Computers

Beyond Mass: Distributed

preterite Computers

I recently wrote about Rostow’s teleological model of economic development, with its highest or end stage of high mass consumption plus high mass production. I’ve also talked some about how an economy creates subjects and subects constitute an economy (consider some sections of my recent conference presentations, as well as what I’ve been doing with Gibson-Graham.

Zuboff and Maxmin offer an interesting spin on the intersection of these things, suggesting that we’ve already begun to move past simple “mass” consumption and production, and pointing out what that move has to do with the way individuals work in a networked economy of consumption. “In an advanced industrial society,” they write, “consumption is a necessity, not a luxury. It is what people must do to survive. It is the way that individuals take care of themselves and their families, much as hunting and gathering or growing crops were for people of earlier societies. For today’s women and men, consumption decisions encompass everything from education to health care, insurance, transportation, and communication, as well as food, shelter, clothing, and luxuries. Through the consumption of experience — travel, shelter, college — people both achieve and express individual self-determination. No one can escape the centrality of consumption. There is no distinct class of consumers. Everyone is a consumer, no matter what their status or income level” (7). So first, there’s an interesting construction of class; second, while the construction of education as a consumable experience good strikes me as problematic (I still don’t have an adequate understanding of the ways in which students, teachers, institutions, societies, and economies interact to produce and consume education, which may simply indicate that the production/consumption binary cannot be adequately applied to education), I’m happy to see them noting the informatization of consumption in addition to Zuboff’s earlier attention to the informatization of production.
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Historicizing Practices

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Writing

Eleven and a half hours on the redeye from Honolulu to New England and I’m stuck with the middle seat in the middle row on a 777. Still, I’ve got two laptop batteries, and my neighbors on either side are sleeping; time enough to do a little blogging, and work on photoshopping some of my Kailua and Waikiki pictures, which I’ll try to post tonight.

Steve Krause, Julia Romberger, and Stephanie Vie gave a fine panel on “Historicizing Computers and Writing: Media and Methods” with some really interesting overlaps, intersections, and complications among the individual presentations.
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Hybridity & the Everyday

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers

Only one more full day left here, and then a long, long flight back Thursday afternoon and into Friday morning. I’ve been having a fine time, though, and I’ll post some pictures of my day trip up to the North Shore.

Nancy Barron, Sibylle Gruber, and Connie Sirois presented on “Theories of Technologies: Rhetorics, Embodiments, and the Everyday” for the conference’s second session, and offered some provocative and engaging insights. I was happy to have the chance to chat briefly with Sibylle and Gail Hawisher afterwards, as well. Most interesting were the theoretical perspectives that Sibylle and Connie offered, and the way that Nancy grounded Sibylle’s theoretical perspective in a description of teacherly practice in a hybrid learning environment.
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CW2004 Presentation

preterite Computers, Economics, Education

After an afternoon of swimming and enjoying the sun and sand (and a brief, sunny cloudburst) at Kailua beach, I’ve got that terrific comfortably weary feeling, and I’m sitting out on the lanai behind the cottage at about 8:30 p.m. Hawaii time, watching the garden’s lush abundance of tropical plants wave in the evening breeze, watching the geckos chase one another up and down the garden wall, and there’s an old calico tom who rubs up against my legs and complains to be petted. No internet access here, so I’ll have to wait until I go to the internet caf� tomorrow to post this, but I couldn’t ask for a nicer night. One of these mornings, I’ll have to get up early enough to catch a sunrise on the beach. The last time I was at the beach was eight or nine years ago, when I was in the Army, and we had a mission hauling eight or ten trailers’ worth of military intelligence spook stuff — electronic surveillance gear — down to the Naval Air Station at Key West for drug interdiction. After being here in Hawaii for a few days, I’ve gotta admit that eight or nine years is way too long.

Anyway. At Computers and Writing, I was on a panel with Matt Bunce and Joan Latchaw, and was delighted to discover the coincidence that Joan and I both earned our creative writing MFAs from the University of Pittsburgh, although hers was in poetry, ten years before I earned mine in fiction. Matt and Joan both gave fine presentations — I wish I’d taken better notes on what they had to say — and we had some excellent and insightful questions from our small audience. Mine was a little bit long, and I had to sprint some, which probably wasn’t very good for its intelligibility, since heavily theoretical stuff only gets worse if you rush it. And, like all my early drafts, it’s really quotation-heavy. Many parts of it may look familiar to those of you who’ve been so generous helping me shape, revise, and this material in comments here and posts elsewhere, and I hope the following text at least begins to do justice to the insights you’ve offered.

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RSA Presentation

preterite Computers, Politics, Rhetoric, Rome

I timed an out-loud reading of this, and it clocked in at way too long, so I’m in the process of cutting it by about a third. The presentation, ten hours from now, will be the radio edit; consider this the extended dance mix. I’d be more than grateful for any gripes, critiques, disagreements, or suggestions.

[Note: links added to clarify references and make the essay a little more Web-friendly. Feel free to point me to additional sources.]

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Rhetorical Self-Production

preterite Computers, Politics, Rhetoric, Rome

Hardt and Negri write that “the manifestos of Machiavelli and Marx-Engels define the political as the movement of the multitude and they define the goal as the self-production of the subject” (63). While they use Spinoza to refine and extend this perspective into an ultimately hopeful “materialist teleology” (66), they do not argue with the perspective itself. Today, the politicized production of self — in the writing classroom and on the web — is an increasingly public practice.
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After Empire

preterite Computers, Economics, Rhetoric, Writing

Finished Hardt & Negri’s Empire today. Good stuff, mostly, with a fairly consistent point of view; certainly succeeds in the philosophy department as much as it fails (which it does, abjectly and completely, despite its clearly huge ambitions) in the materialist department. Their erudition is, of course, impressive, and I wished I’d had a dictionary of philosophy on hand while reading: while I’ve read bits of the Hume, Locke, Hobbes, Descartes, and Adorno that they cite, and plenty of the Aristotle, Plato, Foucault, Derrida, Tocqueville, and Benjamin, I’ve only made it through introductions to Kant and Rousseau and Heidegger, and know Spinoza and Hegel by nothing other than reputation and reference. So I struggled a bit when the references flew, as they often did.
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Proposal Weather

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics

Spent most of this gloriously warm and breezy and sunny spring day sitting out on the deck, letting the girls sniff around in their little circumscribed patch of outside-ness (they’re not allowed to go down the steps, because the steps lead to real outside-ness, with a very busy road right out front), and finishing drafting my proposal for the UNH Conference. And, well, doing a couple hundred pages of Hardt and Negri, too, and paging idly through the new Harper’s that came in the mail today, and putting off looking at the latest College English, but I’ll just share the UNH proposal, for now (which, aside from some contextualizing, is basically Chapter 4 of the dissertation). Keep your fingers crossed for me?
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The Blogging Panel

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

I took notes on other sessions I attended in San Antonio as well, but I figure it’s probably best if I only post on the ones that I found really engaging. That said, much of the notes I took on the weblogging presentation by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy are redundant, because they’ve put their presentations online. All were engaging, and all were radically different in style and content, and all three of them did a fine job of usefully pushing the boundaries of the way writing teachers talk and think about the practices associated with weblogging.
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Keeping Up With Tech?

preterite Computers, Culture, Economics, Education

I don’t have the title of the CCCC presentation given by Pam Takayoshi, Gail Hawisher, and Cyndi Selfe in front of me, but all three focused on hidden, subordinated, or otherwise alternative literacies associated with computers. I’ll admit that I had just come from a fantastic presentation on mentoring by Emily Bauman, Malkiel Choseed, Jen Lee, and Brenda Whitney, and found myself a bit underwhelmed: the computers-oriented presentations held little of the careful nuance, complex argumentation, and sophisticated reflexive richness of the mentoring presentations, instead favoring a straightforward, unadorned, and eminently practical outlining of real-world research findings. I’ll hasten to point out that this is much more an issue of my own personal preferences regarding academic work than it is any comparison of the relative merits of the two panels: I’ve read enough of the work of Takayoshi, Hawisher, and Selfe to have seen that their scholarship is pretty much unimpeachable. So before I get myself in any more trouble, maybe I’d best just go ahead and describe what I saw.
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