Still in Intellectual Debt --or-- Everything is REMIX

After reading Lessig’s final chapters, I find myself still grappling with the issue of indebtedness, maybe now more than ever. Today in class we circled around several issues concerning remixes. Some of us were disinclined to call them essays as such, but I’m going to plunge out on a limb and claim that they are just that: “attempts” in Montaigne’s sense of the term. What they are attempting and what they actually accomplish aren’t necessarily congruent, but they attempt nonetheless. As I mentioned before on Tim’s blog this week, I found Lessig’s example (92) especially relevant.

If these “attempts” are being fielded, and they’re essays, they most probably have at least some shadow of a *perspective*. So who gets to take credit? In terms of copyright assignments, Lessig is critical of artists who allow remixers to use their original work, but fail to give those authors any sort of rights over their remixed creations. He’s especially critical of LucasFilm, who set up a fan-fiction web site, encouraging users to expand the Star Wars universe, but without retaining any creative rights (247). And why shouldn’t these remixers have rights? Weird Al (whose name keeps popping up tentatively during class discussions) seeks the appropriate permissions and is able to get royalties for his parodies.

But does Weird Al “do” Remix? Think I’ll ask him….

Sliding down this slippery slope, I wonder to what extent agency matters in constructing Remix AS Remix. Jessica and Rachel brought these questions up severally, so I’ll try to distill them into my own anxiety: Must we take agency and intention into account when discussing what we call “Remix?” We were talking about *10 Things I Hate About You.* Clearly, the film appreciates Shakespeare, but based on the vast majority of student papers I read, they were familiar with the Ledger-driven teen film prior to experiencing Shakespeare’s play. Can *10 Things* operate in a vacuum? Yes and no. If *10 Things* seeks to be in conversation with Shakespeare (or in conversation about him), then the “original” *Taming* context is necessary for a broader understanding of what the makers of *10 Things* are getting at. As much as I’ve been abused by *10 Things* references in a variety of ways, I would like to give the film makers the benefit of the doubt regarding intentionality. In other words, Shakespeare wasn’t incidental to their plot.

But is *10 things* a remix? What is a remix? Since Lessig came up with so many good things to say about particular remixes, I wonder what will happen should we extend that definition. Let’s try.

Language—as would be the case for all symbolic systems of communication—relies almost exclusively on its own solipsistic context. Languages eventually learn to talk to one another, but those normally form new languages, still based on symbols and still what most Anthropological linguists would call arbitrary (only in the sense that there’s nothing about the word “pen” that screams “call me pen!”). Languages recombine, sentences recombine, words recombine to form sentences, chords combine to form harmonies, notes combine to form chords and melodies—what we see as holistic (and rightly so) still must be composed of parts.

But those parts aren’t necessarily independent from the whole. Anyone who cooks knows that once you introduce a certain combination of ingredients into a mixture, you’ll end up with something that doesn’t necessarily reflect the discrete units of creation you put into it. The same phenomenon applies to Chemistry: take an “H” out of H2O, you don’t have anything remotely *close* to water. Not at all.
Bringing this insane garble back to the notion of Remix, can we call a REMIX something that forms a new whole—a piece of work that isn’t just the sum of its parts? Maybe that definition is problematic too, but if we find ourselves questioning whether a work is ‘original,’ maybe as an audience we exert our agency and decide, “NO, that certainly isn’t remix.” Somebody else may decide otherwise, however.

But who gets to take credit in R/W culture? I remember the Vanilla Ice *Under Pressure* controversy. We can safely say that those songs in question aren’t the same. And who was ultimately responsible for the playing of that background track, anyhow? Hard to say, even with ‘80s studio magic. Most probably, the parts in this case can’t be removed from the whole to show us just *who* is responsible.
Maybe if we can’t sort out the particulars, we can identify some kind of perspective. Maybe that perspective manifests from multiple authors, but it serves as an outlook, a kind of combined worldview. Remix texts, it seems, should be aware of each other. That’s the only way language works, so why shouldn’t it be the case for Remix, even if we decide *everything is Remix*?

Everything is Copyrighted (for 9-23)

Okay, so I jumped the gun for next week’s post (which I should’ve held off until before the 23rd). Chances are I’ll be mercilessly crushed by waves of grading, so better to do this now before my mind turns to mush.

The strands connecting notions of plagiarism, copyright law, and organizational systems are manifold. However, before I jump in please let me take a moment to express what I *really* feel about all of this, in one word:

“Fuck.”

I say this not because the author is dead, nor because there isn’t any sensible way of acknowledging indebtedness, but rather because the borders of what counts as intellectual property are changing in some pretty abstract and difficult to pragmatically approach ways. Weinberger’s mix tape—and his very notion of how we are beginning to organize information in “the third order” faces not only intellectual scrutiny, but mounds of legal issues as well. John Logie, in his rather depressing essay on copyright law, computers, and the composition classroom, exhumes a long legal history documenting the seeds that would lead to a market and intellectual climate dominated by “permissions.” He sees the expansion of copyright laws as a “response to the development of novel communicative technologies,” (137) culminating with analog tape decks and the internet. In short, Logie argues that the vague outlining of the “fair use” statutes in the 1976 Copyright Act fail to fully protect scholarly and non-profit uses of copyrighted material and other intellectual property (139-140). In effect, writing teachers can suffer stiff penalties for violating a poorly defined law. Teachers could even be sued by students for using their work in class exercises (anonymously or not).

‘Better break out the blanket waivers,’ suggests Logie.

To complicate matters, the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) attempted to strengthen the rights of individual intellectual property holders in an effort to protect third world investors and inventors (143-44), a move supported by President Bill Clinton at the time. As Logie puts it, WIPO cast “the public as passive recipient rather than the grantor of authorial rights” (145). This outcome and the series of court decisions to follow were decidedly “top down” by Weinberger’s standards.

Though it should come as no surprise to note that legal prattle can complicate matters rather than resolve them, composition teachers have inherited a heavy burden to pass onto their students. Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati, in their essay on plagiarism and the web, outline the web climate that fosters accidental plagiarism. They argue, vast arrays of information are readily available to students looking for ‘more correct’ perspectives than their own, and that the temptation to copy and paste is high due to the text being right at their fingertips (156). So not only are students in this case plagiarizing, violating academic laws, but they are also violating the terms of “fair use,” effectively putting them in double jeopardy. And, even if the plagiarism proves unintentional, students aren’t safe from violating authorial permissions. If avoiding plagiarism means acknowledging indebtedness, how do we then respond to publishers and authors who demand monetary compensation?

The definition of plagiarism—as both Logie and DeVoss and Rosati point out—has expanded via the internet and copyright law. DeVoss and Rosati in particular advocate viewing plagiarism via an intellectual property lens (159). The rationale here is to speak to the web and its content on the web’s, and capitalism’s, own terms using a ‘real world’ approach: property, and by implication, money. While this approach seems sensible enough, the reality is far more complex. In Chapter 7 of *Everything is Miscellaneous* Weinberger points to sites such as Wikipedia and Flickr who rely primarily on user content, instead laying copyright claim over the systems of organization themselves. Though DeVoss and Rosati argue that anyone can become a published ‘expert’ online (157), Weinberger might argue that the “democratized” spaces online (those characterizing tagging, wikis etc.) defy the very notion of individual authors. Sites such as Wikipedia foster a multi-author landscape—anyone (who is registered) can modify others’ work. Thus, the landscape of intellectual property has expanded not just to ideas themselves, but to the frameworks those ideas occupy (should we see ideas as discrete intellectual units).

So again, I ask, how do we teach students to acknowledge indebtedness when we’re all in so much debt, both legally and intellectually? How do we describe ideas versus frameworks for ideas? While some might argue that academic uses of broadly applied theoretical lenses (postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc.) are similar to how students might engage a framework like Wikipedia, those lenses very often don’t include the baggage of as many copyrighted facets: images, sounds, words, paragraphs, phrases in and out of different contexts, and even the page layout containing them. Therefore, it might be tempting all over again to tell students not to use the web. However, such rationale ultimately only perpetuates the problem—students will continue to use the web, and will continue to steal from it both purposefully and accidentally. Though understanding intellectual property law provides a useful if Machiavellian approach to acknowledging indebtedness, this lens doesn’t necessarily help to resolve or foster an understanding of broader intellectual property issues and laws.

Once more, for the last time, what do we do with this mess? Resurrect the author?

Cyborgs and Foucault vs. the Digital Divide

Interface is a lens, and that lens is crafted by a developer. This may sound like a quasi-creationist reading—especially if I were to say that our very eyes are interfaces through which we process data—but we aren’t born cyborgs. We have to become them.

In several respects, computer users have become cyborgs. When using computers, we adopt another set of eyes (via monitors), hands (keyboard and mouse), and even voice(s) (representative of both our words on a web page or voice through a mic). We can remove ourselves from our cybernetic state, yet it’s still a remediated (if limited) form of perception.

Interfaces and the tools through which we navigate them carry their own sets of cultural assumptions and privileges for people who are used to navigating those kinds of cognitive structures. Selfe and Selfe point out that computer interfaces have been constructed for a privileged class of American English speakers (74). In this course, we’ve made much ado about how modes and media affect composition. So, what does computer literacy mean for oppression?

I think that expecting certain computer literacy can be just as oppressive as demanding an absolutely particular grammar structure. Do any of you remember having the word “aint” bashed from your skulls in elementary school, despite it being a perfectly functional version of “isn’t”? Did anyone really tell you why? Even Word is enraged at me for using it—red lines abound! Maybe this is a silly example, but we can come up with grim historical analogues. America, like other conquering nations, understands the tactical value of culture-kill and language death. How do you think the “West” was won?

I’m not saying (and neither are Selfe nor Banks for that matter) that we should abolish all standards of interface, mode, grammar—what have you—in favor of a free-for all blab-spree of jubilant, self-indulgent, supposedly free-speechy democratized flying robot freedom. However, we can and should teach, as Selfe and Selfe and Banks promote, how to be critical of the existing systems. And no, we don’t have to immerse ourselves in computer programming to do it.

Selfe and Selfe contend, “computer interfaces…enact small but continuous gestures of domination and colonialism” (69): the digital age, a term that sounds almost utopian, hasn’t benefitted everyone, and certainly doesn’t represent everyone. Adam Banks points out that the Digital Divide, a term that has fallen under much critical scrutiny post-Clinton administration, hasn’t been breached. He poses, “access to technologies and the discursive practices that determine power relations in our society, the Digital Divide, and the larger history of African American is, essentially a rhetorical problem…the rhetorical problems that dominate understandings of race in our discipline are technological problems” (12). This relationship between rhetoric and technology doesn’t merely concern access, but also the forms and uses this access takes. For victims of the Digital Divide, current interface models are insufficient.

Richard Ohmann is right to point out that not everyone necessarily benefits from computer technology, and such technology, doesn’t necessarily promote the kinds of literacy that writing teachers strive to convey. Adam Banks uses a particularly striking example that illustrates these fears. In Camden school district (New Jersey), administrators paid over ten million in site licenses for educational software that teaches little more than remedial grammar exercises, which are too narrowly focused to promote compositional skills or critical thinking except for how to navigate the interface itself (19). Effectively, these exercises could democratize student opportunities about as well as the burger button on registers at McDonald’s.

Simply having material access to computers doesn’t alleviate the Digital Divide. According to Banks, users “must also have the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools effectively” (41). Like Selfe and Selfe, he promotes understanding both the benefits and problems/dangers of using any technology (42).
But how do we identify the loci of those dangers? Maybe I have a partial answer, or at least a partial thought.

I don’t really want to abuse Foucault, *but* we should consider the implications that the Digital Divide has on a panoptic society. I’ll go out on a limb (and not much of one), and point out that computers—as are any other FCC regulated modes—can (and do) function as an ideal panoptic cell in many respects. IP addresses can be tracked, purchases online are constantly recorded, computers can be hacked into and their contents stolen, illegal downloading and other thievery is punished and internet users can in general assume the presence of some kind of observer (be it an administrator, moderator, or government tracking system). Worse for the Digital Divide, there’s no obvious central tower to take, no clear map of what cell leads where.

Learning to navigate a panoptically observable interface—in many respects a material factor in the Digital Divide— can be treacherous to identity construction online. While I don’t believe that the internet is a place where ideas of represented gender, race, and class don’t necessarily come to bear, the interfaces through which users access the internet certainly try to make us believe that this is the case. Selfe and Selfe explain some of the particulars (68), but their most salient points concern representing agency through interface. For example, demanding American Standard English and ASCII character sets in word processing programs can seriously damage agency. Sure, character packs are available, but not everyone will know how to go about accessing them, much less installing them. Furthermore, as Banks contests, students need to have regular access to computers in order to exert any sort of agency (41). I’m writing this blog post from my home “office,” ensconced amidst my writerly accoutrements—it’s a comfortable (well…not really) place where I can sit and think and type on my own terms in my own time. I have agency in constructing this space.

I feel as if I’m drifting, so I’ll do my best to tie this all together. Interface mapping involves a kind of cybernetic relationship with computers. That relationship is dictated by the designers of technology in some pretty specific ways, at least until we as users learn to navigate it and define the terms of that relationship. The Digital Divide can’t be solved purely by providing access—that solution simply introduces students to an interface that can’t readily be interfaced with. The Digital Divide will be better bridged when users can become agents who understand their potential roles in the panoptic construction, and use these gazes to their relative advantage. The tower in the middle loses just that much more power the more those lateral cell walls are broken down. But victims of the Digital Divide have to break down those walls in their own ways—like everyone ultimately—then those lateral connections will become clearer, and their uses available. A critical understanding of this mode will help agents become agents—to become themselves in essence—when putting computer technology to specific use.

Going Modal

I’m convinced of aurality’s pedagogical merit in any compositional academic context. Even just today, when talking to Tim and Rachel today about new media, I explained that I often have to use music as a compositional metaphor when lacking some other baseline shared experience with my students. The rationale here is to appeal to a different compositional environment, one that must be coherent in certain respects, constructed to have form and meaning understandable by other people. However, such approaches are rifle with peril. Not all students will understand every such approach, and therefore numerous should be considered. While I feel savvy enough using my music example, others may not roll off my tongue as well.

Cynthia Selfe defines her approach as “civic pluralism” (Response, 607), a reaching-out process that avoids privileging writing as a form of expression, extending its pedagogical value to a variety of peoples who may have been educated with different systems of privileged modalities. She’s right in noting not everybody writes to compose meaning, and cognition is inextricably linked in many respects to expression through a given medium. Modality molds expression.

Doug Hesse, in his response to Selfe’s essay, expresses concern over the teaching of multiple modalities in a writing context. He argues in favor of exploring these various modalities in a rhetoric class, noting that each has its own “best fit” (603) depending on the context. Hesse distinguishes writing as a subset of rhetoric, therefore treatable/teachable chiefly in the context of written language. He’s rightly worried about “stakeholders”: students need to learn how to compose through writing in a writing class; Hesse employs the analogy “If I am to teach German, noting the world’s economic drift…I decide instead to teach Chinese, I shouldn’t be surprised if some stakeholder’s object” (603). He sees Selfe’s aim as “nothing short of calling for an expansive redefinition…of composition as rhetoric” (603). On this point, though, I’m not sure exactly what Hesse is concerned about. He himself points out that writing is a subset of rhetoric, and writing composition necessarily entails the study of rhetoric. So how is composition being “redefined”, as such?

To me, there’s nothing wrong with advocating attention to multiple modalities. True, incorporating a systematic classroom treatment of these modalities is daunting, but certainly not impossible to undertake. No single instructor could cover every modality, regardless. It’s therefore our job to at least acknowledge these different means of composition. Even simply juxtaposing writing with some other modality can serve to highlight the strengths and uses of both. Perhaps, as Hesse suggests, Selfe advocates for a system-wide redefinition of composition teaching. However, such a change would necessarily have to cross departments, cross campuses, and intellectual boundaries. She herself admits, “I try to design my composition classes as places where students begin the complex process of learning how to make use of all sorts of design resources” (Response 606). This way, she effectively raises the stakes for students, not as much teaching them the specifics of modal rhetorical sovereignty (whew!), but instead how to recognize and possibly learn how to take advantage of that freedom (cf. “The Movement of Air 618).

But even when teaching someone how to fish, somebody has to cast a line, and it’s no good to send students out unprepared. The specifics of particular modalities must be taught in some respect, and it seems highly unlikely that an interdepartmental alliance would form to bridge the gap between compositional strategies. Selfe insists, “The time that students spend in composition classrooms is altogether too short” (“The Movement of Air” 643). Of course we don’t have enough time, and therefore Hesse’s critique stands on this point especially. Not only do we not have the time, but we also don’t have a specialized knowledge of all modalities in question. We have to ask ourselves, how do we prioritize modalities? Setting such priorities, especially when considering a pluralistic student audience, is not a simple matter to say the least.

But why do we have to limit composition to the composition classroom? If we are indeed Gatekeepers, why can’t we approach Selfe’s ideas in a forward-looking, introductory manner? College composition can take many forms, and writing should of course maintain institutional priority if nothing else for the sake of our student’s survival the academy. Hesse worries that stakeholders (namely students) need to have maximum investment in a “high conceptual level rather than an accretive one” in order to effectively approach multi-modal learning (603). Again, this notion calls into question the matter of modal specialization: we’re writing teachers, and maybe we’re familiar with some of these other modes, but not necessarily enough to bridge the conceptual gap between these modes for students.

But where we lack the specialized knowledge to help us teach other modalities, other teachers can help fill these gaps in many respects. Since nearly all college courses demand some sort of work production—written or otherwise—aren’t we all composition instructors in a sense? If English 101 and other intro writing courses maintained a sense of forward-looking self-awareness, we’d still get to teach writing while paying appropriate critical attention to other expressive modes. Students need to learn how to be effective rhetorical agents before they can master any given modality.

Despite clear hazards to her approach, Selfe’s appeal to understanding the pertinence of other compositional modalities trumps many of Hesse’s concerns, being the most important point of her argument. While his apprehensions are valid and applicable, little is lost through writing instructors teaching students how to approach/understand/recognize other modalities, even if those teachers can’t function within those modalities themselves.

Relationships with Computers Part Deux

Okay, so stupid Google won't let me respond in full (too much text) so here's the continuation of my responses for the second post.

Scott et al:

Indeed! In the case of new media, I wish I could use the cliché “Times they are a’ changing,” but I’d be a decade too late for my part. An older friend of mine told me at a conference, “the internet is the future,” meaning specifically that we academics (he being an old IBM mainstay in his seventies) should get with the program and hit the internet wave while it’s still rising. It’s funny to think about it like that (the internet as a novelty still), but for some reason what he said didn’t seem incredibly dated to me at first. I suppose my knee-jerk reaction dates me in some respects.

I started thinking about attention in regards to technology (and not just writing technology) when I was trying to (yet again) wrap my head around the full implications of new media as new media. When I think about new media, I free associate “computers.” Since computers are a kind of multi tool—maybe even an über tool—it occurred to me that our thought processes (and ludic engagement such as point and click superseding scrawl and erase) are increasingly dominated by computer time. Time certainly isn’t the only dimension at play, but it seems apt to wonder at how our work process is affected by loading programs, saving, printing, and all of the other interactive minutiae involved. The short (though incomplete) answer is that computers are flippin’ fast. That speed on one hand helps me, personally, to commit more thoughts to paper than I could even begin to eke out in pencil. On the other hand, I’m not as immediately considerate of what I type (maybe my blog posts so far are a good indication of that, hrhrhrhr). Naturally, there are tons of other components involved even in this one crappy example. What we gain and lose will partially depend on individual practice, but mediums predispose—rather than predetermine—particular sorts of products. The best way I can explain my thoughts on this are through guitar noises (*sigh*). Much easier to play blazing leads on an electric with lower gauge strings, but sometimes the rich boom of the acoustic carries a desirable resonance. Maybe it’s the same with writing mediums. Maybe I’m out of my mind. Or both?

I sort of wonder if Walter Benjamin—in regards to his ideas on authenticity and mechanical reproduction—is haunting me. I’m not even sure that I agree with him. I’m stressed at the potential “fast food” implications of mass-produced language, but I don’t think that we should clip a bird’s wings just because we perceive it flies more wildly the higher it gets. Good grief I’m full of bullcrap metaphors today.
Understanding the potential disjoint between new media writing and old media techniques is important for me (I think) as a teacher, but also as a student. However, I’m long gone from the days of handwritten essays, scrawled in my own blood and drool, and I can’t say that I’d really ever want to go back. Though, I do think it’s important to consider just how transitioning from one medium to another affects writing, since so many students come from diverse technology backgrounds. Maybe that I way I can explain the benefits of writing essays in long prose versus “IDK.” Though I guess it would be pretty lol to see something like that.

I suppose my projected ambivalence towards the idea of new media can be best explained as me being crotchety. Not so much being cranky, but rather like someone who has lost something, knows he has lost it, but can’t quite put his finger on what went missing. Gah, I’m venturing too far out into the waters of aesthetics. In any case, I don’t really believe that life without computers would be simpler: just complicated in different ways. I must admit that the idea of “going back” is simultaneously terrifying and revolting (and yes a bit whimsical too—how Janus-faced I am). There’s no going back, even if Snake Pliskin turns off all electricity in the world ala Escape from L.A.—we’d just have to learn to cope with a writing world post computers, which we would probably find as a unique challenge altogether. I seriously don’t want to go back to using those dorky pencil grippers, though some of them did have cool colors.

Relationships with Computers: Going the Distance!

I still remember, from all those years ago, my very first computer experience. Booting up the system—waiting for the system to boot—waiting more—hearing screeching noises—waiting more—growing angry—getting hungry—hearing the lunch bell—going to lunch—coming back—waiting for the system to boot—smelling ozone—rebooting the system: hours later, we had the classroom Apple up and running! Maybe the term “classroom” isn’t grandiose enough. “School” computer is probably more descriptive. Maybe even “town” would work. Despite growing up in a very small town and attending a small school, competition for use of the newfangled machine was intense. The novelty took awhile to wear off, though it did. Somewhere along the line dying on the Oregon Trail lost its glitz.

Growing up in a relatively low tech part of America, computers seemed like unattainable objects of supreme power and status. Nobody owned one—it could cost more than a thousand (!) dollars. Not only that, but they seemed utterly impractical. Sure, one could type, but that’s what typewriters were for. Being a creature of either too little imagination or too much at the worst possible moment, I could think of fewer than five tasks that one could possibly use a computer for: games, typing, number crunching—okay, fewer than four tasks. To make matters worse, it seemed to take hours to start the damn things. In short, they were toys for schools and scientists.

It wasn’t until I was in the 7th grade before I’d even heard of a PC, but already by this time the uses of computers were being made manifest to me. If necessity is the mother of invention, it’s also the mother of having to learn to type when the teacher assigns you four pages of text to copy. Matters only got worse as I grew older.

More out of fear than a sense of responsibility, I decided to take a typing class my freshman year of high school. Our instructor was most of the time disarmingly kind, but a fierce battle-hardened matron of oppression when in class. Ms. Fine was what many would term “old school,” and her singular task was to make typists out of the sorry lot of us. Armed with smelly old HPs, black on green text, and WordPerfect, we ventured forth on our first typing lessons: [Program a metronome at 70-80 BMP] “Jay jay jay space, atch atch atch…Jay jay jay, atch atch atch…Jay Jay JAY, atch atch atch, jaaaay jay jay, atch atch atch RETURRRN!” she would trill. On and on we went like this for months and months, and being on a computer lost its novelty again. Though, probably out of any “skill” I learned in high school—since I never took wood shop—Ms. Fine’s typing course was by far the most useful.

My parents eventually bought a computer so that all of us could theoretically function in the increasingly e-oriented nineties (which were waning fast by now). I began doing more and more work on the computer, typing instead of handwriting. This process enacted a slow but major change. My impeccable spelling atrophied, I grew more loquacious on paper with my thoughts, and I started seeing writing products as wholes, not just as paragraphs strung together. It seemed as if a bigger picture had been revealed to me.

Eventually, computers became a ubiquitous technology in my work and play time. They blurred the boundaries of workspace, living space, and play space. Not only that, but they seemed absolutely crucial to success—so much so, that having one break meant having to buy another to fill the gap (despite the heavy financial burden). Not even televisions shared such priority, or even vehicles. The internet—at first a novelty in its own right—became the juggernaut that dominated communication and commerce giving us the ability to be both everywhere at once and imprisoned in only one place, tied to a box.

Despite its rather sedentary requirements (one must sit or stand still in front of a computer to use it), moving faster became the medium’s obsession. Typing allowed me to write much more quickly, more voluminously in much less time with much less pain. Tasks that were once relegated to other mediums were now almost exclusively conducted through the computer, mail being the most exceptional example. Computers for me became the “do everything” technology, and it was almost all in an effort, a gasping one at that, in keeping up.

I heard somebody say (maybe in 597 actually…or was it at the 302 meeting?) that email conveys a (false) sense of urgency. As a managing editor of a relatively small regional academic journal, I can attest to having a vast reserve of this feeling. With dozens of messages arriving each day from members with a variety of demands, I feel weighed heavily by the need to get to them all at once. Of course, this lack of system breaks down, and so does “productivity,” at least in the electronic age sense. And even where I think I’m trendy, I find rapidly that I’m actually quite dated by my e-malapropisms. A Cougar Quest student of mine recommended that I use IDK for the Tolkien creative writing class I teach via MUSH (Multi-User Simulated Hallucination—think old school text-based RPG on the computer with green on black text and vague cardinal directions, such as “obvious exits are NORTH and WEST). I had never even heard the term IDK until yesterday in 597. I should feel lucky that I didn’t open my evals until right after class. I might’ve ignored its significance.
It’s sort of scary to think of it this way, but every class I teach is affected and effected by computer technology. It’s a strange system with a great proportion of feedback—effecting trends that affect itself, computer technology seems to reinvent, in some manner or another, at a very rapid pace. I try to use different technologies every semester, which on one hand keeps me on my toes and makes teaching no two classes the same, but on the other makes it difficult to find the right pedagogical tools for the right jobs.

The increased ceiling for speed and multi-tasking proportionally increases its capacity to endure change by making itself invaluable. Wow—that last passage reads like gibberish. Let me try again: Computer technology has helped free our attention by reallocating it elsewhere, so that should we find ourselves bereft of it for any reason, readjusting our attention could become a serious problem, both in terms of habits and available resources. Who has a typewriter lying around, or the time to write a 20 page seminar paper in pencil? Maybe everyone has these things, or things like these things. But standards of living are hard to change, especially when our perception indicates that change in the “wrong” or “backwards” direction. Unlike many other technologies, computers adapt to shifting needs, expanding their repertoire. Pens, for example, still do what pens have done (for the most part) for the past thousands of years. When I first saw a computer, I never imagined anything like the internet was possible, much less than Skype (it’s like a Star Trek viewing screen!).

It’s difficult to precisely quantify just what exactly I use computer technology for in a pedagogical context (or any other for that matter). Aside from my own grading, presentation, and research materials, I’ve made using computers a requirement for my courses. This requirement seems natural, especially given how widespread it is. On other hand, computer literacy isn’t necessarily as widespread. It’s obvious to state that not everyone has the same access and experience to particular technologies, but the implications of this fact are heavy. As an instructor, I often don’t feel very technology literate in some contexts, and I’m sure many of the students in my courses feel the same. I feel as if I’m asking students to use a tool that I don’t quite know how to properly wield. So when using computer technology, I often wonder if we are in effect using wrenches to nail in wall tacks.

“Right tool for the right job” adages notwithstanding, computer technology literacies are ubiquitous, and it’s my responsibility as a teacher to make them applicable. However, that applicability need not derail the work of a semester. If an integrated approach just doesn’t work, sometimes abandoning it in favor of something else is better than slogging through an entire semester. Of course, that kind of shift produces problems in its own right, such as spending more time on figuring out technology rather than teaching or writing. However, as technological changes continue to rapidly mount (in some respects more so than others) and the demands for a varied computer literacy increase, adaptability may be as valuable a composition tool as any.

What is my job as a writing instructor?

What is my job as a writing instructor?

This is one of those questions I *really* want to answer well.
In the most basic sense, I hope that as a writing instructor I can effectively convey how to use a variety of compositional tools in a variety of situations. Of course, this hope relies entirely on context. I’ve illogically split this post into three silly sections, all of which in some degree respond to the concern of applicability beyond academe while addressing a variety of such contexts. I’ve been stressed out by questions concerning the “worth” of writing in the liberal arts for quite some time, and Kathleen Yancey catches some of my concern and recasts it into an apparently different perspective from previous composition pedagogical approaches. Research writing to me seems like a good general place to start, as it covers a variety of fields (including “real world” genres).

Research:

After first hearing that I would be teaching English 201 a while back, I thought to myself, “uh oh.” Really, I’ve worked in several research capacities over the years, and all of them academic, so theoretically the material wasn’t the problem, but rather how I was going to approach it. English 101 isn’t the same beast in many respects, despite the two courses’ similarities in structure and content. Teaching MLA formatting and research guidelines is peachy for people who will be using those guidelines—and even for beginning researchers who need something to use— but the 201 crew were a diverse lot with diverse needs. Instead of trying to cover absolutely every research base—and one can spend many hours in the government documents section going through reel after reel with no benefit to anything but perpetuating read-rage (similar to road rage—maybe even roid rage—except with text). Basically, my aim was to foster using the right research method for the right “job.” But teaching writing has to at some point transcend the natural teleology assumed by the term “job.” I try to look for things that all writers—nay humans—share in common, and apply this directly to the value of research methodology. In my experience, getting screwed over is what everyone likes the least.

The phrase “getting screwed” can mean many things, but college students mostly associate it with—yep, you guessed it—money. Sometimes I feel as if I have to, in some way, bring liberal arts education back into a banking model temporarily to illustrate a point (using terms like “value” and “worth”), no matter how Machiavellian and distasteful that feels. If money isn’t something everybody covets, it’s necessarily a concern. In the simplest sense, knowing how to conduct research in a particular context can yield immediate positive results. Okay fine—knowing that your Sound Wave action figure is worth thousands on ebay is “valuable” information, but generally doesn’t demand a research argument (unless, of course, such an argument is involved in the sale/bribe process). A simplistic research argument spawning from the Sound Wave example could be heard in court. “Mr. X broke my thousand dollar Sound Wave figure” implies at least two researchable arguments: 1) Proof that Mr. X did indeed break Sound Wave, and 2) a research argument on the worth of Sound Wave. However, such an argument is ultimately banal, and doesn’t require much critical thinking. But knowing the reason Sound Wave is worth a thousand dollars does demand a greater degree of critical thinking, and this knowledge arms the greedy researcher with not only more information on the item of value itself, but on how to speculate more items like it. Such a question will force research into cultural trends, contexts, manufacturing details, and ultimately the interrelationship of all of these factors to bring us the thousand-dollar Sound Wave. If said researcher works for an auction company, a research essay—verbal or otherwise—is called for.

Naturally, “not getting screwed” can branch off into more complex research oriented advantages, such as: “how to tell when X is lying”; “how to avoid being fired for writing angry things on Facebook”; “how to tell when a presenter has missed a crucial piece of information, especially when that information pertains to the functionality of your vehicle’s brakes”; and others in this vein.

As a literature Ph.D. student, I’m particularly sensitive to students thinking of my topics in terms of “use” and “value.” However, it’s not so hard to convey such value. Even the harshest of naysayers cannot deny the use of knowing literature and how it has been used and abused for political purposes. I try to encourage students to know why particular political leaders/institutions endorse certain books and denounce others. I imagine most literature teachers try to explain the importance of knowing when such abuse/interpretation occurs. In several serious ways—though likely not interconnected with any oppressions the students are facing immediately—knowing how and why a piece of literature (or visual culture or music or any other art form) is being exploited can greatly foster “not getting screwed” in a rather “big picture” sense.

Kathleen Yancey’s idea of interconnectivity between texts composed in an academic setting and ‘real world’ genres basically coincides with what I attempt (“Made Not Only in Words” 311). She poses that students aren’t being asked—at least not habitually—to draw “real world” connections with academic writing. However, I’ll be the first to admit that my priorities up to this point have been in fostering academic survivability for writing students. Without a certain repertoire of skills at their fingertips, progressing to even finish a bachelor’s degree can become an insurmountable challenge. While it’s not difficult to mount threats (“you will fail out of school and therefore fail to get a degree which will lead to you never being employed if you don’t pass this class”) to make our material applicable, it doesn’t really ensure its survival beyond a single classroom moment (as Yancey puts it) or moments. Which, looking to our own professional self perpetuation, doesn’t coincide with “not getting screwed”, culturally or economically.

Of course, “not getting screwed” is only the beginning of research-oriented motivation. Maybe it’s not even the beginning for some. Plenty of people can geek out and live in our world just fine. We teach others to survive in academe because it’s not somehow an unreal world—it’s a very real world to “us” (i.e. people who get paid to teach). But self-perpetuation without some kind of intellectual progeny beyond academics doesn’t really help anyone. Eww…progeny.

Subversion:

Nothing seems so universally applicable as learning subversive writing techniques. Maybe I’m extraordinarily biased in this supposition. Growing up, I at first had a very difficult time succeeding in school. Not that I was merely a loudmouthed, argumentative type—though I certainly could (can) be—but rather my interests and methods yielded the wrong results for assignments. Even when I was on the right track, I would often tweak my language in the wrong ways, leading many teachers to wonder about my mental health. Really, these are all the classical problems many writing students face. The act of writing requires a large degree of self-consciousness, and it’s difficult to commit oneself to seemingly alien methods, which can also seem counter to one’s worldview. In short, I was stubborn. I generally had a good grip on why we were learning something, but didn’t always feel as if we were going about it the right way.

Ultimately, I grew sick of fighting. It was so much easier to follow the assignment directions and to do as I was told in general. However, something inside me kept screaming bloody revolt, and that Alan Rickman type voice couldn’t be silenced. “You can still follow directions and say what you want to say, you just have to be clever”, it snapped. “Whoa,” I inwardly replied. My linguistic revenge manifested severally, though mostly in a form that was tailor-made to fit the assignment in question. That nagging parcel of my mind always ensured that I had something to contribute from my own perspective, my own critical digestion of the material. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that I wasn’t really being subversive, just an okay critical thinker at the time.

However, I’m certainly not saying that out and out subversion isn’t worth teaching and learning. A particularly salient example comes from my brother’s days as an anthropology student. He like other anthro majors had to take “Sex, Evolution, and Human Nature,” a class largely predisposed to approaches in Evolutionary Psychology and (sometimes disguised) Sociobiology. While generally able to voice his concerns with those approaches throughout the course’s run, my brother was eventually forced to write his final essay on defending them. Being a person of strong academic conviction (and mule-stubborn), he opted to instead compose a satire. While he indeed addressed the major arguments and posed an effective defense of them, he made good use of naysayers to deconstruct what he had just forwarded as viable. But simply deconstructing those arguments was not enough—he needed to make it read convincingly—so ultimately Evolutionary Psychology would seem to win over in the end. While he didn’t succeed in overtly attacking Evolutionary Psychology, he did succeed in complicating the issue by giving his counter-arguments ample face time. Even though Hannibal Lecter shares only a minority of screen time in Silence of the Lambs, he certainly steals the show, and his impact reverberates. What a creepy analogy….

And, on a more practical level, subversive writers often operate in grand literary fashion without getting killed. Chaucer survived much political upheaval and still managed to get in his barbs—so too with Shakespeare. The Roman Emperor Claudius acted like a fool in his early adult life, never becoming a target for assassination. Other examples abound—not tweaking the wrong noses often means not getting killed. Also, writers can win more arguments with honey than acid splashed in their enemies’ faces. If only more students considered this adage prior to posting “OMFG I FüKIN H8T3 MY J0B!11! and my BOSS!1!!” on Facebook.
So there: honesty via dishonesty.

Context: A part of Yancey’s argument that particularly resonated with me concerns her emphasis on context transferring. Yeah, I made that term up. Basically, she argues (in two separate points on 311) that students need to understand how to transfer what they learn “from one site to another”, and how that transfer affects their compositions. At first her argument didn’t really resonate with me, but ultimately she’s recognizing a medium’s impact on the projection of compositions. For example, if I were to purchase The Beatle’s mega stereo box-set, I’d have a significantly different listening experience than if I were to have purchased the mono set, especially if my stereo—an (hopefully) effective analogue to writing mediums—has only one speaker. The differences wouldn’t be immediately tangible in every respect, however. With text, changing methods and mediums predisposes that text to manifest in different ways. I spoke with my students a bit about this phenomenon today in class, telling the tale of how my writing style changed rather drastically from when I regularly used pen to when I first began using a computer late in High School. With a pen, my hand often cramped, and I found myself searching for more concise phrases to use. Moreover, my somewhat large script fostered the illusion that I’d written a great pile. My spelling was also superior. However, I generally didn’t have as good a handle on how a longer essay should appear (it not being in front of my face, easy to scroll to), and long compositions were a much more tedious undertaking. The computer, of course, helped me become a lazy speller, a rather fast typist, and possibly a better organizer. Ultimately, the medium changes Yancey refers to are much more complex—my writing training took place in a particular time-frame, places, and social mores which all enculturated that process.

Clearly, new mediums are called for by different pressures. I feel responsible for conveying a sense of self-awareness to my students, to help them understand what compositional tool is right for which job. I’m not saying that they’re always distinct, or that we’d even want them to be, but some writer’s tools work better in different situations. Piling on the statistics when attempting to reach a general audience, for example isn’t a very good idea. Analogously, attempting to slam down a 200-page dissertation on a single web screen may result in readers having apoplectic fits. Obviously, all of these factors apply topically as well. All writing has to be put into context, but not at one to one ratios. Meaning, knowing a particular context is fine, but a single text won’t fit every context the same, nor converse with that context in the same ways. *I’m gasping for e-air*

Bottom line: I’ve whined about academic fields not really talking to one another in meaningful ways for many years (maybe brought on by a sense of paranoia rather than any real understanding of pan academic communication), but Yancey seems to go further than academics. However, I’m apprehensive about her “real world” distinctions she draws between academic writing contexts and other contexts. I hope that her approach fosters connecting contexts, rather than denoting one as real and another as…not…real. I’d like to think that she (we) is on the right track.