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05/24/2004 Archived Entry: "authentic?"

Over on TechRhet right now, there is a debate regarding “authentic technology” (whatever that might mean; what, for instance, is “inauthentic technology”?). I think what amazes me most about many of these debates (not necessarily this one in particular) is that technology is being used for communicative purposes in all kinds of fascinating ways, and composition is not paying attention (contrary to Selfe’s declaration). This is a major point of my work on 1963, composition studies, and cool, but it’s also a point clearly evident when you fire up your browser and start surfing around.
Check out My Urban Dig, for example. Here we have the Web (via the weblog or weblogish application) being used to produce knowledge (how my “things” define who I am). And I can imagine an assignment in a first year writing course that asks students to do the same. But the "authentic" debates don't lead to such assignments, don't use the kinds of writing being produced RIGHT NOW on the Web as heuristics; in fact, the debates don't lead to much at all other than fancy terms which hide the little innovative work being done. We see a lot of print duplication online and we see the rise of technical writing as the leading inspiration for web writing (design an online manual, create a website for a non-profit agency, create a website for an imaginary business, put your resume online as a .pdf). We also see too much emphasis on print conventions. My Urban Design doesn't fret over topic sentences, citation, or paragraph structure. The sight instead utilizes the Web in order to construct a catalogue (itself a fascinating media form) for identifying how material objects lead to identity formation (not, in itself a new idea, but one often not explored in first year or any year writing – literacy narratives have done a terrible job exploring identity even though they often claim otherwise). The weblog/website provides a nice medium for constructing this kind of writing because it allows for a different kind of navigation, indexing, hyperlinked rhetoric.
Boing Boing is another fine example of using the Web in order to categorize oddities (but most folks online know that), as is one of my favorite examples Everything2, where the network provides the rhetoric of inter-linked knowledge.
Authentic? Uh, yeah. It's already being done, ain't it?
Yo Comp! Wake up and surf!