Hipsters

I'm going to go out on a limb and approach my blog differently this week. Call me lazy, but I'm simply pasting the notes I typed while reading. Mainly because I found them somewhat amusing (my notes). I was intrigued by Porter, then Johnson-Eilola was hard to get into - as soon as he got into the Google discussion I got confused, and the annotations in the photocopy added to the confusion of ideas. Anyway, if you read this thanks and enjoy.

PORTER intertextuality

What is originality?

sources + social contexts > writer

editing and editors - objectivity - use of quotes

"norms" of discourse communities

posthumously famous people -Robert Frost

starving artist

hipster.

Eliot's "tradition" = intertextuality?

Bartholomae "The struggle of the student writer is not the struggle to bring out that which is within; it is the struggle to carry out those ritual activities that grant out entrance into a closed society"

"there is this tendency to see writing as individual, as isolated, as heroic" (44)

"community writers"

Johnson-Eilola The Database and the Essay

"We are comfortable with unreliable narrative."

What's reliable?

"The production of 'original' text will continue to be an important activity, but the cultural and economic power of that activity is on the wane."

the anti-hipster, or, hipsters don't want cultural or economic power.

"What right should any single person have over an idea?" should they care about "rights"? greed.

writing≠compilation

sampling in music=[good] compilation

What is creativity?

Does publicity relinquish your creativity/privacy?

Google=writing/rhetoric?

Flying Toasters!

I'm a big fan of Lanham, because even I am old enough to remember the era of After Dark, and the flying toasters were my favorite screen saver.

Even though I never knew how to modify anything about After Dark, I see how it is a metaphor for the modern ability to modify pretty much everything you come into contact with. If "the critic can become a creator" (159) in every situation, what happens to professional creators? If everybody wants to do things their way, that means some things are not being done the best way, and the best way does not get the respect it deserves. This definitely relates to the Kohl et. al article—if everybody can update Wikipedia, how do we know what is accurate or trustworthy? I personally try not to use Wikipedia for important purposes (professors don't like it), but I don't think that just avoiding it is a good enough answer.

At first I was afraid I'd lost Lanham when he started talking about how technology is endangering the development of human reason (on 160), but luckily I think that was just an attention-grabber to keep us reading (it worked for me).

"Might scholarly communication become iconic in ways never seen before? It is fun to think about." (161)

Lanham is talking about this in 1994, and I think that some scholarly communication has become iconic, but not nearly as iconic as communication in general. Again, we see how the institutions in our society actively resist new ways. Lanham says that "I myself don't think that literature will die, but clearly it will change as it moves from page to screen. Graduate programs in English ought to be considering that movement." (162)

It's 2011, and I'm not sure that graduate programs in English are considering that movement as much as they should be. Feel free to shoot me down on this one—I hope they are, but it's not something you hear about often (and I don't know much about graduate programs myself). But it seems to me that individual classes do take multimodal technologies seriously and incorporate them in very meaningful ways, but in classes like the US101 freshman seminar, students are still laboring away reading paper texts with nothing but words and writing papers in MLA format for 80% of their grades. Personal rant: I'm a peer leader in US101 and I had to argue with my professor that instead of assigning another writing assignment alongside an upcoming paper, we should have the students draw concept maps of their papers to enable them to write better papers. You can't make a better writer by telling them to write more. You can't make a better communicator by giving them the same communication tools. It's common sense!

So my main concern coming away from the Lanham article is that teachers who do push the envelope and incorporate more innovative technologies and ways of communication will not get taken seriously. Students might love it, but what about their parents? What about other teachers? What about all of the old people who make important decisions? If they don't like it, how are we going to effectively incorporate it into something as important as graduate school?

Lanham says that "digital technology democratizes the art and letters," (162) and maybe that is what is so scary when it comes to incorporating it into the educational institution. But really, it should be the most exciting thing about it. As Emerson would agree, we always have to push the envelope; we always have to develop more as thinkers and innovators, and technology is what enables that. So maybe we should redefine "scholarly communication" to include multimodal texts, not just text-only journal articles.

It's Friday!

It's Friday!

Diversify!

I'd like to make a motion that all of the cool stuff we are learning about multimodal writing in WRIT 371 is actually applied to texts about multimodal writing.

I still suffer through long articles from academic journals.

In the syllabus, Doug has titled Tuesday's class "Imaginary but Real."

That's pretty all-encompassing, especially if you're an existentialist (I don't really understand existentialism, but I imagine it relates).

Wolf's article talked about computer technologies taking on massive and unprecedented roles, like satellites collecting a terabyte of data in ten days and technologies which simulate crash tests of cars that have never been built (422, 426).

The problem with this is that nobody wants to analyze a terabyte of data every ten days, and who trusts a computer-generated safety rating?

Basically, computers are flawed. They're imaginary. But they're real! And they are very overstimulating. It's basically impossible to analyze a terabyte of data every ten days, and it's equally impossible to process everything the internet has to offer on a daily basis—news, Facebook, email, Netflix, articles from academic journals that are required reading for class.

So I imagine that not everything out there needs to be processed, and focus on the most pressing reading material (Facebook).

Mishra was a more painful read than Wolf. I agree that the use of images in education should be (should have been a long time ago) researched more extensively; as a future educator I want to know what's happening with visuals and stuff. But I imagine that Mishra's concerns can be addressed by any teacher, if the teacher explains the visuals they use, their conventions, abstractions, biases and assumptions. But first, the teacher must understand these concepts, hence the call for more research.

Graphic attention

Bernhardt objectively explores organization of text, and how font size and placement can call attention to certain ideas within the text; even though text is linear and must be read from left to right, the reader can figure out where to start or stop reading without much difficulty in a well-organized text.

Wysocki is offended by a magazine ad, and uses this as a diving board for criticizing the available criticism of visuals, ultimately calling to change the "social and temporal expectations of visual composition" (172).

That's mainly what I got out of this.

Bernhardt makes sense—because of the nature of text, people generally start in the beginning and read towards the end, so calling attention to areas not in the beginning allows for people to start in the middle somewhere and at least read the part of the text they find most interesting.

Wysocki is on more slippery ground. Images (without text) are always "read" subjectively; even if the artist wants to send a certain immoral message, that doesn't mean that every viewer is going to get that message—they could see something totally different than the artist intended. This is why it's always really interesting to look at a piece of art without text, and then look at the title of the piece and maybe a little blurb about it by the author. When I do this, I often see something totally different than the title/description of the piece suggests, and regardless of authorial intent, the piece has the ability to send mixed messages.

This is the main flaw in Wysocki's idea—she assumes that the "expectations" of art are the same as its understood messages. There is something to be said for art that portrays women as strong and beautiful instead of turning them into sex objects, but who decides which category an image of a woman falls into? The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Cliche.

Facebook creeping and attention or the lack thereof.

Williams argues that social networking sites prioritize popular culture references, which lead their users to judge others based on popular culture references. I have no doubt that this is true; I too once had a MySpace (before it was my_____) and I won't tell you what songs played on my profile.

I still have a Facebook, and I was obviously thinking about my "Facebook creeping" methods while reading "Online Performances of Identity." I realized that the main page of a person's Facebook these days consists of their profile picture with links to other stuff (info, photos, friends) under it, their wall with some stuff other people wrote and/or that person's posts and status updates, and now a little "photo reel" on the top. You have to click the "info" tab to find out personalized (or pop-culture-ized) info about the person, and who takes the time to do that? Facebook definitely prioritizes photos and human networking—I usually click on the person's profile picture and see what other pictures they've deemed profile-pic worthy, read some posts on their wall, and call it good. And I am going to venture to say that these things do not have to do with pop culture unless there are pop culture-related things on their wall or in their photos, which is totally possible, but not guaranteed.

They aren't really intellectual, either, and neither is this post right now. Whoops.

As far as Jones and "inter-activity" goes, I found his examples pretty interesting (and impressive). My question now is, what kind of people most often engage in inter-activity? There are definitely different levels of inter-activity, and they don't always have to involve the computer. For instance, while eating breakfast, I often chat with my roommates and read the paper. If I read an especially funny comic, I point it out to my roommate and we laugh together. So the inter-activity becomes social, kind of like when people bond over Star Wars in online forums.

The idea of "cognitive" vs. "social" attention and that "what gives value to information is the amount of attention it can attract" (Jones 22) can also be applied to both online and real-life situations. Lately I've found myself re-developing the skill of tuning people out when I'm trying to read something (this is what happens when I live with three girls). Just by the act of reading, I'm not really paying social attention, but I could be paying cognitive attention, but I'm not. Whereas, if I was online chatting, I would appear to be more polite because I could still read what the person said at a point when I felt like turning my attention there, thus giving it more value than when it was spoken out loud and never registered in my brain.

So, I'm all about FTF interaction, but I can't deny the merits of online communication, whether or not inter-activity is a factor.