Digital Poetry

For those who want to incorporate digital literature into your teaching repertoire, I’ve included some links to videopoems that can give you an idea of the virtual “open mic” that’s out there. In addition to the types of intimate, staged and non-staged videos on YouTube that Wesch was discussing, poets & writers are publishing videos of their work. In her article, Teacher as learner in DV poetry: Toward a praxis of engaged literacies in alternative spaces, Korina Jocson gives a more in-depth view on incorporating digital storytelling and digital poetry into a curriculum. Here are just a few examples of digital poetry that I find particularly fun and teachable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=430gHWUi7jE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrEPJh14mcU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvAcZdnIFxQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md4_U1o39EQ&feature=related

What do Jeopardy’s Watson, Hacktivists, Charlie Sheen & Steve Jobs have in common?

They’re all crammed together in this nonsensical reader rant compiled by Robert X. Cringely from InfoWorld:

http://www.infoworld.com/t/misadventures/readers-rant-ibms-watson-apples-sins-hacker-superheroes-and-charlie-sheen-513

Instead of linking directly, I’m forcing you to copy and paste the link as I have not Emailed InfoWorld (The same InfoWorld, Inc. Johnson-Eilola references in The Database and the Essay) requesting hyperlink permission. If you don’t feel like going through all the extra fingerwork to highlight, copy & paste, let me tell you: the article–a loosely strung together collection of reader responses to other articles by Cringely–is an impressive platform for advertisements. Indeed, with content headlined by such gripping characters as Charlie Sheen and Watson, and strung together by  more big-name Non sequiturs than you shake a Lady Ga Ga at, advertisements do become the most cohesive element of this text (at least I understand the point that the Sprint banner in the Sidebar is trying to make).

So, who is the author of this article? Considering that Robert X. Cringely, whose name is on the byline, has strung together excerpts from other texts (blogs, articles, etc.) perhaps, he sees himself more as an assembler (assemblage artiste?) than author. Perhaps, he not only shares authorship with the authors of the texts he quotes from and the highly recognizable names he liberally throws around this piece, but Sprint, Lumenson and the host of other flashing, twitching advertisers that led this reader to his article. Why not Apple, since they are not only mentioned in the article but the makers of the device upon which I am reading and blogging on? I mean, Cringely’s writing must have been influenced by a device similar to mine at some point in time, right? Maybe Google, because they make this “Chrome” browser? Maybe a miner in The Central African Republic who dug the rare elements that allow my computer to connect wirelessly or the factory worker in China who somehow merged that rare metal with cheap tin, silicon and industrial-quality gold to make this magnificent enigma of a tool that I am typing on. Without those folks, none of this information would go anywhere, so don’t they get some credit?

While an increasingly post-modern look at multiple authorship liberates us from the mythology of isolated creative genius, it replaces it with the reality of ownership. The author(s) of this text that I never intended to blog about for 300+ words now, are inconsequential compared to the owner of this text–who is clearly InfoWorld, Inc. Even if Mr. Cringely was a creative genius, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need his permission to link to his article, I need InfoWorld’s. He probably gets paid per article or word (authorship ends with publication). Whereas InfoWorld most likely derives revenue from readership and out-linking insofar as their advertisement payment is data-driven (ownership continues indefinitely). Not to mention, they, not Cringely, would be the ones to file lawsuits for IP violations if anyone were to use their content in a way that violated their terms of use. Neoliberal post-modernism, as Johnson-Eilola suggests, may have helped to deconstruct the image of the lone author, but has replaced it with a singular, legal owner–one with only proprietary rather instead of creative investment in content.

Openings, Moments, Tectonic Plates, Quartets and Dreaming: This is how we talk about New Literacy

In the preface to Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes that “…the healthiest way of being ill–is one most purified of, most resistant to metaphoric thinking.” The sexiness of new media speak and the metonymy we use to describe the importance of the change these media represent can leave us with a very sophisticated and inspired way of losing what we mean when we talk about new literacy. I’m not trying to poke holes in the print and digital texts by Wysocki, Miller and Yancey from this week’s (I want to say “readings” but perhaps we will need a more precise term for the homework we view/listen to/read/interact with/materialize each week as–if these authors are correct–teachers of adult literacy, we will be asking our students to interact with more than text on a weekly basis) assignments. But I do feel the need to cut through some of the metaphors and approximations about what this could change in the classrooms or English Departments in order to get at what I think they are telling me has changed as a result of new media, network technologies.

Argument is at the heart of our work in composition. How to discover and expose a line of reasoning, the construction of an idea, or the interpretation of a fact or artifact in order to make the world make sense is pretty much what i think were doing when we teach nonfiction writing (though i’m sure i’m missing something in that characterization). Speaking of the multiple media options available to users of the Internet, Richard Miller reminds us, “This is a way to push ideas into our culture. Why wouldn’t we be at the front edge of that?” While I know that our task is not to summarize or revisit the “readings” in these blogs, I still need to do a little distilling for myself: The argument that i think is being made in these readings and these classes is that we have a responsibility-to make available all of the tools in the Universe(ity) that will help our students (and ourselves) make effective, culturally relevant arguments.

Network Authorship in the Age of Web 2.0

In the introduction to A New Literacies Sampler, Colin Lankshear & Michelle Knobel regard new literacies as practices that privilege “participation over publishing, distributed experience over centralized experience, sharing over ownership…” The ethos stuff of participating in New Literacies is not only defined by the ability to collaborate but by the Author’s perceiving him or herself as a collaborating (rather than sole) author in production. Extending Bakhtin’s idea of multivoicedness (see Wertsch) that many voices, authors, ideas, are writing through the author as s/he writes, the network approach to literacy demands that text production is necessarily composed of–not only a multivoiced Author, but–a collection of authors that make the text whole. Even solo texts crediting a single writer or reporter such as newspaper or magazine articles published on line are rarely complete texts in and of themselves, as they often carry a thread (or threads) of commentary from readers-users-writers.

The network approach to literacy potentially disrupts familiar (and even valuable) ways of constructing the author’s identity as it connects to the concept of voice. (As we’ll be discussing identity later in the semester, I’ll hold off on going off on identity at this time.) In her book, The Mythology of Voice, Darsie Bowden confronts–indeed assaults–the “richly provocative” yet impossible-to-define metonym of voice. Published over 10 years ago, Bowden is ahead of her time, foreseeing the connected nature (and privileging of connectedness) of Web 2.0 literacies as redefining–even replacing the all too vague and overused, under-explained voice metaphor. She argues that

“attempting to understand the world of texts in terms of networks rather than voices can provide insights into how we exist in the world: how our repsonses are networked to the utterances of others (a Bakhtinian concept); how we express, communicate, inform persuade, and exist in contexts that include color, shape, movement, texture–all of which are revealed by the senses; and finally, how the power of language goes significantly beyond what voice can convey.” (P. 136)

So, according to Bowden and much of the Web 2.0 discussion (think: The Machine is Us/sing Us) authorship is shared, collaborative–the network becoming an almost self-governing authority that moderates and mediates production of the authors.

A Gardening Metaphor:

The collaborative nature of text production is epitomized in Jessica Hammer‘s Chapter, Agency and Authority in Role-Playing “Texts” from NLS (Chapter 4). If ontology recapitulates philology, looking at the communities of practice among role-playing games, could provide a model for conceptualizing the cocreation of texts and distribution of authorship throughout the entire new (digital) literary market place–not only role-playing environments. Hammer describes three levels of authorship functioning in the creation of collaborative role-playing games (think World of Warcraft, Vampire: The Mascquerade, Everquest)–primary, secondary and tertiary. Instead of thinking as authorship in the network literacy of Web 2.0, perhaps it would be more helpful to think of authorship existing at a particular level. This thought occured to me as I was teaching a class today in Health Education on the social determinants of health (see Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making us Sick?). In this unit, I begin with the article, Levels of Racism: A theoretic framework and a gardener’s tale by Camara Phyllis Jones. Reflecting on Dr. Jones’ gardening metaphor, the Hammer chapter and the introduction, I’d like to offer a similar gardening metaphor to think of primary, secondary and tertiary authorship in Web 2.0 network-style writing.

Imagine authors as flowers or vegetables growing in a garden. They will compete with one another for sunlight, absorb moisture from one another, share available resources with one another (e.g., water, soil nutrients, etc.) go to seed, regenerate and produce more authorflowers. Some will grow strong and vibrant, others will only grow to a middling height, some might go to seed right away. In my mind, these are the secondary authors- the ones who are posting, moderating, doing the most visible production in web texts. Like the flowers, they are the most visible elements and the driving purpose behind growing the garden in the first place.

Now comes along a buzzing bee, or, say, a culture of earthworms. Though they move from garden to garden and don’t stay put, the bees are needed to cross pollinate the flowers creating species the flowers alone never could have managed. Though rarely visible, the earthworms’ presence is always felt as they keep the soil rich and nutritious for the flowers to grow in. Occasionally beetles or other invasive species will come around the garden, but the biodiversity (provided by the bees) and the soil integrity (thanks Earthworm!) will help the flowers sustain their growth even in the face of invaders. These are tertiary authors. Fleeting, peripheral, yet integral participants in Network authorship. They may not claim an affinity or participate in a core way, but their presence (whether they carry pollen or disease) is necessary to keep the garden evolving and thriving from season to season.

The primary author in this metaphor is the Gardener. All of these literacy environments are created and made possible by an ISP, telephone company, creator of the digital environment, advertisers that finance the site, even individual web designers or groups of designers who may not be tied to a corporation or enterprise. The influence of the Gardener is that s/he/it exerts ultimate control over the environment. He can fertilize the soil to grow only a certain variety of flower, he can water some flowers more than others, he can leave the garden alone and let it flourish or perish without his interference, should that invasive species from the tertiary level manifest, he can choose to salvage or dispose of the garden all together without asking the flowers or the earthworms or the bees what they think about that idea. If cornered, the gardener would admit to believing that he is the owner of all the intellectual property produced by the flowers, bees, earthworms, or whatever thing may show up in his garden.

In many ways, this unintentionally long (my apologies) posting, is really me trying to get clear (or perhaps, put my confusion on display) about what is going on in network production. While the New Literacies & Web 2.0 and this network approach to production totally, undeniably interrogate and threaten proprietary notions of authorial voice they introduce others. My purpose with this post is not to suggest that the New Literacies have not expanded and transformed (for the better, I think) our ideas of authorship, nor is it to suggest that we have been fooled into thinking that we are collaborators when we are really pawns in the Master’s Chess game (if this is the case, it is not exclusively in digital texts that we play this role). It is only to interrogate the sense of limitlessness and democratization of authorship/authority that is embodied in the New Literacies discussion. While we produce and share text in new ways, we are not always and only doing it as free agents. Just as our individual voices are heavily influenced by external sociocultural and historical factors, our collective authorship in the new literacies is also heavily mediated and determined by forces outside the “network” within which we compose.