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05/27/2005 Archived Entry: "Ontology"
Clay Shirky writes about tagging and categories. I find much relevant here to the emerging (or me forcing a) crises in composition studies to recognize technological influence on communication. My recent discussions on the teaching_composition listserv somehow put me in position of defender of blogging (a position I don't want). But relevant to Shirky's argument is the question of the categorical systems we've come to assume as natural; Shirky's examples include the Dewey Decimal system/Yahoo and their out-datedness. I'd add to his practical in-use examples the conceptual systems we accept. Notably, in my field, that conceptual system revolves around the question: what is writing?
It isn't the ideas in a book that have to be in one place -- a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it's one place, it can't also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. A book which is equally about two things breaks the 'be in one place' requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual contents.
There is an analogy here to writing in general, or to the idea of writing. That writing might be any number of things at once seems still an unrecognizable concept to many, or to many who teach writing. The category of writing in the writing classroom (since Braddock et. al) has been student writing, whose limited focus and definition creates the tautology of what writing should encompass or how it is generated.
In this scheme:
Writing = X
The Web = X
The writer = the student
The first two categories are shaped by the third.
In that shaping, these categories become fixed and rigid.
This rigidity doesn't mean we shouldn't have categorization. But it does point to how problematic it can be to invoke change (change in meaning, structure, application, category, apparatus, etc.). It also can prevent or greatly limit innovation and invention (at the meta and pedagogical levels). Thus, if the category of writing remains in place no matter what, then any interest in using a new medium (let's just say weblogs for now) ends up only replicating the category's ontological status. Shirky:
One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.
Here, I hear the teaching_composition listserv opposition to weblogs: I don't see how this will matter to my classroom. In other words: “I don’t see the relevance because my categorical rigidity forces me into the position of mind reading, and if that mind reading cannot find immediate usage, then the whole project you put forward is faulty.”
Ah. Mind reading. I must force the new object into the old category (echo of McLuhan) or I can't buy into this new definition/usage.
And this is where del.icio.us seems important. Del.icio.us is not the end all application, but a possible ontological shift in categorization (with applications not yet invented) whose premise resides in allowing categorical determinations to be made later, and to overlap. Shirky notes that in del.icio.us:We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree". That is a really profound change.
Semblance. Barthes hit upon the relevance of semblance to meaning making in Camera Lucida. Semblance upsets the fixity of categorization. In this move, we go from “writing is” to “writing is sort of/kind of…..” No doubt that move also upsets pedagogical imperatives which rely heavily on rigidity for all kinds of reasons (in practice institutionally, of course. But also because of how the stable category is a method of control). To allow the categorical system we depend on to change, much would have to be done ideologically. I really don’t see that happening except in random moments, among few theorists and teachers. Still, much to think about here. And there is enough to think about that if more instructors would take this thinking seriously, they may find better ways to work with the media-populace they teach (i.e. no longer stuffing the irrelevance of topic sentence/hierarchical thinking in the space which functions less and less in such ways).