I have an identity. I have an academic identity.
English professor. Rhetoric and Composition professor. Rhetoric and Composition professor who works in new media. Member of Wayne State. Speaker standing here.

English studies, while no different than other identity place holders, devotes countless energies to maintaining identity divisions. One of its strongest divisions involves who we are (Literary studies, Rhetoric and composition, film and media) and why we need to fight each other to remain different from one another. To be social (how are you) but not media social (how do our identities contribute to each other in terms of meaning relationships).

That point speaks to a larger academic crisis in the age of new media:
the lone scholar. The individual writer. The by – her – self academic. It is a crisis that is not reflected in physical solitude – though that may also be the case. Rather - it is the adherence to a belief in the individuation of the idea. It is the print-based legacy of the individual reader and writer extended to the individual concept and identity. It is a crisis that frames knowledge and its production as individual experiences that settle into individual understandings.

It is the crisis of the individual identity – the person but also idea.
It is the crisis which still fails to understand the web and digital identities.
You may think:– “When this person speaks of identity and the Web he means putting content online, using Blackboard, sending email, maybe even starting a blog.” But such activities - as commonly understood – are still stuck in a fixed identity that mostly centers around a statement which goes something like: I’ve been online. I’ve analyzed an online experience. I’ve noticed a continuing trend from the real world to the online world (racism, sexism, the dominance of capital, etc). I have a cyber avatar.

Not to say such experiences don’t exist. They do. But they are singular identities, singular understandings. They allow us to re-enforce singular positions regarding ourselves, our ideas, our arguments, our politics, our academic work.

They are not indicative of the network.
I want to draw attention to one aspect of new media (and thus, the Web): the network.
Networks foreground the role connectivity plays in content management, information organization, and information production in explicit and implicit ways. What I call the network are spaces – literal or figurative - of connectivity and disconnectivity. They are ideological as well as technological spaces generated by various forms of new media that allow information, people, places, and other items to establish a variety of relationships which previous spaces or ideologies of space (print being the dominant model) did not allow.

These are spaces as databases – collections of information we must, as Lyotard once wrote, learn how to navigate.
What I call the network is what Bruno Latour calls “the social” - a series of relationships developed among people, texts, and things. The social, or the network, always circulates and, through circulation, always moves meaning among those factors (people, texts, places, ideas, things) that generate meaning. The network, therefore, is not a site of observation, but a continuing rhetorical process. Our challenge is to understand how to describe and produce intellectual work without always resorting to studying some application, phenomenon, event purely in order to understand it. In other words, working with networks would also mean becoming networks.

Take BoingBoing for example
I can turn to a website like BoingBoing
And NOTE its networked capacity – the ways it brings together heterogeneous ideas and events into one space. A reader of BoingBoing is exposed to multiple positions at once – many of which have little to do with one another. Stepping back from the site, I may think: “Interesting to see such oddities” or I may begin to rethink a notion of identity which has taught me to see these “oddities” as separate and not as part of a larger conversation or series of linkages.

And that reminds me: I may blog and engage with this process as well.
And my blog MAY be the site of personal anecdotes, professional work, rantings, misgivings, connections. It may be viewed as an individual identity. But I don’t view it that way nor experience it that way. The blog puts me into a network: with other bloggers (academic or non) with other ideas (academic or non) with other experiences.

And why does this matter? Because this network is a becoming process and it is a transformative process. I change. I change each time I am helping extend and shrink this network of social relationships. The relationships are not just personal, they are conceptual, material, ideological, and compositional.

And here is a key concept of the network: Transformation. Latour emphasizes that networks are not just connections, but forces that affect other forces. They are always changing. I don’t blog to remain the same. I blog to engage. To transform and be transformed.
The weblog has come to be a simple version of the network, but it poses specific challenges for academic work once we move out of a fixed identity of this kind of writing (i.e. it’s a journal) and begin to imagine it as a space of network relations. It is also a concept as much as it is a thing (and in saying that I draw from Marshall McLuhan who went to great strides to emphasize that print is as much a movement, an ideology, a concept as it is an actual thing on paper).

Saying that means we can reimagine ourselves as blogs, our spaces of work as blogs, our institutions as blogs. Not as things on the Web. No – I repeat – the blog as conceptual spaces of invention, idea exchange, interaction, and of course, composing.

Blogs are databases of information. In that sense, they reflect the larger project of academia – building, organizing, navigating, and using databases. We’ve called that process in the past: research. Databases in the library, of course, exist to aid research, but databases which are, in fact, research, writing, knowledge is something else entirely. And I am not speaking of a static database, but one, like a weblog, which changes and is changed by networked relations. A database is not an individual entity unless it is closed off to other databases – as the popular software vendors Blackboard and WebCT insist their projects be. Those are not network-influenced are based projects.

To say that is to say that our identities and the identities of what we study and compose are not individual entities either, but databases.

In other words, databases provide an emerging rhetoric regarding how to map space. The space where I work, how I work, what I say, where I say it, to whom I say it. In these databases, “locations self-identify, notices of congestion immediately generate alternative paths [as] the destination, and services announce themselves” (Greenfield 65).

Detroit, too, could be one such database.

(video started here)
I write about Detroit. Detroit is a type of blog. Then. A networked site.

For some time now, I’ve imagined Detroit as a networked city. I learn direction from this network, and I create new kinds of directions (where to go, what to do, how to do it). This is not how traditional database maps work. They provide linear directions. I want database directions. I were to use a networked mapping application like Google Maps, for example, to locate the best route from my home to my place of employment at 5057 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan, I would be directed to head East on 8 Mile, follow I-75 South for six miles, and to exit at Warren Avenue. Based on the data Google Maps has collected (traffic, mileage, available highways), this route is determined to be the “best way� to arrive at Wayne State University. Google Maps provides a rhetoric of efficiency. But I don’t take this route. Instead, I follow the less efficient way to work, down Woodward Avenue and into the New Center. The speed limit is lower. The traffic is slower. Sometimes cars stop in the middle of the road for no reason. There are traffic lights along the way. Construction feels like a permanent feature (usually one or two lanes are closed in any given direction). What would take 7-10 minutes on I-75 takes 15-17 minutes down Woodward.

There is more to this anecdote than the issue of speed. The database Google Maps draws upon in order to predict travel is not the same database I encounter nor that I use as I drive down Woodward. Instead of collecting speed limit markers or the number of traffic lights Woodward hosts into my database, I assemble the sights, sounds, people, places and other features of the neighborhoods I travel through (Highland Park, Boston Edison, New Center), some of which are appealing (The Temple Beth El synagogue, the Fisher Building), some of which aren’t (the impoverished strip of run down businesses within Highland Park, the various check cashing storefronts, empty fields, the Normandie flop house). The trip itself can be easy (the right time of day producing fewer cars) or frustrating (traffic congestion; construction, cars stopped in the middle of the street). The route is accompanied by history (the Model T factory, the General Motors Building) and new construction (various condos, the Youth Center). Each item is noted and stored in my database.

These items comprise the informational scheme I construct to make something called “Detroit.” These “physical” places, however, are not all that I assemble as I drive down Woodward. In addition to what I see or notice, I hear song titles from popular music (”Detroit Rock City” by KISS, “Detroit Bound Blues” by Blind Arthur Blake, “Cadillac Assembly Line” by Albert King), snippets from fiction (a line from Philip Dick’s sci-fi novel A Scanner Darkly, “He sat looking at the empty cup; it was a china mug. Turning it over, he discovered printing on the bottom, and cracked glaze. The mug looked old, but it had been made in Detroit”), obscure references (as in Tom Waits’ “Spare Parts I”: “So I combed back my Detroit, jacked up my pegs, I wiped my Stacy Adams and I jackknifed my legs”), and mocking of the city’s technological legacies (Eminem shouting out in “Without Me”: “Nobody listens to techno!”). Despite the informational overload I feel as I assemble these items (these citations along with the neighborhoods I pass, the histories I recall, the personal moments I experienced, like the time I was at a given restaurant or the recent story I heard about a specific building), they are part of my “overall fabric” I name Detroit; they comprise my network. My fabric is uneasy (I don’t know what moment or reference goes where) as well as pleasurable (many of these moments enhance my understanding of Detroit). My fabric is not a constant; it is a variable that depends on how I access my database.

Saying that is not a dismissal of Google Maps’ services, but an acknowledgment of how database driven information takes several forms – from the efficient to the difficult to understand, from the impersonal routing of spaces to the highly personalized (and some might argue, eccentric) spaces of encounter and cultural exposure. “At every instant,” Kevin Lynch begins his canonical The Image of the City, “there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past-experiences.” The influence of online mapping takes a fairly familiar position like Lynch’s and further pushes us to recognize the relationships which comprise meanings in spaces. “Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings” (Lynch 1). Gilles Deleuze foregrounded such associations in a great deal of his work; notably, Deleuze notes how associations and sensations form blocs from which meaning is generated (Deleuze 167). Deleuze notes that meaning is not just in the thing itself but in the various relationships which connect or disconnect with/from a given space. In other words, my Detroit is a map that is more than streets or boulevards. It is a complexity and possibility constructed out of, among other things, sensations.

And in that acknowledgement, I recognize that when we speak of technology and mapping, we speak of different, yet complimentary, rhetorical systems. Despite its novelty and its convenience, Google Maps still cannot fully accommodate the network I construct. That point doesn’t make Google Maps “wrong,” but it does ask that I consider networks, space, and navigation further so that personalized data is included. The personal dimension of the weblog allows for such a move to conceptually be made.

This very brief example, then, is meant to stand for a type of academic pedagogy – one which puts the academic, administrator, writer, into a series of relationships, into a series of meanings. The example of Detroit is a generalizable one – to other experiences and moments and writings.