Computers

Writing Eula’s Name and Numbers

preterite Computers

Classical economic theory, from Smith and Ricardo, holds that the amount of labor used to produce a commodity is the determinant of its price; neoclassical economists reject this, arguing rather that supply and demand — as constructed by preferences and productivity — are what determine prices. In the computer age, digital reproducibility in particular foregrounds the role preferences play in determining price. However, I think the phenomenon of open-source and freely distributed software — while certainly digitally reproducible — gives all economic models (classical, neo-classical, or Marxian) fits. In fact, I wonder whether economists would even call such software a part of the economy, or whether they would name it as an externality, or a product of a non-class process.

But that’s just the start, here. Let’s add another complicating factor, and talk about the place of depreciation on a balance sheet. We understand that the depreciation of a business asset — its loss in value over time — can be written off, in the U.S., as a tax loss. (This tax writeoff is what makes certain REIT mutual funds potentially solid investments.) When Darla the Wal-Mart greeter decides to start her own small Web design business on the side, the $1000 computer she buys will lose value (and not just due to Moore’s Law) over time, and she can deduct that loss from the taxes that her business pays. So one question I have would be, if Darla gets a big client and needs to invest in a $699 copy of LIFT NN/g Pro, will that software depreciate in the same way (for tax purposes) that her computer does? (Anybody with business experience have insights to offer here?)

I wrote recently about possible ways in which university administrators might view computers as capital, generating return on investment; a better way to put it for that model might be to call them “business assets.” However, Charlie reminded me yesterday that the state university, unlike a for-profit corporation, doesn’t pay taxes, and so computers can’t be written off as depreciation. So I need to keep in mind that, as much as American culture’s understanding of economics seems dominated by the neoclassical ideology, I need to be careful when trying to understand the university through such a lens: capital may do strange things in not-for-profit environments.

But see, I’ve also been looking at how writing circulates as a product in the classroom, and whether education itself can be understood as a product. These questions also become more difficult when coupled to the contexts of the university and open-source software.
Read more

Narratives of Mobility

preterite Class (Cultural), Composition Theory, Computers, Metadissertating

I had two conversations about class today and yesterday, one with a fellow PhD candidate in the Rhetoric & Composition program here, and the other with Charlie, who’s on my committee, and gleaned some small and useful insights from those conversations.

First: in composition (and in many other places as well; the Raymond Williams I so frequently invoke is certainly an example), there exists a genre of the social mobility narrative; the story of the professor from the working-class background. Victor Villanueva and Mike Rose offer perhaps the foremost examples, but there are plenty of others, and in fact one of the things I’m trying to work against is the use of the authenticity of lived experience as the class marker that trumps all others. My small insight, though: within the context of composition’s engagement with identity politics (our assumptions that race, gender, age, class, sexual preference, and other markers of identity influence the teaching and learning of writing), the narrative of the academic’s transition from the working class to the professional class is always going to be a narrative of isolation and betrayal, because the academic can no longer claim working-class status. She can’t go home again. Other identity-politics narratives of entrance into the academy are not so bound by definitions: the queer professor is not made un-queer by becoming a professor.

Second: Charlie observed that the view of technology in composition’s subfield of computers and composition has changed from an understanding of technology-as-efficiency to an understanding of technology-as-equalizer. Early theorists in computers and composition believed that word processing would make writing easier, that computers would help students to write better papers in less time. The enthusiasm for this view waned, and writing teachers began to focus more of their hopes on technology as furthering egalitarian ends, on computers as the tool that might help to remedy social inequalities in the classroom. We’ve moved from asking “How can computers make writing more efficient?” to asking “How can computers make writing more egalitarian?” In this same conversation, Charlie also again suggested that I need to consider whether I’m going to use my dissertation to ask, “How does class affect what students do in the wired writing classroom?” or to ask, “What do compositionists say about how class affects what students do in the wired writing classroom?” In other words, am I doing a literature study or classroom research? A possible answer: I think both efficiency and equity are concerns associated with class; the former with the relationships of production, and the latter with relationships of privilege. And yet nobody in computers and composition ever talks about class. My research question, then, might be: how does the specter of class mobility hide behind and/or inform the discourse of computers and composition? How and why are people in the field avoiding explicit discussions of the very real ways in which concerns of class intersect with our ideals of efficiency and equality?

Educause: Throw Tech At It

preterite Computers, Culture, Education

Cross-posted as a response at Kairosnews in slightly abbreviated form.

cel4145 at Kairosnews has posted an interesting story featuring two links (PDF warning on both) from Educause, an organization that I feel really ought to have a .com domain, or at the very least a .org, but definitely not a .edu: after poking around their site for a bit (check out the corporate stuff), it’s pretty obvious these guys are total shills for corporate technology in education. Not that it’s really surprising, given the tenor of the articles, or even the organization’s motto (“Hello, tech support? Yes, the state has cut our budget, there’s a cheating scandal in the Physics department, the adjuncts are trying to unionize, the English faculty has been snacking on continental philosophers again, and our quarterback’s in jail; we’d like our university bugfix service pack 4.8.3b, please”), but worth noting, since both articles demonstrate unproblematic alliegance to the philosophies that (1) technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods is an independent and value-free force driving social change, (2) universities in providing education qua consumable good must respond to that technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods, (3) universities in their responses to that technological advance should serve corporate/consumer culture. To be even less surprised, check out what Educause says about their readership and their corporate sponsors and advertisers.

Maybe you can tell that I didn’t much care for what either article had to say.
Read more

Wages and Technology

preterite Computers, Education

Mankiw names labor as one of the “factors of production” (two other important ones are land and capital) that shape the production of goods and services. “Supply and demand,” he states, “determine prices paid to workers” (398), said price being the price paid for labor, or a wage. And the wage is equal to the value of the marginal product of labor (Mankiw 400), with the marginal product of labor being defined as the change in output (as output increases) divided by the change in the number of workers (as output increases). Apparently, in most cases, having some over-large number of workers will cause a negative profit, usually because of limited tasks and facilities at which to work (there are no infinitely long assembly lines, and Universities have a finite number of classrooms in which to pay their teachers to teach first-year writing), which explains why output doesn’t increase geometrically with the number of laborers. So where do computers come in?
Read more

Still More on Relations of Production

preterite Computers, Culture, Writing

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.
Read more

Writing as Property

preterite Computers, Culture, Writing

The Movable Type templates (which I’ve only so far modified very slightly for this weblog) include a section for Creative Commons licenses, which I’ve thought about using here, in particular an attribution license. However, the smart points folks have made in the Creative Commons discussion at Metafilter caused me to stop and think a little; I still haven’t made up my mind.

Compositionists who do research in their classrooms, furthermore, are expected to respect students’ writing as the property of the student, and to take considerable care around issues of permissions before reproducing that writing. And student anonymity and permissions around writing and representation are why I’m being weird about self-identifying on this weblog.

What I’m trying to lead into, I guess, is my focus for this post (the thing I didn’t quite make it to yesterday) on the concerns associated with an understanding of writing as property.
Read more