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01/24/2006 Archived Entry: "Language Games"

Language Games
Lyotard tells us that in the computer-age, the language games we play change according to the logic of the database. We are accustomed to certain games within certain kinds of institutions (like a university, or a seminar, or a hallway greeting). But a network (as an ever growing database of information) may alter those rules and conditions of the game. The blog (itself a database) is not immune from this process. Often, those who visit blogs think that the same rules that apply in an article or a seminar apply on the blog as well. The rules may apply...but maybe not on all blogs at all times. Blogs as part of the network (and as contributors to the network) continuously morph and change (following László Barabási's notion of growth). The result for some participants can be frustration. How do I enter this game (this conversation) when the old rules do not apply? We hear the various responses: I get angry. I get hostile. I keep trying to use the same old rules. I condemn those who made the new rules. I storm out.

Institutions, Lyotard notes, pose constraints for the games they support. "There are things that should be said; and there are ways of saying them." The relevance to an emerging institution of the Web and its sub-areas like weblogging is to acknowledge this point. There are things that should be said. There are ways of saying them. Argument may not always be the way to say something. Debate neither. Proving someone's point as "wrong" may also fail. Why? Because in many cases, this is not the game being played.

http://img3.buzznet.com/assets/users8/msthingk/default/gallery-msg-1120512743-2.jpg

but this site, which rocks, has many more examples:

http://www.latrinalia.org/home.html

Posted by spencer @ 01/24/2006 06:18 PM EST

Spencer
Do you have a url? I'd like to see that.

Posted by jeff @ 01/24/2006 05:42 PM EST

I was looking at some dialogic graffiti a while back in which participants argued like mad, not only being nasty to one another but erasing and effacing the comments of the other participants. In debates "on" blogs, since those debates get physically demoted off off the original post and down to to a scree of back-and-forth comment entries (usually), it seems that the dialogue (antagonisic, agonistic, whatever) is never ruptured in the way that dialogic graffiti brawls come to an end. It just keeps going and going, spinning out of control. But I guess I'm thinking here more about the technology than the motivations, which is a vital part of what you say, I think.

Posted by spencer Schaffner @ 01/24/2006 05:16 PM EST

Nice post--I've been following the developments on your blog and on Jenny's with some similar concerns. Of course, blogs can be used for various purposes--even some of them argumentative--but agonism seems in many ways antithetical the kind of work many of try to do in these spaces. Put another way (and to build on your post, Jeff), in the blogosphere there just isn't time for agonism...

Posted by Scot @ 01/24/2006 03:37 PM EST

That's the point, isn't it? Many who have become interested in visuality or digitality want to shove media into the "argument" model. It's not visuality, but instead "visual argument." Why? Why not just visuality?
For blogs, I just find it interesting that sometimes there is an immediate desire to push an argument or a debate, but that the medium doesn't always fit that model either. I, for instance, am not interested in the blog space quickly becoming a debate. I don't care if folks disagree with what I say, but I don't see my space as the medium for playing out the disagreement. That's not why I am writing.

Posted by jeff @ 01/24/2006 02:13 PM EST

Useful way of thinking about it all. It's interesting that "argument" is such a god term in composition (of course we want to teach argument!) but that blogging can suggest other ways of building knowledge through language, that these Enlightenment models of debate aren't the only or even the most productive game in town.

I saw a well-known person in the field give a presentation on teaching students to make arguments with video. I get the point: everything's an argument. Except everything isn't an argument: everything isn't reducible to a claim, we aren't persuaded solely (or even primarily) by points. And yet the term persists: argument.

Whatever. I sort of went off on another tangent there at the end. But, happily, blogs allow for that.

Posted by Donna @ 01/24/2006 01:36 PM EST