My Archives: October 2004
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Gripe Blog
No doubt this blog at times resembles a series of gripes: HEY listserv! Get your act together! What the hell is up with this? What kind of teaching is that!
Yeah, that's me.
But the thing is, when I read through some stuff, I can't help but be critical (most of the time) when the topic turns to new media/writing. No offense, if by chance, the authors I read stumble over here...
It's the Writing New Media book that's causing me some troubles right now...C.S. - respected author – is a main figure in the book. Early Computers and Writing person. Big impact on the field in ‘80s. I respect all that. But this stuff on visual literacy just isn't there yet.
Here’s one reason:
Why are the literacy folks - symbolized here in C.S.'s work - so obsessed with asking students to write "the range of different literacy practices, values, and understandings you have developed over your lifetime (from birth to now)"? For what purpose? That I remember reading X book at X time on X platform - it proves what? That I came from X background in X place? So what? And that this kind of task is so easily transferred from the Brandt strategy (narrative) to a new media strategy without considering any of the so called "new" issues to contend with is perplexing.
The other issue of course is the assumption that one has immediate understanding of one's experiences by simply narrating them. Too much Elbow here. That I recite my experiences doesn't mean I understand why/how they came to be/or not be. Barthes' Roland Barthes book provides a nice counter-response to this personal narrative; in Barthes' work, the codes which construct our experiences are too complex to easily narrate (which self am I?).
Barthes’ interest in “code” makes him a better transition point that the simple personal narrative. Missed moment here in C.S.’s work – for while she can name Jameson, Baudrillard, whoever, in passing, she does not draw from much work either implicitly or explicitly tied to the digital. Kress – ok. He’s there all the time. Is there nobody else beyond Kress worth thinking about? Is his take on the visual (still, termed as “literacy”) the only take? No, of course not.
Looking through C.S.’s other proposed visual assignments, I also wonder why the lack of specificity and direction (ain’t these the folks always hyping “purpose”)? Revise and redesign a paper for the Web…why? List ways writers take advantage of the Web to write essays…why?
Here the “whys” are more “why on earth do I want to do this” questions – not in terms of practicality (“one day you will also have to redesign a paper”) but in terms of context/situation/relevant issue/etc.
Give some meat to the assignment, C.S. Situate it around a problem. Contextualize it enough to give more direction than “write an essay.” C’mon already. And why are these assignments called “visual”? Highlight the visual as invention. You’re just not there yet.
Posted by jrice @ 04:35 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Wednesday Mix
Supermarket High. Fresh olives for sale! That's right. The raw kind. Couldn't believe it. Now how should I cure them? A good vinegar/garlic solution for the brine... Flipping through the Sirc, Wysocki, Selfe, Johndan New Media text...uh huh...hmmm.... Quasimoto's Unseen arrives. Trying to keep it real? You should try keeping it right! Shout out to 6010. Invigorating conversations today. Way too early playoff predictions (in order of seed) for the East: Detroit, Indiana, Miami, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, New York, Orlando (if Grant plays). Possible exception: Washington.
Posted by jrice @ 07:27 PM EST [Link]
Monday, October 25, 2004
My Amazon Releases
Amazon organizes my notion of selfhood around its semantic "new releases" page:Elvis Series 2 Figure: "Rockabilly" Early Sixties. Elvis. Dogville Eh? What's that? Never heard of it. 21 Grams. Oops. Seen it. Try again, guys. Medulla by Bjork. Ah geez. No way. Do you see any Bjork in my collection? I think not. Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection - The Essentials (1988). C'mon. Nothing is sillier than people talking over a movie. I can stand about two seconds of this kind of thing before I get bored. Comic Book: The Movie. I was almost suckered into this one until I saw that it was directed by Mark Hamill. I'll pass. Superfly. Now, we're talking. Pimps, Curtis Mayfield, and bad-ass action. My kind of flick. Posted by jrice @ 03:34 PM EST [Link]
Sorry Zook
Sorry Zook. You were a great guy, good-hearted, and you have passion for the game. But it wasn't working out. This is Florida. We need to win. Mississippi State should never have happened. Leak needs better coaching. The defense is off and on. But knowing Zook, as the Notorius C.R.A.I.G. says on the WTFL listserv, he will still coach his heart out until the very last game.Posted by jrice @ 11:43 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, October 24, 2004
The Discipline (Hey! Punish!)
I hope this is not a breach of professional etiquette (quoting without asking?), but I want to quote from a post to WPA-L today and offer some thoughts. Yo! Do it on the listserv, man. Yeah, well, that usually gets nowhere fast. Silence, baby.
Here's a piece of what I read, archived here:
As well, composition has come to value qualitative over quantitative
research methods, and if we narrow our research methods we become less able
to ask and answer certain types of research questions that can provide
important information for audiences in and outside the field. So, while
there are certainly some constraints about what kinds of research can be
expected and accomplished by an applied field with huge service, teaching
and administrative commitments, I fear we have allowed composition to become
less strong and defensible by de-emphasizing empirical research.
Here’s the beef:
1. Over concern with image (Sprite’s point notwithstanding) and not enough concern with writing. All this effort to prove the un-provable might be better spent working with issues of writing, what this author (who I leaved un-named, but I know his name) places in the category “qualitative” (debatable too). Are we less defensible because we don’t have enough studies saying it takes Johnny X minutes to do X things in X amount of times? And when you prove all that, then what? Positivism.
To be fair, this was part of a larger thread put out asking for responses for an NCTE questionnaire kind of thing which solicits the highly answerable, always can’t agreeable string of items:
1. What do we know about the teaching writing? What best practices, research,
and/or beliefs are most influential in shaping our understanding and teaching
of writing?2. What documents and/or activities are most influencing or impacting writing
and the teaching of writing?3. What are the most important issues and concerns regarding writing and the
teaching of writing that
confront you and/or your constituents now?
Answer: Everything and nothing you want to hear, man.
2. Back to point 1. and responding to these questions (which will do nothing new for us) Writing itself. Here we find another example of composition sitting on the side-line pretending to be science (Research in Written Composition all over again), while writing goes on around it. Take this empirical formulae, and slap it on new media. Then you get: X student wrote X amount of weblog entries in X amount of times (X often exchanged with the race/gender/class variable). Good ole X (the student) says: “Uh, hey. I just wanted to blog that song I dug and link back up to another post I read over here and….”
3. Some self hype warranted again (Mailervision). This is the stuff I write about. So pertinent to the ’63 story and the dawn of new media. Visual Rhetoric? I ask in the last chapter. Oh man. Was there all along (Sketchpad, Blue Note, McLuhan). That Handa and crew just got to it (Look at how images work) is the result of years of “studying” variables (check out Braddock et. al diss TV and film, and even GASP the typewriter) while ignoring usages. The Composition Bubble Boy. “What do we know about the teaching writing?” You: nada. Me: still learning.
4. Is there anybody out there?
5. So yeah. Should ‘of posted all this to the listserv. Would have heard the Vitanza silence (I told ‘em to apply cult studies to OUR own practices…the room was silent).
Posted by jrice @ 08:47 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Cash VS Dylan
Edbauer thinks Cash is better than Dylan. Being the English professor I am, I'll read the two most immediate texts by both to settle this score.
Hello I'm Johnny Cash - my Johnny Cash comic book
Chronicles, Vol 1 - the new Bob Dylan memoir.
In the Cash comic:
"I'm half-drunk! But the other half of me says there's more to life than this! I remembr the songs I used to sing --- about Jesus!"
In Dylan's book:
"At first I was only able to do little tings, local things. Tactics, really. Unexpected things like pouring a bottle of whiskey over my head and walking into a department store and act pie-eyed."
Score: Dylan.
Posted by jrice @ 02:49 PM EST [Link]
Mexican Town Flea Market
Made a left turn off of Livernois this morning for no reason and ended up at the Mexican Town Flea Market.
Lots of junk - though not as much as the pure junk piled up at the Metro Flea Market just down the road. $1.00 Tamale stands run by folks in make-shift kitchens. Our Lady t-shirts for sale. Used tires. Stacks of cowboy boots. Outside, the train roars by.
Posted by jrice @ 12:45 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Hypertext
Lots of talk regarding hypertext and (some) hypertext history over here. The short piece takes us back to Ted Nelson. Ok. But doesn't this stuff take Nelson a little too much to heart (notice the debate in the comments)? Nelson imagined a lot of things regarding hypertext; few materialized. Where are our "thinkertoys" and have we gone beyond the "paperdigm"? This Grand Text Auto take on hypertext is a bit odd because its concerns are all situated within print understandings of concepts: definition (what is hypertext) and categorization (hyperfilm, hypermedia, hypertext). Ok. But once you do all this, then what? And doesn't definition and categorization speak against what Nelson attempts to perform in books like Computer Lib?
What seems missing in this break down is the question of writing. Nelson is quoted as equating hypertext with writing, but the Grand Text Auto folks don't catch that or highlight that. The revolutionary idea Nelson came up with was less about linking or branching or whatever. Nelson, like contemporaries he didn't have contact with (McLuhan/Burroughs) was rethinking writing in terms of media. That's the big news. Like McLuhan's work, the reason Computer Lib looks the way it does is because Nelson is trying to perform his ideas. Wardrip-Fruin concludes by "suggesting this view of hypertext opens a direction for the hypertext community to focus on types of new media for which text is central." Still not sure what "this view" refers to (Nelson's view? It's more realized then even he believes). And why just "text." That's a limited gesture. Hypertext as text...sure. But hypertext involves the images, code, and incorporation of other media (this is where Coover went wrong years ago when he called hypertext dead). If you're going back to the source of Nelson, then you can't limit it to "text" b/c Nelson is integrating a lot more than text into his writing and his demonstration of what a new kind of writing entails.
Posted by jrice @ 08:14 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
For those of you playing long distance:
Detroit on a rainy cold day
Elvis-san
Even more Elvis
I need a big, giant Elvis poster to hang on the wall too....but with the cold weather, garage sales become scarce
Posted by jrice @ 02:04 PM EST [Link]
Duncan Watts writes regarding "cascades" and "percolation" (two ideas related to the network):
If we imagine what happens when an innovation is introduced into an initially inactive population, we can see that it can only spread if the initial innovator is connected to at least one early adopter (235)
An important point for any kind of digital rhetoric studies, it seems. How do innovations (in general or connected to the digital) get picked up?
The apparatus is supposedly there: weblogs, listservs, websites, etc. These are more effective tools than books for spreading ideas. I'm not confident much innovation is being picked up and spread, though (but maybe I'm being too picky regarding what I understand innovation to be). When it comes to adoption in composition, we tend to be quite slow (though the same could be said for English studies in general). Cascades, as Watts defines them, cannot occur in composition or its sub-branch of computers and writing because of the trope "cutting-edge." Cutting-edge is often employed as an excuse - "That person is so cutting-edge. I could never do that." Cutting-edge stops the network from passing on an idea or innovation because it situates that idea around a particular personality or feat mere mortals cannot accomplish. And while we may only need "one" adopter as Watts claims, those adopters tend not to materialize (possibly we need more than one adopter) or only materialize briefly. The network hides those adoptions as "cutting-edge" or novel and lets them fade back into the background while the status quo resurfaces.
Posted by jrice @ 12:22 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Six Degrees
Reading Duncan Watts' Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. One of the interesting tropes circulated throughout the text is how the network causes failure and spreads a given virus (at least up to where I am right now). These are just examples Watts draws on to make his understandings of networks more concrete. But I’m drawn to their negative emphasis.
The positive attributes we might see associated with networks (knowledge distribution, democracy) are not subjects of interest to Watts. Instead, how do systems fail?
Burroughs' virus comes immediately to mind. But I'm also thinking of how various listserv threads become sites of networked failure regarding all kinds of pedagogical issues. Plagiarism is one such place. This meme spreads out throughout the network repeatedly like a Melissa virus. Watts notes that if only Microsoft adopted the incompatible rather than the compatible model, its role in the network of viruses would drastically reduce. Maybe the same could be said for the listserv failure. The desire for compatibility no doubt contributes to the spread of failed ideas (Our ideas must mesh/must be the same/must be reproducible/most agree with most other ideas). Even recently on WPA-L, with the request for Turnitin.com look-alikes we see the failure back in the network. Those responses which intend to make the system less compatible (i.e. those who dismiss the notion of using any such system at all) cannot stop the virus from spreading from post to post to post to post....That is not a compatible response/it serves little purpose in the composition system of networked ideas.
But this is just one example. The more serious examples are ideological (not that plagiarism isn’t ideological…)
Posted by jrice @ 10:11 PM EST [Link]
Friday, October 15, 2004
T-Shirt
The T-Shirt is the poem of the 20th and 21st century.
This site is fantastic. They are making shirts found in movies. This one from the fantastic Strange Brew (STEAMROLLER!) is great. Mouse in a bottle? So far, their tiny stock is limited mostly to the goofy flick Real Genius, but dig this great International Order of Gorillas shirt.
I love T-shirts. Some of my fondest memories of the flea market in Miami at the old drive-in involve buying $5 bootleg concert shirts of The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Kinks, and others. I wish I still had my B.B. King shirt which I bought for $5 at the concert ("cheapest shirt EVER"). Currently, I'm waiting for my Ray shirt to arrive. Gotta love Ray. In his bikini briefs, raybans, and martini. There are these great moments in Achewood where Roast Beef tries to sort through all the silly slogan shirts he's bought over the years.
Posted by jrice @ 10:02 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Warren Avenue
Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan, a Joel Sternfeld photograph found in Seeing & Writing. I use it in an essay I am writing called "Writing Detroit." Rather than writing about cities, I want to create a pedagogy of writing the city. It is a digital pedagogy focused on assemblage, juxtaposition, appropriation speculation, conjecture, mythology, not representation or critique.
Posted by jrice @ 12:45 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Started reading David Toop's Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory. Toop explores the music we never really hear (like his book on ambient music). He collects thoughts and ideas from a variety of folks and events centered on silence.
The reoccurring theme (so far) seems to be Cage's demonstration that even silence is not silence. Pedagogically (of course, pedagogy, right?) I'm reminded of the kinds of non-silence and silent spaces which take place in disciplinary venues like listservs. Flame wars - the ultimate effort to silence. Mark Dery celebrated the flame wars in a nice piece he did awhile back. But the dissent/the wait-a-minute/the Lee Corso "Not so fast, my friend" responses on listservs to various threads quickly invite silence ("did you hear something?" "Nope."). Collin once noted how he felt that he silenced WPA-L with a comment. It feels that way at times when a devil's advocate like me shouts out and hears....silence. When you disagree with the status quo, silence responds. Don’t rock the boat, baby.
And there’s weblog silence. No post silence. No visit silence. No links out or in silence. Or even among the most popular of blogs, the boredom, the repetition of the same comments (debates? So and so is dead…). It’s still silence. If you say the same thing the same thing the same thing…ain’t that silence? Toop wants to use the Japanese term Ma to describe the shapelessness of silence…but it feels like it has a shape. Don't nobody bring up "Sounds of Silence."
Posted by jrice @ 09:17 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, October 10, 2004
Fade in….
I'm really interested when digital events invite DJs to attend and speak. Paul Miller lectures at the EGS and often does speaking engagements at campuses. Chuck D used to hit the college campuses. Danger Mouse is now attending Web 2.0. The connection? Digital writing emphasized in sampling.
You won't find Danger Mouse at CCCC or Computers and Writing, right? Or Miller or Madlib (the hall would quickly fill with the smell of weed) or Gilles Peterson, or anyone else from the DJ world. Not to fetishize the DJ here (it’s just one example of digital writing, ok?), but these examples (all large scale, of course, but easily replicated in the thousands across the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere in everyday computing and writing) identify that folks are writing with technology in ways composition studies cannot yet account for.
This is much of what The Rhetoric of Cool attempts to show. Why are we driven by print based methods and oblivious to the digital? When I watched said well known compositionists (see previous post) discuss gaming, I felt the same way. The lack of "attention" to media in action is quite revealing. It's one thing to post an assignment as "digital rhetoric" because it asks students to "analyze" a website or game (who is the audience? what's the purpose?). It's another thing entirely to produce digital work (and I don't mean websites for non-profits, usability testing, yadda yadda yadda).
I've been mocked for repeating this mantra too much, but man, it's right in our face. We can't imagine 1963 composition looking everywhere but at McLuhan (writing/technology? not enough studies have been done to show its effectiveness, Braddock et. al. write...oh jeez. Did they bother to pick up The Gutenberg Galaxy (or a year later Understanding Media)? Doubtful.
And we can't imagine comp getting with it still today. Discuss a website's purpose? Why? Who the hell cares? What do these blogs do rhetorically? Uh, teach, can I use a blog to do some networked writing here…
Comp needs a clue. Danger Mouse's quote from the first link above: mashing is so easy. The technical stuff is not beyond any 18 year old ability (contrary to what so many folks in the field profess). What to do with mashing, mixing, remixing, now that's another story. Da da da dum. A job for comp teacher. Up up and away.
Fade out….
Posted by jrice @ 04:44 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, October 9, 2004
October Mix
Posted by jrice @ 11:32 PM EST [Link]
Monday, October 4, 2004
CCCC
Hello, hello. It looks like the CCCC streak continues...thanks John L. for the suggestion to appeal.
Posted by jrice @ 11:10 AM EST [Link]
Achewood
I really don't know why I've ignored Achewood all these years. The strip is bizarre and extreme. My kind of stuff. Check out the blogs each character keeps (lower right). Here's an excerpt from Roast Beef's blog:
So much for free rent...back to the drawing board. Looks like I'm going to have to start doing more freelancing, like teaching suckers at night school how to open Microsoft Excel and then that it is okay to close it again.
A scared man pooped in our yard!Lyle is so mean! One of his old movie-making friends who he hates now was pooping in our yard, and when I told Lyle he shot a gun at him! The man got so scared! I am against guns, and also yard potties (unless it is an emergency).
Oh man. Blog mockery, yes. How serious do we really need to take stuff like blogging? Let it loose. All these classroom blogs built around journal writing? What for? To invent the university, of course.
What I really like is that super alter-ego stuff is here on these Achewood blogs as well. The alter-ego is the response to the emergence of digital culture. Starting (eh, more or less; don't hold me to times/dates that seriously) with Fernando Pessoa navigating turn of the century technological innovations (telegraph/typewriter) by writing under all kinds of names to Hollywood naming principles ("From now on, your name is Cary Grant") to George Clinton's various egos to the DJ ("I am what I play") to hip hop singers ("Who's the real Slim Shady?") to Fight Club and so on. Comic characters' blogs. Each with its own feed. Love it. Much better than Lucy's usage of technology (showing Charlie Brown films of his faults).
Posted by jrice @ 10:07 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, October 3, 2004
"If only I could get this damn glass door open...Human! Open up this blasted thing! Stupid humans and their stupid ways of blocking my exit."
Posted by jrice @ 02:06 PM EST [Link]
Saturday, October 2, 2004
The Web and language. Mix it up. Make it up. A digital "novice as expert" rhetoric of bravado in place of chat ethnography.
Posted by jrice @ 11:23 AM EST [Link]
