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01/08/2005 Archived Entry: "Digital Detroit"

Digital Detroit
As I still work to publish The Rhetoric of Cool in a shrinking book market (see the latest Profession for more dreary-eye views), I'm mapping out a new project tentatively called Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network. The premise:
The places of Detroit as rhetorical encounters. A theory of the digital in which Detroit, the city of technology (auto industry, techno), is the focus and meant to be generalized as electronic writing. I'm influenced by some of Jenny's ideas regarding ecologies (rhetorical situation updated) and Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift's Cities: Reimagining the Urban. But this project also represents the nature of my thinking: to juxtapose unlikely ideas in order to invent (cool + 1963 + composition = digital rhetoric/ Detroit + space + chora = digital writing). The avant-garde premise as well: begin with the unlikely, the uncanny, and work from there. Methodology of the speculative.
But that I cannot not write also speaks to a number of things, notably the nature of academia itself. Writing. The thing most troublesome for the profession (how to teach it/students can't do it), and the thing many who are within the profession don't want to do. The years devoted to a dissertation, the requirements of tenure, the graduate student seminar papers. . . . feared by many. So many writing instructors don’t even write. If you write too much, maybe you are guilty of trying to be a hotshot, a publishing superstar. But what if you just have to write. You cannot help yourself. You sit at the computer, see interesting ideas, hear stuff that moves you, and feel like jotting down ideas, assembling weird notions of space and rhetoric, digital culture and writing, pedagogy and networks.
In this last point, I find some comparison to general misunderstandings regarding electronic writing and those pedagogies seeking out to work with such apps. “Teaching with Blogs,” “Getting Student Zines Published: Zones of Proximity,” “How Writers Use the Web: Usability Testing and Student Experience.” These are not so much speculations, but quick solutions meant to convince teachers (and of course, students) the necessity of writing with technology. Yet every time I surf the Web, jumping from link to link, from site to site, I am amazed with how much writing exists on the Net. So many weblogs. So many newspapers. So many zines. So many wikis. So much writing. How is that “our students can’t write” or “we don’t have time to teach with technology” when there is already so much writing in circulation in the digital sphere? I am not the only one obviously who cannot not write.
He says. . . as he goes back to his writing. . . .