I’m actually not talking all that much about blogging here; more about digital genres in general and how they fit into the composition classroom. But “Reasons for Blogging” sounded so much pithier than “Reasons for Composing Web Pages and Other Digital Genres.” Anyway: Clancy Ratliff’s recent post on how to fit student weblogs into her course raised some interesting questions for me. My response to her involved a construction of weblogging as “low-stakes” writing, sort of the wired public forum equivalent of the way some composition curricula use journals, but I find that to be an incomplete answer.
Another piece of the answer might be in recent discussions at Kairosnews about the place of tech instruction in the writing classroom. There seemed to be some consensus that “writing for the web” was an appropriate topic of instruction, and one respondent made reference to skills that prepare students for “the business world.” As some folks have heard me repeatedly observe in other contexts, such a perspective seems to imply a view of writing instruction and higher education as highly vocational in nature: all we’re doing, the message seems to be, is preparing students to be good workers in the information economy.
To be fair, the poster also made reference to “the public sector.” However, that still seems to me to imply what James Britton would call strictly “transactional” uses of writing; words that do the world’s work — as opposed to more “expressive” or “poetic” uses, to borrow Britton’s other two terms. And maybe that’s what I’m after: I believe first-year (well, any-year) composition courses ought to be more than just service courses; I want to hold on to the old notions of the enriching power of the liberal education, as elitist as they may be, as a significant component of writing instruction. As someone who, in addition to currently working on my PhD in rhetoric and composition, also holds an MFA in fiction writing, I believe that writing is good for more than money.
Which makes me ask: why teach digital genres? Most answers I’ve seen somehow serve the vocational or service course model, and the ones that don’t — from hypertext theorists like George Landow, Richard Lanham, et cetera — seem to me to frequently fall prey to the much-decried (sometimes wrongfully so, and sometimes not so wrongfully so) excesses of theory. In a course focused on teaching nonfiction prose writing (often constituted as The Essay), how might I understand the benefits to students of learning to compose in digital genres, in a way that might seem more suited to the liberal education than to the vocational education model?
Bumpy segue: I think these questions about the value of writing in a market context as opposed to other contexts are coming partly out my frustration with Hazlitt tonight. Hazlitt writes that “Amateur writers on economics are always asking for ‘just’ prices and ‘just’ wages,” and opposes the just to the functional: “Functional prices are those that encourage the largest volume of production and the largest volume of sales. Functional wages are those that tend to bring about the highest volume of employment and the largest payrolls” (106). The dollar sign, for Hazlitt, is apparently more important than foolish notions about the Just (were he alive today, I picture him being chums with Michael Milken and Ken Lay); Hazlitt clearly believes very strongly in Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the self-regulating power of the market, as long as the market is left alone.
Heilbroner & Thurow, however, point out one obvious significant problem: “the market system has no way of providing certain public goods” (20) such as education. (Apologies for rehearsing common knowledge; it helps me get things in order in my head.) Another problem, making daily news on Slashdot, is that Hazlitt’s somewhat antiquated notions about production ignore the complications that digital reproducibility introduces into a market economy. Still, Smith is one of Heilbroner & Thurow’s holy trinity of economists, the other two being Keynes and Marx. According to Heilbroner & Thurow, for Keynes, “there was no self-correcting property in the market system to keep capitalism growing” (31), which is where government comes in, to help the economy continue chugging along. Marx, of course, does not believe that markets are self-regulating: surplus value theory suggests that the profits of capitalism lie in unpaid labor, and this circumstance is what creates class struggle. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, until it all blows up.
How does writing instruction serve or not serve production and employment? Smith, I think, would argue that the market’s invisible hand might tap universities on the shoulder and beckon composition classrooms towards skills that will serve the post-Fordist economy. I’m not sure what Keynes would say. Marx wanted class conflict, so it’s hard to really think about his perspective, but there are Marxist educators like Paulo Freire who advocate a form of education that both fosters a liberatory “critical consciousness” and simultaneously does not deny the student the technical or vocational skills she needs.
What this all adds up to is the conclusion that I’m in a contradictory position: I favor an ideological model of education that incorporates concerns that go beyond the economic, but my interest in class yanks me immediately back to those same economic concerns. Dang.
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