a violation of expected order

Epistemology and ideology, please count as my final electronic.

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:27:15 GMT

I feel kind of overwhelmed by this week’s readings and I’m still sort of trying to reconcile them and work them out—I probably have more questions than answers now—but here goes. Rhetoric. Epistemology. Ideology. Hmmm.

How is it that everything always comes back to Plato, Aristotle or Descartes? Scott’s article, “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” is obviously in direct contention with Plato and Aristotle and their belief that rhetoric is just a vehicle (something flashy but ultimately substandard—like a Corvette Z06) for weighty philosophical truths (or in this discussion, knowledge). His conclusions are relatively straight-forward. Truth, he says, is contingent largely on time and place, and determining truth is a matter of cooperative human inquiry. I have to admit, there’s something a little unsettling about resigning oneself to the idea that nothing is just “certain.” Scott says, “Man acts and speaks before he knows. Or, better, it is by acting and in action that he is enabled to know.” Does this somehow imply that there are different “levels” of knowing? Actually, what IS knowing by Scott’s definition? Does knowing equate to certainty? Because if critical inquiry enables us to know, then aren’t the conclusions we draw some kind of certainty, and can’t those certainties be applied to other inquiries? Or do they simple not translate, being so completely situated in a certain time and place as to be applicable ONLY to THAT situation? Maybe I’m completely missing what Scott is implying there. He seems to be ultimately concerned with ethics and I can see why that is—acting with certainty leads to the inevitably of consequences which denies personal responsibility. Or maybe, just maybe, that’s a bit absurd in its reductivism. Is the average person who acts with perceived certainty completely incapable of evaluating outcomes? Is it impossible to reason, “I was certain, but I am wrong”? Or does Scott’s definition of certainty exclude “that” kind of certainty? Is his certainty not “perceived” but absolute? Would he claim that a person who later admits to his uncertainty wasn’t actually certain in the first place at all? I do agree with him that rhetoric is epistemic, and that “truth” is often contingent on time and place, but I almost feel like he’s reducing it to a kind of “everything is meaningless except in this one situation” stance and that’s a little hard for me to swallow.

The Farrell article, I thought, was really interesting. I’m not sure what year it was written (that’s my only annoyance with this book—they don’t note the year of every article) but it must have been sometime before people really fell out of love with Aristotle. There are seemingly Aristotelian, common-sense conclusions in Farrell’s approach. Even people with no background in rhetoric could probably read this article and agree whole-heartedly that social knowledge is generative and that rhetoric contributes to this social knowledge in an epistemic way. I imagine that Farrell’s approach was criticized less for its theory of social knowledge and more for its delineation of social and technical knowledge—technical knowledge is not the realm of rhetoric, he says, and dismisses it casually. This works in Farrell’s article; it doesn’t necessarily work as a very comprehensive theory of knowledge or way of knowing. Still, there are plenty of smart people out there who’d certainly agree with Farrell—in fact, if you took your average person and explained to them Cherwitz and Hikin’s 4 “stances” of people on this issue, most of them would probably fall into the category of mitigated subjectivists—that would be my guess, anyway. If I had to place myself into one category, personally, I think I would straddling rhetorical perspectivism and mitigated subjectivism. I bet there have been some mitigated subjectivists out there who’ve addressed the solipsism issue? I like the idea of rhetorical perspectivism, but I’m not entirely sure that “perspectivism” is something new—it seems like the age-old rhetorical appeal to considering context, albeit sort of reconfigured as “relation” (actually, maybe I'm recalling Foucault: "The positions of the subject are also defined by the situation that it is possible for him to occupy in relation to the various domains or groups of objects: according to a certain grid of explicit or implicit interrogations, he is the questioning subject and, according to a certain program of information, he is the listening subject; according to a table of characteristic features, he is the seeing subject, and, according to a descriptive type, the observing subject..." etc.) and I’m still not 100% convinced that rhetoric can address science and technology in the same way that it can social matters. On the other hand, thoughtless empiricism really gets my goat. I guess I’m floating somewhere inbetween?

The fourth article—McGee’s “The Ideograph”—escaped me a little. I see the link he’s trying to create between rhetoric and ideology, and the ideograph’s relationship to power and normalizing forces. After 9/11, ‘patriotism’ became a real ideograph and I think the notions attached to the term really changed. But at the same time, an “ideograph” is something I’ve always sort of thought of as a cultural concept or construct—I guess he’s arguing that ideographs can be personal as well as cultural. I do like his analysis of these “ideographs,” though (had anyone used the term ideograph before or since?). My one question was really about his claim that ideographs make “pure thought” on these subjects impossible. I’m not so sure by any standard that “pure thought” even exists! I mean, if even our innermost thoughts take the shape of language, which is the mechanism by which we “know”; then how can any thought be separate from that? How can language “get in the way” of thinking if thinking IS language? And if thinking is not language, then what IS it? Why doesn’t McGee tell us that? Because he doesn’t know? Because his concept of “pure thought” (I guess it is actually Ortega’s concept) isn’t really thought at all? Perhaps it’s a feeling? A stirring in the soul? Gas bubbles in the guts of an infant? Who the hell knows. In any case, I see his point about the usage of certain ideographs being historically aligned and all that jazz. I’m just not overly-impressed with his theory; it seems kind of old-hat somehow. I’d elaborate, but I can't exactly explain what I mean, which I guess actually implies that right now language is constricting my communication. Ha ha, how ironic!

Bitzer, Vatz, etc. - please count as electronic. :)

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:59:03 GMT

The question we were all wrangling with at the beginning of the semester—“WHAT is rhetoric”—has sort of been answered in my mind. Partially. It’s been a piece-mealy kind of process, though, and I know I still don’t get it in its entirety; but I’m feeling a little more comfortable talking about it with each reading that we do.

The readings for this week were particularly interesting to me because they seemed to sort of delineate two separate camps within rhetorical theory. I think the exchange, particularly between Bitzer, Vatz, and Charland illuminated a lot of things (although the latter was pretty dense and at times I had to stop and try to locate what he meant). Bitzer’s “rhetorical situation” was something that hadn’t really come up before in our readings, at least not in specificity. The “rhetorical situation” is really interesting to think about, and Bitzer’s consideration of it seems to make a lot of sense. There definitely is an “appropriate” rhetorical response in various situations, and I think naturally that would draw one to the conclusion that such responses are dictated by events. Bitzer’s “rhetorical situation,” to me, isn’t as preposterous or morally repugnant as Vatz seems to consider it. It’s true that Bitzer fails to consider meaning and I think that this is a legitimate criticism of his theory—he doesn’t quite make the leap to some possibly important implications. If anything it seems like short-sightedness; or maybe it’s more a case of Vatz leaping too far and finding fault in something that Bitzer did not consider necessarily integral to his theory. I wonder, did Bitzer ever write a response to Vatz and specifically address meaning? I have to admit that I agree with Vatz when he points out that the act of making meaning rests largely (or wholly) with the rhetor; although I'm not entirely sure that his dismissal of eulogies and things of that nature as being "ingrained" within us is really a refutation of Bitzer's argument. It seems that although meaning-making lies with the rhetor, it can be so heavily influenced by situation in some extreme cases that it would be disastrous to fail to consider the situation as at least contributing to meaning and the choices the rhetor makes. (Vatz made me laugh, I have to admit, with his praise of rhetoric as a “supreme discipline.” It’s not that I don’t believe rhetoric to be a supreme discipline, but I found it slightly amusing for him to state it so matter-of-factly. This guy obviously has an agenda of establishing rhetoric as the greatest thing ever, so I suppose it’s good of him to not hide it. I started giggling when I read the last line of this article, and my boyfriend asked me what was so hilarious: I read him the line and he retorted, “Funny, I always thought the supreme discipline was physics. Which made me laugh even harder.)

Charland was a bit hard to wade through and his point got a little murky to me at times. I realized after I read it that I didn't actually know what year it was written; when I figured out it was published a good 18 years ago, it started to make more sense. It seems hard to imagine these days that rhetoric needs a “rehabilitation” of any sort; the courses are central not only to English but are increasingly cross-disciplinary, to the point that rhetoric has almost taken on a life of its own. I'm not sure what cultural studies is up to these days, but the fact that they still exist leads me to believe they've found a way to distinguish their discipline from rhetoric (which it seems is what every discipline seems to want to do - distinguish themselves from their cousins). In any case, there was a lot of value in Charland’s article and even though entire paragraphs of it went a little over my head, I gleaned some good information. I like when he talks about rhetorical theory and criticism in particular: “Rhetorical criticism and theory study the practical reason manifest concrete in the public performance of discourse, of historically and situationally activated texts.” I keep taking notes on every definition of rhetoric and rhetorical theory that I come across (haha), and I think Charland’s is a really clever one. I think part of what of he is trying to say here is that a rhetorical analysis of something looks at the ‘what’ and considers the ‘why,’ but in a manner that goes beyond words (which in and of themselves, Bakhtin would probably say, are devoid of meaning) and into all of those variables of a situation and a time period. I keep trying to explain to my engineer friends what rhetoric is, what a rhetorical analysis is, and they are always asking for concrete examples. Charland’s definition to me is one that can easily translate into reality, which I really like! (In the past, I often found myself telling people about the legal cases brought against the studgun manufacturers Star Expansion Corp. and Power Anchor Corp. a number of years ago – where the operator manuals were so rhetorically retarded and devoid of any consideration regarding audience or situation that they actually resulted in terrible injury and death. Sometimes when I’m trying to explain rhetoric to people I feel like an oddly-situated Patrick Moore: “TECHNICAL WRITING SAVES LIVES!” but actually more like, “RHETORICAL CONSIDERATION OF TECHNICAL TEXTS SAVES LIVES!” which isn’t very Moore-ish at all but you see where I'm coming from!)

The Karlyn Campbell article suffered even worse the ravages of time, being written some 35 years ago... but I did like her conclusion that the rhetoric of women's lib was, at the time, the most radical rhetoric on the scene. When you think about it, women's lib and feminist issues really were so radically counter to social norms that I'm sure it really frightened and alienated people. It was fundamentally threatening to the institutions so dear to us - marriage and family.

Campbell and Blair, please count as electronic. :)

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:18:49 GMT

There was so much crammed into Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric that my immediate feeling upon reaching the end was that my brain was overloaded and I couldn’t possibly remember enough of it to write a coherent response. But that brings me to a thought! Campbell treats memory in such an intriguing manner, at least compared to his predecessors. He gives so much credence to memory in regards to the other faculties; I don’t think that another writer we’ve read so far places such an emphasis on memory (outside of the Ancients who rely heavily on rote memorization). Campbell’s view is much different, insisting that even scientific proofs rely on memory in some capacity (you have to be able to remember the preceding ‘links’ in the ‘chain’ of a proof before it will make any sense to you). He also admits that memory is certainly not infallible, but that without it, we would nothing to contribute to our understanding and experience.

His treatment of memory and the other faculties in general is fascinating. In some ways it almost seems like he is more concerned with psychology and human nature than anything else, especially when he's commenting on ‘the Passions’ in Section V. He’s breaking down the ‘circumstances’ that influence the passions and they are all psychologically-oriented, like probability/plausibility, importance, proximity of time—but especially ‘relation to the persons concerned’ and ‘interest in the consequences,’ as those are definitely two things that I don’t think any other rhetorician has mentioned thus far. I have just re-read Katz’s ‘Ethic of Expediency’ and for some reason this section about “relationship to the persons concerned” and “interest in the consequences” kept bringing me back to that idea of the rhetorical ‘other,’ the one we marginalize (and in Hitler’s case, persecute) by creating a distinctly different rhetorical sphere to place them in. I guess I was struck with the idea of just how powerful Campbell’s ideas really are. When he says that “of all the connective circumstances, the most powerful is interest,” I immediately thought of the way in which Hitler fueled Germany’s interests in the war by preaching that Jews and other non-Aryan groups threatened Germany’s existence and well-being. How else could he have persuaded decent people to do terrible things, than to convince an entire country that their survival as a people depended on these acts?

For some reason I didn’t find Blair as interesting as Campbell, and maybe that’s because his emphasis on the cultivation of taste amused me somewhat. “In some men only the feeble glimmerings of taste appear; the beauties which they relish are of the coarsest kind; and of these they have but a weak and confused impression: while, in others, taste rises to an acute discernment, and a lively enjoyment of the most refined beauties.” I was a little confused at first as to what taste had to do with anything, but I think his argument is actually that good taste is essential in order to reason well: “Correctness of taste respects chiefly the improvement which that faculty receives through its connexion with the understanding. A man of correct taste is one who is never imposed upon by counterfeit beauties; who carries always in his mind that standard of good sense which he employs in judging of every thing.” It seems like Blair wants to connect taste with speaking and writing well; and it’s interesting how much emphasis he puts on composition compared to the other authors we’ve read. It almost seemed like a departure from the more sensible Campbell, who tried to explain things in terms of psychology; Campbell defines taste more as an inherent sensibility that you can refine by exposing yourself to genius. Campbell seems to dwell a little on genius, in fact; he almost starts to sound a little schoolmarm-ish (I guess that makes sense, considering these were lectures to his students). I'm assuming that what we have in our book is only part of Blair's lectures because somehow, it feels incomplete.

(This entry was edited because somehow when I first posted it, I only managed to copy/paste the first paragraph. Duh.)

Augustine's "On Christian Doctrine." Please count as WRITTEN response. :)

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 02:21:26 GMT

I read Book IV of Augustine’s “On Christian Doctrine,” and from B&H’s Introduction to the medieval period I guess I was expecting something a little different. I actually enjoyed reading this and didn’t find it wholly characteristic of what you might consider “extremely unenlightened” religious dogma espoused by the Church and the people in power during the medieval period. In fact, Augustine seemed like a relatively likeable guy, the kind I might want to eat some roasted pig head with or something (I really have very little knowledge of medieval times, could you tell?).

But I did find a few of his thoughts really interesting, especially when he talks about not considering yourself to have actually “said” something until a person understands what you’ve said. He writes: “Because, though he has said what he himself understands, he should not be thought yet to have said it to him by whom he has not been understood; if, however, he has been understood, whatever the manner of his having said it, he has said it.” This surprised me somewhat, for two reasons: 1) his emphasis on understanding, which seems somehow contradictory to the Church’s policy of blind allegiance during this period, and 2) his de-emphasizing of style: “whatever the manner of his having said it, he has said it.” Augustine obviously values style, and he basically wrote Book IV as a style guide of sorts, but I think he must value understanding and “proper” interpretation even more. I won’t pretend that Augustine is somehow an enlightened guy who’s using his powers of speech to assist others in finding their own truth—obviously, he believes in a truth that’s entirely spelled out in the Bible—but, I certainly don’t think he believes his methods to be any kind of manipulation, and he does seem to value teaching and learning as something that’s much more important than other Medieval period writings might suggest.

In some way Augustine seems like a kind of segue between Classical rhetoric and whatever comes next. That’s just sort of the impression that I got as I read. Augustine doesn’t seem to value some kind of surface-level, literal reading of Scripture. The truth he seeks, although it’s out there somewhere and attainable through scripture (sort of Platonic if you substitute scripture for dialectic), doesn’t lend itself to simplicity. In fact, I think Augustine may even encourage a healthy amount of investigation. Maybe I’m reading him wrong, but it seems like he’s prodding his readers to use their various capacities to investigate the often-obscure meaning that the Scriptures hold. I realize he’s probably speaking more to clergy members and not lay people, but it’s still interesting in that regard. That is definitely not to say that he doesn’t consider style important. The actual persuasion of a person to act: that seems to be what Augustine holds dear. He writes: “It is necessary, therefore, to that the sacred orator, when urging that something be done, should not only teach in order to instruct, and please in order to hold, but also move in order to win. For indeed, it is only by the heights of eloquence that that man is to be moved to agreement who has not been brought to it by truth, thought demonstrated to his own acknowledgment, even when joined with a charming style.”

I wonder if Augustine’s ideas of interpretation and translation didn’t influence Christian leaders in the future--ones who eventually split from the Catholic Church and formed other denominations. Augustine acts as though it’s a given that there is only one “Church,” and I imagine at the time in his area there WAS only one church, so perhaps he never anticipated that his words might contribute to dissent. I guess it’s fascinating to me, given that the dozens of Christian denominations today exist and thrive on differences of “interpretation.” Did Augustine have any idea what he may have been getting Christianity into, encouraging the Catholic Christians to look deeply at the Bible’s metaphors and figurative language?

Augustine's "truth" is his primary concern, but he still devotes a huge portion of this book to style, recognizing its importance in persuasion. I think the conclusions he comes to about the three styles are particularly interesting. "But the end in view in the moderate style, namely, to please by eloquence, is not in itself worthy of being used, except, through the very pleasing quality of the expression, to gain a somewhat more willing assent or a firmer hold for a matter which is useful and good..." In some ways I feel like this is really his point, and it took him 25 pages to get there. Style without substance is "not worthy" of use, but style can be put to use in the understanding of the good.

Plato and stuff.

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:20:42 GMT

I decided to go with Plato this time around (although I definitely want to go back and read some Cicero…) and since I’d just finished some Sophist-hatin’ with Against the Sophists, I decided to skip Plato’s Gorgias for the time being and move on ahead to Phaedrus. I have to say that I’m glad I did; I don’t know enough about Plato to make the assumption that this is a good overview of his thoughts on rhetoric, but at least it came off to me that way.

Reading this left me with a sense of why Plato has been so influential on Western thought. His emphasis on systematic divisions between two things; his insistence on something like a ‘thesis’ and the importance of defining your terms; and his thoughts on the different ‘classes’ of souls, which, although pretty crude by today’s standard, is what we would conceive of as audience awareness. Shades of these practices definitely still exist in writing today (ironic, as Plato doesn’t give much credit to writing, but more on that later).

According to Plato (the character Socrates), the precursor to practicing dialectic artfully is having a firm understanding of divine ‘truth’ along with knowledge of the soul. He seems to be saying that truth is transcendental, that all human beings are sown from the same universal truths, but that not every human being is capable of actually recognizing that truth. Indeed, only certain pure souls are gifted with this ability, and these souls seem to exclusively inhabit philosophers, lovers of beauty or musicians (much lesser souls go to sophists, demagogues and tyrants).

I thought the emphasis on the divine was pretty fascinating, as Plato ‘the philosopher’ seems to be a really reasonable guy, one who would probably argue for saneness and rationality. Socrates talks about the muses and seems to be implying that they may actually be there with him, under that tree; his insistence on the madness of love being a divine gift seems to me somehow colored by the fact that he may not really be in his right mind. I guess I’m wondering if perhaps Plato was trying to make the subject matter of Phaedrus seem less contradictory with his other work by suggesting that Socrates was enraptured by something mystical. I suppose I haven’t read enough Plato yet to be able to know for sure.

Plato’s opinion of writing and rhetoric are one of the more interesting facets of this dialogue. He doesn’t seem to give much credence to writing, claiming that it makes men forgetful and urging that writing cannot be taken seriously… ironic, considering this would have to apply to his own written dialogues. Rhetoric in and of itself he believes to be a sort of superficial art, claiming that “there seems to be a great many holes in their web” and going on to give the example of the inadequate physician. It seems sort of ironic that so much of what we've come up with about rhetoric and writing stems from a guy who wasn't particularly fond of either.

For my outside reading I dug into GMA Grube's translations of Plato's Five Dialogues and started with "Apology" because it seemed the most interesting, being a supposed recounting of Socrates' speech at his trial. I thought that possibly having a bit of Socrates' voice (channeled through Plato, at least) might be an interesting contrast to Phaedrus. I had no idea who GMA Grube was when I opened the book, but I figured there must have been a good reason why my boyfriend owned this particular translation when he's never expressed much of an interest in ancient Greek stuff. (It also saved me a trip to the library!)

Who knows how much of "Apology" was embellished by Plato, but wow! Toward the end of Socrates' speech, I was ready to vote him history's most sorely mistreated man. The charges concerning atheism and corrupting youth seemed ridiculous, but what do I really know of ancient Greek culture? I'm sure he did really come off as an arrogant bastard, though. It seems to me that he practically ensured his own death sentence by not proposing a harsh enough alternative to the death sentence.

I thought it was pretty hilarious how Socrates refused to say that he was a teacher, or that he accepted money for teaching. It seems like he is definitely trying to separate himself from the Sophists in every imaginable sense. I also wonder if Plato's account of Socrates' relatively calm acceptance of his death sentence was really how it went down. I suppose it's possible.

Someday I'll do a electronic post that isn't a blog or a website, I swear...

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:42:31 GMT

My first general thoughts on the Sophists were that 1) they were way ahead of their time and 2) I really like them! I was honestly a bit surprised to read something so old that seemed so modern (well—post-modern) and relevant to rhetorical studies today. Their main concern seemed to be that truth has no independent “absolute” existence, but is dependent upon the time and the situation that one finds themself in. I don’t know a ton about philosophy, but I doubt that kind of idea would have been taken seriously before the postmodern era.

Dissoi Logoi served the dual function of giving me some insight into Sophistic thinking and giving me a little lesson in Greek history (as did the Introduction to the book, which I thought was really interesting). As the introduction to Dissoi Logoi pointed out (man were you right about there being good stuff in the introductions!), we don’t really know the author’s position in these two arguments—whether something can be good and bad at the same time, or whether these two things are transcendent (i.e., not dependent on an individual’s perspective). Knowing what I know of the Sophists (very little), if I were to hazard a guess I’d probably say that the author really did believe that most things could be bad and good, seemly and shameful, etc. but that these definitions depended on the time and the situation and thusly it would be silly to say “bad is good” or “seemly is shameful,” as they could never be both to the same people in the same situation at the same time. I’m not entirely sure why I got that impression from the reading, except that his example of the sane and the demented saying the same things at different moments seemed to be his most compelling case. Despite the repetition in the beginning, I actually enjoyed this article. I thought the section on wisdom and moral excellence was particularly cool, especially his view on democracy and the dilemma of casting lots to assign public offices. “For there are in cities men who hate the people (demos), and if ever the lot falls to them they will destroy the people (demos). But the people itself ought to keep watch and elect all those who are well-disposed towards itself, and ought to choose as its army-commanders those who are suitable for the job, and to choose others to serve as guardians of the law, and so on.” Very forward-thinking! It’s possible that it rings truer than ever in America today, since really, not voting at all is really every bit as dangerous as casting lots.

Isocrates seemed to be speaking from a very high horse in Against the Sophists and Antidosis and I feel like there were some issues of hypocrisy between the two speeches. I personally feel like there is a limit to how much instruction can help a student, but maybe that limit is actually higher than Isocrates gave the Sophists credit for. He seems to think that their instruction is worthless based on the lower fees they charge and his own feelings about the Sophists' intelligence. One of his big issues seems to be the fact that the Sophists tend to emphasize less a student’s “native ability.” This is somehow incredibly offensive to Isocrates. At the same time, in Antidosis he goes on to say that the want of education is not base or shameful, and that men who gain their power of good thought and speech through education are less often in error. I found this to be somehow just a bit contradictory; essentially he seems to be saying that his method of education is noble while the Sophists’ is not, without entirely explaining why.

The concept of "native ability" in Against the Sophists is particularly interesting. Public universities today are lauded as great equalizers. We strive to get everyone INTO the university with little regard for native ability and a very optimistic attitude about how much we can teach, how much we can improve a student's life, which seems to be a pretty Sophistic way of thinking. The argument that Isocrates is presenting still seems relevant today and could even be sort of framed in the context of public schools like Texas State as opposed to exclusive schools. And I think strains of that same argument also surface when you hear a grad student say (sometimes with indifference, sometimes with remorse or bitterness) that 'grad school is the new undergrad' and that a graduate degree is practically a necessity to 'stand out' from all of the average joes that go to college.

I’m going to skip to the contemporary reader and talk about Poulako’s “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric.” This article made perfect sense to me, of course because I had just read all of the older Sophist stuff, and I really thought this article tied it all together very nicely, especially with the inclusion of the concepts kairos, to prepon and to dynaton. I always knew that kairos had something to do with ‘timeliness’ but framed in a Sophistic context it made a lot more sense.

I like Poulako’s definition of rhetoric because I think it does advance some aspects of rhetoric that seem important (opportune moments, appropriateness, and possibility) without pigeon-holing it as much as saying 'rhetoric is public speech' or 'rhetoric is persuasive argument.' I don't think it's so much a 'definition' as a possibility itself. I'm not sure if that is how Poulako intended it, but but I sort of think of it that way. He goes into the idea of possibility more than anything we’ve read so far, and it made me realize that I do believe rhetoric has a lot to do with possibility. “Even though it opposes the actual, it always seeks to become actualized.” I think that’s an important characteristic of what I consider to be rhetoric, because I don’t think every form of communication is concerned with possibility quite like rhetoric is.

My C&C response.. er, and my seminar paper!

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:33:34 GMT

I have been thinking so completely about my seminar paper topic that I am going to use this C&C reading response to sort of hammer out some details. Fortunately I found some things in C&C, specifically the Johnson-Eilola and Hea article, that gave me a brain jolt, so I’ll expand on that here.

I actually saved the Johnson-Eilola/Hea article for last (now I wish I hadn’t), for the very arbitrary reason that I saw the word “rhizomatics” in their article outline. I know that probably sounds silly, but the whole “rhizome” thing has been difficult for me to chew and swallow (starting back with Landow and the immensely confusing concept of “arborescent multiplicities” that I remember him quoting), and I just didn’t feel like tackling it again in this article. Long before I got to the rhizomatics bit, however, I ran across a point that should have been obvious all along, but for some reason never was:

“Johnson made an early and often quoted distinction between (a) hypertext that invited exploration and (b) hypertext that invited active reader participation in the construction of new links and nodes. We’ve built such an enormous amount of the first type (exploratory) that we’ve almost completely forgotten about the second (constructive). Sure, we can all build new web sites, but the private ownership model (inherent to some extent in the file structure of most operating systems) keeps those sites separate.”

I have long been interested in collaborative work online and the ways that new systems and software has influenced the growth of collaborative work, but I never actually narrowed this down in terms of Exploratory vs. Constructive hypertexts. The distinction seems incredibly important to me now, with the growth of things like wikis and collaborative workspaces. What is it about the nature of constructive hypertexts that has limited their use to very specific contexts? Is it simply a very print-based notion of authorship, or is there something else there? Where are constructive hypertexts succeeding, and why? I think that there is so much here to talk about--I'm just not sure if it's already been done to death.

One thing that has really sparked my interest in this is actually the undergrad class that I'm an IA for. It's a film class, and the students have been assigned a final paper (only about 2 pages long) over a film of their choosing. My lead professor, who all semester has encouraged group projects and presentations, made it a requirement that each student have a partner to edit their final paper. When she announced this I could literally hear the collective groan. Then an odd thing happened: our professor went on to say that the students needed to exchange and edit thse papers through e-mail. Their demeanor entirely changed--suddenly, it didn't sound so awful anymore. Somehow, the work had become inexplicably more acceptable.

It raises an interesting question: are students more willing to not just edit, but collaborate, in a digital environment versus a print environment? Imagine a class where students were required to post their final papers to some kind of account where everyone had access--something like Google Docs. Would the "digitality" of the process result in better, longer, more involved editing? Perhaps even something beyond basic grammatical editing? I think, for me, that it would--I'm on the computer a great deal as it is--and having all of the information right there at my fingertips would probably be a catalyst for my deeper involvement in the process. This is pure speculation, as I've never had a class where anything like this has been employed, but I can imagine that having all of those texts right there back-to-back, with easy means for adding comments and suggestions, would result in closer involvement with those texts.

There are a lot of angles one could take here, but I especially like the implications for education. The question becomes specifically about constructive hypertexts in education: their nature, their use, their advantages and pitfalls. Consider our class Wiki in particular, which has seen little use and seems to have functioned more as a novelty than anything else. Why did it fail? Was it the technology itself, difficult to use and visually unappealing? Was it our fear of our words being marginalized or altered? How might it have succeeded? What are the implications for constructive hypertexts in education as a whole? Which brings me back to rhizomes, and Johnson-Eilola/Hea's claim that "Rhizomatic tropes of hypertext acknowledge that no one is in control, that our literate practices, while not arbitrary, are also not predictable." Or are they? Are there specific factors that determine success and educational value in regards to rhizomatic notions of hypertext?

Of course, there is always the question of how far is too far. Another article in C&C’s anniversary issues that I found immensely interesting was Robert Samuels’ “The Future Threat to Computers and Composition: Nontenured instructors, intellectual property, and distance education.” The title struck me immediately, given the fact that I may well be a “non-tenured instructor” next year, and my interest in intellectual property and distance education (which I largely value as positive) is huge. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of this article, because I still feel even after reading it twice that Samuels is speaking of extremes, not standards—and yet I found myself fascinated, especially with this terrifying notion of “calibrated peer review,” or CPR. While replacement of graduate students with undergraduate students strikes me as a bit fool-hardy, I honestly there are some positive approaches that something like CPR could take. First of all, I do believe that students can learn from each other very well. I understand that Samuels’ concern is students grading each other, eliminating the need for actual writing teachers, but I also see how computer-assisted peer revision could be a pretty neat thing in the proper contexts, possibly increasing the quality of student papers and reducing the workload for professors or TA's. So the question remains, how far is too far? How involved do we let our students become in their own writing processes, without upsetting the balance of teaching faculty or letting student work suffer through a lack of guidance? What if CPR weren't *just* CPR, but something like "CPPR"--calibrated peer AND professor review? I know that Samuels' article doesn't touch on this, but I don't think he would be entirely opposed to it--it seems like an interesting middle ground.

I obviously have a lot of things to think about here, and I'm going to keep digging through different volumes of C&C as well as archives of the TechRhet mailing list that I signed up for. My next step is really to make an outline and hammer out exactly the points I want to make--and how I am going to order and separate them--since I'm most likely going to put these up in website form!

"I got the whole Adobe CS3 for free," or -- My Kairos Response

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:50:08 GMT

While I enjoyed all of the Kairos 10th Anniversary issue, the article that struck me most was Martine Rife’s article, “Why Kairos matters to writing: a reflection on its intellectual property conversation and developing law during the last ten years,” especially the discussion of Creative Commons licensing (not surprising, given my interest in collaborative work and the nature of “ownership” in the digital world). I had heard of the Creative Commons license before, but I knew very little about the real “tech specs” of it. So I visited the Creative Commons website and found myself genuinely impressed with the ideas driving this movement:

“Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.”

It is safe to say that the “digital revolution” and the proliferation of things like P2P software has profoundly impacted the way we think about copyright and ownership. Companies who are keenly aware of this—Google might be considered one of them—have taken steps to offer free and innovative programs (like Google Docs) that avoid traditional pricing structures and instead rely on alternative means of generating revenue (advertising seems to be the big one right now). This attitude extends logically, I think, to the idea of intellectual property and the Creative Commons license, since it’s increasingly apparent that enforcing stringent copyright standards in a world where information spreads faster than the speed of light is at the very least difficult and at most entirely vain. I’m not meaning to imply that the Creative Commons license arose from a big sigh of resignation, as I honestly believe the spirit of CC licensing is one of collaboration and learning, of the ideal that freeing up information is beneficial to both creator and consumer, but I question whether or not something like the CC license ever would have taken off in a world of print. The driving force of this movement, it seems to me, is the digital revolution surrounding it, and how that revolution has reshaped our thinking about the nature of ownership.

There is a letter on the CC website from a science fiction writer named Cory Doctorow (author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which you can download for free) that was a real delight to read. In it, he explains just how his use of CC licenses has helped spread his work to places never before imagined, making sure to emphasize that the problem for authors like him “is not piracy, it is obscurity.” Of the financial benefits of the CC system, he says:

“CC licenses turn my books into dandelion seeds, able to blow in the wind and find every crack in every sidewalk, sprouting up in unexpected places. Each seed is a possibility, an opportunity for someone out there to buy a physical copy of the book, to commission work from me, to bring me in for a speech.”

The financial particulars of a system like CC are particularly interesting to me, as more and more authors and creators grapple with the impact of the Internet on their bottom line. Recently J.K. Rowling filed a lawsuit against the popular site called Harry Potter Lexicon on account of the site’s plans to publish a 400-page book largely consisting of material from the website—a collection of fan-written essays and encyclopedic material, such as “a catalog of magical creatures” and “who’s who in the wizarding world.” Rowling’s issue is certainly not the “quality” of the book’s material, as she has long praised the site—but her contention that the print version of Harry Potter Lexicon will interfere with her own plans to write a Harry Potter encyclopedia. In other words, the Harry Potter Lexicon was safe as long as it stayed in the relatively harmless world of the Web and didn't cut into Rowling's mega-millions. What Rowling and thousands of others authors, musicians, etc. haven't fully realized is that the amount of choices presented to consumers in this day and age isn't just limited to what we consume but also how we obtain that product and oftentimes whether or not we pay for it at all.

The explosion of the Web has created a situation in which everything that can be digitally exchanged—books, movies, music, video games, software—can be exchanged for free, and as computer technology becomes cheaper and more widely available, I expect this trend will only increase. The situation is practically begging for a new business model, one that emphasizes choice, something Americans are demanding more and more in every walk of life (the Wendy’s phenomenon, if you will—why do we have to have fries with our burger?). The latest resounding example of this is Radiohead's new album In Rainbows, which is available for download on their website at any price a person wishes to pay--in Radiohead's words, “whatever you believe this album to be worth.” I expect this tactic will resonate well with many consumers, who are sick of paying $15 for an album knowing that the band will only see $5 if they are lucky. Last I heard, the average price Radiohead was receiving per download stood around $8, a much higher profit margin than they would see per-record if released through a standard record company. As one of the most popular bands on the planet, obscurity is certainly not Radiohead's concern; their "experiment," as they have termed it, is an acknowledgment of what they call the record industry's "decaying business model." This is forward-thinking in the digital age.

The implications for the field of computers and writing are huge. An increasing amount of authors like Cory Doctorow, along with forward-thinking scholars across many fields, are beginning to view systems like CC with greater enthusiasm as it becomes apparent that these systems may offer some solutions for the digital conundrum we find ourselves in. Not only do they encourage scholarship and collaboration by allowing a work to “find every crack in every sidewalk,” they have huge potential for delivering authors from obscurity and providing them with the financial support they need. We can no loner think of things like copyright and ownership in terms of black and white, two extremes—the technology is too influential and too pervasive, too active to be subjected to notions of intellectual property designed for print. I’m fascinated with all of this and excited to see where it goes from here, as the seeds have definitely been sown.

Inman response..

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:56:59 GMT

To be completely honest, Inman didn't say much that was of interest to me until the third chapter, where I think he finally started to develop this idea of the "cyborg" into something meaningful (at least, to me) for his purposes. I am somewhat fond of this idea--including individuals, technologies, and other important elements in shared contexts--in our investigations of literacy, pedagogy, etc. My one concern would be that while he does talk about responsible implementation of this "cyborg" approach, I almost feel like he's skipping over just how difficult and subjective this approach might prove to be in practice. I also sort of feel like he's extracted a well-used idea from "holistic" pedagogy (an idea of cultivating the "whole person" by seeking to "encompass and integrate multiple layers of meaning and experience rather than defining human possibilities narrowly") and calling it something new and snazzy, but maybe that's just me.

That said, some of his ideas are still pretty solid and interesting. I was pleased with his assertion in Chapter 3 that it may be detrimental to have a standard accepted "canon" of works in the Computers and Writing field. Rather, we can "legitimize" the works of many scholars in this field by thinking of scholarly activity as being "cyborg," which to me is basically saying "let's not end up like those Lit snobs"--that's the the kind of nudge that makes me happy in my heart. His re-hashing of pedagogical evolution isn't anything I haven't read before, but I do appreciate his inclusion of distance education, which still seems to hold an uncertain place in our society. I will be taking the majority of my classes online next semester, and I've checked out Texas Tech's PhD program online as well, which are all things that have forced me to think about the value and prestige in a "distance" education, and how I will ultimately approach employers or colleagues that may be skeptical about online education. I suppose distance education is of particular interest to me.

I thought that Chapter 4 extended logically from Chapter 3, and it was interesting to see Inman's case study of sorts with his own students--moreso his methods and their implications than his actual results. I guess I thought it common knowledge that things like environment and available technologies were going to have a marked effect on composition and learning, but perhaps I was wrong. The more interesting question, to me, is how to apply these observations in a meaningful manner while still attempting to remain objective. How do we discern which of these observations are actually important? How do we create meaningful change out of what we’ve learned? I’m not so sure that Inman really approaches an answer, but I do at least admire his attempt to spotlight the many facets of learning that we may not always consider.

I liked Chapter 5, and I thought it raised some interesting implications as well, especially regarding the “literacy of the screen.” On pages 211-212 Inman writes:

“The way we make meaning on the screen is informed by our full meaning-making histories, not just our experiences with computers and other technologies. These technologies, that is, do not automatically offer a new space where new critical orders can be raised and challenged; instead they bring with them material conditions already facing individuals in their day-to-day lives…”

While this struck me as correct, it also struck me as somewhat short-sighted. What is to be said of the children as young as 4 and 5 today whose encounters with literacy will be almost wholly mediated through a screen? As our world desperately tries to fuse education with entertainment, a child’s primary experience with learning in many cases has become dominated by “educational” television and videos (even some marketed at babies, like the Baby Einstein series), kid-friendly websites, and video games that promote “learning.” I am not trying to suggest that picture books no longer have a place in our society, but they are definitely less prevalent today than 20 years ago—honestly, books were my primary source of learning, and “edutainment” was not a part of the vernacular. This phenomenon (and I call it a phenomenon because I have been amazed to see children as young as 3 and 4 years old playing games online, operating a mouse and arrow keys, locating desktop icons and launching applications—long before they can write or read)—raises even more critically the idea of access and how it will affect the literacies of the future. Will these children with “access” to technology be so well-versed in the literacy of the screen that they comprise an entirely different class than those who never had access to these technologies? And will the end result of a society sold on "edutainment" ultimately be positive, negative, or just… different?

With books, issues of access didn’t seem nearly as huge—in comparison to a computer, a DVD player or a “Leapfrog” system, books are relatively inexpensive and could be borrowed from the local library, if nothing else. The question of access in relation to technology has me wondering if the schism between the rich and poor of this country will become markedly more defined. Books, in that sense, seem much more democratic than the screen; they have long been synonymous with a sort of “equalizing effect” that the new technologies have yet to realize, despite lofty ideals of “providing a voice for all.” It leaves me wondering: will the children of today ever actually write an assignment by hand? Will they ever actually touch a physical dictionary, or encyclopedia? I imagine many of them will, those without access to more expensive (and popularly regarded as "superior") electronic means. What effect will this have on society? I'm terribly interested to find out--perhaps there will be little effect at all. I have read a few interesting studies, one in particular that claims use of the Baby Einstein series of videos contributes to smaller vocabularies in young children, and many development experts still claim that the best way for children to learn is through hands-on interaction with their environment. On the flip side I have also read claims that things like video games actually promote critical thinking skills. What kind of implications does this hold for a society intent on teaching our children through the screen?

I guess ultimately I did like Inman, though I thought he had fewer interesting and original things to say (original to me, at least) than Landow. I'm not entirely sure if the "community voices" sections were quite as effective as he wanted them to be. I understand his insistence on emphasizing "individuals," and while it's one of those ideas that gives me the warm and fuzzies, it also seems like a measure of fleshing out his book some. I found myself skipping by them halfway through the book--but I imagine I would have read them dutifully if the questions he were asking actually pertained to the chapter he had just written.

Taking a "by" on Kress.

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:02:09 GMT

I've been battling a nasty headache for three days now - I'm just going to take a by on Kress. :/

Humorous asides, pt. 1

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:28:20 GMT

Landow response...

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:59:01 GMT

As evidenced by my last entry, I have been thinking a lot about collaborative work lately; so when I came to Chapter 3 in Landow—“Reconfiguring the Text”—I knew that he would probably segue into the topic at some point. Imagine my delight when I came to this very paragraph:

“In reducing the autonomy of the text, hypertext reduces the autonomy of the author. In the words of Michael Heim, ‘as the authoritativeness of text diminishes, so too does the recognition of the private self of the creative author’ (Electric Language, 221). Granted, much of that so-called autonomy has been illusory and existed as little more than the difficulty that readers had in perceiving connections between documents. Nonetheless, hypertext … does do away with certain aspects of the authoritativeness and autonomy of the text, and in doing so it does reconceive the figure and function of authorship” (126).

The sentence in bold (emphasis mine) struck me the most. Seeing it in print made the concept feel like it should have been painfully obvious all along (especially after reading Bolter), and yet I had never really considered the implications about authorship that arise when one is simply able to link (or juxtapose, or retrieve with ease) two or more documents. The “definitive” text no longer stands as definitive; its meaning is constructed in relation to the texts surrounding it (whether they be supplementary or critical), and as the connections that tie this text to others become more transparent, the notion of the creator’s authority diminishes. In essence, knowledge as “meaning” is not simply created by one author, as our current system of print technology and book publishing dictates. William R. Paulson points out: “the reader’s task does not end with reception, for reception is inherently flawed. What literature solicits of the reader is not simply receptive but the active, independent, autonomous construction of meaning.” In “reconfiguring the author” by treating him as a text himself—one in a sea of many required to create meaning—hypertext (unlike books) seems to be the perfect medium with which to support that “active, independent, autonomous construction” that Paulson so glorifies.
That is not to say that books have never behaved in manners primarily attributed to hypertext. I seem to remember that in high school (eons ago), our library had a series of books on controversial issues—“The War on Drugs,” capital punishment—which juxtaposed two different essays by two different authors with opposing viewpoints (if I remember correctly the series was called Point/Counterpoint, but I could be completely making that up). I read several of these books for a public speaking class and I remember marveling in the sheer novelty of two authors seemingly “griping” at each other in the same book. I had never seen something like it before and have rarely seen it since (although some magazines and journals will take a similar format, the opposing articles are often not even contained in the same issue). I didn’t realize it at the time, but the essays of Point/Counterpoint were helping me to create connections and meaning simply by existing next to one another. In a hypertext environment, the implication of course is that connections can be made far beyond the scope of what two juxtaposed essays in a book can support.
So how might hypertext change the face of collaborative work, especially in the humanities—where working together is often met with a resounding “ewww”? In a field sometimes referred to as “the cult of personality,” hypertext—as we touched on above—may help reconfigure notions of the author in the humanities, gradually contributing to an atmosphere where knowledge constructed collaboratively is every bit as meaningful as knowledge created individually (it is my prediction that those scholars with gargantuan egos will never warm up to hypertext). In much the same way, hypertext also serves to reconfigure the text itself—it shifts the balance of power from writer to reader in forming connections to other texts. As Landow explains:

“The humanities take a far more restricted view [than the sciences] that emphasizes individuality, separation, and uniqueness—often creating a vastly distorted view of the connection of a particular text to those that preceded it… hypertext changes all this, in large part because it does away with the individual text that characterizes the book” (140).

    This reconfiguring of text and author gives way to a new form of collaboration, one which I will call “networked” collaboration, which derives from hypertext’s fundamental ability to support links and exist on a network. Networked collaboration is the most interesting to me (being unique to hypertext) and, in my opinion, is also the most underutilized form of collaboration that exists. It seems, at this point, somewhat a novelty in the humanities—left to systems such as Intermedia or the Victorian Web—and regarded largely as experimentation. How much easier is it to collaborate in a networked environment versus “real life”? Much easier, I would say—unconcerned with physical space and time , collaboration and the consequent construction of knowledge becomes much more independent and deliberate (the latter, I believe, a result of conscientious collaborators understanding that in a networked environment, every person both participates and shares—as reader and writer).
    I think it is relevant to note that while hypertext environments certainly support collaboration, they can also support the creation of meaning through “anti-collaboration” as well—a sort of meaning that arises when one participates unwillingly (or unknowingly) in a text. For instance, one could easily create an environment something like “The Skeptic’s Bible,” which would contain the entire text of the Bible, or relevant passages from it, with pertinent links to other documents exposing historical inaccuracies, logical inconsistencies between various manuscripts, biological criticisms of Creationism, etc. While I don’t think the Bible’s authors would be making too many objections, it’s easy to imagine this kind of “unwilling participation” from a living author as well. For some authors, then, there are risks inherent with hypertext; their authority is more easily diminished. It is safe to say that meaning, in a hypertext environment, can be created by a number of methods not easily achieved through the limitations placed upon a printed book.
    Beyond collaboration, hypertext has huge potential for reconfiguring literary education as a whole. Chapter 7 in Landow was the second-most interesting chapter for me, but I’m going to save my thoughts on that for my next post.

Random driving thoughts..

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:00:27 GMT

On my long drive back to Austin after class, I have a tendency to keep thinking about whatever it was we discussed that day. I guess the truth is that I have an aversion to forming opinions on the fly, or even speaking at all without having really chewed something over. So if an idea holds my interest on the drive home, I've decided I'll write about it here.

Last class, someone made the point that people in the sciences work much more collaboratively than people in the humanities - which, given the subject matter and traditional views of both fields, somehow seems odd. My experience with people in the sciences is relatively limited, but ever since I started dating my current boyfriend (a chemical engineering PhD student at UT), I've made a few observations (chiefly, two of them) about the nature of the sciences that might help illuminate the disparity.

First of all, failure is very much a part of the scientific method - it's "built in" as a near-necessity of what Science does. If a stranger asks my boyfriend what he's doing with himself in the lab, he'll often reply (only half-jokingly), "trying to turn experimental failure into experimental results." This is an extremely common sentiment shared across members of his lab. Failure is, for better or worse, a GREAT deal of what happens in the sciences. Because a good 90% (or perhaps 95%, or even 99%!) of what they attempt ends in failure, it seems to actually create a sense of camaraderie amongst them. It is also safe to say that a great deal of failure becomes less personal when it is spread over many members of a group. Instead of, "My experiment was a failure," the sentiment becomes "Our group just hasn't figured this one out yet." The latter, for a group of scientists, is much easier to swallow. The best scientists experience failure repeatedly, but their 5% or 1% success rate is the celebrated part of their research - not the monumental failures that preceded it.

This is in stark contrast to the humanities, where having bad ideas - or even no good ideas - 95% of the time is completely unacceptable. Making a name for yourself (and a living) in the humanities requires increasingly bigger, more progressive, smarter hypotheses, with little room for failure or criticism. Whereas failure is built into the scientific system, it is viewed with disdain in the humanities, where sometimes it seems just as important to buffer yourself from criticism as it does to create good ideas. The very nature of this system discourages collaborative work; in fact, it encourages individualism by rewarding those who can find some way of proving others wrong (I am not making the claim that this is either "good" or "bad," it just seems to be "the way it is").

Logically this leads us to the question of how the sciences can support such a high rate of "failure." I know very little of economics but I think I can safely say that in the sciences, a relatively small success rate can still be hugely economically viable. I have seen how my boyfriend's professors live, and how my own professors live - mine aren't the ones driving Porsches and treating their students to dinner at Ruth's Chris. Because in the humanities, there is always a concern with collaborative work - we'll call this concern "splitting the royalties." Such a concern simply doesn't exist in the sciences, where society places a huge economic value on a relatively low "success rate." This economic value seems to negate (and indeed, even surpass) their high rate of failure, which is the second major factor that I feel encourages collaborative work in the sciences. They fail together, and they succeed together - and they make a lot of money either way. I won't be so brash as to say this is "right" or "wrong" - it's just the nature of the thing. Finding a cure for cancer is without a doubt going to create a greater economic impact than coming up with a cool but completely unimplementable theory for open-source education.

These are just my observations, and I admit I could be completely off-the-mark...

First reading response - Bolter.

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:39:00 GMT

    Bolter has really been my introduction to hypertext theory, so for weeks I've been struggling with something appropriate and meaningful to say. The scope of this book is so huge that I've decided the best way to approach this is by taking a few points of personal interest and adding my thoughts.

In part because of Chapter 10 as well as our "chat" class, the idea of an online "intellectual" community intrigues me. The massive amount of information exchange that takes place in academia seems perfectly suited to some kind of virtual "home" where instant publishing power allows for a very free and dynamic exchange. While many academics have personal blogs and there are millions of sites devoted to scholarly subjects, at times it seems near-impossible to interact with these "formal" sites and their authors (it may be, in fact, difficult to even find them in the first place). Perhaps that's a throw-back to the conservative idea of the author as the "end-all."

    In reality I believe all discourse is the product of what came before it (I guess you could call it the "remediation of thought"?). This is especially true with all of the responses and criticisms you see in academia. What better way to initiate a dialog than to open it up to discussion in a forum where physical and social restraints simply don't apply in the same manner as published text? The speed at which things are expressed, shared and linked over the internet gives great power to this idea of shared discourse (and, by extension, peer review).

    In Ch. 10, Bolter quotes Fred Rheingold in "Virtual Community": "The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost--intellectual leverage, social leverage, commercial leverage, and most important political leverage." Sometimes I wonder if the "technophobia" we see in academia has something to do with fear of this "leverage." For decades, having a scholarly voice has meant going to great lengths for your work to be seen. In a medium where anyone can publish their thoughts with the click of a mouse, are some scholars afraid of a "dilution" of the intellectual voice or a gradual redefinition of authority?
    In some manner, it seems self-defeating. With faster and easier methods of exchange, intellectual thought may flourish in ways never before imagined. "Authorship" may become increasingly a collaborative effort. There are a lot of implications here, certainly, especially involving intellectual property, but is knowledge ever really "owned"? Or is it simply "created"--in effect, "sewn" from other bits of knowledge?
    I'd like to see a sort of community (even if it only extended across individual universities) where the object was a free exchange of ideas. Even here at Texas State, I see a disconnect between certain departments that may benefit from each other's knowledge (while our class resides in the English department, computer science, psychology, cultural studies or communications majors could have a lot to say about what we're studying). Harnessing the power of things like blogs, online databases, and easy means of exchanging files could prove incredibly beneficial in sharing ideas, finding people with similar areas of interest, and ultimately creating knowledge.