blog blog
So, I recently missed Foolscap’s first blogday, bad blogger that I am. A lifetime of therapy and counseling, I’m sure, awaits.
So, why do we mark blogdays anyway? Or blog birthdays, if you prefer, but my own preference is for “blogday”. We don’t mark the days we first learned to read (ReadDay?) or write (WriteDay?), perhaps because we tend to think of those events as more procedural and evolutionary: I know I couldn’t tell you what day I first knew how to read. (Although an aunt did get me a trophy for being the best reader in my kindergarten class for my birthday one year.) I point to these two “events” rather than one’s first word or first steps because they seem more integral to the way I use my blog–almost said the way blogs are used, but of course not all blogs are used the same way–in fact, we might even recall my own recent deliberations for how to use my blog.
I’ve not been writing here as much as I would like, esp. given the things I’ve been reading of late. I still owe the much promised responses to Rice, Derrida, Lakoff/Turner, and now I can add the Gorgias and the Sophist and Debra Hawhee’s book as well. In part, one reason I’ve avoided doing the page-by-page note posts is because I’m sort of more interested in thinking through these texts as applications, or maybe as rhetorical lessons, than simply as a collection of notes and bon mots. Of course, when I come to use these texts eventually, Ill need that citation mode, but I’m much more interested at present in seeing how I might link together Lakoff/Turner, Derrida, and Kant . . . or Rice and Derrida and Hawhee (which is sort of where my brain is at right now).
So, in other news, I’m coordinating a panel submission for RSA that will involve myself, Jessica Rivait, Kim Lacey, and Jared Grogan–no blogger he. When things are assembled, I’ll put up the preamble to the panel for general assessment–and on that note, anyone have any advice about good texts on celebrity, ethos, and media(tion). This isn’t the Lennon project again, (though it could work) but a new approach (for me at least) to questions of pop rhetoric.
My goal for the ucoming semester: One post a week if time allows; the 1020 course has a pretty rigorous online component so I want to be sure I keep on the ball with that.
Anyone know if I can set my MacBook’s delete key to work like the PC’s delete key with using the “Function” button?
big mac
So, this post is being written on my shiny new MacBook Pro. (Thanks a zillion, mom!) I’ve been having a lot of fun figuring out the nooks and crannies of the Mac OS, and having bouts of frustration with the keyboard–it works, but you have to apply more prssure to the keys than I would otherwise have thought, in addition to just getting the hang of using the narrower notebook keyboard. It’s been a learning experience, and in the best way: driven by curiosity, not mandated by function. Of course, in order to know how to do certain things–use certain functions–I have to explore, but the point remains.
Having recently read Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, I’ve been sort of theorizing this experience. One point that SJ makes is that one function of complex media is just this search/explore pattern, process that, Johnson argues, equips cultural consumers with a set of skills based on conjecture, hypothesis, and deductive reasoning. SJ locates this in games, but it might be extended to at least one part of the technology learning process. The Mac came without bulky manuals and guides and whosits and howtos (rather disconcerting at first for this longtime PC user), and that provokes an interesting thought. (Well, interesting to me at least.) Apple seems to have moved away from the PC-model of learning–the don’t send you the weighty tomes that I’m sure Dell, HP, Compaq would. Instead, the interface in the Mac OS seems to encourage the sort of exploration I’ve been enjoying the last thirtysix hours or so (not consecutively).
As an invention strategy, then, we might ask how to make exploratory texts. Here, of course, I don’t mean the familiar exploratory essay, but rather a text that allows for a reader and a writer to try things, play with them, follow options and connections. This is not a new goal, of course, since many of the new media rhetorics we’re familiar with seem to have just this ideal as their guiding goal. But it may make for an interesting assignment: ask students to design their own OSs–not to a computer, necessarily, but to a space, perhaps, or a text of their own choosing. That is, if the OS is the basis for how we interact with with the computer, we might ask students to apply that notion to another moment of interaction: How do you interact, say, with Wayne State’s campus? What information is necessary to make one’s way from Parking Structure #2 to State Hall: what options are you presented with, what paths are open to you, and what happens should you follow one path rather than another? I’m not sure this a great assignment or anything; in this bare bones description, it sounds like the lamest Choose Your Own Adventure book ever published: “If you decide to give a dollar to the Lyndon LaRouche volunteers, go to page 72.” But there is something of an interest here–I think I’m edging to what I’ve seen described as the Deleuzian notions of “drift,” but since I’m behind on my Deleuze, I can’t sy for sure.
Something else I’ve been thinking about, invention wise. I’ve not written much about the “dictionaries” project of late, because it was sort of stagnant for a while. But recently, two ideas for possible ways to make this syllabus work:
As I’m envisioning it right now at least, the semester would revolve round two projects. The first would be based on neologisms; the “necessary words” assignment. In a nutshell, the goal of this project, as the name indicates, would be to create a list of necessary words to describe cultural phenomena. Students would be asked to first, coin the word, and then to explain its meaning and to suggest why it’s a necessary word–what is the exigence, then, for proposing the new word. The research would be based upon finding scenes in writing (or elsewhere) that are described by this word. So, for example, one that I’ve come up with is indiegestion, whose roots lie in “indie” (as in music) and “indigestion”. Indiegestion describes the moment an indie band reaches a certain point of oversaturation, and even those writers and critics who championed them initially grow weary of them. So, to show this through research, I’d locate the early reviews of a band’s work, and then find the follow-up scene where (ideally) the same writer describes a frustration or disappointment with the same band. This wouldn’t be the strategy for every neologism, of course: the methods of example would depend on the word in question. So, why do I like this assignment–what theory is behind it? Well, using Rice’s Rhetoric as a starting point, I could point to features of commutation & appropriation as at least two new media rhetorics at work here. The tutor text for this project would be McFedrie’s Word Spy: The Word Lover’s Guide to Modern Culture, which is a somewhat satiric (but nonetheless valuable) guide to media-derived neologisms, compiled both through observation and invention. In addition to Rice’s work, I could point to other new media theorists (or, like Derrida, who have influenced new media studies) whose work abounds in neologisms and wordplay–as Rice uses Burroghs, for example. Another point such a project might make, at least peripherally, is that the new media (or at least, the media that are still new to us) need new words to describe new experiences: just three years ago, the noun/verb “YouTube/youtube” would have been gibberish–actually, “Google/google” makes even more sense there on the same grounds. Another, more concrete point about invention is that since students are inventing their own words, they also need to invent the appropriate criteria for its demonstration. . .thus, they’re being called upon, as in the mystory/discourse assignments, to invent as they invent–both the text in question and the rules or creating that text.
The second project is based on the text that Rice recommended, Unspun. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s similar to Raymond Williams’ Keywords, except instead of terms central to critical theory, the terms investigated here are all tech related (there is some overlap–Williams might make good addenda to this text). My idea here for this project is somewhat more vague . . . at present, it’s just called the “demonstration” project. I’ve been thinking about ways to ask students to demonstrate how some of these words circulate in different ways through the web or through discourse. For example, one of the essays in Unspun is “Ideology.” My idea for what a student interested in ideology might do is to create a series of wikis or blogs or sites that mimic/echo different ideological perspectives found on the web or elsewhere. So, for example, you might have a student set up both a religious fundmentalist blog, using the blog genre to compile fundie sites online and offer comment on them; in turn, the student would also have to create a blog/wiki for a counter-sitem, working the same way but taking the opposite stance. Okay, so that example is not the greatest. But one of the other essays is “authorship,” which might yield itself to a richer project. I envision a student creating a series of sites that consider different dimenions of a single author: biographical information & influence on his or her work; the ethos created by an author through the work he or she produces/d; and the Web imprint of an author: how an author is presented/hailed/critiqued in online discourse. This is just one question about authorship that the Web might lead us to, of course: there remains the question of who students (and instructors) become once we engage with the phenomenon of online authorship as well–but how to suggest a project for that question escapes me thus far. More reading/thinking are in line. Anyway, the point I want to achieve with this project is not to have students just write about online authorship or ideology–to use them as topoi–but to demonstrate these scenes of contention, to perform them. Again, the debt to Rice’s work is obvious, but as a side note, I’m pleased with these ideas at least to the extent that I think/hope they show I’ve started to embrace the Vitanzan/Ricean dictum: Theory Is Practice: to have my pedagogy be informed by theory, and to to have my theory be enabled by pedagogy. To think, as Rice might say, rhetorically.
metamoment
So if anyone was wondering, I think I have decided on the MacBook for the laptop mentioned below. There’s just too many problems with the Vista OS at present for me to feel comfortable with it, and Mac has a great reputation anyway, esp. among peeps whose opinions in these matters I hold in high regard (thx Jeff and Jill!).
I’m writing this in the dept’s ninth floor computer lab on one of the dreaded Macs against the back wall. I decided this would be a good way to test run the Mac OS and get a feel for using it, and you know what: awesome. I love how the taskbar at the top of the desktop becomes integrated with the individual proggie’s taskbar. I like the disappearing/reappearing dock. The only things I’ve not liked so far–in the brief time I’ve spent playing around with stuff, is that I can’t figure out how to rename files (for example, image files taken from online sources) and the fact that the “home” and “end” keys don’t work the way I’m accustomed to. If anyone has advice, it’s welcome.
So now, al I’ve got to do is find time and get mater to order the MacBook.
Sweeet!
metamoment
I’ve decided that–while I still like the blog being primarily a space for textual reflection and theoretical workouts–I should on occasion devote more time to writing about personal things. Of course, that phrasing suggests theory etc. is not personal and that it’s just something I do, not part of who I am. Which is silly: I’m a theorist. Or, at least, aspire to be so.
So, faithful reader(s), why the decision? Well, the blog I read most attentively is Yellow Dog, and although Jeff’s theory/pedagogy/discipline/profession posts are always great, I often enjoy the little slivers of personal info that find their way to the blog. Again–the t/p/d/p2 stuff is, I’m sure, “personal” to Jeff as well. But I like those moments, and they’ve been echoed in certain ways by Collin’s recent Barthesian ”Summer of Personal Reflection” theme on his blog (until recent undisclosed events have made it difficult for C to blog), and the floating webmemes like “7/8 random things” that encourage bloggers toward similar “personal” scenes of invention.
So I’m introducing the new, semiregular feature called the “metamoment” which is devoted just to those scenes where the object is solely or primarily myself–again, with the caveat of the personal/professional divide being one of those dichotomies that Derrida warns against (and Ulmer and others have tried to deconstruct or work against through mystorical invention). This decision also finds its roots in last week’s chat with Jessica–one topic was whether, in the process of professionalization, one feels some sense of “authentic self” slipping way. For me, no–I’ve always been into theory and abstraction, and the professionalizaton merely gives me an appropriate database to draw from in expanding those interests. But one way to destablize that risk of losing authentic selfhood–ill-defined, true, and troubled as well by questions of essential/discursive subjectivity–might be to offer–against the usual concerns of theory, rhetoric, pedagogy that dominate the blog–insights into myself. And, to show I’ve been reading Jeff’s book (why I still kiss ass when he’s at a new university, I don’t know, haha.) to juxtapose (personal and theory) and commutate (blog becoming site of personality rather than theory).
I’m nearly done with both Jeff’s book and Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, which by chance I’ve found myself reading along one another. There are echoes btw the two, and when time comes to write about that, I’ll try to address the two together . Also, I have yet to do the full Derrida post (where in god’s name to start?) and the post of Lackoff/Turner (easier to start, but not much to say). Also like to do one in response to the aforementioned music post from Jeff’s blog. I guess that prompts something else: “Metamoment” will be category for those such posts, whereas category “meta” will remain the category for blogging about blogging. So I guess that makes this a metametamoment?
Lastly, a cry for help. Very generously, my mater has decided to purchase a laptop for my upcoming birthday. I’ve pretty much decided on a PC (sorry, my Mac-lovin’ pals) ‘cos I’m a glutton for punishment, if you believe the recurring Mac vs. PC ad campaign. But most new PCs I’ve checked out have the new Windows Vista OS, and I dunno much about it–I’ve heard the folks at Microsoft are still having a lot of problems with proggies not running on it and such, so I’m hesitant to choose a Vista-based PC if that’s the case. So, here’s my cry: if you know aught about Vista, pro or con, drop a line or two; or, if you want to plead your case on Steve Jobs’ behalf and convince me to come over to Mac, take that up. Why not? I’ve already abandoned lit studies for rhetoric, right? I’ll just do whatever you kooky folks tell me to do.