I
met with Sid the other day to chat about texts I’ve been reading and ideas I’ve
been trying to flesh out. The meeting
went well (I had thought the meeting would go half an hour and we chatted for
over an hour) and was discursive, as I expected it would be (and wanted it to
be). What I'd like to do is recap some points that I may return to in the future,
hence the reason why I’ve written a post (I’ve noticed how I’ve treated this
blog for the last several weeks: as a way to take notes and summarize texts, to
articulate and clarify ideas, to communicate with Jake, to record interesting
quotes that may be helpful for papers, to familiarize myself with this form of
writing for me).
I
expressed to Sid my interest with spatiality and writing, even briefly
discussing ‘homogenous, empty time’ and Live Homogenous, Empty Real Time and
how I’d like to begin thinking about Space replacing the Time in this concept. He suggested that I check out more of Georges
Perec (Sid references Perec’s theories on space in Postcomposition). He also
recommended that I consider ‘use value,’ as well as always ask myself: is something usable
space? He brought up the idea that if space
isn’t usable, it ceases to be space.
This leaves us with the assumption that space is dependent upon place,
upon occupation. I also asked Sid to define
writing, and first he gave the disclaimer that this definition is very
general, then gave the following: writing is the act of making, the concepts of invention (which he
also stated are always spatial). I
didn’t have a chance to ask him if mouse clicks would constitute writing (e.g.
“share” or “like” on facebook. I am
specifically thinking about writing our identities/identity writing in digital
spaces) because I articulated some ideas I’ve had lately about objects having
consciousness and agency, and he argued that an object wouldn’t per se have
consciousness but would have agency. He
suggested that I look into Rubbish theory, Object-oriented theory, and Thing
theory, as these theories may offer some insights. All of these theories I am
unfamiliar with, but I’m excited about exploring them. He also recommended I
check out a short read called I am a
pencil. These recommendations also
guided our discussion into how to approach my work. Sid contends that I (and we rhetoric and
composition scholars in general) should have theory be the focus and then
surround the theory with cultural artifacts and examples to illuminate how the
theory functions. This approach is much
different than my previous work as I was educated to consider theory as
application (and "not as a couch" as one of my past professors once remarked). Many
of my past professors emphasized the object of study and then work with
theories (deconstruction, political economy, semiotic analysis, discourse
analysis, et al.) as methods (if you couldn’t already tell by more utterances
in the previous parenthesis). Sid
believes that too many times we have the inversion: cultural artifact
as the focus and theories working around it.
What I believe Sid was pushing me to do is to be the inventor of new
theories (which would make sense if we compositionists and scholars want to
bring something new to the conversation), something that Greg Ulmer also
suggests in our pedagogy with writing courses.
This new approach for me, theory rather
than a cultural artifact as the foci, will be a challenge, which gives me mixed
feelings of excitement, nervousness, and confusion. The rest of this summer, fall and spring will
be a roller coaster of insights and frustrations as I begin to develop my
thesis . . . find MY THEORY voice.
I told Sid that I’m still interested in
the connections between writing and activism (Writing Acts(ivism), Writing
Activates Activism, Writing Acts), specifically thinking about writing as
activism, and he suggested I check out The
Revolution will not be Tweeted. He
also remarked that four Cs has a section or panel specifically on writing and
activism, so I will need to research past conversations and arguments.
The New Media Reader Edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick
Montfort
I
decided to begin The New Media Reader,
a 2003 book complied of excerpts from various scholars in numerous
disciplines. I chose this text to read
next in order to familiarize myself with some of the theoretical, philosophical
and practical approaches to the digital humanities. The first excerpt is Janet
H. Murray’s “Inventing the Medium” as she introduces how various scholars,
writers, engineers and scientists from the last sixty years have considered new
media and its potential. After discussing briefly some of their ideas about what
computers might do for society, specifically in their relationship to information,
Murray identifies two general camps through which to see new media: humanists
and engineers, historically the former seeing “the contradictions and
limitations of the great systems of thought” which “causes them to question the
very project of systemized thinking” and the latter emphasizing “a vision of a
meta-book, a navigable collection of books that will carry us gracefully to the
next level of information control and systematic thought” (4). These two camps
are not a definitive dichotomy as many arguments have often crossed into each other's camps (as well as
into many other “camps”). But, in the last fifty years, scholars from these two
and other camps have offered insightful ways to think about new media, about
ways that we engage and produce new meanings with machines, and about how we
continue to (re)define communication and communities. As “we are moving toward a world of ubiquitous computing,” Murray
remarks, our relationship with knowledge will take on new definitions, new
properties, new forms and “the promise is that we will not be crushed by our
own knowledge, as the writers at the beginning of this period anticipated,
because we will organize it together in a vast distributed and synchronized
effort” (10-11). Murray ends her
introduction with summarizing Tim Berners-Lee’s work and development for the
World Wide Web and suggests that Berners-Lee took the admirable route with his
invention: choosing an open Web standard and not commercializing it.
Murray
suggests that the “representational power of the computer derives from its four
defining qualities: its procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial
properties” (6). She claims that the
encyclopedic property is the most obvious for the functional power of the
computer because of people's desire to compile all of human knowledge into one place. But the properties I’m most interested in
right now are the participatory and spatial.
Murray highlights that spatial properties enable us to navigate actual
(as registers within the machines) and symbolic (as on a Web “site” or in a
dungeon under a trap door within a fantasy environment) spaces and argues that
“this spatializing quality is based upon the other two properties [procedural
and participatory]” as participatory “allows it [to] receive input, to allow manipulation
of its processes and data by the user” (6).
This
will be a rant here as I flush out my nascent ideas: I guess what I’m
interested in is how people participate (specifically write) in the symbolic spaces of
activism, both real (and real in the sense of the physical world and the
digital world) and imaginary to ensure a desired identity. A very basic example (and since I have wanted
to consider the rhetoric and circulation of this text): the Kony 2012 video, a
social documentary released on March 5, 2012 by the non-profit group Invisible Children. For the moment, I’m going to set aside the
issues of the “white man’s burden” approach, as I do see this video working as
a neo-colonialism for the digital cultural that tries to perpetuate the U.S.
military industrial complex (we also see Kony as a representation of the Kurtz
figure). I’m also going to set aside any kind of commentary on the video's rhetoric, specifically with the
visual rhetoric and Jason Russell (the co-founder of Invisible Children and narrator of the social documentary) and his
son Gavin, elements that I do think would be essential in a analysis. What I’d like
to consider briefly is how this text was able to disseminate and circulate (the
Wikipedia “Kony 2012” entry remarks, “As of 30 March 2012,
the film had over 86 million views on video-sharing website YouTube, and over
16.6 million views on Vimeo”) so rapidly.
The video was posted first on YouTube, but nearly simultaneously was
presented on facebook for the obvious network capacity to bring it to users’
news feeds. Facebook users watch the
video, are emotionally (and rationally) inspired to participate in arresting
Kony and bringing him to justice. A simple facebook user click on “share”
facilitates the video to connect to other news feeds and we quickly see the
proliferation of the video in the digital world (slacktivism has never been so popular). On the one hand, this digital space, not only
the Web, YouTube and facebook spaces, but more specifically the facebook news
feed space, which has limitations (although dependent upon how many “friends”
one has and how those “friends” participate in facebook, for example posting
links to articles or music or writing “what’s on their mind” or getting
“tagged” in photos or sending messages, et al., which will all determine the
speed of the news feed scroll) in how quickly posts are observed, provides
opportunities for those with internet access and a facebook account to what I
would call “community” information about social issues, people, injustices, policies
enacted or rejected, etc. The digital space,
when occupied with texts and transformed into place, enables users to develop
a different kind of consciousness (place structures consciousness, paradigms,
mythologies, agency, meanings) and conscience.
We become aware of numerous atrocities, corruption, and unethical
activities (both historically and currently, but typically the latter). But it
isn’t just that we are aware; these issues instill a sense of responsibility
(whether that responsibility should be present or not is another issue to be
dealt with in its appropriate philosophical branch). And the facebook news feed
could also encourage them to research more on an issue (and, depending on what
they research and how interested they are in “doing something” about it, they
could be active in other ways, rather than simply reading information, such as
writing a letter to their state representative or participating in a protest
march (I’m thinking of the May Day march in Chicago)). So, we could argue that facebook could (or
does) improve social conditions, an often technological glorification that fits
within the Enlightenment meta-narrative of progress and science.
Of course, when I say “community” information, I’m
implying what McLuhan suggested in 1967: “’Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has
vanished. We now live in a global village” (63). But, more importantly, it is apparent that the
“we” (as both McLuhan and I have remarked) and articulation of this “community”
information and “global village” is political: certain classes, races, genders,
and sexes are included and others excluded.
Which brings me to the other dimension of the facebook news feed space:
it suppresses voices, as well as (which may be appear with any suppression)
includes and excludes certain issues. In
this article http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679507/joseph-konys-ugandan-victims-find-a-voice-on-twitter,
Riyaad Minty suggests that “their [Ugandan] voices were getting drowned out by
other people mass sharing/commenting on Kony 2012.” What we see here is (more) limitation of the
possibilities in not only the news feed, but in the space of commenting (even
those marginalized peoples who may even have access to the Internet may find
their voice buried). Forget the hyper
information of people’s opinions and feelings or the idea that engineers had in
the mid-twentieth century about a confluence of information into one system as
more sustainable and progressive. As
much as voices can function to subvert hierarchies, they also dislocate and
subvert voices (and possibly sustain hierarchies) and overload systems of
information, although it may be specious to consider it an overload (or rather we
should be careful about how we approach and value an overload). Of course, I
know I’m talking about voices as information, but what else constitutes
information? Information is ideas articulated from a voice. Voices, which are a culturally bound
subjectivity, write information. Can a singular unit, such as the Web, offer
all information to be available? It
appears that place, after being created from homogenous, empty space, has the
potential to implode on a system. McLuhan’s claim that “space has vanished”
should be better articulated as “places work us over politically.”
Questions: where and how are these two ideas of digital space that I just "articulated" challenged? Does the distribution of, circulation of, and reaction to Kony 2012 invent other spaces that hadn't been considered before? Obviously, we have people writing about and participating in social issues in digital spaces, which I have thought is productive. Dialogue is a prime way to work through political issues. But did the dialogue disintegrate? Did the dialogue destroy an important aspect (Ugandans' voice) of the issue? Should dialogue be regulated, and if so, what would that regulation look like?
Obviously, I need to do more research into what
folks were writing in the comment space that drowned out Ugandan voices, as I’d
also be interested in what the writing says about the participants’
subjectivities.
I know I’m not saying much here, but my goal was
to just write some thoughts and questions. In a way, I’m not sure what exactly
I was trying to articulate or why I felt the need to write and post in the
public sphere.
McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. Produced by
Jerome Agel. Germany: Gingko Press, 1967. Print.
Murray, Janet H. “Inventing the Medium.” The New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick
Montfort. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003. 3-11. Print.
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