So What Do We Do Now?

I'm still thinking about the implications of Chun's argument(s), especially in terms of rhetoric, teaching, writing, and the internet.

In the interest of brevity, my question is this: Given Chun's idea that freedom is what makes us human, and opens up spaces where "real" deliberation -- to use Anne's term-- can occur, how do we make this happen?

What does Chun want us to do, exactly? Is it enough to write a book and think about it? (I think so). But does she want to inspire me/us to teach in ways that bring about her kind of freedom? How?

Finally, if she does want us to teach in ways that bring about freedom, how might we reconcile it with the current aims of the university?

Sigh.

The text from my poem

Sorry, guys. It looked a whole lot better in MovieMaker, and even when I played it on Blogger just before it posted. So here's the text. It might actually be better to read the text, then look at the movie -- since the "animations" are more for mood and a/effect, than anything else.

A letter to his lover, after reading Marlowe (“A Passionate Shepherd to His Love”)

Istanbul, Turkey, 23 October

There is no phone, no fridge,
but there is a house.

It is an old woman’s house, with musty
sheets and old furniture and stale
yellowed windows;
two small beds and a pull-out couch;
nothing in the kitchen but a hot plate
and a few dinged pots.

But there is a house.

we have not had rain in weeks.
The clouds never melt,
and the sky never opens its fist to release
raindrops that crawl like marbles
onto the desert ground:
a desert without a sun.

Through the clouds somewhere I know you are sleeping
turning over in a place I have never seen,
your body silent, still, never letting go
of my shadow that lingers still, on your breath.

I am alone here, in this house
where so many others have left
their residue, and every time I open the door
the lonely ghost of guilt ambles over
and takes my coat.
No, I say, we have not had rain in weeks,
but there is this house.

Darling I cannot give you the poem you need
the poem with its lady twirling among roses
and a gentleman watching, intent, sweeping
her away to his quiet quarters.

I cannot give you that. We
we have not had rain in weeks.

But there is a house.

Poetry in Motion

I don't have PhotoShop, so I made a movie. Here it is. Enjoy.

An Attempt for a Recipe Collective

Many thanks to Anne for hosting a great party on Saturday for Plan B people! Since at least two people asked, I'm putting the recipe for my salad on the blog. Rest assured: even people who can't cook can make this! It's EASY.

Depending on the number of people, you'll want 1-3 pounds of small red and or yellow potatoes, a pound of green beans, half a bunch to a whole bunch of green onions, olive oil, salt, and fresh ground pepper.

Cut potatoes in half. Cook in water until tender.
Cook green beans until bright and crunchy. Cut in half.
Cut green onions.

In large bowl, put everything together. Mix. Drizzle with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Mix again, and taste. If it's dry, add more oil. Then, continue to add salt and pepper to taste. Voila.

Note: when my mom makes this, she uses red onion. If you want to go this route, use about a quarter of it, diced. I prefer green onions, because they're not as strong. But, it's up to you.

Better Late than Never -- Paranoia as Postmodern Condition

I want to focus on Chun's use of "paranoia" in reference to our conversation in SL on Monday night. I am beginning to think that Chun -- indirectly and ambiguously -- discusses paranoia (and with it, control) as a condition of postmodernity. Here's why:

On the one hand, we are being monitored (thanks, Lessig) constantly, whether we know/like it or not. When we sign up for an ATM card, the machine tracks our every transaction, for bookkeeping purposes, and most likely for other more sinister ones as well. We could argue that we willingly sign up to be monitored when we agree to have an ATM card. Chun and Lessig make us aware of the many ways surveillance/monitoring is a necessary part of the digital age.

On the other hand, once we're aware of this surveillance, we become paranoid. Who's watching us? Why? Where? For what ends? Chun seems to characterize this as extreme; if we become too paranoid, we'll refrain from being free, of course, but of even acting or leaving our homes.

It seems that Chun (and, to an extent, Lessig) is arguing that with the internet, necessarily comes paranoia; if we want to exist in a digital age, we must confront the paranoia or learn to live with it. Lessig raises important questions about what to do once we have realized how much we are monitored. Where are there spaces, as Anne reminds us, for deliberation, especially if in doing so we must confront paranoia?

Paranoia is of the irrational; it results in addiction (in many cases). This is an idea I am borrowing from Avital Ronnell, who wrote Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Society. In it, she argues that whether we're snorting crack or reading books, our society is an addictive one. Certain addictions become "normalized" -- going to school, reading, writing, driving, Internet surfing. These addictions are acceptable, whereas drugs are not, obviously. Nonetheless, our society is one in which addictions prevail, because of Dasein and the irrational fear of being discovered (A rough paraphrase -- forgive me). Paranoia, then, becomes evident only in the manifestation of our addiction.

How does this relate to Chun/Lessig, who only indirectly speak of addiction? I don't have any definitive answers, but I would venture that if the postmodern condition is necessarily a paranoid one, then it is also an addicted existence. We "solve" our paranoia through our addictions, and become paranoid about them, too. A vicious cycle that makes my head spin and brain hurt.
The conditions in which we live, where the internet reigns supreme, creates the context(s) for paranoia as postmodern condition, and, consequently, false consciousness about freedom, control, paranoia, and liberty. In some sense, we could blame the internet for these things, but, just as addictions index our paranoia, the internet can index something else altogether or vice versa.

What am I addicted to? What am I paranoid about? More importantly, what do we do about it?

Before my brain explodes, I'll leave now.

The Website is Up and Running!

It's finally here -- my website! Go to: www.uwm.edu/~etlinger and click on the "projects" tab. It should take you to the welcome page, which is called "only conversations." Then, click "enter" to "enter the conversation."

Feel free to explore the other links as well.

I'm posting this because I want feedback....

Writing Machines, and Why I am Never Building a Website Again...

(Okay, maybe that last part is a lie. Suffice it to say that I'm a tad frustrated).

Making a website is difficult. I think that most of it has to do with the system here at UWM, which continues to give me headaches. (I won't get into that). The hardest part is deciding what to put on it, where it will go, and why. I feel like I am caught in a manifestation of Weinberger's third-order, miscellaneous world. And I don't like it.

Sometimes, I really hate rhetoric. Anne, I fell into your trap. This is really, really, really hard -- and, of course, that's the point. If it were easy it wouldn't be worth doing, for one thing, and the whole purpose -- as I see it -- is to make us aware of these familiar practices and expectations. Which is good for me. But that doesn't mean I have to like it (which I do, actually, just not while I am working on it).

The real reason I posted is to talk about the connections I am seeing between our class and N. Katherine Hayles' book Writing Machines. The book takes up questions of materiality in the digital age, arguing that scholars/critics/academics transfer practices and assumptions from reading print texts, to digital ones. According to Hayles, this causes the facts of materiality to become invisible. (Remind us of anyone we've read?!?) She analyzes three main texts in her book: the "cybertext" Lexia to Perplexia, Tom Phillips' artist's book A Humument, and Mark Z. Danielewski's A House of Leaves in order to demonstrate the ways we might consider materiality, through authors that take up this question in the form and content of their "books."

While I wish she would have put more pressure on the three texts she discusses, at the same time I really enjoyed her book and her ideas. It made me reconsider how I thought about materiality, both as an aesthetic experience while reading, as well as a field of study. On the one hand, the pleasure of reading for me lies in the tangible, tactile: I love the smell of books, the feel of the pages, the sound that covers and pages make when they rub together. I love curling up and reading by dim soft light. I can't separate these physical, "real" experiences from reading, even if I am reading for school. So when I consider this, I am skeptical of how these internet texts call into question materiality, because it seems so flat for me.

On the other hand, however, I recognize that not taking a print text's materiality seriously leaves us in a bind. We run the risk of taking for granted the materiality of the internet, too -- something many authors we've read this semester have argued. It makes me wonder whether the internet, and texts produced on the internet for the internet, opens up spaces for new modes of materiality, and whether those will come to stand in for, or at least alongside, the other ones. Will I be wholly entangled in the experience of reading an online text, in the same way I am entangled in the experience of reading a printed one? Or, is the very fact that I am asking this question missing the point? And what about the ideas of two (or twenty) materialities arising alongside each other?

I'm not sure. I want to teach this book, someday. And just about everything else we've read. I guess I have a lot of thinking to do.

Project Update: A Rhetoric of Management

My project explores the many ways composition teachers can use Facebook (and MySpace) in first-year writing. In many cases, the arguments exhibit an interesting tension on the subject of whether to bring these sites into the classroom as serious objects of study. On one side of the discussion are educators, scholars, and other concerned folk who claim that these social network sites (SNS) are strictly social, and therefore do not allow participants to "see beyond their social walls." But, on the other side, are economists -- gasp!-- and other such ilk who believe in the power of technology to impact the way we teach, think, and learn. My project does not attempt to offer a definitive answer to these conversations, but rather to supplement them by offering some insight into how first-year writing, specifically, can not only benefit from Facebook in the classroom, but also allow students to engage with their world socially and critically.

The project focuses primarily on the "rhetoric" of Facebook, which I am calling a "rhetoric of management." Since Facebook and SNS require users to post a profile that identifies themselves, this profile becomes the site of interaction. It's not just one page to get to other pages, or a list of signifiers; instead, this profile not only evolves and changes over time, but also enables the interaction and those changes in and of itself. In short, it's the Golden Ticket to the factory. A "rhetoric of management," then, refers to the (often) unseen processes and behaviors that go into changing, updating, or managing, this profile. While my colleagues may cringe at the business language of my term, at the same time it is not my own, per se (danah boyd calls SNS profiles sites for identity management) and despite its connotations, I think it accurately, and effectively, describes what users do on a daily basis.

Truly incorporating this rhetoric into our classrooms means that we have to reframe, and re-focus, a few of our understandings about management. I am recasting "management" to refer to those hidden, or invisible, processes that encompass surveillance, invisible audiences, sociocultural engagement, taste/class/race, and, finally, resistance. While Facebook blatantly creates, and maintains, a particular taste based on its interface, and while a lot of problematic stuff happens within its confines, at the same time educators cannot continue to bury their heads in the sand about it. But instead of just bringing it into the classroom as a site for analysis and critique -- useful things that should also come up -- we should find ways of learning from, and with, Facebook. This project seeks to find ways to do that, ultimately toward more active, engaged, and critical ends.

Comment on Kristi's Blog

As I've taken to doing, I'm posting my comment to Kristi on my blog so that others can read it.

While I agree with your critique of the Ondrejka article, I'm going to play devil's advocate (because I can) and because I think it's important to his own argument.

First, we might claim that corporations should stay out of academic journals, especially since they're (most likely) going to "sell" the technology/interface/product with which they are affiliated. However, this inside view is necessary, I think, in order for us to 1) be able to have these conversations, and 2) understand what the technology does, from an "expert" position.

Second, I am wondering whether Ondrejka's essay invites discussion about who gets to write these kinds of essays. That is, since the face of education is irrevocably changing (if we believe him), then wouldn't it make sense that we should value and therefore not dismiss his claims as someone from the inside? Again, if we believe CO, businesses (etc) will "fail" if they do not embrace the trend; is academia among these "businesses" who will fail?

Finally -- and this is from a more personal standpoint -- so what if he's from the inside? I think his bias is clear (if not directly stated) and I think that it does not matter so much if he sells SL from the "corporate" viewpoint. I think academia in general is too caught up in their own biases against these "evil corporations" that they too readily, and easily, dismiss some great stuff. He's a businessman and technology guru, not a rhetorician, or a part of the academy. Therefore, he does not have to kowtow to our expectations in order for it to be a well-written, articulate, intelligent, and useful article.

Keep in mind that I'm not a huge fan of his redacted views of education and the role that technology plays in shaping it; at the same time, though, I find a lot of academic articles even WORSE. So, where does that get us?

I apologize if I sound angry. I'm not. :)"

Teaching in the Digital Age

How does digital media, particularly games and virtual worlds like SL, impact the way(s) that we teach?

I'm investigating this question in this class, which I hope will become part of my dissertation in general. I'm interested in how teachers must respond to the learning that is going on outside the classroom, inside it. That is, do teachers need to understand that a different kind of learning goes on in (non) places like SL, so that they can effectively tap into them inside the classroom?

Danah Boyd, author of many (online) articles on Social Network Sites (SNSs), has argued that they do not belong in the classroom, since they are strictly social, though she also argues that they accomplish very important sociocultural work. But while I understand that most of the "work" that goes on is social, there's no reason that the social can't, or shouldn't, enter the classroom.

I'm not suggesting that Boyd is wrong here; I am just trying to use her ideas to explore how teaching with, and from, sites like Facebook, might change our students' attitudes about the ways they use the internet.

My question also stems from my reading of Ondrejka's claims about the educational potential of SL. While I agree with a lot of my classmates' posts about the problems of authorship, the apparent elision of issues like race, gender, access, and class, at the same time it does pose interesting ideas about how learning and teaching might change in response to the learning going on.

I am wondering if what Ondrejka says about the new forms of collaborative, "for fun" learning are really true. What kind of learning is it? Is it "real" learning (learning that is engaged, active, and has an impact on our lives), or is it learning confined to SL? Do people learn about others' race, class, gender, etc issues from interacting with them on SL? Or, is the learning task-based? There is nothing wrong with task-based learning, both inside or outside of the classroom, but I question whether Ondrejka's claims about long -term, collaborative learning really can/do apply. Does SL provide space for the interaction between critical, social learning (the type we try to engender in Comp courses, for example) and the learning to get a job done?

Obviously, these are reductive claims on my part, and they warrant some reconsideration later. But for now, I'm still puzzling out whether teaching should, or could, respond in kind to these claims. If we took these ideas into consideration, and incorporated them into our classrooms, how would it change the ways we think about the places where "learning" has taken place? Evaluation? Etc?

First Life Frustration in Second Life (Part 2)

So I joined Second Life officially, instead of playing as Curtin Mumfuzz. "I" am Mirella Chunes, the closest thing to a French name I could get. (Does anyone want to talk about how "foreign" the last names are?)

I must admit that I don't/didn't like it. What's the purpose of driving around, flying, or seeing all of the objects? Is there a mission or something? I felt like I was playing "Kings Quest," except that game was WAY better, and you could actually take stuff. It was cool. I was frustrated, confused, and a bit irritated at the lack of instructions the SL people give you. As Trevor and everyone else have said, it'd be better if I were with friends. But then again, what would we do? Chat? I'd prefer an IM, thank you!

The most interesting part of the whole experience was creating my avatar. Not only did I like choosing her from a list of possibilities (though those were very limited and stereotypical), but I loved being able to play with makeup, coloring, face proportions, etc. To me, this is a facelift without the knife! I am wondering how many women use these appearance adjustments to represent who they "really" are, or who they would like to be. I tried to stick with my usual appearance, though I gave myself aquamarine eyes. And I was disappointed that there's no selection for hair! I wanted my curly hair! :)

How, then, does appearance play a role in how you/we interact with the many environments of Second Life? Why does it place such a high importance on it, yet allows us to choose any representation? Is it an exercise in fantasizing or dysmorphia? I wonder if, as you progress through the "worlds," you can add different features, clothes, or options. I am also curious to know about the degree of performativity (I never, ever thought I would cite Judith Butler. Go figure) that SL engenders, encourages, or resists. Overall, how does SL help us think about, or interact in, our "real" life?

Questions: Can you have a "job" in Second Life? Can you do stuff other than walk, drive, or fly around? Again, the biggest hurdle for me is still the point of the "game." And who, really, is the target group for Second Life?

As for technical difficulties, none. I just got a new computer in December, so it has all those spiffy cards, memory, etc, etc.

First Life Frustration in Second Life (Part 1)

First, let me say that Craig Saper, a scholar and professor of Communications, is teaching his class in Second Life. That is, for lack of a better word, badass!

Second, let me admit to cheating. I went into Second Life as my office's character, Curtin Mumfuzz* . He's a goth-looking dude, and he can fly. As I entered as the indomitable Mr. Mumfuzz, I was thrust into an environment ("world? I don't even know what it's called!) where I had to "fly" in order to get around, but I had no context and no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I didn't know how to look at, or touch anything, or if I was even supposed to. What is the purpose of this?

From first experience as Mumfuzz, I wondered if the main attraction of Second Life is to replace a life you don't actually -- and, for whatever reason, cannot -- have; it seems like it enacts a fantasy of "being able to fly" if that's what you choose. At this point, I admit that I am not enthralled or compelled to download it on my own computer, but I will see if this changes when I am "myself."

Stay tuned for information regarding my avatar and subsequent Second Life escapades.