Computers

Blogging as Local

preterite Computers, Writing

Via MetaFilter come the findings of Fernanda Viégas for the MIT Blog Survey. The comments to the MetaFilter post remark on the institutional boundedness of the study: indeed, Viégas acknowledges that “the results from this survey cannot be generalized to the entire blogging community; instead, these results are representative of the state of affairs in certain portions of the blogging world”. However, Viégas points towards the conclusion that “blogging is a world in flux where social norms are starting to flourish”, and offers some interesting specifics. My somewhat tangential question might be: if blogging practices are in fact culturally localized, how might we start talking about discourse communities and contact zones in relation to teaching, learning, and writing with technology? John at Jocalo has done an excellent job of pointing to how many of the discourses of composition are institutionally bound; what happens if we attempt to look at weblogging in the same way?

(Cross-posted at KairosNews, sort of to accentuate my point: lots of folks read there who don’t read here, and I suspect there may be the occasional visitor here who doesn’t read KairosNews all that often.)

Consumption and Content

preterite Computers, Writing

I never knew what RSS was, or RDF either. I’d see the acronyms in Dorothea’s writing, or in the hard tech blogs I occasionally visit, and understand that they were, yes, a technology, something about gathering content, but I’d tell myself that I didn’t much feel like putting yet another thing on my plate — not only the dissertation, but also wanting to learn MySQL and PHP and Actionscript and freshen up my Unix skills and maybe some Grep as well — and so I’d say to myself: it’s a tech thing, and you’re not that hardcore. But then IA mentioned it in a post, and she and Jill and Dorothea are people to whom I’ve learned to listen re tech issues.

And I’m hooked. Condensed content is fantastic, and I feel like I can read much, much more than I could before, when I was reading all content via my browser. As you might expect, if you know me, this raises a couple questions.
Read more

Critiquing Lyotard

preterite Computers

In the first chapter of his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard makes the by now familiar observation that “the miniaturisation and commercialisation of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited”. His continuation is worth quoting at length: “The nature of knowledge,” he argues, “cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language. The ‘producers’ and users of knowledge must now, and will have to, possess the means of translating into these languages whatever they want to invent or learn.” Of course, I don’t agree, and the notion of translatability — as if the form and content of learning were easily separable; as if language were the transparent vehicle of thought — is only the first of many problems with this passage.
Read more

Let’s Not Get Rich

preterite Computers, Writing

Houghton leads off his essay (PDF; also linked yesterday) with the familiar instrumental assertion that the production and distribution of knowledge are vital to national (and, cheerleaders for globalization would add, international) economic prosperity. To which my quick rejoinder would be: can we be a little more specific here? As far as economic prosperity goes, the studies I’ve seen are unequivocal in their conclusions: economic inequalities — the gap between the rich and the poor — have grown hugely in the past thirty years. So, Mr. Houghton: economic prosperity for whom?
Read more

Academics & Circulation

preterite Computers, Education, Writing

The good Chris Worth, and others, have recently forwarded some excellent links; here are three around a common theme — communication and the circualtion of ideas as one aspect of the university’s academic commons — that I thought far too good to keep to myself. I’ll try to have more to say about them soon; tonight’s kind of an off night, with still a lot left to do (including responses owed to a number of people, bills to pay, et cetera: talk about a lame Friday night).

Crisis and Transition: the Economics of Scholarly Communication (PDF link); a very conventional neoclassical perspective, in which Dorothea and Charlie and others might have a few holes to poke.

Open Source Content in Education: Developing, Sharing, Expanding Resources; an article that borrows some points from the one above, but offers a different perspective — although I’m uncomfortable with the separating-out of “content”.

Commons and Communities in the University: Some Notes and Some Examples (PDF link); another critique of the neoclassical market perspective as applied to the university.

More tomorrow.

The Refrigerator

preterite Computers, Culture

What does one do with the last two tablespoons or so of Crab Mornay from Friday night that didn’t fit into the puff pastry shells and remain in the refrigerator? A rhetorical question: in the spirit of the local Fat City restaurant that offers a phenomenal lobster club sandwich, I toasted two slices of whole wheat, melted some butter, diced some mushrooms and onions, grated some more Swiss, and made myself a Crab Mornay grilled cheese sandwich. And washed it down with the last of the fantastic grassy razor-sharp fruit-bomb Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc and Deutsche Grammophon’s recordings of the String Sextets of Johannes Brahms. Would that all leftovers were this good.

While the Brahms features another Aronowitz — Cecil — on viola, I’m taking a short break from Stanley Aronowitz tonight to check out a recent Computers and Composition article: namely, Jim Porter’s “Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter’s Tale”, from 2003’s issue 20. (Those who follow the journal in question will note that I’ve been silent on the topic of Jeffrey Grabill’s recent article. There’s a reason for this: more on the topic sometime soon.) The questions at the heart of Porter’s article are some of the same ones I’ve been asking:

“How much do these computer-based writing technologies really matter in terms of their effects on writing? Is the computer changing writing in truly substantive, even revolutionary ways? Or is it simply one more writing tool, like the pencil, that aids the writing process but doesn’t revolutionize it?” (384)
Read more

The Acid of Money

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Computers, Economics

I’ve been thinking here lately about questions of value: how do we determine what something is worth? The question stands at the heart of any examination of class and inequality. I think of the way recent discussions of the value of going to college have largely enacted a commodified dollar-value-only view of education, and the way I’ve wanted (and tried) to contend that there are other values that demand consideration. Bill Maurer, in “Uncanny Exchanges: The Possibilities and Failures of ‘Making Change’ with Alternative Monetary Forms” (Society and Space 21), asks, “Does the ability of money to render the qualitative into the quantitative flatten social relations” (317)? Maurer’s essay, which looks at how using, calculating with, and thinking about alternative monetary forms — his examples are the riba and zakat of Islamic finance specialists and the HOURs currency of Ithaca, New York — restage our economic beliefs about qualitative and quantitative valuation, problematizes this “false dichotomy between culture and practical reason” (318). In a similar vein, Steven Gudeman in Postmodern Gifts contends that “The many cases of reciprocity recorded by anthropologists challenge the idea that material life must be completely organized by market practices” (3): market modes of exchange and non-market modes of exchange, and their associated forms of valuation, can and do exist in a diverse economy.

Before I start sounding too hopeful, I should point out that Maurer sees alternative monetary forms as being “haunted by transcendental value” (332), and this transcendence is what I’ve followed Gibson-Graham in seeing as so problematic in contemporary representations of the economy, as well as in various instrumental representations of technology. Richard Barbrook, in “The Hi-Tech Gift Economy”, seems to completely buy into such conceptions of transcendence, suggesting that internet users “collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money or politics” and “give and receive information without thought of payment” to the point where, “In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligation created by gifts of time and ideas”.
Read more

What I’m Working On

preterite Computers, Metadissertating, Writing

This is pretty long, and probably pretty dry. And if you read it all the way through, you might even call me a flippin communist. Isn’t that reward enough? Dammit, where’s Curtiss?

Anyway: As I think I’ve pointed out before, some first-year composition programs teach the five-paragraph theme, while others teach writing as closely connected to close reading in a cultural studies context (University of Pittsburgh; Rachael’s prized — and rightly so — Ways of Reading), and others teach the personal essay, and others (University of Minnesota) break it down according to genre (the abstract, the proposal, the research paper; other institutions use the lab report, the memorandum, and so on), and still others, according to Sharon Crowley, choose to focus on “traditional grammar, orthography, and punctuation” (229). These widely varying instances of composition instruction have their own class connotations within those wider university contexts. This offers another reason why compositionists seem unable to agree on what class is in their classrooms: the various models of composition instruction and of the university are connected to differently theorized purposes for education, which in turn lead to differing perceptions of the dynamics and movements of class. A teacher teaching a course that traffics largely in the personal essay will likely have a definition of class as it functions in the classroom that relies primarily upon personal experience and authenticity claims. On the other hand, a teacher teaching the genres of the essay would seem to be relying upon a service-oriented approach, in that those genres make up the forms students will need to do well in other courses, which would seem to incline towards a view of class largely reliant on occupational definitions.
Read more

Making Commodification Visible

preterite Computers, Economics

Bruce Pietrykowski, in the June 2001 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues, quotes David Noble’s examination of “the identification of the campus as a significant site of capital accumulation” resulting “in the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property” (300). Pietrykowski points to the ways in which this “corporate university model offers up a rhetoric of libertarianism, entrepreneurialism, and individual empowerment” which may “fail to account for the social system in which the market for educational services is embedded” (304). He also notes that “the introduction of computer-based technologies may well signal a new terrain of struggle over the purpose and nature of higher education” (300), which sounds to me a lot like my own hypothesis: computers make freshly visible the economic commodification of higher education and also represent a point of possible intervention into that commodification.

What Technology Does

preterite Computers, Economics, Education

How much do we see technology as being the primary basis for economic progress, within capitalism or any other economic scheme? How connected is our instrumental understanding of technology — the understanding I want to problematize — as neutral and universally applicable tool to our understanding of the capitalist economy as neutral in its privileging of efficiency above all other values? The capitalist economy operates upon an ethics of efficiency: that which is not efficient will die. Do we assign an ethics to technology? That which is not useful will die, perhaps? The discourse in which education serves competitiveness in the global economy must at some level assert that education promotes higher efficiency. What is the class status of the technocrat, upon all the axes of class that I’ve been exploring?

We understand that the technologization of education was a response to Sputnik. Public policy created a historical space within which students are operated upon and improved by technology (and, in computers and composition, student writing is improved by technology) and improved that they might operate technologies more efficiently and even produce more efficient technologies, just as students are operated upon and improved by literacy education and improved in order that they might operate words more efficiently and even produce more efficient ways of communicating. Yet the watershed moments in composition have come when instructors have perceived students as subjects, and not as a collective needing to be improved. How many of those watershed moments has the discipline of computers and composition had?

Few, I think. This is because the discourse of technology takes problems of politics and culture and transfers them into the ‘neutral’ realm of technology, where the instrumental nature of technology will make it easier to divorce those problems from student subjectivities and then simply find the appropriate tool.