In my dissertating work (which, yes, has been uneven lately), I’m looking at an intersection, a nexus: the wired writing classroom as a place where rhetorics meet students meet communities meet technologies meet economies meet teachers meet classes meet writings meet publics. The nexus, itself, imagined as a single space comprising multiple elements, and each of those elements multivariate: publics are as diverse and diversely defined as economies, economies as diverse and diversely defined as rhetorics, and so too for classes, students, and the rest.
This intersection — singular in its abstracted space, in the way I try to hold its relations, it is legion — scares me. I can’t take all this on, I say.
But I am, I want to say back. If it was easy, somebody’d already have done it. If it was just a thing, a single and separable thing, you’d hardly do a dissertation on it.
Conversation
Dan Pagis
Four talked about the pine tree. One defined it by genus, species, and variety. One assessed its disadvantages for the lumber industry. One quoted poems about pine trees in many languages. One took root, stretched out branches, and rustled.
Translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell
(from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, J. D. McClatchy, ed. New York: Vintage, 1996.)
These seem to be the same sort of questions that have been discussed at WealthBondage a bit. Tutor had a post that linked to Anne Galloway’s site where she was asking questions about who we design for, who is the customer? Is it the entreprenuer who commercializes it or the community that has to use it? It matters particularly much when we consider social software and Civil Society.
That’s really the most important thing about Open Source, the licenses are designed so that the community owns it, and not any particular interest. It really is a powerful idea.