Reading used to receive not only attention, but public support, as this image shows. Reading today occurs in other settings/screens, as the second image shows.

Last night: convergence and what it means for literacy and schooling

POSTER

230 The everyday life emerging in information technology is a battleground over the nature of human identity.
181 What I call the segmented family of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first multiplies the cultural forms of the home. Above all, the formation of the body through identifications and object choices has altered by dint of information machines. Oneiric assemblages of child and machine inscribe the body with a structure of desire whose shape may be difficult to characterize but whose difference from the Oedipal child is certain.
244 Digital cultural objects may be transformed by the “consumer” in their reception. Segments may be easily added or subtracted from the cultural object. Bits and pieces of any other cultural object may be inserted into, or blended with, the one in question. Sampling, the musical practice of merging sounds from several locations, becomes a general feature of all cultural objects. The cultural object thus loses its fixity, and the “consumer” becomes not a user but a creator. [What does such a claim do to remediation?]
248 In the domain of cultural objects, brands have not worked well. [vs. Jenkins]
265 A new contradiction of capitalism emerges in digital culture whereby the urge to sell commodities comes into conflict wit the need for private information.
266 Open source and open content are tendencies within new media that build on structural features of digital technologies. BUT Great resistance is engendered against new media tendencies that offer cultural directions that do not fit the model of the commodity characteristic of modern socieity.

SCHOOL

How much or little is our model of literacy changing, and given that answer, how does that change what we do in school?

If sampling and remixing are now a part of invention, then do we teach these processes? That might mean teaching kinds of materials, kinds of texts made from them, kinds of spaces they inhabit, and ways to design them rhetorically. This is a new curriculum and also connects to Lanham’s suggestions re copyright. In such a curriculum, what are our criteria for assessment?

Do we also teach new ways to read such materials, such texts?

Do we teach the/a theory that makes all this hang together? Is this the site for critical awareness?

In the case of English Studies in the future, do we think of ourselves professionally—as in the profession of English—or disciplinarily—as in literacy studies writ large?

In the case of Wysocki’s new media, do we think in terms of networks (and network as framework) with effects on practices and understandings, and the relationships between them?

Re Payne and Hayles, how much if any is the code part of what we know and what we teach?

In such a curriculum, what would we hope to gain, and what might we lose?

Project Presentation

Overview: This multi-faceted program would incorporate various media and other efforts aimed at encouraging youths smoking cessation/prevention. The program would be initiated in the provider setting, and would have several media outlets that would fuel further participation and opportunities to increase information dissemination.

Target Audience: Children ages 11-17 and their parents in the family physician setting to provide information about the health risks of smoking and educational materials to help prevention and cessation. Region: Miami.

Total Budget: $2.5 million

Program Components:

• Physician Workshop: Program training provided to physicians
• Media Relations: Print, radio, online, etc. (community-based)
• Toolkit for Teens: Printed and digital materials and promo items
• Toolkit for Parents: Printed materials, possible cd/rom, promo items
• Clinician Program: Guided peer-to-peer discussion forum
• Web Site: Program hub for advertising, tools, info, networking activities
• Community Partnership: Local health community partners

Check out 'Bob Quits'

Evaluation and Measurement: Measurement will demonstrate program effectiveness by comparing actual percentage change of smoking cessation/prevention rates of program participants to rates of a non-participating control group. Indicators will include:

• The number of participating doctors
• The number of students they reach
• The number of Web site hits
• The number of teens registered to Web site
• A baseline market survey of sample demographic before program
• After-market survey to gauge changes in attitudes and behavior among participants

"Evil Bert...is indeed a trouble maker." (25)

p 24
"Transmissions of images, texts, and sounds may now, in the digital domain, be both noiseless and incoherent." ... "Translation is now a central dimension of any cultural study."

p 127
"The critical value of modern art is limited by the form of its objective presentation; that is, it appears as an object that may become a commodity and that reinforces the hegemonic relation of subject to object characteristic of modernity. ... [T]he art of networked computing brings forth a culture that highlights its future transformation rather than confirming the completeness of the real."

p 134
"If hypertext is a different inscription of writing from printed books... then the hypertext's effects on the reader might also diverge from that of the book. ... Hypertext located on a network of computers reconfigures all positions in the literary act--author, narrator, text, reader--to such an extent that perhaps the term narrative does not adequately capture or indicate the new positions."

Whither School?

Here Is What I’ve Added Up So Far:

In “The Audit Of Virtuality: Universities In The Attention Economy” Richard A. Lanham questions common assumptions in the university. His argument shies away from traditional practices in the university, such as the preference for face-to-face instruction, the function of tenure as a job description’s stabilizer, the role of administration as a collective faculty bodyguard, the idolization of academic as being above economy, impure motive, outside influence, and inefficient but designed to be so. The larger critique was the misalignment of the university with the Internet.

In “What Should College English Be Doing?” Thomas Miller blames the University for the decreasing value of English in the curriculum because of its “devaluing its engagement with writing at work in public life” (154) and, thus, makes an argument that College English must evolve, to become “literacy studies” instead of English studies (153). This evolution includes the embracing of new media in particular. Jeff Rice’s “Networks and New Media” falls in line with this philosophy as it embraces the idea that the proliferation of College English is rooted in its networking abilities.

In “English Studies in Levittown: Rhetorics of Space and Technology in Course-Management Software” Darin Payne vilifies the “education-in-a-box” that course management tools like Blackboard offer students. Even broader than this is the criticism Payne delivers to computer software in general reinforcing iconography that privileges middle and upper class business culture.

What these articles say about the future of schooling, specifically schooling in College English, is the necessity in evolving and moving away from the “ivory tower” that creates a disconnect between the professors and students. To prolong the life of literacy studies, instructors must connect with students and incorporate identity and passion into the classroom, not ignoring the real-world benefits that literacy studies offer students.

“To speak on the Internet, there are no age limits, no gender limits, and no religious, ethnic, or national requirements. Indeed, there is no way to discern these traits in most Internet discussion forums, from Usenet to chat rooms, from Listservs to blogs.” (42)

“The commonality of identity theft leads to some amusing and interesting speculations concerning the future of “identity.” With the high frequency of the crime, even the criminal cannot be certain of the security of his or her own identity, or that the identity he steals is not already stolen.” (91)

“The security of identity in the digital world is, as a consequence, a different matter from safety in the physical world of extended objects. What is stolen is not one’s consciousness but one’s self as it is embedded in (increasingly digital) databases. The self constituted in these databases, beyond the ken of individuals, may be considered the digital unconscious.” (92)

“What needs special emphasis in the context of my effort to make sense of the new crime of identity theft is that individual identity is being transformed, by dint of information media, into something that both captures individuality and yet exists in forms of external traces.” (111)

Three Quotes from Information Please

“My contention is that information increasingly appears in complex couplings of humans and machines. Culture can thus no longer be understood as separate from technology. If this is so, many assumptions long held in modern society require revision. One such assumption is that cultures are in essence national. Yet the emerging mode of information, tethering humans and machines, is recognizably global” (p.1).

Hybridity of cultural objects and their continual transformation in planetary exchanges now form the matrix of human experience" (p. 23).


The Internet enables planetary transmissions of cultural objects (texts, images, and sounds) to cross cultural boundaries with little “noise.” Communications now transpire with digital accuracy. The dream of the communications engineer is realized as information flows without interference from point on the earth to any other point or points. As Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver theorize: ‘The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point’ (Shannon and Weaver 1943,3). Cybernetic theory is seemingly fulfilled by the Internet: both machines and the human body act on the environment through ‘the accurate reproduction’ of information or signals, in an endless feedback loop that adjusts for changes and unexpected events (Wiener 1950).

Posting Poster Quote

"One characteristic, then, of the new media landscape is that positions of enunciations now extend throughout the globe (of course, not equally), bringing into contact multiple and heterogeneous cultures . . .
Transculture is emerging as a major aspect of media exchanges. Cultural objects increasingly find their way across their territorial point of origin . . .
At the same time, networked computing promotes interactions among the like-minded, within subcultures of all kinds, groups that do not wish to open themselves to a larger world." (40)

All kinds of opportunities for a broader view, but also the opportunity to create enclaves of all sorts. Tearing down walls and putting them up -- with the same tool.

Toby's 3 quotes

1) “Global conditions, one might say, signifies transcultural confusion. At the same time, the network creates conditions of intercultural exchange that render politically noxious any culture which cannot decode the messages of others, which insists that only its transmissions have meaning or are significant.” (11)

2) “Hybridity of cultural objects and their continual transformation in planetary exchanges now form the matrix of human experience.”(23)

3) “The psychic, the political, and the cultural unconscious are all registered in a field of human relations; by contrast, the media unconscious includes the dimension of the thing. The media unconscious estranges the human from itself, introducing a symbiosis of human and machine that destabilizes the figures of the subject and object.” (36)

4) “Others are hopeful that globalization is not simply an extension of capitalist markets but the beginning point of a new form of collective human life.” (47)

5) “If I am granted such a modest epistemological poster, I propose here to discuss the assemblage of networked digital information and humans in relation to globalization. I intend by this combination of humans and machines to designate not prosthesis, not a machine addition to an already complete human being, but an intimate mixing of human and machine that constitutes an interface outside the subject-object binary.”(48)

6) “Digital culture enables the transformation of any text, image, or sound, so that fixed objects like books and films – a fixity that has been taken for granted in modernity – are no longer default features of art. Digital conditions of cultural life also bypass physically determined identities, including disabilities (even paraplegics can communicate on computers), bodily characteristics, ethnic origins, national citizenship.” (52)

7) The Internet is virtual not in its lack of territoriality but in its departure from space-time configurations associated with earlier forms of communication” (55)

""

I don't do Apple Crumb Cake, but it does remind me that I need to branch out from boule's of soup and apple cider. Without further ado, a price fixe menu:

Appetizer: Scallops and Bacon:
"Only in the digital age can social markers of the physical world - gender, class, age - be nullified" (99). Perhaps true, but this quote, part of Poster's dialogue on identity theft, takes too narrow a view of the identities constructed by analogue mediums. Fluctuating identities beyond physical markers are not, or should not be a new concept.

Entree: Grilled Ostrich in a bourbon glaze, sweet potato mash, szechuan green beans:
" The degree of autonomy of each culture is significantly reduced as a consequence of global information exchange" (1). While I don't necessarily agree with the basic premise, I like that Poster acknowledges the danger and reckless means by which a constrained local works to maintain autonomy - I see your President Bush and raise you a second term.

Dessert: Chocolate Mousse, in a tulip truffle shell:
"The conflict of the colonizer and colonized characterizes the entire trajectory of Western globalization, but in each phase of that history, the figure of the colonizer and the figure of the colonized take on different dimensions and are fraught with different patterns of strife" (28).
I agree wholeheartedly with this, but argue that the overemphasis on this pattern, or the excessive weight placed on the historical implications of this pattern, are drastically affecting the way we approach relations today, as for example in race relations, interactions with the Middle East, and to some degree, feminism.

Gratuity will be included in the check!

3 quotes from Information Please

1) "One can never be absolutely certain, then, of the identity of one's interlocutor. While not unprecedented, the ethical issue of identity in online exchanges is new in its systematicity. The interface of the computer, coupled with the ease of communicating through the network, renders identity in question in every case. Messages sent through the Net are always suspect. What is the ethical value of this unrelenting suspicion?" (Poster 151)

2) "In the world consisting of electrons and light pulses, the virtual space of the Internet, narrative and narrator are impossible to specify. The hypertext of the Internet and the Web evacuates all meaning from the term narrative" (Poster 135). But does it, really? And in all cases? Aren't weblogs narratives?

3) "At a second level of television's place in the larger culture, it is possible to recuperate narrative theory. In John Rowe's view, 'Television is merely participating in the larger rhetoric of an economy of representation, in which the principal aim is not the marketing of commodoties but the production of narratives capable of being retold by their viewers' (Rowe 1994, 101)" (Poster 136).

A quote and some response

On page 57, Poster says, "The understanding of networked digital information and human assemblages must not become the basis for a new totalization or metanarrative. However compelling the new media may be, they do not constitute the only basis for understanding contemporary conditions, and they are not the only component of the larger process of globalization." The idea of "human assemblages" interests me: what counts as an assemblage, and how do we define it? Also, he's looking for multiple narratives, which I like. One way to think about such narratives is through the concept of palimpsest, which would permit a multiple layering of narratives conducive to a fuller understanding of change--and stability ;)