Culture

On Egocasting

preterite Class (Meta), Culture

In her essay “The Age of Egocasting,” Christine Rosen describes the “personalization of technology” by which “the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he [sic] consumes is nearly absolute,” and how such technologies “enable us to make a fetish of our own preferences” (1). Our preferences — as publicly enacted in blogrolls, in “100 Things About Me” lists, in the way we express tastes and preferences and likes and dislikes and praise and blame in weblog posts, in the way we hurry to post our own answers to online quizzes that tell us who we are, in our audioscrobbler and iTunes playlists, in the very weblogs we choose to comment on — are, in their performance and in our self-conscious sense and monitoring of that performance, ourselves. This, Rosen says, is egocasting: “the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s taste” (2).

We’ll return to the issue of the public construction of an online self (via egocasting) in a bit. First, though, I want to turn to the perspectives Thomas De Zengotita offers in Mediated on the individual and social practices and effects of (though he does not use the term) egocasting.

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The Personal

preterite Composition Theory, Culture, Writing

So this idea’s got hold of me and I can’t leave it alone, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it’s unsettling my notions of where I thought the final chapters of my dissertation would go. And I think this is what I’m going to have to propose for CCCC because I can’t put it down, can’t let it go unexamined, and so I’ve been following trails of sources at the library and on the Web the past few days, a little apprehensive at where I see it going.

What got me started was Jenny Edbauer’s thoughts on the general equivalency of student essays written in the critical-pedagogical mode. The assignments required by critical pedagogues have become so common that they now show up — in all their generic characteristics — in the online term paper mills. As I tentatively concluded in my notes on Linh’s CCCC presentation, they’ve become our unmasking-hegemony equivalent of the New Critical close reading, only the object is culture rather than literature. And as Jenny points out, they’re so common that they’re easily exchanged, one for another, to the point where — as Doug Hesse suggested with his examples of the Intelligent Essay Assessor and the Essay Generator — no writing needs to be done, because it’s all been said. This is the end to which critical pedagogues have brought Paulo Freire: writing as the regurgitation of lecture, where the ultimate lesson the student takes from the teacher is this: “Do you now see how you’ve been duped by the dominant culture?” And of course the student will answer, outwardly: “Yes, teacher, I see.” And inwardly: “Yeah, sure. Whatever. Just give me the grade.” Because for all their hand-waving and hair-tearing about hegemony and ideology, many of the aging inheritors of Freire often forget that students are powerfully insightful cultural critics with a deep, thoroughgoing, and instinctive awareness of the performativity of culture, and the lessons that these inheritors of Freire would have them absorb about how meaning is constructed become so much lip-service bullshit, not worth writing about and simpler in its generic received-wisdom nature to download from cheathouse.com. Any individuated use value to the student is ignored in favor of exchange value for the grade.

This — Jenny’s “general equivalency” — is shallow writing in that it offers no room for personal inhabitation. We’ve forgotten Freire’s instruction that the subject must be the student’s own experience, not the facile unmasking of the hegemonic functions of assertions about capital punishment or tax reform. But use value subsists in what the writing means, directly, to the student, and that’s where I see an alternative offered by Peter Elbow’s “believing game” and the pedagogical possibilities of personal writing.

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I’m SO Not a Designer

preterite Asides, Class (Cultural), Culture

OK, so it’s a little less ugly, now that I’ve borrowed atthe404’s Vesuvius layout. Haven’t ever worked with PHP before, so while the learning curve isn’t exactly steep, it’s still making my head hurt. Had to try a couple different hacks to show recent posts; I’m sure I’ll have to try a couple more to show recent comments. And I’m still not sure I like the layout; I want to get the pictures back on the left and the links and stuff back on the right, because — knowing that people read left to right — I want readers to see the attention-getting stuff first (the tall skinny semi-abstract greenish pictures), and then get to the meat of the entries, with the admin business (the links and such) saved for last, on the right. And that CSS skullduggery will take a non-technically-oriented person like myself a little bit of doing — so, yes, this layout is gonna mush around some over the next few weeks. But the green and gray will stay. I like the green and gray.

What else is going on? Not doing much reading; trying to get some chapter-drafting done. The cats are at peace, and Dad’s said that — after a long, long time — he’ll be happy to host the extended-family Christmas Day dinner downtown again, which means I’m in for big-time cooking and cleaning duties. Having inherited my mom’s recipe collection and some of her cookware — including a molded English pudding steamer — I’m on deck for doing the steamed-for-six-hours holiday plum pudding, so I’m going through a series of dry runs, making sure I can do this big involved recipe right when the time comes. (The recipes are all like, “Make sure the suet melts before the flour particles burst,” and I’m like: huh?) I’ve never asked a butcher for beef suet before; never even thought I’d do such a thing, especially not for a dessert. But that’s the odd thing, I guess: the radical disparities in the class backgrounds of my mom’s side of the family and my dad’s side of the family produced the strangest mishmashes of holiday meals; English puddings and birds cooked within birds alongside black-eyed peas or collard greens boiled with ham hocks. With my mom’s family, you had stilton and scallion puffs as an hors d’ouvre; with my dad’s family, you had pickled pig’s ears as a snack. Popovers versus cornbread; grits versus grapefruit; “highballs” served at 6 p.m. on Friday versus a Pabst Blue Ribbon with lunch after you mowed the back pasture.

I learned about cars from my dad. The first car that was mine’ to drive was Granny’s farm-use 1974 GMC Custom 1500: a big, old, rusted-out pickup truck, painted Creme de Menthe green. To work on the engine, you had to actually climb inside the hood and sit on the wheel well with your head bowed. The do-it-yourself orientation I learned from driving and fixing that truck has really informed the way I approach Web technologies: while knowing I’m a complete novice, I’m not too afraid to climb in under the hood and tinker a bit. (My greatest victory with that GMC was using two scraps of pine 2 x 4 and an empty plastic oil bottle to get the engine to limp home a hundred miles from Harper’s Ferry.) But see, until lately, until checking out my mom’s handwritten recipes and comparing them to the dogeared and wine-stained pages in her Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Fannie Farmer, Julia Child, and other cookbooks, I hadn’t figured out that she did the same thing in her cooking. In that realization, stratifications of class and gender, men’s work and women’s work, seem to collapse in odd ways.

I’m wondering how those stratifications might play out in Web work. Historically, doing code has been a more male-dominated thing, and design as a field has had (a few) more women — does that divide point to a class divide, as well? Is design more upper-class, more stylish, more chic? Do we expect coders to have dirt under their fingernails?

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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The Encomiast

preterite Culture, Writing

Or maybe that title should be, “The Would-Be Encomiast”.

I’m on the internet social-networking space Orkut, at the invitation of a kind and generous friend, who also wrote me what Orkut calls a “Testimonial”. While I know it’s rude to question the product of generosity, I’m not quite sure how to feel about Orkut: it makes me feel like I’m in a very demonstrative and cliquish high school where the accepted practice is to walk around and demand of people: Will you be my friend? If it’s not clear from what I write here, I was never good at that. I’m a big-time introvert. But there’s something interesting going on there, in that closed-off private networked space: people are performing encomia, for no apparent reason.

Why would anyone do such a thing? We review movies, we give books a set of stars, but can we commodify people, reduce them to a value? Well, of course we can. I haven’t yet (written a Testimonial, I mean), because I’m not sure how to start: all the good qualities of the folks to whom I’m networked seem self-evident in their profiles and online writings, so how might I be original in my praise without seeming obvious or redundant? Anyway: the existence of such things on Orkut makes me ask: how common a form is the encomium these days? Letters of recommendation — yes, I’ve written a few of those for students. Political endorsements — yes, I’ve heard a few of those this year. But the first form is hardly public, and both forms seem more deliberative (you should hire this person, vote for this person) than epideictic (praise for the sake of praise). And in the wider world, testimonials themselves seem to hold little purpose other than as the advertising industry’s form of deliberative rhetoric. So I’m led to what feels like a very odd question, one to which I think the answer is less obvious than it might immediately seem: why — to what end or purpose — might we publicly praise people?
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Feenberg on Culture

preterite Culture

Yeah, I know I’ve been slack about responding to comments, and I’m feeling guilty about it. I’ll try to set aside the time tomorrow; today, I spent most of the day stranded in a New England city an hour from home (more like 90 minutes in this morning’s snow) while I waited for the dealership to try to find the electrical problem in my car that my local garage still couldn’t find after three visits. The good news, I suppose, is that I got most of the way through Andrew Feenberg.

Feenberg, in 2002’s Transforming Technology (Oxford University Press; an updating of his 1990 Critical Theory of Technology), points out that “Although technologies are first and foremost tools for solving practical problems, they are not fully understandable in functional terms. This is especially true in cases where their function is itself in dispute” (107) — and of course this is the very thing I’ve been trying to get at in describing the differences between the liberal and vocational education models and how they connect to computers in the classroom. Naturally, I was pretty psyched to see this, and even more so with what came next.
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Horatio Passes Through

preterite Composition Theory, Culture

Passing_Through raises some interesting issues. First, one might wish that Passing_Through had followed one of Friday’s links, or maybe visited Wikipedia, or even at least attempted to read the rest of the post more closely: the definition Passing_Through offers is simultaneously too slim to be useful, inappropriate to the context, and rather idiosyncratic. Unfortunately, Passing_Through also seems to have a rather impoverished view of writing, in which collaboration does indeed occur as a way for writers to use their experience and skills to assist one another, and which indeed often seeks to solve common problems. (Passing_Through might find Andrea Lunsford’s contention that “Everything’s an Argument” instructive on this topic.) One does indeed doubt that anyone will add another three chapters to Gone With the Wind, just as much as one doubts that anyone will add another thousand lines of code to VisiCalc anytime soon.
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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)
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Weblog Geography

preterite Culture, Economics

I’m still grading papers, and I’m trying to fight off illness with massive doses of orange juice.

It’s occurred to me that while a lot of people have talked in passing about the geography of weblogging, not many people have really talked about mapping weblogs in any sort of sophisticated way. There have been the various left/right and political compass chartings, but I find them rather one-dimensional and uninteresting. So, too, people have pointed to Web tools that let you give your weblog a geographical identifier tag, so your perspective can show up as a red pin on a world map somewhere — again, not very interesting.

I’m more interested in the way people set up boundaries and communities of inclusion and exclusion in weblogging, and how the liminal spaces get constructed. Some people sort their blogrolls into categories, so there are academic weblogs, political weblogs, design weblogs, tech weblogs, and so on. (Are there personal weblogs, as a category? Or is every weblog somehow personal? What about group weblogs?) And there are groups of New York weblogs, Indonesian weblogs, and so on. There are weblogs that allow comments, and there are weblogs that don’t. But most weblogs I’ve seen, in their linking practices, don’t restrict themselves to a single focus, although there often seems to be a sort of limited constellation of interests. How do those constellations intersect? How many different methodologies could one come up with for mapping weblogs, and what would happen if one superimposed one methodology over another over another, like those anatomical transparencies in old encyclopedias?

I’m interested, in part, because of the economic globalization angle, and the way that the internet was supposed to foster the breakdown of borders and the movement of footloose and transcendent transnational capital. As I’ve noted here in the past, I don’t much believe in that perspective — the economic critiques of the discourses of globalization offered by Porter and others are compelling — and, in fact, I think we’re starting to see the solidification of nascent weblogging communities. Now, “communities” is a word I take care in using, since it’s rarely if ever deployed in anything other than a vague and positive sense, but there’s a point I want to make here: communities have borders, and communities have members and nonmembers and even sometime members. I think the Web is already a local space, and is becoming even more local via the way people construct their webs of links.

And the more I think about this, the more it seems obvious, and the more I’m certain I should have done some more careful Googling before putting this entry together. Jill or Anne or someone similarly brilliant has probably already written something incredibly smart about it.

Back to grading and orange juice.