinated by this twist on online education, and I would love to see how well these work in real-time. How do the avatars enhance/alter/hinder the experience? What potentials are there for a writing classroom in this space? For "class discussion"? Would this be a more "safe space" for composition and/or ESL students than a traditional classroom?

On a different note, in the short time I've spent in SL, I've run into (sometimes literally) a lot of "public art" of various kinds: billboards, outdoor art museums, sculptures (not to be confused with naked, frozen, new-arrival avatars), gardens, etc. It's interesting to me that people have filled this world with so much visual art. In what ways does this (and other aspects of SL) indicate what people value or would like to see in the real world? This leads to larger questions of what is simply replicated/reified in SL and what is created as a movement toward residents' personal versions of either utopia or distopia.

Shaneequa Scharfberg

2008-03-29T18:57:00.008-05:00

That's me!

Here are some initial observations from my first experience in Second Life:

Tone
In light of Thursday's conversation about the tone of Weinberger ("Everything is Great") vs. Chun (fear and paranoia), I was intrigued by the tone of the What Is Second Life? blurbs on the website. For example:

Amazing things are created everyday in the Second Life world, but the depth and power and capabilities of SL mean that we have just scratched the surface - join and become one of the explorers! (citation)
The Second Life world is a place dedicated to your creativity. After all, an avatar is your persona in the virtual world. The picture below shows how easy it is to create your avatar. Despite offering almost infinite possibilities, the tool to personalize your avatar is very simple to use and allows you to change anything you like, from the tip of your nose to the tint of your skin. Don't worry if it's not perfect at first, you can change your look at any time. (citation)
Second Life residents are eager to welcome you and show you around. Within this vibrant society of people, it's easy to find people with similar interests to you. (citation)
And from the Community Standards: We hope you will have a richly rewarding experience, filled with creativity, self expression and fun. The goals of the Community Standards are simple: treat each other with respect and without harassment, adhere to local standards as indicated by simulator ratings, and refrain from any hate activity which slurs a real-world individual or real-world community.

Clearly, SL falls on the highly optimistic end of the spectrum, although it does attempt to ward off problems with its "Behavioral Guidelines." But these are about the actions of the "residents," not the actual technology itself. In this respect, the technology is transparent and is presented as being completely in service of the creativity and imagination of the player. (Of course, they never use the word "player," except perhaps in-world when residents are playing a game. Otherwise, you dwell and act and move and build relationships within SL; you don't play it.)

Technology
For me, however, the technology was definitely not transparent. The program crashed twice for me and three times for my husband (whom I cajoled into trying out SL with me from his laptop - maybe we overwhelmed our wireless connection). Also, movement in-world was sluggish and often delayed, which got pretty annoying. I'm sure part of the problem was my lack of skill (I liked the "thud" sounds whenever I or someone near me ran into something; I also liked the fact that it let me walk underwater when I accidently missed the bridge).

Identity
Given our conversations about avatars and identity, I purposely chose a name with a different racial marker than my real world identity — Shaneequa (it didn't let me choose Sh'neequa) — and a goth image, although I still chose a female avatar. I don't know what to make of this, in Nakamura's terms. It sure didn't seem like a big deal, although I admit it was a little weird to be greeted by SL with "Welcome, Shaneequa Scharberg!" Perhaps this will matter more when I interact with more with others; so far my conversations have consisted of "do you know how to do [blank]?"

Writing in Second Life

I haven't looked into this more but on Help Island, I saw a sign advertising: "Check out the Second Opinion: A newsletter for the friends and residents of Second Life." Hmmm...could there be a career in this?

I'll write more when I get the chance.... I've had real-world corn on the cob cooking the whole time I've been writing.

Chun questions to return to...

2008-03-28T20:38:00.002-05:00

My notes from class of topics and questions that Chun hasn't yet addressed fully or that I would like to address next time we discuss Control and Freedom:

- Space?? (addressed by Chun and on a few of our blogs, but not in class)

- How can we use technology to increase/propagate freedom?

- More on the relationship ("twinning") of control and freedom

- More on the freedom-technology-transparency relationships

- Is sexuality more implicated in technology than we generally realize/admit? (This might have been Anne's question.) What have we to gain from considering these relationships and implications? What might be the repercussions not only for our use and understanding of technology but for our understanding of our sexuality? (We may not want to go there...)

- What is Chun saying about the relationship of the internet to "print" and writing and reading? (see, for example, 122) Also, "literacy" and "looking" and "publicity"? And the "privatization of language" (127)?

Spaceless? Not if you have a little imagination...

2008-03-25T20:39:00.003-05:00

While I am enjoying Chun's book and finding it thought-provoking, I was a bit surprised by her discussion of "space" in chapter 1, in particular her apparent lack of imagination or willingness to move beyond the physicality of space. To give her the benefit of the doubt, she is clearly very knowledgeable about and concerned with the hardware of fiber-optics and the movement of packets, etc. These are things I know nothing about and it was good to be reminded that my computer is constantly communicating with other computers and that the internet is much more complicated and much less transparent than I tend to think it is. And in chapter 1, she does move beyond physicality to talk about cyberspace as "a metaphor and a mirage," but then she concludes that sentence by saying, "for cyberspace is not spatial" and later, "cyberspace is spaceless" (39).

It certainly isn't "spatial" in the way that we are accustomed to thinking about space and spatiality, but it seems to me we lose a lot by claiming that the internet is not spatial at all. I have been studying the concept-metaphor of thirdspace, which radical postmodern critical geographer Edward Soja defines as a "real-and-imagined" space of possibility that arises from but is other than firstspace — real, material — and secondspace — imagined, conceptual (Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places). While I don't think cyberspace is a perfect representation of Soja's thirdspace, I do think that we can conceive of the internet as a space that builds upon and is equal to the spaces with which we are more familiar but is itself a whole new kind of space. Must we define the spatiality of the internet in terms of "the sender's and recipient's computer" (39), fiber-optics, etc.? Cyberspace might be placeless, given her definition of place as "a finite location," but it certainly isn't spaceless if we take space to mean "an interval" (45).

Chun writes that cyberspace is "fundamentally unmappable and unlocatable" (43) and that as we surf we "teleport rather than travel from one virtual location to another, and the backward and forward icons do not move backwards and forwards between contiguous locations" (47). This made me think that it is mappable: It's just that we all build our own maps — just as we build (or Amazon builds) our own stores, as Weinberger showed us in Everything is Miscellaneous.

I do really like Chun's assertion that the "Internet is as much about time as it is space." Perhaps that is a feature of the spatiality of the internet: Though digital stores and encyclopedias and maps are less constrained by physical space in digital environments, perhaps they are more constrained by time. As we get more and more impatient and want everything at our fingertips in an instant, users are less likely to wait for a long download or upload, to pay attention to an outdated website, to participate in asynchronous chat, or to read large chunks of text (I better wrap this post up soon!). If space is "an interval," then perhaps in the "thirdspace" of the internet, space is represented as time and/or time is represented as space (see Chun's example of a "page that emerges bit by bit on the screen" [22]).

One other quick comment about space: If memory serves, Chun never talks about space in terms of interface. It's interesting to think about the use of space in web pages and the fact that a programmer can't fully control how space and spacing is represented on a user's screen.

I won't take the space and time to discuss this, but I was really interested by what Chun contributed to the conversation we've had intermittently this semester about how operating systems and software "interpellate" and "produce" users (20, 21). Also, thinking back to Nakamura: "[S]oftware corporations...tell you that you are behind, and not in front of, the window" and "It is impossible to resist subjectivity by doing nothing...if we jack in or are jacked in" (Chun 21-22).

Making use of this medium...

2008-03-13T09:21:00.004-05:00

So, instead of working this out in my head or on a piece of paper in my private notebook like I normally would, I think I'll take advantage of this medium to process through some of the challenges I'm encountering while trying to decide on a term project for this class. (And yes, I'm probably way behind lots of you who have already met with Anne and started your projects. C'est la vie.)

I often find it difficult to decide on a primary focus during the early, or even middle, part of a term because I'm so wrapped up in learning new things and because I know each new book and discussion will shape my thinking and expand the possibilities. But I think I'm finding some particular challenges endemic in this class (sorry for the "disease" connotation of endemic; that's neither intentional nor Freudian :-) ):

Every time I begin to think about a particular question to investigate or topic to explore, I move quickly to, "But how will I represent this digitally? What kind of multi-media project could I do with this topic?" This tends to shut down my line of inquiry prematurely.

On the other hand, if I begin by choosing a particular medium in which I want to work (e.g. making a movie, creating a wiki, etc.), then I feel like the project will be too concrete, too practical, and not theoretical enough. As we talked about a few weeks ago, how does one represent theory through images? I don't think it's impossible, nor do I think that's exactly what I have to do, but I'm not sure I know how to begin with the "images" (in whatever form they may take). And yet, I don't necessarily want to begin by writing a paper and then try to translate it in some way into a multi-media project. I hope the two develop together, informing one another.

Ideally, I would like my project to tie into my teaching: I always feel more invested in a project that promises to benefit my (future) students by helping me work through some aspect of composition pedagogy and reflect on my own teaching practices. While we have been enacting some of the relationships between digitality and pedagogy - by blogging, for example - we haven't read much about this. That's fine: It provides some gaps for me to synthesize theories and bring in my own experience but makes it a little more challenging for me to bridge the seeming (but false?) dichotomy between theory and practice.

A few of the broad subjects I've been scribbling some notes about:

- digitizing race in the composition classroom (e.g. How do the technologies of writing used in first-year composition reinscribe
race?)

- "thirdspace" and digitality (e.g. In what ways does the internet constitute a thirdspace and what are the possibilities inherent in
this?)

- While I still don't have an answer, I have continued to be intrigued by the "What kind of world would you like to live in and how will/can/should digitality create this world?" question, along with its various offshoots.

"Beyond Kittens, Beyond Angels"

2008-03-11T10:05:00.004-05:00

A huge thanks to Anne for turning me onto the NY Times migraine blog. I'm posting a link here to Monday's (3/10) entry, Beyond Kittens, Beyond Angels, because it relates to Nakamura's discussion of women's roles as producers on the internet. Specifically, it talks about how women have been using chronic pain blogs ("sick lit") to build community with one another, free themselves from constraining stereotypes and the demand that they wrap up their pain in a tidy narrative, and present something more authentic (to them) than women's websites that never get beyond "angels and kittens."

I have to go now. I have a headache.

Amazon Was Right Again (aka Why I Need a Kindle)

2008-03-05T00:59:00.006-06:00

First of all, I agree with several who have already posted: I am concerned about Benkler's seeming uncritical disregard for issues of access in relationship to hardware (e.g. those who can't afford a computer), software (e.g. those who can't learn to fully participate in the internet), and information (e.g. those in countries that monitor and restrict free expression). Because this discussion is going on elsewhere, I will try to focus my comments on other aspects of Benkler's book.

Several of you have also commented on this reading being a pdf. I spent some time before I began reading investigating the various formats available through the wiki. Most interesting to me is the "Bulleted" option, in which someone has gone through the entire book making decisions about subordination: One sentence or part of a sentence is presented, with successive sentences bulleted underneath. Basically, it makes explicit the implicit processes we all do as we read. I couldn't stand to read much in this format, however, so I stuck with the pdf.

Then I spent awhile downloading Acrobat because Preview wouldn't allow me to highlight on-screen. But -- surprise! surprise! -- neither would Acrobat because I didn't have "document rights" to the document. So much for Benkler's grand open-source concept. I don't know who exactly "owns" this document (and I don't know how he is making any real-market money off these free downloads of his massive book through the nonmarket economy), but I apparently do not have the (copy)right (or left) to participate in it or modify it in any way.

Once I settled on my only means of interactivity back in Preview -- drawing red ovals, creating clunky marginal comments, and bookmarking -- I sat down to read. Within the first few pages, I found that I had to fight a tendency to skim: Because of the glut of information I encounter on the web, I think I've become accustomed to skimming when reading large amounts of online or digital text (but I read your blogs closely, honest!). I was also tempted to skim because I was behind: Even though I took my laptop with me to the dentist and read while waiting for my appointment, I wasn't able to read on the bus or in all the other in-between times during which I can usually snatch a few pages. Hmmm...maybe I really do need the Kindle -- "Amazon's Revolutionary Wireless Reading Device"! -- that Amazon keeps trying to sell me.

Why bother blogging about all this? Because material conditions matter. They are an inescapable part of the economy of digitality. And as much as Benkler talks about nonmarket, non-proprietary developments, there are still plenty of market-driven technological advances (like the Kindle) that make all this possible. Of course, it goes the other way, too, and perhaps that's his point: As more people make their books available for free download, for example, demand -- the driving force of capitalism -- for hardware like the Kindle goes up.

Now, a few other brief observations about "The Wealth of Networks"...

Like Weinberger, Benkler talks at length about Wikipedia (esp. pages 70 and following), and once again, I was left with a question that neither author seems to address. Even though both discuss the relationship of Wikipedia and Britannica, and even though both tell stories of rapid changes being made when errors are revealed, neither discuss where contributors are getting their information in the first place. Ideally, entries about new and current events/people/things can and should be written by people who have direct personal experience with them; and ideally, information not obtained through direct experience must be cited; but who's to say that an entry on Alexander Hamilton wasn't written and edited by people using Britannica as their primary source? Eventually, I suppose, subsequent editors will add additional sources and perspectives -- working toward the "neutrality" that Weinberger and Wikipedia tout -- but it strikes me as odd that neither author (to my recollection) addresses even in passing the question of where contributors get their information.

Sara wrote about the Mars Clickworkers seeming like (or leading to) "outsourcing." The Mars Clickworkers project both excited and frightened me: The name itself calls up images of long assembly lines or children in China sewing button-eyes on teddy bears. There are, of course, significant differences: At this time, at least, participation in this project and others like it is completely voluntary, and some projects -- such as SETI@home -- don't actually require any participation by the human, just the machine. Not only does the mass participation have tremendous potential in terms of work being done, but it allows millions more people to gain agency and engagement with something they would normally never experience (without training for half their lives to be a NASA scientist). In our world of ever-increasing specialization, I don't think the "experts" will ever lose their jobs. But perhaps the grad students of the world, or even the underpaid -- but still paid -- factory workers of the information industry, will someday see their jobs vanish into the global void of open-outsourcing.

And yet, I would like to believe with Benkler that the networked information economy "will likely result in significant redistribution of wealth, and no less importantly, power" (468).

This is WAY too long, but one more quick comment: At the very end, Benkler writes, "As we observe these battles; as we participate in them as individuals choosing how to behave and what to believe, as citizens, lobbyists, lawyers, or activists; as we act out these legal battles as legislators, judges, or treaty negotiators, it is important that we understand the normative stakes of what we are doing" (472-73). I wrote in an earlier post that perhaps we should be more self-reflexive about the choices we make online and the consequences of those choices. I think Benkler helps us think through these choices and consequences, showing us how such small, individual decisions as whether or not to download a free song or contribute to Wikipedia or use Linux can have tremendous repercussions (when multiplied by millions) in the marketplace.

Transparency Revealed

2008-02-28T10:16:00.003-06:00

I was intrigued by our transparency/whiteness vs. "mojo"/blackness discussion last week (ala Nakamura), so I decided to search "transparency" in Flickr and see what it gave me. The first half of the movie draws from those images. The rest you can interpret for yourself....

Make sure your volume is up.

Misc.

2008-02-26T18:35:00.005-06:00

In the spirit of miscellany, some random thoughts on Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger:

** Obviously, the form of this work -- a printed, fixed-in-time-and-space, paper-constrained book with tidy chapters and subheadings and no messy hyperlinks -- seems pretty ridiculous and therefore provides the perfect commentary on a second-order world that is not completely ready for the "third order of order." Weinberger's book did, however, manage to feel less outdated than Nakamura's (although today Facebook and MySpace would have made for more appropriate examples than Friendster and could have advanced his argument about the social nature of knowledge), partly because he much more frequently acknowledged that the state of the web in general and particular websites would likely be different by the time someone read his book.

** As does the Slate article that Andrew linked to, I did wonder if the discussion of wikipedian (yes, it's an adjective) NPOV was a bit too utopian. Is neutrality possible? Is it preferable? Do we define neutrality by the number of people participating in the conversation? Even if millions participate, does this guarantee that the power, privilege, and hierarchies of our world won't be replicated in the ways knowledge is shaped in the third order? What about group-think? (Actually, I would suggest that collaborative websites are much less likely to succumb to group-think than in-person gatherings.)

** The Slate article, written by Chris Wilson, makes frequent references to secrecy and hidden agendas. He calls sites like Digg and Wikipedia "oligarchies" rather than democracies, and, like Nakamura and (to a much lesser extent) Weinberger, he says that the internet has not lived up to the "fairy tales of participatory culture of Web 2.0." He ends by saying, "Digg and Wikipedia would do well to stop pretending they're operated by the many and start thinking of ways to rein in the power of the few." Similarly, Weinberger lauds sites (like Wikipedia) that make the discussion part of knowledge- and meaning-making available to all viewers. Even so, we would do well to remember how much goes on behind the scenes: As many constraints as the digital third order removes, it still operates within certain boundaries and limitations, and there are still programmers and entrepreneurs and others pulling at least some of the strings. Take this blog, for instance: Because I have neither the expertise nor the time to design and program my own website (although I did take a C++ class about a hundred years ago), I am constrained by a very useful but very limiting template that shapes the way I write and present myself and my ideas to you; it is, therefore, shaping the way I make meaning and the way you make meaning of my meaning.

** For those in this semester's "Rhetorics and Democracies" class, I was thinking about the "public sphere" throughout this book, related especially to questions of "democracy" (raised above), social structures, and collaborative meaning-making. For those who were in last semester's "Feminist Rhetorical Theories" class, I heard some resonances between our readings last semester and Weinberger's discussions of "gaps" (e.g. "knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps" [146]) and re-mapping (we can no longer rely on Aristotilian "trees" or other second-order "maps" of the world).

** A side note about the massive amounts of stuff available on the web, the ease of finding much of this stuff, and how quickly it has become second (first? third?) nature to grab my laptop and search for something I want: A few weeks ago when I was blogging about being watched by a Van Gogh painting, I wanted to find the poem I wrote about this experience when I was in college. Even though it's safely tucked away on a piece of paper in a folder in a box somewhere and the only digital copy is on an old computer that wouldn't start up the last time I tried, my automatic reaction was to pull up Google. This is MY poem, written 7 years ago, never published, never emailed, never uploaded, shared only with my professor and a few peers in a workshop...and yet, somewhere in my subconscious mind I was just sure that if I wanted it, I could find it on the internet. (Thank goodness I can't, and neither can you or anyone else!)

** Though I have some critiques and there were places I felt Weinberger could have theorized or problematized further, I really enjoyed reading this book. Clearly, his audience is not (primarily) academics, and that was refreshing!

Wisdom from the Web: "owning a Mac = getting owned"

2008-02-19T21:29:00.011-06:00

I don't like to be manipulated. I try to be wary of the ways that ads and commercials seek to shape my attitudes and choices. But Apple totally has me in its back pocket. I love Macs for their performance, but I have to admit I also love the "metaphysical mystery of cool" (113). Even before reading Nakamura's chapter 3, I had often discussed with my husband the new Apple ads, which began after Nakamura submitted her final manuscript (reference our discussion last week) and which are entirely predicated on the "cool" factor. Some of the ads don't actually say anything about the performance of Macs, but they make other computers look silly, old, uptight, unhip, and boring simply by juxtaposing young, nonchalant, hip-without-trying-too-hard "Mac" against bland, suited, older "PC." After reading Nakamura's discussion of the "'mojo' of blackness" and "Afro-futuristic visual culture" of The Matrix and Apple's iPod ads, I wondered if the "Mac vs PC" commercials would have worked or worked better with an African American playing the role of "Mac." Would this have critiqued whiteness in a similar manner as the Matrix movies? Are white Americans ready enough to align themselves with black "mojo" for the commercial to work? Buying into an idealized (and stereotyped) image of African Americans in order to enjoy a movie is one thing; identifying with and acting upon this identification (to go buy a Mac) is another. (By the way, I am by no means uncritical of this use of race to entertain and sell.)

This issue of identification is interesting to consider in relationship to race and interactivity. I wrote last week about examining the choices we make as we use/browse/manipulate the internet, and Nakamura writes about online communities that are formed by people who identify with one another on the basis of, for example, race (alllooksame.com) and gender/physical condition/life stage (pregnancy websites). How often are our choices as consumers and producers of digitality driven by our identifications? In what ways might this limit and/or increase the subversive potential of the internet? Apple.com encourages identification by asking its viewers, "Which Mac are you?" and by claiming, "Leopard has over 300 amazing new features. But most impressive, it just works the way you want it to" (italics added). But what if this backfires: What if the viewer doesn't identify? (keep reading)

When I couldn't get all the ads to play on the Apple website, a quick YouTube search revealed not only many of the original (pirated) commercials but also numerous spoofs, including one shown on David Letterman. Most interesting, in light of Nakamura's chapter 5 on the "Asian or Gay?" controversy, is a spoof entitled "Mac vs PC Parody: The Unspoken Message." (The beauty of this medium is that I don't have to explain it: Just click the link and watch it!) The poster, maddoxaom, explains, "I feel like I have to be gay to own one." The first few responses are fascinating, with such comments as: "iGay" from AcePilot101; "owning a Mac = getting owned" from noisecape; and a thread about Australian, Japanese, and American computers, which I couldn't follow. The most recent post (which is, minutes later, no longer the most recent) attempts to engage the parody on a more critical level as well as on a technical production level:

I own 6 PC's and 9 Mac's and just cannot find any humor or wits in this clip.
Is 'GAY'(hihihih, uptight, hihihi)still a topic for grown-up's? (hihihi 'GAY' hihihi)
Is it a topic still supposed of being capable to carry a funny plot? (hihihi 'GAY' hihihi)
Have I overlooked essentials?
Lousy below the line production, not less, not more, weak command of text. 10/5 on boredom. (hihihi 'GAY' hihihihi)

These parodies and resulting comments are producing, as Nakamura calls for, but what are they producing? And what are they reproducing? Are they producing openings for subverting the dominant consumer model of "cool" or are they reproducing other dominant systems of oppression (such as homophobia)? If I had more time and space, I would talk more about Kenneth Burke's definitions of identification, as well as Krista Ratcliffe's call for disidentification and non-identification as spaces in which to engage difference and practice genuine cross-cultural communication (Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness).

I think, by the way, that Apple is doing some of the "reenvisioning of what constitutes a 'major life activity' or salient 'information'" (182) that Nakamura suggests after outlining the Pew Foundation study that said minorities engage primarily in "Fun" activities. Several of the "Mac vs PC" ads juxtapose highly visual, highly social iLife activities—iChat, iPhoto, iMovie, etc.—against the business functions of Windows.

Sunny snow day

2008-02-13T23:38:00.004-06:00

This was more fun than my last experiment, at least once I took the pressure off myself to create a self-portrait that portrayed the essence (whatever that is) of my being. I took the background picture from my back deck on our snow day last Wednesday; the little girl is me at age 2; and the other picture was taken this summer in the spot where Luke proposed 6 years earlier. Obviously, I used the gradient tool, but here's what I'm most proud of (and wasted the most time on): I wanted some "snowflakes" in front of the little girl, so after trying a bunch of other methods, I simply "erased" them (at medium opacity)! It's not perfect, but it's my crowning achievement of a long evening of PS play.

"Cyber-rape?"

2008-02-12T21:01:00.007-06:00

First of all, I second Sarah Etlinger's assessment of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet so far: intriguing introduction, disappointing first chapter, redeeming second chapter. Now on to some of Nakamura's ideas that got me thinking....

The J. Lo stuff in the Introduction was both compelling and difficult for me to read. I haven't seen the "If You Had My Love" music video, but the descriptions and stills make it pretty clear what's going on. I was angry with Lopez for pandering to the male gendered gaze (she is not alone, of course, as this is the modus operandi of nearly all female celebrities, singers, dancers, etc. regardless of the medium), and I wished Nakamura had problematized the production/producer aspect of the video (who generated the idea? who was the visual designer? who directed, produced, costumed?). (She does mention that "it is really the invisible interface designer whose work conditions the limits and possibilities of interactivity in this case" [19].)

But here's where I really got interested: "The pleasure of the interface lies partly in its power to control movement between genres and partly in the way that it introduces musical genres that audiences may not have even known existed" (25-26). Actually, my mind took off after "power to control movement" and went in a different direction from the rest of the sentence. Due to the interactivity of the simulated interface portrayed in the music video, and of actual websites, the user literally controls the movement of the objects in/of/on the site -- in this case, the object is Jennifer Lopez. With simple clicks of the mouse, the viewer "makes" Lopez dance, in the style of his choice; he "makes" her undress, shower, etc. in front of him (or he could -- I don't know if these "selections" are shown on the video); he is allowed "multiple points of entry into her digital image" (19); he can replay particular parts of her performance over and over, at any time, at his whim. Thus, in a sense, he "controls" this Latina. I couldn't help but write at the bottom of page 25: "cyber-rape?" Nakamura says, "The interface lets you 'have' Jennifer Lopez in a variety of ethnic and racialized modes by clicking on one of many links" (28).

You might argue that the viewer and his "object" are not operating on the same plane: He is not actually controlling her because he sits as a physical presence in his darkened office, and she exists (as far as he is concerned) only as pixels on a computer screen. But as Nakamura writes, "In the case of the video, the cursor functions as a visual proxy that in this case stands in for the viewer; it is itself a kind of avatar..." (26). Thus through the cursor, the viewer enters the digital plane and joins Lopez there, but though they "exist" together, she is still the object and he the subject with the power. His control is limited, of course, by what has been programmed into the website: He cannot see more than she has chosen to show him. But this brings me back to my earlier questions of who is really calling the shots behind the production of the website/video? Not only do I suspect the involvement of male producers and directors, but, as Nakamura points out elsewhere in the book, commercial pursuits are always at the mercy of the consumer.

Nakamura gives us another example of the user's power by way of the cursor in Chapter 2's discussion of alllooksame.com: "The site also shows that racial codes come from the user as well as the interface or content of the site itself. The site exposes the user's participation in this construction; it shows how individual acts of viewing and 'typing' or clicking create race just as surely as do large institutions such as schools, medical establishments, and the law" (83-84). Earlier on page 83, she refers to "interactive self-reflexivity." I'm not sure that I agree with her that "alllooksame.com produces a community based on a shared act of interactive self-reflexivity," but I am intrigued by this concept. Does the internet encourage us to be self-reflexive? Other than remembering to delete cookies and browser cache every once in a while, and perhaps going to the "click here every day to end breast cancer" websites, do we think critically about our choices to click or not click, and what the implications of these choices may be? Even though the entire premise of the internet is networking, how many of us consider surfing and interacting with websites to be an intensely personal activity? How many of us get angry when confronted with the fact that many sites track our clicks, implant cookies on our machines to recognize us and record our movements, and seem to learn our tastes and interests (I don't know about you, but Amazon's "Recommended for You" creeps me out with its accuracy)? More importantly, what world is constructed by the choices we make with our mouse? Anne asked us the first day of class, "What kind of world do you want to live in?" Do the ways you interact with/in digitality help move the world toward or away from your imagined ideal future?

Less than average

2008-02-12T21:00:00.001-06:00

I took the test at alllooksame.com. I got a 5. Out of 18.

Semiology and Propaganda

2008-02-05T17:26:00.000-06:00

I chose to write about this image for two reasons: (1) I hate to be manipulated so I like to analyze advertisements and commercials; and (2) I'm fascinated by my response to this poster versus the expected and probable response from its intended audience (which I assume to be Chinese people, particularly Chinese youth). This analysis will be brief and very incomplete. (See previous post for an interesting reaction to something else in Visual Methodologies.)

Following are a few signs, along with what they seem to signify "in themselves," how they relate to other signs "in themselves," their connections to wider systems of meaning (from codes to ideologies), and what they say about ideology and mythology (98). I will address both what they represent to me and might represent to their intended audience.

(I have to admit that I cheated a little bit. I noticed the title of the image file, so I searched Lei Feng and found a Wikipedia entry with the exact same image and a translation of the Chinese characters as, "Follow the examples of Comrade Lei-Feng" or "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng.")

Doves (?) and Gun - These seem to me to be in stark contrast with one another. In my cultural understanding, doves (if that is what they are) symbolize peace and even carry a religious connotation (the Holy Spirit descending like a dove at Jesus' baptism). Therefore, it is anachronous in my Western discourse to see doves and a machine gun (which I equate with violence and ugly death) pictured together. But in China's militaristic, nationalistic, socialistic culture, it may not be unusual to equate the two. Guns in China may signify peace, pride, and duty to one's country (a devotee of Chairman Mao, Lei Feng joined the Communist youth corps and later the People's Liberation Army, before his death at age 22). Or, perhaps this is precisely what this propaganda poster is attempting to do: "transfer" the viewer's association of peace from the dove to the gun, and from the gun to the military, the government, and even Mao himself. As Rose writes, "[I]n that process of making meaning, the viewer is also made in specific, ideological ways" (99).

National Emblem and red color - This one's pretty obvious. No subtlety here. This signifier doesn't give us the kind of interpretive "creative freedom" (99) that some of the others do, but rather seems to be an appellation (100), a "hey - I'm talkin' to you!" And that "you" is definitely not me.

Great Wall - This seems to be a good example of Barthes's notion of mythology. The first level of the sign is meaning at the denotive level: " 'In meaning...the meaning is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions' " (97). For someone living in China, an image of the Great Wall would certainly come with all of the above. But I imagine that it has also become something more, something bigger than the accumulation of history, facts, etc. " 'When it becomes form, the meaning leaves contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates'.... The meaning is put at a distance, and what fills the gap is signification." (97). The Great Wall is, therefore, a sign of Chinese superiority, national pride, and security (even though most tactics of modern warfare wouldn't be daunted in the slightest by a big wall).

Face - Obviously, this is a young, healthy, attractive (?) male, a symbol of the virility, strength, and future of the empire (even though he's dead). His facial expression might be perceived by a Chinese person as determined, resolved, thoughtful, and - back to the doves/gun discussion - peaceful. That isn't necessarily my reaction, but again, that's my culture/discourse coming through. And to be perfectly honest, I'm predisposed against interpreting his expression in a positive light by the insignia, the gun, and the assumption that this is "communist propaganda."

Then again, are advertisements really anything other than propaganda?

The Painting Is Watching You

2008-02-05T16:58:00.000-06:00

While reading the Rembrandt review by Adrian Searle (36-38) -- which ended, "Standing in this room I realised that you can't review Rembrandt. Rembrandt reviews you." -- I was reminded of an experience I had in the very same museum (The National Gallery in London) about two years after this review was written in 1999.

One of the very first paintings I saw upon entering was one of Van Gogh's sunflowers (if I remember correctly). Like all the other "good eye" critics around me, I stopped and contemplated it thoughtfully with my chin resting on my hand. Then I moved on. Several hours later, my friend and I finally made it through to the last room, a special temporary exhibit on how we look at art. It had diagrams, for example, that traced the eye movement of a viewer looking at a painting: what drew the eye first? was there a pattern to how it jumped around the painting?

But the most interesting -- and creepy -- exhibit showed a copy of the Van Gogh painting I had been looking at earlier, but this time it was displayed next to a television monitor, on which people were looking intently at me -- or rather, at a painting of a sunflower! That's right, the museum had mounted a tiny concealed camera in the frame of the painting, producing a "painting's-eye-view" of its audience. I was absolutely transfixed by the concept of the painting looking back at us. I stood there chuckling to myself over the guy picking his nose, the puzzled faces of the less "sophisticated" museum goers, and the scads of copy-cat High Art connoisseurs with their heads slightly tilted and their eyes glazing over.

I actually wrote a poem about this experience (from the perspective of the painting), but thankfully it's buried deep in some college file.

The Red Wheelbarrow

2008-02-02T21:10:00.000-06:00

I was going for a reinterpretation William Carlos Williams' iconic poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow," using this photograph of a woman in Indonesia (with a red wheelbarrow) and a boy from Rwanda (with non-white chickens). I had to start over a couple times and got thoroughly frustrated, so what I ended up with is not what I had envisioned, but that's part of the process, right? If I have time, I'll play with it some more, but several hours is more than enough for now.

Since you probably can't read the text, here's the poem:

The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The Rwandan boy comes from the blog of photographer Adam Bacher, called Bacher's Blog. The boy holding the chickens is Jean Claude. Here is the original image:

The Indonesian woman with the corn (which, says Bacher, was what the chickens were fed after this picture was taken), came from a 2005 USAID story. The photographer is C. Gredler.

What are the copyright laws on photos posted on one internet site and used on another? Is this considered "private use"? I'm certainly not making any money off these photos, but I am displaying them to the public, a public that could just as easily find them on the original websites, as I did. Interesting.

Grrrrrr...

2008-02-02T18:38:00.000-06:00

I'm incredibly frustrated with Photoshop right now. Just thought you all should know.

E-Trash

2008-02-02T18:33:00.000-06:00

As I was driving home from class on Thursday, I heard the beginning of a program on "High Tech Trash" -- exactly what Anne was talking about in class (children in third world countries salvaging tiny bits of gold from garbage dumps full of computers, etc.). If you're interested, you can listen to a podcast of Here on Earth from Wisconsin Public Radio or check out the story and pictures in January's National Geographic.

Rainbows and Cancer

2008-01-29T18:12:00.000-06:00

In the Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (about a planet with no gender), Ursula K. Le Guin writes,

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life. ... Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic. (first page of Intro)

I think Vinge did a credible job of extrapolation in Rainbows End (by the way, I love that Robert contemplates the lack of apostrophe in this name of the retirement community [152] and I assume this is the referent of the last chapter title, "The Missing Apostrophe"). The technology Vinge created seemed relatively feasible but not too obvious, given today's trends of digitality and innovation. But because of Le Guin's warning, and because I know all books need conflict, I was expecting some sort of global "network failure" -- some major meltdown in this brave new world of wearables and analysts-by-the-million. I was actually kind of surprised that the meltdown wasn't bigger than it turned out to be; in my more charitable moments, I might attribute that to the character development that enabled Vinge's novel to not hinge entirely on the tension created by the futuristic technology.

But back to Le Guin's quote: Is there any way to imagine the future of our digital world without the vision ending in metaphorical (and literal) cancer? From Anne's brief introduction on Thursday, it sounds like each book we read this semester will fall in different places on the pessimism-optimism continuum. I think Vinge is actually fairly optimistic: He doesn't seem to attribute the bad things that happen to digitality, but rather to the people (mostly Vaz and Mr. Rabbit) who misuse it for their own gain. ("Guns don't kill people; people kill people"?) I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe technology PR? Perhaps many people are afraid of the constant march of technology because whenever an author tries to extrapolate it out into the future, it feels scary and generally doesn't end well.

Regarding the place of writing in this world, I was intrigued by the concept of sming. When I described it to my husband, he said, "Sounds almost like telepathy." Pretty close, although of course it isn't mind-reading and it still requires some kind of physical movement, however slight. Luke read a book in graduate school called The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, which definitely seems to be the trend of most digitality (as evidenced by the presentations for Ms. Chumlig's class, with visual special effects that made Robert's stripped-down poetry recitation a boring anomaly). But the sming, like today's text-messaging but without the abbreviations, seems to have kept writing (in some form, at least) alive and well. Do the lines between orality and writing blur when it takes a few blinks or shoulder twitches to send a message? What are the implications of a message suddenly parading across one's field of vision? Ironically, this written "dialogue" presented a challenge for Vinge, who had to figure out how to represent it on the page. The result is workable, though it's clunky and doesn't at all represent the natural ease with which the actual sming took place. The more I think about it, the more I realize that writing-as-communication has been eclipsing oral communication for some time now: Like most people I know (esp. those in my generation and younger), I almost always opt for email over a phone call. So is writing safe and sound? Depends on how you define "writing."

By the way, stupid question: Am I supposed to know who Mr. Rabbit is? I kept expecting the big "reveal," and never got it. At different points throughout the book, I was convinced that he was just about every major and minor character, but now I think he really is the unknown chimera that he was for all the characters. If so, that's actually kind of cool. Scarier, too. But maybe I missed something? I'm not sure why the "carrot greens" were such a big deal at the end, so I guess I did miss something. Good thing this isn't a lit. class.

Imagine a world...

2008-01-25T19:23:00.000-06:00

How often in a grad class have I been asked, "What sort of world do you want to live in?" One time, counting last night.

But I think this question underpins the work I do in most of my classes, the undergrad ones I teach as well as the grad ones I take. Or at least, I hope it does. I would like to make this question, and my ever-evolving answers, a more conscious part of both my academic and personal lives. (And yes, I would like to live in a world where I can write "life" at the end of that sentence.)

What do I want to remember from today's class? That both writing and digitality (hmmm, my digital spellchecker doesn't like that word) are factors in creating the world I want to live in. Of course, after the interconnectedness-of-everything lesson we learned last night, I suppose everything is related to producing the world I want--or don't want--to live in. But for now, it will be enough to spend the semester contemplating the role of writing and digitality in the world I live in and the world I want to live in. If I'm going to be a good epistemic rhetorician, I need to point out here that my ideas of "the world I want to live in" are in large part shaped by writing and language. I cannot separate them or draw a linear model of what influences what--interconnectedness, remember?

I also want to remember not to sit in front of the projector because looking back at Anne, or whoever is speaking, through/towards the lamp gives me a headache. And considering I've flushed my expensive liver-destroying migraine meds down the toilet (on purpose), that's something I would like to avoid. Maybe in Second Life there are no migraines.... Now that's a world I want to live in!

Title?

2008-01-24T12:52:00.000-06:00

My college roommate (a fellow English major) and I hated writing titles for our papers, and hated even more getting papers back from teachers with "title?" scrawled across the top. So when we read and commented on each other's papers, we always wrote "title?" at the top, just to be obnoxious.

Because I didn't have any other ideas, and because my husband insisted that simply titling my blog with my name was lame, I borrowed the phrase "standing under" from Krista Ratcliffe. In Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, she writes:

[U]nderstanding means listening to discourses not for intent but with intent--with the intent to understand not just the claims but the rhetorical negotiations of understanding as well. To clarify this process of understanding, rhetorical listeners might best invert the term understanding and define it as standing under, that is, consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others while consciously acknowledging all our particular--and very fluid--standpoints....

Standing under our own discourses means identifying the various discourses embodied within each of us and then listening to hear and imagine how these discourses might affect not only ourselves but others.... Standing under the discourses of others mean first, acknowledging the existence of these discourses; second, listening for (un)conscious presences, absences, unknowns; and third, consciously integrating this information into our world views and decision making. (28-29)

This may not be a perfect fit for what we are doing in this class, but it has been in my mind since reading Ratcliffe's book in FemRhet last semester and I think it is beginning to inform all the work I do.

The First Post

2008-01-14T22:59:00.000-06:00

It's amazing that this is my first blog. I was so excited about web-logs "back in the day" -- not so many days ago -- of their inception. I thought this format was made just for me. But then I panicked: What would I write about? Who would care? And most of all, how would I have time to make every post live up to my standards of composition quality (and, you will come to learn, quantity)? And so, I never started.

Do I read blogs? Yes, although not nearly as many or as often as I would like. Back to the overwhelming feelings: So many good (and bad) blogs, and so little time! I would like to say that I read scholarly blogs -- writers, teachers, political pundits -- and I do sometimes. I have found blogs to be helpful when doing research; I don't generally cite them, but I find they often give me ideas or lead me to helpful resources. The blogs I read most frequently, however, are those of friends and family, especially the ones with cute pictures and videos of their tiny tots. I am grateful for this invaluable link to the lives of people I love but don't often see in person.

Setting up the blog was easy but time-consuming, mostly because I spent time exploring both Wordpress and Blogger -- even setting up blogs with each -- before deciding to go with Blogger. I really wanted Wordpress to win out. I like the open source thing and I wanted to be different from the minions on Blogger ("different," that is, like the minions on Wordpress). But Wordpress had a lot of issues with Safari and I found the interface a little less intuitive and streamlined. I still haven't deleted that blog yet: Maybe it will be my "underlife" (see Erving Goffman and my FemRhet seminar paper, Fall 2007).

I chose this template because I like the sleek black look, and because I knew I wanted to use this great sunset picture, taken last April over the pond across the street from our rented townhome in Franklin. I'm not tremendously gifted in the visual arts, so I like to keep my visually creative endeavors simple and classy.

The final question I have been asked to respond to sounds just like a question I might pose to my English 101, 105, or 102 students: When you write in your blog, how is your thinking about your writing different (is it?) from writing in other contexts? I don't know that I can answer this yet, in my first post; I imagine it is a question I will be thinking about throughout the semester. But here are some early conjectures:

I am certainly thinking very differently about audience already. While I recognize that this post will be read primarily by my professor and a few classmates, there is the possibility that it could be read by The Public (insert dramatic music here). The tone of most of the blogs I read (even the more scholarly ones) is decidedly more informal than the typical academic paper I might otherwise be writing, so that (perceived) sense of genre is influencing my tone and composition decisions.

Interestingly, I find that I am writing faster and editing/rereading less than I usually do. Perhaps I feel freed from (dramatic music again) Academic Writing Conventions. In addition, the medium and material conditions of this writing are different: the look of the blog, the autosaving going on once a minute below this text, the knowledge that this will be available to the world the moment I "Publish Post" rather than when I print it out tomorrow and hand it to my professor. This last quality creates both a sense of immediacy and of distance: It will be "public" immediately but I will not (in some cases, will never) actually face my audience.

The fact that I can edit this post any time in the future is also very intriguing: I like the statement it makes about recursivity, that buzz word we toss around the first-year composition curriculum so much. If our first-year comp students wrote all of their essays as blogs, would that help them see that writing is not a linear event but requires returning, rethinking, rereading, rewriting? Or would the linear format of most blogs reinforce the idea that a writer starts at the beginning and keeps moving forward. I guess that's true, too. Time for me to move forward....