My Archives: February 2005
Monday, February 28, 2005
Posted by jrice @ 10:14 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Tag/Elvis
David Weinberger writes about tags. The short piece is insightful and part of what I am understanding as not just a meme rising in popularity but instead a monumental shift in organization on par with the ideological shift of linearity brought on by print (McLuhan’s “extensions of man”).
That the Web began with the list is important. Netscape's "What's Cool" or Yahoo directories were initially print-directed and have/are yielding to more complex organizing structures left fairly open-ended (at least how Ong identifies the open nature of electronic media).
Weinberger writes:
Without trees, how would we organize college curricula, business org charts, the local library, and the order of species? How will we organize knowledge itself?
I have been thinking about this too lately (trying to write an essay which realigns tagging/linking/with university/writing organization; the rethinking of the legacy of Harvard’s English A). "Tagging systems are inherently ambiguous," Weinberger notes. This ambiguity (echo of Burke) is the heart of digital media and let us suggest, the new university. The test case: this week's reading in 7020, Greil Marcus’ Dead Elvis.
Elvis as tag. “Echoes, not facts,” Marcus writes. The multiple variations of references to Elvis collected speak to the nature of the tag as organizing principle for new media. Which Elvis do I use to label/name a given piece of found information? Depends. Let me dip into my collection of references. That ambiguous answer does not rely on audience-generated heuristics (KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE) but rather user-generated desire (NAME MY FETISH).
For tagging relies on fetishistic inclinations for organization, no?
“I have been thinking about this too lately…” Barthes, in Camera Lucida advises regarding his own media-directed practice: “Attach it to different class of fetish.” There’s no arguing against disciplinary practice as fetishistic regardless of its shape or flavor. But what if that practice switches from referentiality (you are now an English major) to open tag, the Dead Elvis model? You are now….this and this and this…depending on the day/moment/reflection/encounter’s desire. . . where do you want to reference today?
Ambiguity as disciplinary practice – the very knowledge work Alan Liu is so quick to reject in his latest book.
Posted by jrice @ 05:32 PM EST [Link]
Friday, February 25, 2005
FlickrReplacr
FlickrReplacr - a fascinating tool which allows you to swap text for image. Bookmark the Bookmarklet, then highlight text on any page. Click on the bookmark and watch the swap which works via flickr tags.
Here we see again another aspect of the power of the open tag and the spirit of commutation as digital rhetoric.
Posted by jrice @ 01:08 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Let's See. . .
I never did get Booth's book. Still waiting. Dummy me, wanting to get free shipping I ordered it with another book about Detroit. That's held up the delivery. I guess I'm missing the carnival at CGB.
I started Brad Vivian's Being Made Strange instead. Maybe we carnival this one next, folks?
I'm fearing financial ruin. My sewer connection under the street may be broke. The tree roots that were clogging up my system may have also been holding up the line. The roots are cut, the line collapses. I'm up the creek if Homeowner's doesn't cover any repairs.
So much sporting news to discuss...Fiedler cut! About time. Moss traded! I don't care. CWebb traded (????). That means that A. The Sixers are completely unrealistic about making a run this year and/or B. The Kings have unrealistically given up on making a run. Take your pick. The West is tight, but it ain't won yet.
March Resolution: Keep the blogging going, baby. I've been slacking lately.
March scent: Madness...I smell it coming....
Posted by jrice @ 03:32 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Copyright Criminals
This video on sampling has been making the Web rounds lately....
Posted by jrice @ 08:05 PM EST [Link]
Monday, February 21, 2005
Images from the Weekend in Austin
Posted by jrice @ 10:44 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Gym
At the gym this morning:
Guy: So put any new music on your iPod lately?
Me: Yeah, some stuff you probably don't know
Guy: Like what?
Me: Oh, some hip hop, dj stuff.
Guy: You mean like that electrophonic music?
Posted by jrice @ 09:15 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Wednesday Rama
Writing. Always writing. What kind of job is this?
Basement leak. Great. Rain brings a small stream into the basement. Gutters seems to be obvious answer - divert water. But I hope it's not serious underground saturation.
How to make a cheap portable espresso machine
Why is my copy of Booth's book still not here? I'll be late to the carnival.
Who here reads Dog Eats Doug? Anyone? Anyone? Yeah, me neither.
The end of Center Stage. Never went there.
Ska
Posted by jrice @ 03:54 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
My essay "Cyborgography: A Pedagogy of the Home Page" just came out in the latest issue of Pedagogy. If you have Project Muse access at your school, you can read it there.
Posted by jrice @ 07:00 PM EST [Link]
Monday, February 14, 2005
Rice-Ness
Sneak peak for (maybe) a part of next week's discussion in 7020:
As I noted yesterday, I found a copy of Su Tong's Rice in a local bookstore. I bought the book, not because I am familiar with the writer (though later I remember that I have seen the movie version of Raise High The Red Lantern, originally a Su Tong book). I buy the book because of it's title: Rice. It names me. Always accused of being an egoist (or arrogantist) by friends, I am made even more aware of this spirit of Rice when I purchase the book. What is this feeling of Rice-ness I am tapping into through a mere $6 purchase?
Next week, we'll read Camera Lucida. Barthes notes the "uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical."
Each time I felt it hardening and thereby tending to reduction and reprimand, I would gently leave it and seek elsewhere: I began to speak differently. It was better, once and for all, to make my protestation of singularity into a virtue - to try making what Nietzsche called the "ego's ancient sovereignty into a heuristic principle."
I name this principle a digital one; I do so for reasons mentioned here before (the domination of the ego in digital or digital motivated work stretching from Mailer to Warhol to Eminem). But I also do so because. . . .I SAY SO.
This ability to write with ego – to enact what I also sometimes call Detroit Grammar (borrowing from the re-named Eminem song “Nuttin’ Ta Do” – renamed by others not Eminem on website bulletin boards) – is the feeling of being digital. It is, as Barthes might say (thinking of the Italianicity notion in Image/Music/Text), Riceness, that something which encompasses Rice, but which is not a referent in itself.
The heuristic challenge is to ask how does one not write Riceness, but one’s own ego as X-ness?
Posted by jrice @ 10:09 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Rice
Found today in a used book shop in Ferndale:
Su Tong's Rice.
The accidental encounter: the meeting of literature and the name. A moment for writing instruction (for how many would not understand such moments, see earlier post). The Derridian signature project actualized in any number of places (like Calvino's If On A Winter Night). I am signed and sign via a number of media outlets; intentional or not. That it cost $6 to secure this moment is important. But why? I don't know yet. Such is the nature of query...more later.
Posted by jrice @ 06:38 PM EST [Link]
Theories of Scientific Management as Writing
It used to be that a WPA listserv post might provoke me into responding. But the lack of discussion these days on the list really makes me feel that listserv discussions on WPA go nowhere fast. And between Edbauer, Donna, and me, we had more discussion on our blogs than the list did. So here's another post from the master of scientific management in composition studies. Although I'm sure he doesn't remember, on another listserv, I once called his understanding of program administration Taylorist. We hear Taylorism again in this post. It starts with a move against cultural studies, language learning, or related areas of thinking about writing (which other list members group together under the generic label of theory):
So what I think about these days, instead of worrying about whether
language accomplishes anything meaningful or injustice continues
infecting the human spirit, is whether each individual caught up in the
process of first-year composition at my school actually ends up writing
more effectively.
And then states:
This forum needs to think about how to teach AND ADMINISTER freshmen
composition better. I see continuing calls for information and surveys
and calls for presentations and such, and people pointing out this book
or that article to go to, but I don't see anybody figuring out and
describing in any detail how large composition programs using graduate
students as instructors can do the job better than the miserable way it
is being done now.
The answer to this problem, if you know the school said writer admins at, comes by way of a Taylorist-efficiency grading machine built out of file sharing software and conformist curriculum (everyone does the same thing).
The answer, as this post claims, also is to think about graduate teaching as one of incompetence. It attempts to solve that incompetence by removing the instructor from teaching itself. Teachers can't teach, this response says. So what do we do? We do everything for them. They come in, do what they're told, offer no input, and go home to their other work when the day is done. In and out. One best way. Assembly line pedagogy. Students, too, become part of that assembly line; doing the same work semester after semester. Problem solved, right?
I guess. If you think education should be run like a Model T factory. So much to critique here, but I guess one item worth mentioning is how said admin seems to think that the only answer to the labor issue (too many sections of comp/not enough instructors who make real livings) is to just dumb down the work we do. Remove thinking (on the side of instruction and learning) and that will make the machine work even better. If we don’t think about what we’re doing, we can’t do it wrong, right? And we can’t complain, right? And we can’t show how this method is screwed up, right? And students won’t know that they’re getting crappy instruction, instruction far worse than if instructors in this system could think about what they are doing, right? And said students won’t gripe because they’re not thinking about their education, right?
Right.
Posted by jrice @ 02:30 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Things I Don't Give A Damn About
The Oscars
American Idol
Duke (basketball, that is)
Creative Commons
Dilbert
The fate of Ward Churchill
News stories about blogging
That people who drink Lite can't taste their beer.
Posted by jrice @ 10:13 PM EST [Link]
Friday, February 11, 2005
Warhol Chronicles Part III
On the Web, everyone will be famous for 15 hits.
http://homepage.mac.com/rishey/.Movies/mj120804.mov
obligatory NOT SAFE FOR WORK disclaimer.
Posted by jrice @ 07:54 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
Pushing the Envelope
I don't like getting political here in the crowded offices of Yellow Dog ("Koom, put that back!"), but maybe a word or two on the parallel missions of FCC censorship and composition attitude as expressed on its main listserv WPA-L. From the halls of Congress, Fred Upton applauds legislation that will raise indecency fines to $500,000.
"My sense is we're not going to have any problems," said Rep. Fred Upton, R-MI, chairman of the House telecommunications subcommittee. "With passage of this legislation, I am confident that broadcasters will think twice about pushing the envelope."
Don't push the envelope. Don't rock the boat. Don't do anything. Intellectuals love to call for free speech and whatnot, but our own little niche of academic work (for those of you reading who are not academics), devotes a lot of time basically saying the same thing: Don't push the envelope. Composition has become the FCC of expression. As one notable compositionist said recently on the listserv:
As we've gotten academically cuter with our pedagogical ideas, we've
shunted ourselves further from both the writing program administrators
who can understand and appreciate them, and even further from the
possibility of their finding their way into the actual lesson plans in
the tens of thousands of classrooms that teach writing in America.
C'mon, you say. Those two statements aren't the same. Oh no? The little-bit softer tone of the second quote is saying that we don't need new ideas, and in particular, we don't need new ideas that push the envelope. Such ideas are too dense for common folk to understand. "Don't you theorists get all fancy now with your edumucated talk." In other words, don't say anything. Cause if it’s a bit complex, it ain’t worth knowing.
So what? What are you griping about, big shot professor? So - the undertone is the ideology of complacency. It's a not so subtle message, typically directed at younger folks in the profession, to keep their mouths shut. “Either agree with us in our language, or get the hell out.”
Another compositionist argues:
Let me just leave with the suggestion that the
desire to be engaged in intellectual and/or creative pursuits (and thus
*be* intellectual and/or creative) is quite possibly (I think probably)
implanted in us by a hierarchically arranged social structure that gives
dominance and privilege to those who get paid for thinking (or for thinking
they are thinking) over those who do manual labor (which I call real work).
Thinking is not work, then. Beyond the romanticizing of working class ethics here (“Oh, glorious manual labor! Oh Marx! Oh Lenin!”), there is a move to stop thinking. That's not "real" work. Thought is unnecessary. Just do what you're supposed to do, and don't think about it. Don't push the envelope.
This is where we are today. A rhetoric of the envelope. The clarity narrative instilled in students now has come full circle in the open. "Folks," the narrative says, "it's not enough that we've been telling students all these years to see the world as clear and coherent (i.e. don't push the envelope by showing the world its problems). Now we want the rest of you teachers to keep it simple too." And the left is worried about the right? Shades of Pogo once again: We've met the enemy, and it is us.
Posted by jrice @ 08:51 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, February 6, 2005
I call this post: Tomorrow:
Bush in 30 Seconds/
The Shining in 30 Seconds with Bunnies
The 30 Second candidate
The Group of 30
ABC:30
30 Minute Meals
30 St Mary Axe
30 Day Returns
M30
Page 30
Highway 30
Texas 30
Posted by jrice @ 04:06 PM EST [Link]
Sunday Mix
Now that's a lot of chick peas. Falafel/humous, anyone?
If you could invite 10 Bloggers to dinner, who would you invite. All of you. C'mon over. I hope you don't mind cat hair everywhere.
Madden 2005. I cannot figure out how to punt the damn ball. I keep throwing on fourth down!
Ernst Mayr, dead at 100. He's the one guy in Havelock's breakdown of 1963 and writing that I never read. Oh well.
In Detroit, we debate such important topics as What's better? Jimmy Johns, Subway, or Tubby's. Mmmmm. Which processed meat to choose from on bread baked from the worst flour available. . . 
Bad quote of the day: "Actually, just wanting to be known is bad enough. I suspect most of us
have bought into this. That's why we write." Oh man. Must not respond to WPA-L....must not respond....don't get baited....
The Jewish Hero Corps. Hey! They stole my idea! Well, sort of. My idea was "Ethnic Superheroes."
"Hey Jew Boy, help me get this cat out of a tree."
"Hey, that's not nice. That's racist."
"No, really. That's his name. Jew Boy. He's the Ethnic Superhero."
Who you got? Pats or Eagles? Eagles 24 New England 17.
Posted by jrice @ 01:11 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, February 5, 2005
Job at Wayne
We've re-opened our search for someone in computers and writing. I've been in Detroit three years and served on two searches at two different universities. That little bit of experience reveals, among a number of things, that people are reluctant to move to Detroit.
Some reasons are valid (it's cold!) and have little to nothing to do with our area or schools (though I can understand negative reaction to my previous place of employment...). But unfortunately, the city's negative reputation often puts us at a disadvantage. No place is perfect. But Detroit is a fascinating place to live (or live near as I do); it is rich in cultural events, diverse ethnicity, sports, food, and oddities. I'm attracted to the last item on that list (and thus am continuously amazed by the photography of Detroit Funk or the exploits of the Detroit Blogger. I've been inspired by the ruins and oddness of the city's musical, technological, racial, electronic past enough to want to write a book about Detroit (but the way I imagine a city/a place/a rhetoric...).
Then there's Wayne. I think that in the next few years, Wayne will become one of the better theoretical/digital programs in the country, one that merges issues of poststructuralism, cultural studies, globalization studies, digital studies, and rhetoric and composition. As the new folks find a niche, and as we work more across disciplinary boundaries, we're going to see an incredible program develop (and maybe one of the more innovative M.A. programs in some variation of professional writing/design and rhetoric).
So why this post? If you are either looking for a job, or if you are looking to go to grad school (or have students looking to move on into grad school), consider this a meta-ad: an ad for the ad. As Barthes would say, it attempts to generate a sense of "ad-iness." Advertisements for Ourselves (my favorite trope).
Posted by jrice @ 08:23 AM EST [Link]
Friday, February 4, 2005
Ballettikka Internettikka
Steve does a great job bringing exciting speakers to campus. Yesterday, Bojana Kunst and Igor Stromajer presented "Impossible Connections" - an intriguing update of the "Happening" (at least as I see it) which fuses GPS, wireless, mobile phones, remote control, and the experience of an event. The projects - Intima Virtual Base: Ballettikka Internettikka and wPack redirect our attention to various forms of connectivity (at dinner, everyone is trying to bring up wPack on their mobile phones). If there is a question like "what does the avant-garde have to do with the digital," we see one kind of response in Kunst and Stromajer's work.
Posted by jrice @ 10:23 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, February 3, 2005
Tags Run Amok
Short note by Shirky at Many-to-Many on tags. If I understand this note, it's a critique of the rise of the tag for how it can encourage spam. That in itself, however, isn't really much of a critique. The example, which no longer comes up through its link, reveals the potential for spam (if we want to engage in a critique of waste/unsettling the system/etc), but it reveals much more. The little I read by Shirky tends to expose a limited view of emerging systems, understanding their capacities only via the logic of usability, manners (?), civility, standards. This “thing” thing be dangerous is a recognizable trope in technology critique. But that this “thing” might push us into new areas of perception (good or bad) is not. Value judgments are important in this kind of critique: Tag = bad. Or: Tag = good (as I noted on Derek’s blog, McLuhan’s interest in technology is not one of liberation but exploration: “what the hell is technology doing to us?”). But maybe we can suspend value for thought, at least for a second or two. What are the implications of an organizing system which is difficult to pin down because its markers (the tag) are shifting, multiple, contradictory, associative, and often have little to do with one another outside of the whim of the one who does the marking?
There is, no doubt, more than one answer to this question. That some folks in the upscale end of Web critique/commentary avoid the possibility of questioning/answering is not too surprising; web presence depends on its own stability of meaning (some blogs known; some not – reputation as critique; I remember Rebecca Blood’s advice about being consistent in order to be a “good” weblogger). But even this response hints at possibility: the emergence of Warhol/Mailer self-proclamation. A bad thing? Who cares? Should we not consider the possibility of self-reproduction (some kind of Kroker fantasy of biology/technology future?) as much as we have considered textual reproduction (Benjamin)? Increase my presence through the tag, in contradictory and stable ways. . . the tag as technical machine of the alter ego. A DNA writing machine where identity depends on the words one chooses to place between a set of brackets (and a set which closes off the identity though the backslash).
Posted by jrice @ 09:32 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, February 1, 2005
Remix Photoshop Tuesday
Posted by jrice @ 09:07 PM EST [Link]
Photoshop Tuesday
Posted by jrice @ 09:42 AM EST [Link]
[Archive Index] [Main Index]
