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.