At some point in administration, you feel the question asked: what about assessment? I say “feel” because what you experience is more than a phrase or question or even subtle reference. It is an overall feeling. An obligation. A matter of consequence. An opportunity. And so on. A felt.

No one has to actually say anything for the term to be felt. Most often, it is experienced through numbers. Surveys. Data. Counting. How many of one thing done how many times over how many years. We you have gathered so much data, you draw a conclusion. Sometimes, the conclusion demands more assessment! We tell stories of our assessment practices. And because assessment is so quirky, so murky, so hard to pin down, the stories are helpful. They represent what is, in fact, difficult to represent.

Assessments are hard to pin down. Like meaning. Like an image of sailors. Like an image of a boy whose head is too big. Like an image of Queen Victoria on a horse. These are, of course, images Barthes poses and his response is that as hard as it is for him to pin down a meanng, he can identify a trait or characteristic that strikes him.

Assessment as punctum. Without surveys or counting, a detail that is striking. “That time when the power went out. . .” ‘It snowed so badly, only three students came to class. . .” “The way you described the street light in your third paragraph. . .” “You walked into class one day without any books. . .” “That is the perfect opening sentence.”

Google returns a series of links according to the concept of the page rank. As Google describes the idea, page rank gives you “what you need and what you want.”

But what do links want? To connect. Our is a time for making connections, to rephrase McLuhan. As this one screen shot attests: News, background, video, specific moments, fans. These are partial moments of connectivity. We can expand them as we drift through the lists of rankings.

What do I want when I link? One might consider that connectivity is the heart of all pedagogy: teaching how to make connections. The assumption, as any first year textbook will demonstrate, is that such connections are already known (thesis). Ours is a time for making connections. What do links want? What they don’t yet know. This is also a question of space. And it is a question of learning about space.

On page 11 of the Dylan page rank, there is a link to Walkin’ New York. New York as Dylan visits it. This, of course, is fetishistic web writing, but still, out of all the page ranks, this one ranks low. Fetishes are personal spaces. Fewer people link to Walkin’ New York than they do to the Wikipedia entry or the video of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” One reason (posed as metaphoric and not as literal) is the relationship of each of us to a particular space or spatial figure. Why would I link to a map of Dylan in New York when I really want to know the relationship between X and Y? Or, even better, I really want to know my relationship to Y.

For a long time, I’ve asked that question about Detroit. And I am still asking it as I write away. But in between, I ask it of Columbia, Missouri as well and of Dylan as a space. This is the overall question of the page rank as way to communicate. What is my relationship? This, too, is the question for pedagogy and research.

In 1965, Dylan is recording “Like a Rolling Stone.” This image shows Dylan from afar, practicing, contemplating, thinking about the session. Dylan is spatialized. His image projects within the studio as if linked to various “things” and moments that will continue on long after the song is recorded (”after he took from you everything he could steal”). Those moments (quotes, references, this photograph, the picture in my office of Dylan recording “Like a Rolling Stone”) are what makes Dylan a space. Space is the key to Web 2.0 thinking. This Dylan I begin with is a Web 2.0 moment. The moment of self-tagging, of interlinking, of spatial thought, of continued play. This is the Web 2.0 moment.

Most thinking regarding social networking reduces the social to either personal interaction or software. Such a position should not surprise; it has always been the Humanities and popular response to new media. The logics of new media are “new” in that communicative innovations foreground practices the majority of us are unfamiliar, at first, with. But to say that is not to deny Web 2.0 moments pre-Web. A celebrity figure is easy to employ as a Web 2.0 focal point because celebrity (as Greil Marcus shows with Elvis) always generates links. New media makes that linking more obvious. I say that “Dylan is spatialized” because in that moment he is framed within the studio, I see a story unfold. Not a story about Dylan. A story about me. That story is generated by links.

In Sprawling Places, David Kolb argues that places link. Hyperlink logic makes the observation all the more obvious. Of course, places linked prior to the hyperlink. The point is not to argue against an observation like Kolb’s but to extend the point from the physical to the conceptual or to the rhetorical.

Googleidentity is the hyperlinking of space. In that sense, I am linked to Dylan in a new media space that exists only in the moment I link to it. I don’t identify with Dylan as much as I link within and to Dylan.

I can call that moment a Page Rank (capitalized to differentiate it from the algorithm Google runs) because I will motivate the rise or fall of linked references depending on where I situate myself in that specific networked moment. All writers make choices, after all.

And now a Page Rank of Dylan. . . .a spatialized story continues. . .

Another feature of Googledentity is celebritacy. New media literacy is partly defined by celebrity culture. Identification with the star image motivates not just personal identification, but literate practices. Celebrity contributes to meaning making. I may or not want to be a star. But I do use the celebrity for a variety of purposes (like the Celebrity Read! ALA campaign). For example, Snoop Dogg offers a tribute to Johnny Cash.

The ode or tribute is not new to new media. The mimic of the icon, however, is amplified. Google, via its YouTube acquisition, allows for further amplification through page ranks, sorted links, and video. Johnny Cash, too, engaged in similar meaning acts. His own celebritacy moment, however, is delayed until digital media can send the image to a mass audience.

Johnny Cash as Elvis (as opposed to Snoop Dogg as Johnny Cash) is analogous to the delayed effect of Gutenberg’s Bible altering mass literacy practices. It took further innovations over time before the imitative literate moment could be effective (imitating the personalized, solo reading experience did not become quotidian for almost four hundred years; celebritacy takes closer to forty years). What is important, though, is not the imitation or remake on its own. Impersonation is a form of making meaning already familiar to rhetoric. As it shifts to Google, though, these kinds of impersonations (which are more than personality repetition) is also a form of delivery. Googledentity is a delivery based identity system (identity extending from the personal to the body in general: textual, spatial, informational, etc.).

My own Googledentity, as previous posts suggest, is not based on Snoop Dogg, Johnny Cash, or Elvis. It is based on Bob Dylan.

Google makes us smart or dumb? Rich or poor? Black or white? Agency, as some believe, is at the heart of the Google phenomenon. The question may not be “What do images want,” as Mitchell asked once, but, as Google critics or lovers note, “What does Google want?” What does Google do to me? These folks are scared or fascinated. Google has agency? Indeed. Maybe an implicit one. Or an extension of man, as McLuhan would say.

The phenomenon of Googledentity. Google bombing. Ego surfing. Page ranks. These are the attributes of Googledentity, the struggle to simultaneously be linked and then to lament or praise the act of linking. Carr, like others before him, worries over decaying reading and writing skills as well as the automation of the human. An early example is that Google prevents folks like him from reading War and Peace. Google makes Carr like substances want to read short pieces, not long and windy narratives. Of course, with or without Google, I don’t want to read War and Peace.

In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Then let’s assume we are machines. Machines like Burroughs’ writing machine that is half text half human devouring and copying and appropriating cultural moments and ideas. To me, this is the Googledenity. All your links belong to me. I am the link. In my Googledentity, I link to Sam Malone pretending to read War and Peace so that he might impress Diane. My identity is made up of links. Viral connections. Hubs of information. I just pushed that one link of Cheers to the top of my imaginary page rank.

Google lists. Imagine Walt Whitman singing of himself. Those long lists of descriptions. I am the poet of this….I am the poet of that. In “I Sing the Body Electric,” the lists become the body itself.

Upper-arm, arm-pit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, fore-finger, finger-balls, finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, back-bone, joints of the back-bone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body, or of any one’s body, male or female.

Googledenity, though, must mean more than a list of body parts. All Yahoo or Netscape could muster in their early days was just that: an index. A displayed index. What makes Google more than an index? Google bombing. Ego surfing. Page ranking. Links. Connections. Scans upon scans upon scans upon scans sent out among each other to be displayed in various hierarchies or found by chance or focused in upon (site:) or. . . .

I sing the body digital.

From the Missouri Archives, 2008.

Dylan, in 1963, stands outside his Village apartment. He looks back at the camera, and the shot is discarded by record executives who see something they don’t like. The image discomforts them. “We can’t use this,” they say. “It won’t sell the record.” In the chosen shot for the album cover, Dylan is not aware of the camera. The shot is preferred.

In this shot, Dyan is, in fact, freewheeling. You see that freewheeling in the implied emphasis of his walk. His legs stand out. The city falls behind him in a fading perspective. The Columbia Archive shot is anything but freewheeling. It is comfortable. I’m with a woman, it reads. I’m comfortable. On the record cover, the city is emphasized. The City is disorganized. It is crowded. It is covered in snow.

Each city brings its own levels of comfort or discomfort depending on time. The time it has taken for the Columbia Archive to be found makes the shots more comfortable than they appear to be. All archives make information eventually comfortable. Skimming through a Civil War archive cannot represent the discomfort of a nation collapsing on itself. Skimming through a personal archive cannot represent the discomfort of being younger, of transgressions, of various problems one encounters or discusses on a day to day basis. Cities, too, can function similarly. They take time to be comfortable. By the time I was comfortable in Detroit, I had to leave.

I’d like to write the Columbia, Missouri archive now. Not that we are not comfortable. We are. But let’s fast forward to the real comfort. The house settled into. The town settled around us. Am I comfortable with Columbia the way I seem to be, via my spatial story, of Columbia? Which Columbia is the tag I reference?

Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, and other patrons of folksonomies promote the tag as a major principle of new media organization. And their work is, for good reasons, very comfortable. Still, I keep pushing the narrative folksonomy for the reason that it discomforts as it comforts. The play on words, the overlapping tags, these are fine and comforting. But the discomfort is in what McLuhan called the “startling and effective” results of information brushing against information.  In other words, we are faced with a narrative dilemma: What to do with the dual tag other than tag?  How do such tags spatialize experience?

From the newly found Columbia Archives:

Outside of his apartment during a photo shoot for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan in 1963,

The story of 1963 is the TV story I began telling earlier. The story of 1963 has been, for me, the story of cool, but it is also, I now see, a TV story.

Notice the pipe. My story is a folk story, as I have know it to be for some time now. A folk(sonomy) story. Maybe here is where Shirky and I move apart for a second. The complexity of Web 2.0 is less, for me, about an open ended communication environment that allows for all kinds of levels of participation because of increased control over content and platform. . . .take a breath with this long sentence. . . instead I’m more interested in rhetorical possibilities. Not that two are exclusive. But rather, I’m interested in the folksonomic rhetorics generated by telling spatial stories. In that sense, our stories are generative. The 1963 story I have told about cool could end, or could become even more folksonomic as my (in Latour’s words) attachments increase.

“Whatever we’ve done as a people, it’s always turned up in. . .” the announcer of Dylan’s TV appearance begins. Song? Or in the folksonomic. Dylan outside of his apartment in 1963 is me. Not in a literal or representative sense, but in a more folksonomic sense of identification. In an attachment sense.