Computers

CCCC07 I14: Our Uses of

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Conference Notes, Writing

The full title of this panel was “Our Uses of Student Writing: Thinking Critically About Composition Scholarship.” Mariolina Salvatori presented first, giving a general overview of the panel as a whole — she would focus on scholarship, Jennifer Whatley would focus on research, and Richard Parent would focus on student writing in the context of the internet. Salvatori then moved into her portion on scholarship, offering as an introductory condition the assertion that a student text is to composition scholars as a literary text is to literature scholars. The difficulty, however, lies in that literature as a discipline has developed clear (albeit evolving: note the widely ranging reactions to Moretti’s work) rules of engagement for literary texts, whereas composition’s rules for engagement with student texts are still emerging, ad hoc, in process, to be determined. Furthermore, some of our conventions of engaging student texts are not in line with our theory, and this may indicate our ambivalence about the status writing about students may not grant us.

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CCCC07 C.26: Textual Transgressions

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Conference Notes, Writing

Collin Brooke acknowledged at the outset of this panel that there were technological difficulties coordinating this panel’s presentations, and the start of the presentations was delayed by six minutes as Collin (the chair) and others worked to overcome those difficulties. The panel’s full title was “Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis,” and the presenters offered a useful body of insight into the various ways that textual appropriation functions online, and how those various functions of appropriation serve to illuminate our practices and preconceptions surrounding the teaching of writing.

Clancy Ratliff’s presentation, “Negotiating and Regulating Plagiarism in Everyday Blogging Practices,” began from a personal example: her weblog, CultureCat, has been repeatedly plagiarized, in various and interesting ways. Ratliff has posted a brief recap with slides of her presentation, but I think she’s being too modest in the account she gives: as is typical of her work, her presentation was insightful, witty, and focused. The first example of weblog plagiarism she offered came to her via an email that read: “You hv posted a very kewl blog. I have stolen a few things from It just to start with my own blog.”

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Production and Appropriation

preterite Computers, Economics, Writing

Last Friday night, I was having dinner and seeing Pan’s Labyrinth with my attorney (she was drunk, of course, and amazed me yet again by somehow fitting a twelve-pack of St. Ides, an enormous Smith & Wesson 460 with the 8-inch barrel, and a two-pound venison tenderloin for snacking on into the hunting vest she wore beneath her DKNY wool coat), so the next installment of Cadet Mala Casey’s story will have to wait until this coming Friday.

Tonight, I went into the city for dinner (vegetarian on Curry Hill at Pongal, on Lexington between 27th and 28th: excellent, excellent Indian food but indifferent service) with some new acquaintances, some old friends, and my Master’s thesis advisor, and so had a stretch of useful focused reading time on the train. And it helped me put together some stuff about value and appropriation that I’ll likely talk about at CCCC.

First: in an article on social networking sites in BT Technology Journal, Judith Donath and danah boyd offer a brief discussion of the ways economic signaling theory can be used to analyze the way people display (wear? badge? perform? publicize?) their connections in social networks. While Donath’s and boyd’s discussion is largely confined to social networking sites like Orkut and Friendster, their conclusions are generalizable to our increasingly networked culture in general, and to blogs in particular: “The expenditure of energy to maintain a connection,” they argue, “is a signal of its importance and of the benefits it bestows” (Donath and boyd 81), or–in other words–a signal of its value. When I leave a comment on a post by Bradley, Jeff, or Joanna, I’m signaling its subjective value to me in ways that are socially reinforced, to varying degrees, by other commenters, while at the same time creating additional value for myself through the labor expended in creating my comment on the post. In much the same way, if Chris or Liz or Amanda leaves a comment here, they’re also producing additional value that can be appropriated by the broader community constituted by our various blogrolls, and the semi-invisible (to us, at least) community of lurkers. And as we know, the scholarly apparatus of citation is another form of value-signaling.

But the concerns emerge when we start to talk about the appropriation of value. We know that information is a non-rivalrous and non-scarce good, but with the intellectual DRM of plagiarism policies, we treat it as rivalrous and scarce. While plagiarism policies predate the information age, they’ve become inextricably embedded in its evolution. In Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion, John Logie (I’m a bit late, but thanks for suggesting it, Clancy!), approvingly deploys Andrew Ross’s 1990 description of “the ongoing attempt to rewrite property law in order to contain the effect of the new information technologies that… have transformed the way in which modern power is exercised and maintained” (Ross 10, qtd. in Logie 31) in order to help illustrate “the degree to which the state depends on the maintenance of stable property lines” (Logie 31). Logie offers a strong critique of the ways bureaucratic attempts to respond to the digital reproducibility of information have wholly failed to account for its not-rivalrous nature. At the same time, though, Logie points out that “U.S. courts have repeatedly rejected the notion that creators of intellectual property are entitled to any special consideration based on their investment of labor,” and cites Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s insistence in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service that “the public’s interest in access to information can trump the creator’s expectation for a return on effort expended” (55).

This is a clearly economic argument, and an apparent rejection of the labor theory of value. (I think. Other perspectives?) Do I agree with it? Well, it’s law, so it doesn’t really matter whether I agree or not–but it strikes me as interesting that the rationale inheres in an emphasis on the consumer rather than on the supplier of information; on the appropriation rather than on the production. Part of my project for this CCCC presentation, then, should be to come up with a basic and rudimentary rhetoric of the process of production, appropriation, distribution, and reproduction of value in writing. (Which might help me compose an answer to Jenn’s important question.)

Outsider’s Hubris

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

At the moment, I’m trying to get a handle on Sraffian economics and I’m recognizing the deep poverty of my economic self-education. I’m struggling with stuff that’s beyond me, and feeling quite foolish. For a while, I’ve carried the outsider’s hubris of telling myself how smart I am for trying to import into my discipline concerns I see as hitherto ignored. I told myself I’d take a graduate course in heterodox economics, with a couple semesters of independent study as an introduction and a graduate directed study as a follow-up, and I’d be OK.

Well, not so much.

I can read some of the articles in the economics collections and journals, especially the ones that apply cultural studies or rhetorical perspectives to economic problems, like Timothy Mitchell’s excellent “The Object of Development: America’s Egypt” or Duncan Ironmonger’s “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product.” But I’m not so good with the equations, even the simple ones, until I read back through a couple times and see what’s being parsed, and even then I don’t often get it, and have to read further for context. Case in point: I’ve got Stiglitz’s 1974 review article on the Cambridge capital controversy in front of me, and it’s killing me. I know what it’s about, and I recognize the assertions, but I can’t parse the proofs. Even some of the recent evaluations of Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, which I want to use to help me get beyond the notion of marginality that neoclassical economics poses as an alternative to the labor theory of value, are giving me a hard time.

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Of Possible Librarian Interest

preterite Academia, Computers, Education

The new issue of Kairos is out, and it’s a good one. Of particular interest to some of my librarian peers, for whom I have much respect and whose scholarship I wish my discipline would more fully engage in conversation, might be James Purdy and Joyce Walker’s remarkable and compelling essay, “Digital Breadcrumbs: Case Studies of Online Research.”

Good stuff from my perspective, and I’m curious to hear what those respected expert peers might say.

Instructional Technology

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers

The institutional powers at my school are terrified of the Web. All of the useful online tools — grade books, attendance records, even Blackboard — are only accessible via a school-issued computer and Virtual Private Network. Course web sites have to go through various layers of approval and changes have to be sent through an extradepartmental authority.

In some ways, I understand why: here, we’re a .mil as wel as a .edu, and there have been considerable .mil hacking embarassments in the past, including one incident last semester that DoD responded to in typical fashion by shutting down practically everything on the .mil network for two days; the proverbial locking the barn door after the horse is gone.

But still: making a course LMS unavailable except via VPN that one can only access via one’s work computer with smart card properly inserted? That’s paranoia past the edge of ridiculousness. Are we somehow worried that the Chinese are going to hack Blackboard and insert subtle anti-Taiwanese and pro-planned-economy rhetoric into my lesson plan on film, Istanbul, stereotypes, and composing cultural alterity? Is Al-Qaeda going to weaken my students’ moral fiber by making them think that plagiarism is more complex and sophisticated an issue than the MPAA’s anti-theft intellectual propery rhetoric suggests? (Oh, no. Wait. I already do that.)

One challenge I’m continuing to run into is the hierarchical and monolithic nature of IT here: the Army gives all the students and all the faculty their computers, and only certain programs and practices are approved. I can’t count on students accessing the course web site via Firefox on their Ubuntu laptop at the local coffee shop: here, it’s IE, Windows Vista, and 802.11i (!) all the way, no matter what. So I can encourage them to use Open software, but really, when Uncle Sam gives you all the corporate stuff for free, incentives and evangelizing become a bit more difficult. And I can’t exactly fight Uncle Sam on this stuff.

But still. It’d be so, so nice to have simple, secure FTP access to courseware of my choice on campus websites. To have a path to Perl and my own /cgi-bin.

Walking Hours

preterite Computers, Rhetoric

In my first semester as a new professor, much of my attention is going either to managing the load of papers, committees, and other work or else to syllabus development and lesson planning (and my enjoyment of the time spent in the classroom), but I’m also aware of some of the unique aspects of the extracurriculum here. Consider, as one such aspect, the way certain discipline concerns are managed:

I’m not sure what else to say other than the practice of videorecording, editing, and distributing this film stands in an extremely interesting relationship to the exercise of discipline depicted in the film. There’s something of the repurposing there that Jim Ridolfo has talked about in his investigations of “rhetorical velocity,” and that repurposing does interesting things with the relation between representation and power. Note to self: this bears further investigation, especially at an institution like mine.

Declamation and the Digital

preterite Computers, Rhetoric, Writing

In Lester Faigley’s “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal” (CE October 1986, 527-542), this analogy stopped me:

In organizations where computer technologies have become commonplace, people have taken advantage of opportunities for horizontal communication on topics of their choice through computer ‘bulletin boards,’ which function like radio call-in programs. (538, emphasis mine)

It’s an early metaphor, certainly, and a notion that’s been addressed in various ways in our nascent literature about writing and blogging. But I love the shift there, the look to older technologies, and the way we understand those older technologies today as the domain of an apoplectic Rush Limbaugh or a low-key Tom Ashbrook. (No offense, Tom: I like your show a lot. But NPR, as the smart counter to Rush, sometimes tries too hard to make its programming chamomile-tea mellow and inoffensive.) Usenet as late-night call-ins from the cranks and tin-foil hat crowd.

Blogs, of course, have been widely represented as the same, and I hope we’re past that now. But what about the aspect of declamation? What about the late-night crank phone call to the radio station where the listener offers a half-hour raving systematization of gray aliens, the Zionist Occupational Government, black helicopters, man-hating bra-burning feminists, the United Nations, and the general incompetence of teachers of writing?

What happens if we understand those as instances of Seneca the Elder’s suasoriae and controversiae in the context of their relation to the hegemonic force of mainstream discourse? As, in fact, counterhegemonic uses of genre that in their deployment of genre serve to either (1) indict the way that discourse functions under an oppressive regime or (2) praise the operation of discourse under that regime, depending on who’s reading.

No answers. But I keep coming back to that Faigley quote as a moment of interesting rupture. Its juxtaposition of qualities and modes.

Accepted

preterite Class (Marxian), Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

Looks like I’ll be in NYC this spring, and among fine company, judging by the rhet-comp blogosphere’s activity today. I submitted an individual CCCC proposal for the first time since 2000, and I’ve been placed into a panel titled “Capitalism, Commodification, and Consumerism,” so I’m definitely eager to see who I’ll be presenting with. And happy and grateful, as always, to have the opportunity to share what I’m working on.

My presentation’s current title is “Identity as Economic Activity: Representing Class from the Wealth of Nations to the Wealth of Networks.” I’m planning to do things differently this year: I’ll try to write it as a journal article first, and then condense it down to presentation length in order to (I hope) get some helpful feedback before sending it out.

Abstract follows, for those who might be interested.

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