Key pithy quotes:
Lisa Gitelman: “One of my points is that all new media emerge into and help to reconstruct publics and public life, and that this in turn has broad implications for the operation of public memory, its mode and substance. The history of emergent media, in other words, is partly the history of history, of what (and who) gets preserved –written down, printed up, recorded, filmed, taped, or scanned–and why” (26).

Steven Levy: “the iPod was suddenly at the center of two of the biggest and most disruptive trends in digital media: a grassroots uprising of a wisdom-drenched crowd of the self-appointed and an à la carte disintegration of the traditional packaging of broadcast and cable programming. Would the iPod destroy the networks by allowing us to cherry-pick and shuffle all our media, the same way it lets us shuffle our music?”

Links that may become useful/interesting sidetracks within the discussion to come:
check out these fascinating old digitizations of tinfoil recordings: http://www.tinfoil.com/
and compare these versions of history to the ones Gitelman and Levy tell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting

Questions to talk through:
★ “Disruptive” and “innovation” are quite big buzzwords these days and it seems STEM and business students especially are often pushed toward making big, game-changing, attention-getting moves in their fields and careers. But not all “disruptions” or “innovations” are worth the buzz, necessarily. How do we help students navigate and question the ways their ideas will change the world? What kinds of projects might train them in how to be thoughtfully and conscientiously disruptive?

★ Some of you assign podcast projects to your students. How could Levy’s and Gitelman’s pieces supplement these assignments in English 106? in other writing classes?

★ Gitelman describes how “the exhibitions provided a playful and collective engagement with good taste. In making their selections for recording and playback, exhibitors made incongruous associations between well-known lines from both Shakespeare and Mother Goose … They could participate together in the enactment of cultural hierarchy” (35). Where do we see this kind of participation and enactment online today? What cultural hierarchies emerge in networked/virtual spaces?

★ (Sorry for those of you not in posthumanism class with us, but I’m gonna make you think about materiality.) This class is called Computers in Language and Rhetoric, and for some reason it can be easy to leave physical, material, embodied things off to the side when wireless connectedness and ideas and words and virtual realities are so exciting. Where is materiality important when thinking/teaching/researching this kind of stuff? Where could/should it be more important than it seems to be here and now?

An Activity about Public Memory-ing and Multimedia-ing:
Pair up and assign roles: 1 person to scribe, 1 person to digitize. Extra people might double up on roles, or simply contribute discussion bits.

As you discuss the questions above, the scribe should document the discussion using ONLY a sheet of tinfoil and any chosen implement of inscription.

When you get bored enough of the questions/discussion, hand off your tinfoil transcript to be digitized. I am leaving the digitization/conversion process up to you. Somehow transfer the discussion notes made by the scribe into this google doc (handily repurposed from the day Sammy led discussion back at the end of September).

Feel free to comment on and reply to other groups’ efforts once your own tinfoil inscriptions are transferred. We will see how the conversation evolves (or doesn’t?) as it moves between/across media….

The takeaways from today’s articles all sparked similar reactions. Leonard and Mortenson, both with articles from the maybe-less-relevant-to-the-field-of-composition journal Games and Culture point out that representation matters a lot and should matter a lot, and that everything has history and context, respectively. Okay. That’s all well and good. These points are useful, and they’re being used. Cool.

The pedagogical bits in Delwiche’s piece feel even more useful, potentially, for me right now. Looking at games and game worlds to see that “these environments are complex discursive communities characterized by a ‘full range of social and material practices’” (161) is neat, and “MMOs have instructional promise because they immerse students in complex communities of practice, because their immersive nature invites extended engagement with course material, and because they encourage role- playing” (162). Okay. That’s all well and good. And the students learned. Awesome.

I was also glad Delwiche finally got around to including a nod or two about the risks of addiction and life-disruption that go along with some of these games. The way he deals with it feels tacked-on, but I’m glad it’s there. (I just finished reading Felicia Day’s memoir, which includes an account of her own game addiction, and maybe that’s why as I read this article I couldn’t help but cringe a bit, thinking what if some student in this class gets sucked in and can’t get out?)
Bianca has already called out this author for the unquestioning way he seems to accept game spaces and virtual worlds as “safe,” and along with that, and other points that have been made about the pros and cons and complexities of the kinds of courses that can be designed around games, I think we can’t take all the games and gamer-y enthusiasm at face value.  Yes, they are cool tools and spaces. We can learn in and through and around them a lot about composition and rhetoric and society. They have their costs, just like everything else. But onward we go, writing and teaching with all the writing and teaching technologies that make sense to keep using.

John and Amelia’s digital handout.

Bogost’s examples make me think even more about the blurry line between games and life. simulations of work environments or political situations or prison infrastructure? simplified and gamified, sure, but like Sherri says in her post, it isn’t hard to see the “serious messages about corporations and politics” in these kinds of activities. I wonder if that should help us feel more able to do anything about the real procedures and issues that we face in this world, or what. recognizing procedural rhetoric in a game is cool. do we recognize it everywhere else, too? maybe the simplification gets in the way.

I’m about to teach my 420 students to write proposals and argue for small changes in the imaginary business contexts they’ve chosen to work in this semester. written proposals are one thing… boring, maybe, but conventional. if I had more time and were a more gamer-y type of person, it might be cool to ask my students to re-mediate their proposals into a game. maybe it would be a fun thought-experiment, at least.

not having dates on these chapters made it a little hard to situate them in what little I know about the history of games studies. I figure that Gee was pretty foundational. he certainly spends lots of time carving out a place for games and pedagogy and all that in these books.

the problem of content Gee points out in the Semiotic Domains chapter seems so familiar to rhetoric, right? from Socrates it’s been debated–what are we really learning when we learn to rhetoric? there is no “content” to it– no unique substance– unless we say that the content is everything, which isn’t always useful to say.

maybe it’s that as Gee points out, “Critical learning, as I am defining it here. involves learning to think of semiotic domains as design spaces that manipulate us (if I can use this term without necessary negative connotations) in certain ways and that we can manipulate in certain ways.” (43)

I think that’s what we are hoping to keep learning about and teaching about as rhetoricians. so it’s okay for us to not have our own content…

and as people in the world, we can make a difference in whether this critical learning happens for everyone around us, not even just students. this snippet was sort of encouraging (though I do recognize that not everyone is into the endless picking-apart-of-things that we academics so often are): “If these people encourage reflective metatalk, thinking, and actions in regard to the design of the game, of video games more generally, and of other semiotic domains and their complex in­terrelationships, then this, too, can encourage and facilitate active and critical learning and thinking” (46-47)

how we do that is another question, and I imagine we all have our own ways.

Huizinga’s chapter 2 is my favourite. words and languages (German in particular for some reason these days) are always fascinating. all the Greek and Latin is a little hard to get through since I don’t have that background (I imagine those were more common educational staples back in the 30s) but the whole idea that the ways we use words like “play” and “playful” and “game” and “sport” and all that is important. I don’t know if I’m smart enough to know what to do with that importance, but there is probably a lot to be done. this chapter of Homo Ludens is an example. it enlightens cultures for us, and almost starts to sort of map how play shows up differently and is embedded differently in different parts of the world. that we play games and play instruments but don’t play our voices… that’s interesting. but you can play a recording of someone singing. I think something in the word play seems to need at least some external dealing-with-the-world and dealing-with-others-ness. its connection to learning and rhetoric is in there too. it’s really cliche to say everything we do is some kind of game we play and modify as we go, but it’s true. and it’s helpful (if frustrating sometimes) to remember.

what intrigues me more about these articles are their methods sections and the ways the authors frame their research. is this proof that I did learn something in Empirical last semester, maybe?

these two are similar studies. very quantitative, tons of graphs and tables. both Rickly and Wolfe point out gaps in current knowledge and propose small ways of beginning to fill those gaps. they both acknowledge some of the limitations of their approaches, and they are careful not to overgeneralize. they are small sample sizes, just single classrooms. Wolfe’s data supports some really interesting and subtle observations about how men and women converse. Rickly gets pretty fancy by including the BSRI measure as an alternative variable. because of the small sample sizes, who knows how generalizable those observations are. the value of this kind of writing research is sort of puzzling to me, for lots of reasons. the value of empirical research at all seems so arbitrary, so much of the time. dependent on ideologies and values and traditions and ethos and lots of other random stuff. I guess I can at least accept that this sort of work is as valuable as we decide it is. we do what we can with it, somehow. maybe it really does fill gaps in our understandings of the world…

less relatedly: I’m really curious after reading so many articles that mention it, what this Interchange system was like. google led me here: http://interchange.rtfm.info/index.html?id=WUbIWbGx
and then here: http://www.icdevgroup.org/i/dev/demo where apparently there is an online demo. but I’m not sure this is the same Interchange that our 1999 composition scholars have been talking about all this time. hmmm. still very curious.

In “Feminist Interventions in Electronic Environments,” Mary E. Hocks asks a question or two I think we have some answers to at this point, seventeen years later: “Can a hostile environment–a legal definition of sexual harassment–actually develop on public electronic forums? What exactly is at stake if harassment occurs in a nonwork environment?” (112).

Yes. Yes, the web can be a hostile environment. And plenty of things are at stake, not only for individuals but for everyone.

As so many of the examples Pamela Takayoshi gives in “No Boys Allowed: The World Wide Web as a Clubhouse for Girls,” the female is usually the marked category. The separate, cordoned off section. That marked-ness involves so many risks and so much discrimination, though I think things are getting better.

Today it seems like feminist interventions are not only about women, but gender equality across all kinds of spectrums.

I wonder, can the kind of art project expressionism stuff Sullivan spends so much time on count as a form of feminist intervention, to use Hocks’ term? Is the above image an example, in some sense?

The uniqueness of what Sullivan describes (though it does seem much less unique now, given how deep we’ve sunk into web technologies and online communication since the 90s) does give it a lot of conversation-changing power, I think.

So how do we use that?

Examples that come to mind:

all the hashtag movements, like #yesallwomen, where everyone can share stories
these comic/articles like this one, that seem so personal
what else can you think of?

postsecret also came to mind for some reason. it’s more a collection, and made up of analog stuff, but still it seems to fit with Sullivan’s vision.

an activity for us:
Create either an autobiographical or activist hypertext piece about something, maybe related to your research interests, maybe related to your teaching themes, or other topics from our class. It can be really short and small–an image, a tweet, a post, or some quick combination using Storify or other similar tools. As Sullivan describes it, these should be “hypertexts that produce both a personal and social transformation” (30). To also fit this into Hocks ideas, it might be cool to fit your piece into an existing conversation outside of our class. What existing issues/debates/etc. could you respond to?

question for Dr. Sam: have we been reading (and will we continue to read stuff) in roughly chronological order? 

some of them seem so old, partly because we’ve been talking about all these issues and things for so long now… gender is a thing. and it matters. and it’s political and personal and important. technology is enmeshed in this lots of ways. but so what? and what can we do about it? well, Brady Aschauer goes over what some people have been doing about it. I liked the turn in her historical overview, here where she says, “Dissatisfied with simply noting these patterns, philosophers, historiographers, sociologists of science and technology began to plot the reasons for the patterns along the axes of historical neglect and material misuse. Searching for the hows and whys of gendered work led them to recover and reclaim two distinctly different types of women’s experiences with technology” (9). seems a good beginning. research is always political too, though. and I’m glad she also eventually recognizes and critiques the essentialism in some of the research there.

it’s also cool that she discusses writing as a technology, and rhetoric as a technology. I don’t think we talk about that enough.

—

as a postscript: oh boy would this Chapman fellow be even more worried about our attention spans now, after thirty years of this internet thing. and who knows what he’d say about mobile devices.

I also don’t know if his print/visual divide is valid anymore. tv and newspapers are both old fashioned at this point. 

we are teaching in a different world. our obligations and our circumstances are changing still, in new contexts where web writing is not so new or scary or strange or complicated. not many of us feel obligated to teach coding–there are plenty of other arenas where students probably have learned it by now. but some things are still true for us, it seems.

like what Rae and White notice about evaluating web content: “accessing information on the Web is not as much of a problem as distinguishing between valuable information and eye candy” (427).

and this: “more people have the potential to express their ideas and to influence others. Instead of the select few having access to the mechanisms for book publishing, broadcast television, or radio, people can take part in the new communication possibilities available through the computer” (423). we don’t need to make many claims about this anymore. we know. and yet– there are plenty of populations who don’t have this access. and plenty of people also have their access controlled or limited or tracked in sketchy, colonial-ish ways, too. there are lots of big hairy conversations and arguments to be had about access, even if some things can be somewhat taken for granted in 2015.

and perhaps this bit is still true too, from Maurellio, on how “research has not yet determined how much this use of code must be incorporated into composition courses” (411). I sort of chuckled at this. will research ever determine, unequivocably, exactly how anything should/must be done in any writing classroom? I mean, research is good and useful and all, but I have my doubts about how many “musts” it will ever be able to fully support.

I really love the concept of a metamedium–a medium that can reflect on itself. the web is not the only such medium, I don’t think. maybe most are, in some fashion.