|
U-blog, I-blog |
||
 |
||
|
I wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly Introduction to Writing Studies
 |
|
Tinderbox 3.5?? I just got an email from Eastgate announcing the release of Tinderbox 3.5. I haven't posted here since Sept. 2004, and I am using Tinderbox 1.2.3, although I haven't wanted to take the site down because I still access some of my notes, and I don't mind keeping the site up as an archive of blogging activity between 2002 and 2004. This site is relevant to an article I published on blogging--another reason to keep the blog up. I do still blog, but in really fragmented ways. Something close to a personal blog at TenADay Clippings from my feedreader at "All Clippings, all the time." Various course blogs through blogger, the most active and interesting (IMHO) for my Visual Culture and Language Course. I wonder how blogging is evolving for other people? Some high profile bloggers just pack it in, others slow down, some, like Douglas Rushkoff, just announced that he is looking for teammates because individual blogging is too demanding. Blogging has often been defined by its regularity, but it seems to me that, like journaling, and like most of our human activities, we do it when it makes sense and fulfills us, and we don't do it when it becomes a drag, a bore, a burden--and we have the luxury to just stop. I also wonder what I am supposted to do with these files once my iMac passes along and I no longer have a functioning version of Tinderbox. True archives, at that point? To be read and printed, not manipulated?
New Literacy and The Essay Two pretty interesting finds tonight, thanks to Dad and Google Alerts. A concise but comprehensive overview of The New Literacy, published earlier this month. A smart and interesting essay about The Essay, written by a Computer Programmer / writer, a likely combination in the next age of literacy.
McLuhan, Ulmer, Method I'm working on an essay about McLuhan's Laws of Media, and I am often thinking about how McLuhan's laws relate to Burke's Pentad, and tonight, Ulmer's CATT(t). Whenever I bring McLuhan and Ulmer together, I see in their work a lot of similarities even though Ulmer specifically distanced himself from McLuhan in Applied Grammatology. Okay, to the heart of the matter. McLuhan and McLuhan say that if you drop one of the laws of the tetrad, you end up with "not formal but efficient cause, and familiar Method" (8). Ulmer's first chapter in Heuretics establishes his own heuretic, CATT(t), which I have tried to map onto the Laws: Contrast = obsolescence or reversal (can't quite tell). Analogy = enhancement, intensification, or amplification. Theory = a repetition of an existing theory, modified = retrieval Target = enhancement or reversal (also can't quite tell). Ulmer's "tale" is the telling of the new theory, and while McLuhan did not include the tale as part of the tetrad, he clearly understood that his own new tale needed a new kind of telling, a telling consistent with his message and distinct from the old kind of telling. If analogy and target both function to describe how a Method (or a technology) are kinds of enhancements, and contrast is in fact best mapped to obsolescence, what Ulmer seems to be dropping is reversal--what will the new Method become, when taken to its limits? Because his frames of reference are Plato's Phaedrus, Descartes on Method, Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism," none of these methods contain within it an account of their own reversal. They are all methods concerned with asserting themselves, with pushing other examples and problems aside, drawing on existing, authoritative theories. Ulmer, to the extent that he continues to work in the tradition of Method, is in the process of trying to invent something new (hence his latest book, Internet Inventions), and his work focuses fairly precisely on issues of composition--how should we compose in the age of video? within the apparatus of electracy rather than literacy? McLuhan did not pose that question so much as simply tackle it through his own compositions, focusing instead more precisely on the hermeneutic tasks of "understanding media". Ulmer may consistently identify with Derrida rather than McLuhan, but it seems increasingly like he builds off of McLuhan implicity as more or more than he builds off of Derrida. That said, if his CATT(t) in fact does not consider reversal, the future ground, the reversal of the New Method, remains unclear, and the invention is made without a sense of its consequences. Ulmer's focus on Methods and theories and even genres, framed in the context of rhetoric, perhaps makes the question of reversal less pressing than say, inventions like nanotechnology, although the questions of reversal for discourse do seem worth considering. Ulmer's objects of analysis are pretty consistently textual, rather than material, although he clearly understands that rhetoric, invention, literacy, and electracy happen within the context of technologies and a material world. So, in sum ; ) McLuhan's objects: media, technology, texts (in his literary scholarship). Ulmer's objects: texts, pedagogies, Methods, media--although largely assumed. McLuhan's goal: understanding, with a generalized sense of action. Ulmer's goal: application, invention, understanding assumed. McLuhan's laws: figures and grounds balanced. Ulmer's CATT(t): figures privileged, obsolesced grounds acknowledged. Nuff' said?
Farenheit 9/11 Thoughts I saw Farenheit 9/11 yesterday--emotionally draining, especially seeing the Iraqi and American mothers emotionally destroyed by the war. As reviewers have been saying since Cannes, Moore is actually pretty low key, and during the last 30 minutes or so, lets the people on the screen provide the analysis. Two initial thougths (I'm expecting more later): Moore has stayed incredibly "on message" since Roger and Me. F 9/11 ties threads together adeptly towards the end to send the message that America is far from a classless society, and that the war is part of the process of keeping the class structure in place. He even has footage of Bush addressing a fundraising crowd and saying "You are the haves and the have mores, and you are my base." Along similar lines, he continues to use Flint MI, his hometown, as a rich topoi, a rhetorical place, to return to, for issues that are about America and the world. He follows two Navy recruiters on a day at the mall in Flint (not the new, suburban mall, but the old, urban mall); we see them target young men and women, work them over pretty aggressively. Moore comes back to a scene of young African American men at a gym talking about the war--all knew people in service. He has a short scene where he shows a neighborhood that looks as bombed out as the Baghdad. But he really focuses on a mother from Flint who had always believed the forces were a great option for the young and unemployed in Flint, until her son was killed. Her son's last letter expressed his anger at Bush for sending troops to Iraq for no reason, and she herself says that she feels fooled and betrayed by the government. I've been wondering what conservatives are saying about the film. According to this story from the AP, the White House and Republican party are taking a "no comment" approach, but a group called "Move America Forward" calls it a "misleading and grotesque movie" and they are using a letter writing campaign to try and keep it out of theaters.
Links to Tetrads online I'm compiling a list of online materials that explain or use McLuhan's "laws of media," also known as the tetrad. I'll probably update this note periodically, but here is what I have so far. I'll make the links active, eventually. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. "The Internet, Laws of Media, and Identity Politics." http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Tetrads.html. 1996. Accessed June 3, 2004. A good essay, especially for emphasizing the need to go beyond the tetrad. Federman, Mark. "Laws of Media Tetrads." http://www3.sympatico.ca/federman/MerrillConsulting/transform/ncb2.htm. Accessed June 3, 2004. Federman consistently does a nice job of glossing McLuhan. Goodbrey, Daniel Merlin. A Webcomic Tetrad: http://www.e-merl.com/comtet.htm. Accessed June 6, 2004. This webcomic tetrad is a webcomic in itself, offering a narrator and a story line--although viewers are free to move around the space. Very cool. Moulthrop, Stuart. "You Say you Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media." Postmodern Culture 1.3 (1991) 53 para. Archived in Project Muse: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.3moulthrop.html. Accessed Oct. 3, 2001. Probably the most extensive application of the laws of media in the field of Computers and Writing, although Moulthrop does not exploit the visual dimension of tetrads. "The Tetrads: Four Laws of Media." http://www.jesgrew.org/wake/tetrads/index.html ND. Accessed June 3, 2004. And McLuhan, Eric. "Survivor Tetrad." http://www.jesgrew.org/wake/tetrads/Survivor.html. ND. Accessed June 3, 2004. Eric McLuhan's tetard is a link off of the main tetrad site. Both are short and to the point. Rheingold, Howard. "McLuhanizing Mobile Media." Mon Nov. 24, 2003. http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100229&ref=1310423 A short article that emphasizes the brainstorming qualities and use of the Laws of Media.
what if we have already learned all of McLuhan's lessons? In reading a stunning lecture McLuhan delivered to educators in 1959, I started to wonder what a retrieval of McLuhan can really add to educational reform. Not that his radical vision‹discovery based education, problem-based education, educating students in the mastery of global new media, etc.‹has been realized, but that many radical educators are still pushing many of the same kinds of reforms. Joshua Meyorwitz essay about taking mcluhan seriously ends with this observations: "In the long run, educational theorists and practitioners have taken McLuhan and "medium theory" rather seriously after all‹even if they have not been fully conscious of it" (106). So, what is the value in recovering his ideas? The rhetorical weight of being able to say to those who resist "look it was obvious to McLuhan in 1959 what needed to be done, and we still haven't done it!" ? A "theory value" is often attributed to doing this kind of recovery work, but McLuhan's reputation is so problematics, the dynamics are considerably different than the great Bakhtinian recovery of the 1990s. Is the recovery worth the risk? Although Ulmer chose to use Derrida as his relay, there would seem to be a relay-value in working through McLuhan's texts, as they more adequeately spur me to write like tv than do Ulmer's texts. McLuhan, as I noted in an earlier post, can be thought of as an early practitioner of alternative academic writing. I also wrote about Jeff Rice discovering, after the fact, that his pedagogy essentially matched up with McLuhans--raising the very problem I have started this entry with. Maybe some of the value will be in looking at contempories who have been influenced by McLuhan but continue to be overlooked in educational circles. scott McCloud's work on comics, David Byrne's films, music, and multi-media composition, david carson's photografiks, etc. The grand sweeping move would be to re-configure the humanities based on McLuhan, vygotsky, Montessori rather than Frye, Bruner, Newman -- although such a totalizing move seems antithetical to the McLuhan project of probe and exploring rather than theorizing and explaining McLuhan himself preached "understanding," but I like the notion that we can only have "simple knowing," -- see the introduction to gramophone, film, typewriter. The anti-theory arguments have always had a certain appeal for me; theory hope continues to prevail.
Cooling off classroom discussion I was thinking about McLuhan's "acoustic space" today and trying to figure out ways to illustrate it that are more concerete than the examples he tends to give. I thought about my education--my time as a student--and my attempts as an educator--my so called life as a professor. My professors were certainly all products of print culture and more or less products of visual space: ordered, hierarchical, communication moving in a single direction. I certainly didn't email my professors, doubt that I ever called them on the phone, remember getting calls for two of them. None of them blogged. Even during the four years I was working on my PhD, I have few memories of emailing my professors. I can remember a couple of classes that set up listservs--usually the students set them up--and I can remember a few of the discussions getting Hot really quickly. The email culture at that institution, in that department, was generally quite Hot. But as I probed that memory, I also thought about my interface: the old vt 100 terminal or whatever that thing was called. Orange text on black screen. I usually composed my Hot contributions to class discussion late at night, dark room, dark screen, nothing but letters appearing on the screen. I don't think I have been involved in any exchanges online quite so hot since then. I am wondering how much that has to do with the move to GUIs, to discussion boards where all the text is there to be read and re-read, rather than disappearing in to mail boxes. I've become goofy, ridiculous, a McLuhan-wanna-be punster typing away in black on white and surrounded by the serene blues of OSX, the puppy dog icon for Fetch, etc. Apparently flaming (such an appropriately hot metaphor) still exists on slash dot or other techie lists where the involvement in work is sufficiently intenses that fires still burn through words, and various websites still steam with hatred for the Other, but I am going to bet that in the ground of classroom, online discussion, the fires of the 1990s have cooled, and the interface(s) have some significant(?) roles to play. I
McLuhan and academic writing Baeten, Jan. "Illustrations, Images, and Anti-Illustrations." Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT P, 2003. 179-99. The point I would like to stress here is how McLuhan and Fiore's two books play a fundamental role in the emergence of a new type of academic writing, in which word and image (or better: textuality and visuality) are merged in a kind of big McLuhanian move toward "global connectedness" and in which the principle of scholarly distance and Olympian neutrality is abandoned in favor of a more committed and "writerly" way of writing, and thus of thinking. (190) The general point about McLuhan and Fiore being innovators in re-thinking academic writing is solid, but this article drove me crazy with its misrepresentations of McLuhan as determinist and postive futurist, and with its claim to advance a "screen theory" which is simply a variation on "the medium is the massage."
Jeff Rice on cool Rice, Jeff. "writing about cool: teaching hypertext as juxtaposition." Computers and composition 20 (2003): 221-36. available at sciencedirect.com if your institution subscribes. Drawing on Ulmer's chorography, Rice describes a class built around the many meanings of cool‹McLuhan's participatory media (cool media) and Amiri Baraka's notion of cool as calm, unimpressed by the horror's of the world, including African American cool towards oppression and appropriation, among others. Rice connects the works of McLuhan and Baraka to the 1963 4Cs call for a rethinking of research paper, a rethinking that is needed more than ever, Rice suggests, considering the changes in the writing environments. Student produced handbooks of cool are mosaics, juxtapositions, embodiments of cool about cool that perform the cultural studies practice of decoding "cool" with the rhetorical practice of making something cool. Rice acknowledges that he inadvertently is proposing essentially what McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan proposed in 1977 (234). I have never met Jeff, but I dreamt about him the other night. What better sign that I should get reading and blogging him?
2003 in the rearview mirror My semester has ended and my blog has officially been neglected. If I go back and look at my blogging for 2003, I think I will see that I was most active in the summer when I had more unstructured time (ie research time), and that I am having trouble making blogging a central feature of my teaching. Like my students, I simply have trouble fitting it into my schedule. My plan is to try my blogging space as a freewriting space in the spring of 2004, and see if a stronger notebook focus, rather than filter focus, will both bring me to the blog more frequently and motivate me to find time to write during the semester. blog, I will talk through you in January. have a nice break.
Green Squiggly Lines I mentioned an essay in class today called "Green Squiggly Lines." I have been meaning to read this piece for quite some time, so I am finally getting arount to it--turns out to be quite a substatial evaluation of writing instruction in computer-mediate environments. I will need to return for a closer reading. Perhaps some of the most valuable concepts/skills I can teach my students are 1) how to understand search engines and do search engine math, and 2) how to understand and use a grammar checker.
Blogs in Education--an update My use of my personal weblog has fallen off this semester, and in my ongoing study of weblogs in my classrooms, I would also say that students this semester have shown less interest than students last time this year. Fair enough--the technology and the product have to make sense to the user. That said, I browsed Jill/Txt's teaching archives and found some great new material. She talks about three student responses to blogging: 1. You see it, get it instantly, love it and blossom with it. (I'm one of these people) 2. You see it, don't quite see the point, perhaps you're quite sceptical, but if you do it for a while you come to find it valuable. 3. You see it, hate it, try it reluctantly and continue to hate it. The full post is worth the read! Jill/Txt also links to a visual representation of the use of weblogs in education, posted by Scott Leslie. I'm a little obsessed with information graphics right now--very nice! J/T links to Adrian Miles (Australian new media guru) and his assessment matrix -- could be very helpful in my electronic communication class's discussion board. Miles links to a blog parody, and says you know a genre is a genre when it can be parodied: the dullest blog in the world. Finally, 'cause it is late on a Friday night/Saturday morning, I will cull from this archive a link to Mark Bernstein's (mr eastgate, maker of Tinderbox) entry about reading websites critically. His observations are sharper than the usual Library tip sheet: he points out that a #1 ranking on Google does not = quality or authority, just popularity. He uses as examples that Rebecca Blood's history of weblogging is the #1 hit for "history of weblogging" but it is a much criticized article within the community. He also says the #4 ranked site for "theory of evolution" is a creationists site of skeptical value.
Weblogs and online communities Sybil is working on an MA paper: how to build an online community (the bison blog) via a weblog. I need to help her find some relevant scholarship: Everything in Moderation is a weblog about managing online communities. Abbe Don is a interface designer and interactive multimedia artist specializing in digitial storytelling, information architecture, and virtual community projects. Her reading list seems like a great place to start. Derek Powazek has a site promoting his book (which is on the reading list): Design for Community. |
|
|
Home | About | Recent | Archives Copyright Kevin Brooks, 2002-03. |