I used weblogs yesterday as an example to make a distinction between for-profit and for-pleasure writing. As usual, I was a little hasty. Consider what Glenn Reynolds had to say this morning:
“You can blog for the money — in which case you should be very glad that Andrew [Sullivan] is raising the bar, and generating a general sense that it’s okay to donate. Or you can blog for fun, in which case why should you care if he’s getting some bucks out of it?”
Reynolds goes on to talk about his reasons for blogging, and has some interesting points and links; his perspective helps me to see that maybe, as with the tentative answer to that question Catherine Gammon asked me, the motivations might not matter as much as the act itself. For me, this is a small step towards one way of thinking about the production of writing, within and outside of the composition classroom. At the same time, it raises other questions.
Of which the most elementary would be: what are the differences in the motivations for the consumption of for-profit as opposed to for-pleasure weblogs? The answer seems self-evident, until I start thinking about the position of the composition teacher. Does the teacher actually consume writing? The first inclination is to immediately answer in the affirmative, but consider the fact that the composition teacher is actually the one person who can’t stop reading a piece of student writing. She can’t just make a little mark after the first two or three sentences and tell the student, “This is where I got bored and flipped to another paper,” in the way she might get impatient with an article in a magazine or on a weblog.
So I think I’ve still got a lot of working-out of assumptions to do about how writing gets produced before I understand the implications of the positions of orthodox Marxist theorists of class in English Studies, people like Richard Ohmann. (Cripes: that’s one ugly sentence, Mike.) But I can at least ask more specific questions. In looking at the broader context of the university and the narrower context of the composition classroom as comprising a number of overlapping relations and processes of production and consumption,
How do compositionists understand education as a product?
How do compositionists understand writing as a product?
How do compositionists understand educational institutions as producers and consumers of those products?
How do compositionists understand teachers as producers and consumers of those products?
How do compositionists understand students as producers and consumers of those products?
And with all this, I’ve got to keep in mind that the Marxist angle, while obvious, is only one angle on socioeconomic class; while it focuses on relations of production, it obscures things that are more usefully illuminated by other perspectives (class as wealth, position, education, difference, experience, et cetera). I should also point out that, in acknowledging the vocational model of education, I’m implying a break from the Marxist perspective by taking a more Weberian view concerning the hierarchization of students via occupation once they leave college. (To put matters more accurately, college serves as one of the sorters in that Weberian hierarchy of occupational classes.)
The reason I’m on this relations-of-production thing yet again today, the reason I continue to flog this poor horse, is that I checked out the absolutely amazing labor of love put together by Daniel Anderson (for those of you who know me, no, obviously not that Daniel, for whom I’ve had a story I’d like to write percolating for a while) over at Kairos. I mean, Anderson clearly put a hell of a lot of work into this video essay, including a 28MB QuickTime movie and a bunch of other smaller clips, and it’s really worth checking out. I found it interesting because, yes, it used the term “prosumer” to talk about production and consumption, in the context of bringing student digital video composing projects into the writing classroom. (There I go again with ugly prose. I’m just all overadjectivey tonight.) “Prosumer,” of course, refers to the digital video equipment Anderson’s students use, placing the cost and functionality of the equipment between “professional” and “consumer.”
See, already there’s fun stuff going on, even in the terms. Professional implies equipment that’s for use by those who do it for a living; they make money doing it, so paying for expensive equipment is an investment with a return realized in the consumption of texts produced with the equipment. And consumer, as in “consumer electronics,” indicates less-expensive equipment that’s not intended for professional use, but only for consumption: like hi-fi gear, it’s for fun, a luxury; something that you work in order to be able to consume.
I get a little skeptical, though, when Anderson starts pushing this as an educational “solution.” Sure, it has some interesting learning payoffs (now I can’t get away from the money metaphors); Anderson or one of his students suggests about the digital movies they made that “by producing, one can become a more critical consumer,” and furthermore, “when you become a producer of something, you re-evaluate how you see that media,” which, well, sure, I mean that’s straight Marx right there: you’re changing your relationship to the means of production.
The problem is, while Anderson suggests that moving down on the price-of-equipment continuum is a good thing, he’s still way up there on that continuum. At points in the movie, with all the Powerbooks in evidence, I thought I was watching a Mac commercial, and while I like Macs, the fact of the matter is that a base-model Powerbook starts at $1600, most digital video cameras are still well over $500, and even an entry-level “consumer” Mac goes for $800. Anderson suggests that “professional technologies enable more sophisticated levels of competency but limit access,” but his own project is hardly throwing wide the doors.
I wouldn’t have such difficulties with this if he didn’t invoke (and apparently miss the point of) an essay by Patricia Fitzsimmons-Hunter and Charles Moran (“Writing Teachers, Schools, Access, and Change,” in Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet, Taylor and Ward, eds. New York: Columbia, 1998.). While Anderson constructs Moran and Fitzsimmons-Hunter as focusing on “the literacy and agency possibilities afforded by entry-level technologies” (a level which, to reiterate, digital video is currently not: Fitzsimmons-Hunter and Moran discuss the uses of $200 bare-bones word-processing SmartBooks), the fact of the matter is that their essay argues for more focus on teacher training, and less spending on what they call “computer-in-every-pot” projects.
For Fitzsimmons-Hunter and Moran, computers have much less predominance in the cycle of production than they do for Anderson: the interaction between teachers and students is where education is produced — not in the interaction between students and digital video technology.
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