Who’s Talking? A Review of Week 2, Part II

 Not only do the problems of writer and identity and authority fit under rhetoric’s age-old question “Who’s talking?”, so do problems of maintaining individuality in collaborative writing environments, and maintaining engagement amidst a massive wash of electronic texts.

This week saw us grapple with a number of questions about how the writer remains an independent individual in a collaborative, networked world of electronic texts. Who’s talking, if texts aren’t actually individually authored? How are you going to paraphrase another writer by putting what they say “in your own words” if there aren’t any words that are your own? How can you have your own ideas when you get so many (okay, almost all) of your ideas from other people? And where the hell did they get their ideas?  I mean, who had the idea the first time—and how come they got to be so lucky and we’re stuck with “There is nothing new under the sun”? Not to mention how much writing with other people(‘s ideas) sucks, at least if you wanted to have your own ideas. (This is why I love Porter’s account of Jefferson getting edited by committee while drafting the Declaration of Independence.)

These are genuinely fair questions, and they stymie researchers too. It turns out to be incredibly difficult to tease apart culture and inspiration. But then again, if you’re not sold on the claim that the best writing is purely original (thank Shelley and Keats for that one), it kinda matters less. Except as we have to figure out the arrangement questions that Eilola-Johnson raises. From a writer’s point of view, though, here are maybe some important question: What do you think? Why do you think it? Why does it matter? If as a writer you can say those things, you’re gonna be all the original and all the individual you need to be. And hope to goodness that what you think, why, and why it matters, are informed somehow by the world and people you surround yourself with. J

Engagement. Here’s what I will say: technology reveals disengagement. It doesn’t cause it, doesn’t facilitate it, doesn’t enhance it, doesn’t teach it. It makes an already disengaged student obviously disengaged. But, so, the link to “Who’s talking” would be, for me, simply the point that our electronic world gives us a lot of voices to listen to. As rhetors encountering texts, we have to prioritize. Or, back to my point about revealing disengagement, what we’re reading reveals our priorities. 

Who’s Talking? A Review of Week 2, Part I

It’s struck me throughout this week, re-reading the assigned texts and then experiencing the flow of all your conversations on those texts (creating, inevitably, and entirely new string of texts to also talk about), that the problems which have most interested most of you come down to one of the most basic questions askable in rhetorical analysis: Who’s talking?

My list of hot topics includes trustworthiness—how do we know who to believe and who not to as writing becomes less edited and there are fewer and fewer gates to it; individuality—in a world where writing grows increasingly collaborative, how do we ensure any authorial independence, responsibility, or incentive?; and engagement—how, in electron- and technology-soaked environments, especially classrooms, do we encourage or regulate engagement with the individuals who are “present” in physical spaces? I can see all of those concerns as stemming from the ways in which writing technologies are showing us more about a writer/rhetor’s entanglements, both intertextual and collaborative. Take the trustworthiness or believability question, otherwise known as the “internet dog” effect. 

Electronic publishing can make it indeed very difficult to know the most basic authorial information, who someone is. And beyond basic identity, we stand to be fooled about authority: it’s quite easy to sound authoritative without being authoritative. So how do we know who’s talking?  And whether we should listen to them? 

Wikipedia captured the height of these anxieties: a 1900s understanding of publishing met the possibility of democratic editing, leading to a hysteria born of not understanding that entries would be continually edited, not just edited by The Bad Guys and then left in perpetuity as would happen with a print text. The Wikipedia hysteria also captured another old-school presumption: the Single Authoritative Source, or “knowledge in a vacuum.” To presume that Wikipedia would be the end of accurate information as we know it is to presume that what it says can’t be compared to other sources and that readers can’t make judgments about what to believe. 

Don’t you love being trusted so much, dear reader? Don’t you love it when the proponents of such hysteria say, in effect, “I am smart enough to recognize such deception but nobody else is.” Okay, whatever. (Like when 30 people get in a room to complain about how advertising is too persuasive, and each of them says "I would never be swayed by an ad like this, but all those boneheads out there will be." If none of us are swayed, where are all those boneheads?)

The rules of rhetorical source evaluation haven’t changed. You still ask the same three questions you should always have been asking of any text you encounter, no matter the type:

• What is the purpose and motivation of the text? Why did someone bother to write this to begin with?
• Who benefits from this text? Now that the text is written, who does it help? Who does it serve? And if you like, who does it work against or resist?
• Who has paid for this text? Even in a world of essentially free electronic publishing, most texts are still expensively produced, and even of the free ones it’s easy to ask, “If this text cost money, who would pay for it?”  This question gets at sponsorship, and sponsorship gets at supporters and networks of friends. If you know who paid, you know whose interests the text aligns with.

What’s funny is that you probably have never had these questions put to you before exactly this way, but you’ve always needed them, even before the “Who’s Talking?” concerns raised by open electronic publishing. We don’t actually need them more now, we just use them more now, which says spooky things about the past, if you ask me.

So: electronic, networked texts expose – in ways that the traditional publishing industry disguised – questions of the writer’s authority and identity, but rhetorical analysis and the same networked electronic resources (search engines, online reference works) give us just as good ways to ascertain these things as we’ve always had. Often better.

Next up: maintaining indivudality, and staying engaged.

Some reflections on writing and technology

I don’t have a way to really unify the readings of week 2 beyond “writing as technology,” and to gather up and discuss *all* the themes raised in this work would be, well, more than a blog post. So what I’ll do here instead is address a few themes raised by the work that seem particularly important to me.

The first thing I want to claim is that technology isn’t “changing” “writing.” By which I mean that “writing,” whatever it is, is the same as it has always been: the  composition and inscription of thought in symbols, which renders the thought both shareable and non-ephemeral. When we see writing differently as different technologies are brought to it, what we are seeing is light shown on different aspects of writing by the technologies that favor those aspects. So, for example, current technologies force us to consider the pastiche nature of writing more than some earlier technologies did because current technologies particularly afford pastiche. Similarly, with current technologies, revising writing comes as naturally as breathing, whereas technologies such as the typewriter tended to “lock” writing and strongly discourage revision. To no one’s surprise, then, in an age of typewriters extensive focus was devoted to planning writing, where in an age of word-processors planning gets somewhat less emphasis and revision gets a great deal more than it used to.

I think probably the most difficult of these pieces to read is Johndan E-J’s piece on “The Database and the Essay,” because it presents some of the toughest theory and some of the most complicated ideas. But also some of the deepest and most important questions to writers of our age: What is the line, if any, between “writing” and “compilation”? How much should a word be worth?  Who should make money off other people’s writing?  And -- if would I be right in reading E-J’s conclusion as being that there will be no agreement about such questions, only localized struggle -- is that condition unavoidable, “built-in” to writing technology now, or is it a human failing that could be fixed?  I would love for us to think about these things together.

I’m interested too in the apparent ironies and disjuncts and contradictions that current writing technology brings us. Consider the issue of time, which “users” experience as latency (how long it takes a thing to happen once we’ve asked it to). Latency drives us nuts: we like things to happen fast and happen now. (Think  of how you get your hands on music, or any other information, and how frustrated you get when it takes more than seconds.)  So here’s an irony: the multimodal creations that get us things instantaneously take eons longer to create than their pure alphabetic equivalents would. For every mode you add to your composition, you don’t double the time it takes to compose, you square it. And that’s if you’re highly skilled. Another irony: we work now in worlds of collaboration, yet collaboration slows us down -- you can work so much more quickly by yourself. We value speed but our work demands more than a solo performance.

I’ll return to my original claim, though: so often, what we think of as “new” in writing was always with us, and just masked. Wikipedia: fabulous example. Few people understand that every encyclopedia (and dictionary) ever has been a compilation of articles each written by an expert or a collaboration of experts and then edited toward correctness by other experts -- just like Wikipedia. Its early detractors seized on the “anyone can edit!” nature of the work as its weakness when it should have been easy enough to recognize from previous eras of writing that collaboration was always the strength of the encyclopedia, and more would thus most likely be better. (A complication for my example: much of the quality and reliability of Wikipedia now comes from how difficult it has become for “just anyone” to edit articles on it. Still, though, it remains mostly a meritocracy of informed persuasion.) Wikipedia isn’t really a change in writing; it’s the use of current technology to expose the same collaborative nature of knowledge-making in writing as was always there.

In a number of blogs I’ve read for this week so far, the futility of trying to see the future of writing technologies has been pointed out. This is one reason I like returning to rhetoric -- there are so few universals related to writing in part because writing is a technological sport and thus the tools will always be evolving and emphasizing different aspects of writing. Rhetoric has the few universals there are. So further food for thought for me is, how are technologies responsive to rhetorical principles such as contingency, situationality, and epistemology?  I can predict that tool that respond best to "it depends" and have the  most to do with knowledge construction will be most successful. (At last, I think I can.)  And whatever most enhances interaction is probably going to be very valuable.  The interesting questions are, how do we get any more specific than that?

Some thoughts on rhetoric after week 1

While the reading you did last week on rhetoric is far from comprehensive, it hit most of the central concepts of this area of study. I would stress the most important of these as situationality (versus universality) and exigence. Understanding that how to interact/communicate/persuade depends on a situation which has given rise to a perceived need for that interaction--and thus constrains it--explains much of why writing works the way it does. (If you didn't see my summary post on rhetoric, might be worth a look.)

In a full-on rhetorical theory class (such as ENGL 450) we would spend a lot more time on the deeper philosophical implications of rhetoric that we’ve touched the edges of here -- the nature of knowledge as experiential (built through interaction among people) rather than purely objective or subjective, and the inadequacy of absolutes and universals in meeting contingent situations. (Creating a kind of relativism that makes many people uncomfortable, until they’re shown that "absolutes" were always subjective and relative too, and merely claimed not to be in order to gain power.) Some of these issues will inevitably arise as we study other themes in the class, so we’ll come back to them in practical ways; in the meantime, it’s good to know they’re there.

For us as writers rather than philosophers, though, the study of rhetoric remains most fruitful in response to a writer’s two biggest, ever-present questions: What makes writing good? And, how should I write this? Out of these we can find an answer to Mandy’s question: Do writers need to really understand “the nature of writing,” or can they just write? Writers always just write, but part of writing is having those first two writerly questions. Using rhetoric to understand the nature of writing simply tends to yield more usable answers to them. Rhetoric tells us, you’re supposed to go into a writing situation asking “What will make this writing good?” and knowing that the answer will be different than the last time you asked the question. Rhetoric explains why your professors keep giving you conflicting advice, answers, and grades on writing, and why that is not broken but rather why it’s inevitable. (And it is the deeper, philosophical role of rhetoric that might then prompt us to ask, Why did you believe for so long that there was supposed to be consistency, universality, absolutes, across writing situations, instead of immediately recognizing that quality is contingent upon exigence and situation? Why would you ever have believed that two different teachers should give you the same grades on your writing if they read it in two different situations?)

In your discussion this week it’s seemed that the rhetorical theory has raised questions about some other assumptions we have about writing, too, especially originality and individual authorship. Obviously, Porter’s work challenges our traditional sense of an “Author,” that sole inspired writer who thinks up the whole story from scratch. (I didn’t, interestingly, see any of you question Porter’s motives for writing this piece -- that is, I didn’t see us treating Porter or any of the others as rhetors writing rhetoric. Hmmm.)  Earlier writing technologies (codex books, for example, as well as addresses to the Roman Senate) emphasized the individual aspects of writing, and the technologies we study in this class now emphasize how writing always was never just an individual pursuit. Present technologies expose the interaction and collaboration that have always been at the heart of writing. How might it help you to believe this about writing? Because it might change the way you go about it.

Several of you created a question for me that -- well, I’ve grappled with the question before but not quite considered it in these terms, and I think it may help me in some scholarship I’m working on right now. That’s the question of whether computers, algorithms, software, and tech tools should be considered rhetors themselves. Opinion seemed to run mostly on the side of No, which is probably a fair starting point. But as I deepen my own study of how people interact with texts that are mediated and even created by machines (we’ll look at this later in the course), it seems probably very fruitful to use a rhetorical framework that asks, in what ways are these machines, these “inanimate objects,” rhetors and in what ways are they not?  It’s just another angle on the older question of how humans, as rhetorical beings, “project” rhetoric onto non-humans. Really good stuff, and your work has given me some fresh angles of vision on it.

Lastly, it seems in classes like this I never get as much chance/time as I’d like to talk about persuasion, because there’s so much else to study. I was happy to see a lot of questions and discussions from you around this. In the shortest possible form, I have a suggestion I’d like you to look for as you study persuasion around you, based on the pisteis (logos, pathos, ethos). I want to claim that when something is persuasive to you, the ultimate root of that persuasion is identification: you see in the person trying to persuade you values, beliefs, and ideas that you already agree with. (Arguments are persuasive when they line up with ideas we already agree with.) When we see in the rhetor our own existing values, beliefs, and ideas (that they’re merely connecting their own claims to), it’s like looking in a mirror: we look at the rhetor and we see our best selves, and that is (naturally enough) attractive and persuasive to us. This post is already long so I won’t explain how each of the pisteis relate to identification, but maybe later. Just look around you to see if you could buy my claim, and if so, try to see how that identification is established. You’ll see logos, pathos, and ethos.

I’ll end this, then, by going back to the root question of rhetoric: how do you know what you know, why do you think what you think, and how do we construct knowledge and change our minds through interaction?  That may seem to many of you like a strange frame in which to put “writing,” if you’re thinking about literature and fiction, but maybe this will help: people are storytellers, “homo narrans.” We know, learn, and think, in stories. Stories, too, are rhetorical, human interaction through symbols.

Greetings and Salutations

Like the description says, this is my instructor blog for WRIT 371 Digital Rhetorics (summer 2012 at Montana State). I'll use this blog mostly just to provide my own commentary on the course readings and you guys' response to them, as well as other subjects in the course.

By way of introduction to myself, I'll just say, there are going to be some weekends during this class where I'll be hard to reach -- with apologies -- because I'm going to be out on mountainsides just a bit outside wifi coverage. However, since most of this course happens during mud season, my mountain biking, backpacking, off-roading, and hiking will be reasonably confined and most of the time you'll be able to find me online, the other place I tend to live.

I've titled this blog "Thoughts from the Summer Highland" in order to get a resonance with one of the greatest works on rhetoric ever written, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Unfortunately, the abbreviated summer course schedule leaves us no time to read the book in this course. But I hope you'll read it sometime. In it, Pirsig uses the metaphor of hiking in high mountain country to dramatize the study of rhetoric and the human reasoning and values that underlie it. This notion of the high country of southwest Montana in summer -- the Gallatin and Beartooth and Absaroka and Crazy mountain ranges -- converges a mode of living that I value and a sense of traversing challenging intellectual spaces, and thus I like it as an emblem for the class.

A little more general background on me: This course starts my fifth year at MSU and my 16th year of college teaching. I'm a writing/rhetoric/language guy, possibly because I'm something of a gearhead -- I like figuring out how things (physical/mechanical/electronic/linguistic) work. When I'm researching, it centers on what different people imagine writing to be, and how that influences how they write. For myself, writing is a fascinating kind of problem-solving, though I much prefer *having written* to actually *writing*. I teach writing because I like having a hand in changing the way that people think about writing, and I hope this course will do so for you.