Divers beware

As in: Reading

I just finished reading McNally's Luck, the third (?) book in the Lawrence Sanders series about Archy McNally, a South Beach dandy who does 'discrete inquiries' for his father's law firm.

Detectives have often been hollow characters with amusing habits: Holmes did coke, Poirot dandies around England, and so on. McNally's twist amuses because it provides both the dandy-ness of Poirot and a pleasant use of particular phrasing and dialog. Some excerpts:

I was familiar with W. Scott's warning about tangled webs....

The menu, taped to the wall, was a dream come true. We studied the offerings with little moans of delight. Dishes ranged from piquant to incendiary, and I recoked that we might have been wise to wear sweats. The stumpy waiter who came bustling over to take our order had a long white apron cinched under his armpits. He also had a moustache that Pancho Villa might have envied....

[The linen berets] were soft enough to roll up and tuck in a hip pocket, yet when they were donned and the fullness pulled rakishly over to one side, I felt they gave me a certain devil-may-care look....

I went directly to my rooms when I arrived home. I stripped off the dull costume I was wearing and donned my favorite kimono, a jaunty silk number printed with an overall pattern of leaping gazelles....

"I've got to be completely honest with you, Archy," she started—and my antennae stiffened. When people say that to you it's time to button your hip pocket and make certain your wallet is secure....

As I neared the end of the book, I marvelled at the marketing department's chutzpah in producing the cover pictured here: the plot involves neither a missing fancy car nor any diving at all. Generally, when the cover art depicts a diver swimming around a coral-covered car, one expects to encounter those elements in the book. Alas, this story revolved around a kidnapped kitty-cat, a pair of murders, and a psychic named Hertha. I can't help but imagine the broad swath of diving-mystery readers who finished McNally's Luck and threw it down in disgust.

On the plus side, Sanders did work in a McLuhan reference:

...So Hertha Gloriana is the only lead I have."
"It's not much," he said.
"No," I agreed, "it's not. But they do say the medium is the message."
He gave me a dour smile.

Something to work against

As in: Reading , Teaching

"The inertia of habituation is at work."

Greg Urban uses that short sentence to explain how Casper Weinberger acquired his tendency to use the first person plural we primarily to describe US citizens.

I think the notion of culture as objects moving through space (with inertia, acceleration, and deceleration) is a great way to explain the importance of cultural studies and education in general. Education in its best form accelerates and re-combines culture; it also shows learners how to do the same.

Having explained this concept to my students, I can imagine using the notion of the inertia of habituation to address concepts we know by habit.

I can tell I'm going to like this book a lot. Thanks Jeff!

Greg U

As in: Reading

An early reaction to Metaculture, which I started reading this morning.

In the foreward and opening pages of chapter 1, Urban (aided in the forward by Lee) suggests that the metaculture of "newness" drives capitalism and modernity. Two observations about this:

• LINK: Urban mentions that meta-cultural texts (like film reviews or "news" shows about fiction TV) help accelerate the process of cultural circulation. I'm reminded of a passage in Steven Johnson's Interface Culture in which he predicted (quite rightly, I'd say) that metaculture will be one of our primary sorting mechanisms as the digital age expands.
• Grand narrative: By default, I tend to look at things through the grand narrative of electracy, the emergence of the third age of human communication being a key part of our culture's development at present. Thus, when I read the following, I made another connection:

  The interpretation of culture that is intrinsic to metaculture, immaterial as it is, focuses attention on the cultural thing, helps to make it an object of interest and, hence, facilitates its circulation. (4)

  I locked on the word interpretation because of my interest in the demise of hermeneutics as a scholarly research model. I look forward to examining the relationship of the production of metaculture to the search for something new; to whit, what kind of metaculture is Ulmer's heuretic method?

Fear breeds ... money?

As in: Reading

I read Steven Levitt's Freakonomics last week—a very interesting use of statistics to answer questions you normally won't think of economists asking. One chapter focuses on parenting and an interesting dilemma:

No one is more susceptible to an expert's fearmongering than a parent. Fear is in fact a major component of the act of parenting. A parent, after all, is the stweard of another creature's life, a creature who in the beginning is more helpless than the newborn of nearly any other species. This leads a lot of parents to spend a lot of their parenting energy simply being scared.

The problem is that they are often scared of the wrong things. It's not their fault, really. Separating facts from rumors is always hard work, especially for a busy parent. And the white noise generated by the experts—to say nothing of the pressure exerted by fellow parents—is so overwhelming that they can barely think for themselves. The facts they do manage to glean have usually been varnished or exaggerated or otherwise taken out of context to serve an agenda that isn't their own.

[For example, while most people feel that a home with guns is more dangerous than a home with pools, the] likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn't even close: [a child] is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident ... than [from] gunplay.(150)

Levitt argues that very often experts use their expertise to take advantage of those who don't have it. In the parenting world, they use fear to sell stuff.

Most innovations in the field of child safety are affiliated with—shock of shocks—a new product to be marketed.... These products are often a response to some growing scare in which ... the outrage outweighs the hazard. Compare the four hundred lives that a few swimming pool precautions might save to the number of lives saved by far noisier crusades (153).

It's the "experts" lesson that I find most intriguing about the book—Levitt pretty much says you can't trust experts to be straight with you. Their expertise is their power. Makes sense, but kinda depressing.

Scorned

As in: Reading

As I was typing in some key ideas and quotes from Jane Jacobs' The Coming Dark Age, I noted that one of my very favorite contained the word scorned. I love that word. Maybe that's why I love the quote. Thus, here are two of my very favorite quotes with the word scorned:

Hospitals, transit systems, and orchestras are scorned as free-loaders seeking handouts if they can't directly pay their way or, better yet, make a profit either for tax collectors or for a corporate partner. Greed becomes culturally admired as competence, and false or unrealistic promises as cleverness.(114)

and one of my favorite sentences ever, from Robert Ray's The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy:

Having two young daughters, who announced their resentment at my attending a conference during Easter (known in our house as a presents holiday, as opposed to a scorned food holiday like Thanksgiving, in which they have no interest), and reminded that I had also missed Halloween (for another conference), I went for a walk to redeem myself, to buy them presents (90).

Scorned. The word for the week.

Writing New Media

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

Our reading group meeting was fantastic last night. We met to chat about the first couple chapters of Writing New Media by Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, and Sirc. As our conversation ranged over a wide territory of issues, we started talking about Selfe's piece, "Students Who Teach Us," in particular her description of David, a young man who developed outstanding technological literacy skills while simultaneously failing to succeed in college—so much so that he flunked out. Selfe writes:

To make it possible for students to practice, value, and understand a full range of literacies—emerging, competing, and fading—English composition teachers have got to be willing to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic. And we have to do so quickly or risk having composition studies become increasingly irrelevant. (54)

Selfe buys into the idea that the need for electrate composition in our classes ties to the changing world outside; we need to learn to recognize these other ways of communicating and help teach them. She says, on page 51, that when David's teachers failed to recognize his new technological literacies, the "missed important opportunities to link their instruction goals to his developing strengths" (51).

Pegeen asked why David's instructors should have recognized his new media literacies, rather than his competency in his own dialect. Had his instructors been willing to go to bat against "standard English" and the power-centered grammar rules that go with it, he may have succeeded. In short, our discussion last night asked why new media should be the space through which we "stay relevant" and (implicitly) "change the world." Why not use our knowledge that different dialects operate under perfectly logical grammar systems and our understanding that standard English grammar reinforces power structures that put at a disadvantage the already disadvantaged to argue for the validity of poly-vocality, rather than the validity of new media?

Whoo doggies, it was a beaut of a conversation. Here are a few of the highlights:

1. After a long conversation, we generally agreed on the idea that perhaps it needn't be either/or but rather could be both/and. Teaching and being aware of both kinds of polyvocality allows us to leverage the student's talents best.
2. New Media pulls ahead in many minds because it's clearly recognized by systems of power as important. In part, systems of power also recognize that while digital technologies can allow for sophisticated articulations of thought, they can also be used to replicate existing structures of power (as with, say, TOPIC).
3. With both New Media and Alternative Grammars, we generally agreed that our teaching balances between the rhetorical, idealistic goals of our ethics (in which we recognize and teach the intellectual value of these ideas) and the practical needs of our students who come to the college for credentialing (whom we tell that instructors in other departments won't appreciate what we know here—that this work you're doing has value). The question we returned to is why we're willing to go to bat for new media and not for polyvocal grammars?
4. Perhaps the "both/and" idea becomes increasingly relevant as we think about the ways in which economically disadvantaged groups have made use of new medias to express their ideas; mixing, hip-hop, skratching become spaces where these elements collide/intersect. (To pay homage to that crossing, Doug put in "The Humpty Dance" while we chatted.)
5. Finally, we acknowledged that New Media's popularity also stems from its institutional currency. Because of point 2 above, new media scholarship helps get people published, get jobs, get money. Arguing for alternative grammars does not (Norm lamented that this discussion is much harder to have since the ebonics fiasco).

Our coversation led me to re-think much of how I approach grammar (philosophically), but ultimately won't change what I do with it in the classroom right now. Instead, it will certainly influence my thinking about the value of new media scholarship. I definitely concur with the notion that new media scholarship affords another avenue into the discussion of polyvocality—it might even be the element that opened the door for such a discussion.

Walking in the City

As in: Composition , Reading

From de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life:

Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse that upholds its privilege by inverting its content (speaking of catastrophe and no longer of progress), one can try another path: one can analyze the microbe-like, singular, and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization. (96)

Booyah! That's why I like M-de-C. This paragraph describes precisely the activities of the baroque (as Ray would call us) chroniclers of electracy. Some phrases that hyperlink for me:

• "speaking of catastrophe..." sounds like the Rhet/Comp plagiarism conversation to me. "Students are downloading their papers! We need some TechnoGotchas!"
• "swarming activity" sounds like mixing, filesharing, blogging, podcasting: the web's ecstatic flurry of new stuff.
• I would love for my students to harness "surreptitious creativities."
• "frantic mechanisms" echoes the catastrophe quote above. RIAA lawsuits, the Broadcast flag (recently defeated!), anti-Wi-Fi.

If we follow de Certeau's lead here, perhaps the internet isn't the Global Village, but rather the Global City. It's the nameless city from The Matrix.

The Worst

As in: Media , Reading

Regarding American Idol, it seems to me the yucksters over at Vote for the Worst (link unavailable when I checked, see this article) are the strange grandchildren of Michel de Certeau.

This pledge is to keep whoever we've selected as the worst competitor in the competition by voting for them for the entire time alotted every week. Even if you live outside of America, tell people about the pledge and spread the word. At the top of this page, we will post a banner with the contestant that we're supporting. If you so choose, vote along with us and help keep the no talent of the week in the competition.

These folks are indeed making do with what TV offers them. They're interacting, taking this pre-packaged show and making their own fun of it. Perhaps this is where sampling and mixing come in. What if they re-cut AI episodes to look like the people they wanted to win won? Does interacting with the show on its own terms (esp. given the likely manipulation of voting totals by Fox execs) make do, or are they just giving the show more publicity? Perhaps this is just a more direct version of the William Hung phenomenon.

Vote for the worst directly opposes one of my film students from UF, who told me that she was a rabid Clay Aiken fan (during that year on AI), and that she participated with a group of folks who made collage-videos for his songs and posted them online. Making do indeed.

Sarah Vowell 2

As in: Reading

Just finished Assassination Vacation last night. Excellent. Aside from her usual wit, Vowell included several awesome quotes from other places. One of my favorites is from James Garfield's address at some commencement:

It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure—the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below. (134)

What the best college teachers do

As in: Reading

I finished reading Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do a couple weeks ago, and its had me re-examining my pedagogy (as good books about teaching always do). I've posted a couple choice bits in the extended entry. The main page gets this one, though:

When introducing the class, one instructor "asks his students for a show of hands that they are willing to be on time for every class and participate intellectually in the deliberation of each day. "The decision to take the course is yours," we heard more than one person say, "but once you make that decision, you have responsibilities to everyone else in this community of learners." (113)

I like this idea—the making explicit that the first day is a choice. IF you decide to take my class, great. BUT, you make certain commitments when you do.

A few more choice quotes:

33 "...they have consistently found that most extrinsic motivators damage intrinsic motivation. That have also found that if they use "verbal reinforcement and positive feedback"--in other words, encouragement or praise--they can stimulate interest, or at least keep it from evaporating."

36 "...the "characteristics of highly respected courses" included "high demands" but "with plentiful opportunities to revise and improve their work before it receives a grade, thereby learning from their mistakes in the process."

On the first day of class, "Rather than laying out a set of requirements for the students, they usually talk about the promises of the course, about the kinds of questions the discipline will help the students answer, or about the intellectual, emotional, or physical abilities that it will help them develop."

74 Three parts of the 'promising syllabus'
1. Lays out "promises or opportunities" the course offers to students
2. Explains "what students would be doing to realize those promises" "avoiding language of demands"
3. "Summarized how the instructor and the students would understand the nature and progress of the learning."

93 On introducing the tasks/challenges to the students: ""You must want to do this," she will say, "and be willing to spend the time it takes to develop your character. But the choice is yours.""

131 they call on their students "the way they might do so around the dinner table rather than the way they might cross-exam them in a courtroom or challenge them to a duel."

Vocab lesson

As in: Reading

It's rare that I read a book whose author regularly uses words I'm unfamiliar with. Thus, I present my list of new words from Avatars of the Word. (Bonus game for you: see how many you know without looking them up!)

rebarbativeness, page 3.
lability, page 10.
etiolated, page 94.
cynosure, page 101.
bumptious, page 116. This word (quite rightly) makes me think of the Bumpuses and their hounds in A Christmas Story.
suasion, page 169.
velleity, page 188.

Does anyone else think it's lame that the OED Online isn't free anymore?

Skepticism

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

The other day, I had a long chat with a colleague about electracy, new media, and many other things. I described my theory about Future Shock (at the bottom of the page), and she agreed; she also added that in her experience, it was with generation X that students started being consistently skeptical of not only texts, but symbols, explanations, and conversations about those texts. This is not to say that they were not skeptical before, but rather that a sea change had occurred in which many more were skeptical now than were in the years before the Gen Xers hit college.

Then I read this in Avatars of the Word:

The underlying insight of this strategy [of "teaching the arguments of the field"] is that ours is already a culture permeated by irony. Skepticism about received messages is rampant, leaving any system that depends on transmitting those messages vulnerable. To use the space of the classroom to teach both the message and the critical reception and evaluation of the message is to create an opportunity to reach students at multiple levels. (119).

I'm not sure what I want to do with that passage, but I found the synchronicity pleasing.

Dang kids!

As in: Blogistry , Hypertext , Reading

Quoted in Avatars of the Word by James O'Donnell:

They have chopped up the text into so many small parts, an brought forth so many concordant passages to suit their own purposes that to some degree they confuse both the mind and memory of the reader and distract it from understanding the literal meaning of the text.

That's Nicholas of Lyre, lamenting the proliferation of manuscripts in the fourteenth century. This passage struck me as hilariously apt (as it obviously did O'Donnel). More later.

City of Quartz 2

As in: Reading

Some more bits of Davis' book I like:

What a 'real' Marxist Hollywood film would have looked like remains a matter for arcane conjecture. Perhaps the best potential candidate was the remarkable screenplay of An American Tragedy which Sergei Eisenstein and Ivor Montagu wrote in 1930 during the Soviet director's brief and troubled stay in Hollywood. Dreiser supposedly loved the script, but Paramount — alarmed by its 'monstrous challenge to American society' — killed the project. (92)

I'm captured by the phrase "monstrous challenge to American society." It seems like something to strive for, as a cultural critic.

"As late as 1883, local seers envisioned a purely parochial future [for Los Angeles]. Ostrich raising was still described as a 'prominent industry' and naturalist John Muir saw the region's best hope in beekeeping"(111). C'mon! Does it get any better than that? Ostrich raising!

City of Quartz

As in: Reading

I'm reading Mike Davis' 1991 book on the train in the next couple weeks. I've been meaning to read it for a long time, but it was always checked out of the UF library, and I never needed it enough to recall it.

Some passages I've enjoyed so far:

Sometimes film noir is described in shorthand as the result of the encounter between the American hardboiled novel and exiled German expressionist cinema—a simplistic definition that leaves out other seminal influences, including psychoanalysis and Orson Welles. (40)

I like this description because I thoroughly enjoy German expressionist cinema. My master's thesis turned on the idea that Hollywood took the techniques from German expressionist cinema (madmen and dramatic mise-en-scene) and used them to create horror films, which turned the "madman" into the "psychopath."

Writing about James Ellroy's Los Angeles Quartet:

The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest. (45)

I feel like this passage applies now just as much as it did in the early 90s, perhaps moreso. I'm also reminded of Dark Knight Returns and Dark Knight Strikes Again, in which Miller plays the "good" fascism of superhero might-makes-right against the "bad" fascism of Reagan/Bush/Corporate America.

Finally, for today:

[When Adorno and Horkheimer were in America], they allowed their image of first sight to become its own myth: Los Angeles as the crystal ball of capitalism's future. And, confronted with this future, they experienced all the more painfully the death agony of Enlightenment Europe. (48)

It seems like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash exemplifies the final state of L.A.-as-capitalism's-future. In it, he describes L.A. not as an urban wasteland, but a suburban one in which all space has been bought, built upon, and commodified. He describes a place where one could drive hundreds of miles without ever driving on a street—one merely goes from parking lot to parking lot. Davis draws a distinction between 20s-30s noir, which focused on the dark underbelly of suburban life, and 40s noir, which fastened on to the urban hellscape of downtown L.A.. Stephenson clearly plays into the former apocalypse.

Death, disease, and the Irish?

As in: Flotsam , Reading

My favorite passage from How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier:

Similarly, black might connote mourning, death, or heaviness, whereas blue can suggest coldness, depression, aristocracy, or submissive faith. White might suggest cleanliness or sickness, and green can relate to envy, compassion, or the Irish (154).

I don't know why I think that's so funny, but I do.

More How to Lie with Maps

As in: Composition , Hypertext , Media , Reading

I just finished Mark Monmonier's book. It's great. There's one passage that strikes to the core of my being with a glowing, cartographic, nerdly joy. He writes:

...map publishers have been known to deliberately falsify their maps by adding "trap streets." As deterrents to the theft of copyright-protected information, trap streets are usually placed subtly, in out-of-way locations unlikely to confuse or antagonize map users.(51)

It seems to me that the "trap street" is a fantastic opportunity for hypertext writers. While people working for "transparency" and "clarity" certainly wouldn't want trap streets cluttering up their "site maps," I think hypertext authors interesting in the more playful aspects of the web could use "deliberately falsified" elements deliciously.

When trying to write using hypertext to be more socially active or aware, this passage seems particularly apt:

By omitting politically threatening or aesthetically unattractive aspects of geographic reality, and by focusing on the interests of civil engineers, geologists, public administrators, and land developers, our topographic "base maps" are hardly basic to the concerns of public health and safety officials, social workers, and citizens rightfully concerned about the well-being of themselves and others. In this sense, cartographic silences are indeed a form of geographic disinformation(122).

Perhaps an offshoot of adbusters could be mapbusters--people dedicated to the cartographic education and elucidation of social problems often ignored in maps.

How to Lie with Maps

As in: Reading , Thoughts from the "L"

Two passages from Mark Monmonier's book that struck me today. First, a funny one:

A more personal example of creative cartography is Mount Richard, which in the early 1970s suddenly appeard on the continental divide on a county map prepared in Boulder, Colorado. Believed to be the work of Richard Ciacci, a draftsman in the public works department, Mount Richard was not discovered for two years. (5!)

The second passage struck a chord with me:

...using outside contractors for compilation or drafting requires a strong commitment to quality control buttressed by the bureaucrat's inherent fear of embarrassment. (43)

I think this passage strikes me because it highlights the difference between a bureaucrat and a good politician ("good" in the sense of being good at politicking, not in the sense of being good for the people). Both Clinton and W seem to be without any sense of embarrassment. Both know when they need to spin, but neither ever seems ashamed in the way the media and the public think they should be.

"the engines of invention"

As in: Composition , Reading

My favorite bits of what Ulmer says are the bits about "invention." I have since attempted to work the process of invention into all my assignments, regardless of whether I feel they do the work of new media or not. Of course, invention is a fun term in its own right, what with Barthomome's students inventing the university, among others.

I take glee in Jeff's comments on WPA, as well as his blog posts, because they say, very eloquently and much more brazenly, things that resonate with me.

It seems that the New York Times is catching up with the Florida school. Erich Kunhardt's Op-Ed piece from 14 December, "Necessity as the Mother of Tenure?" suggests that universities need to embrace invention as one of their main goals. He writes:

However, "academic entrepreneurship" - the patenting and licensing by universities and their faculty - has not become part of the academic mainstream, and is generally viewed within the Ivory Tower as conflicting with the mission of the university. That mission is now often captured by the phrase: "to teach, and to research." I think a third element should be added: "to invent." There are two compelling reasons for broadening the academic mission. First, the university shapes the thinking and outlook of our future workers, and also offers one of the most stable environments for bright Americans to work on new things and sustain our creative leadership. Second, putting an emphasis on invention would enrich the academic community by adding a new dimension of creative expression. Independent of whether inventing can be taught or not, affirming the creative process as a long-term value in the university will serve to stimulate faculty and students alike. (par 3)

Of course, Kunhardt writes here about patents as the result of invention, which isn't what I'm suggesting we do. Rather, I'm walking in the same direction Ulmer walks when he suggests that "The best way to learn about the potential of websites and the internet for supporting learning in the Arts and Letters disciplines, is to invent a new practice of writing native to hypermedia"(Internet Invention, xiii). Rice makes a similar move in Writing About Cool, inventing a method for writing hypertext through concepts of "cool."

So, if we ignore the passage about "patents," Kunhardt's piece becomes a campaign for web-writing using the logic of invention (heuretics instead of hermeneutics).

Some relevant passages:

...inventing is viewed mainly as technology transfer, not as something with academic value of its own. It is no surprise, then, that few faculty members get involved in inventing, and students are not challenged to attempt it. And any arguments that inventing should be nurtured for its potential contribution to American economic development are quickly dismissed (par 7).

This reminds me of Jeff's recent post about the stubbornness of the composition community in refusing to engage with more inventive pedagogies and thinking. Plus, invention's harder grade.

The quickest way to change this mind-set will be to get administrations and faculties to accept successful inventing as a step toward tenure. After all, in a few decades research went from being a foreign concept in academia to being the most important factor in tenure decisions. However, unlike research, there is no established peer-review process for evaluating inventions, no way to evaluate the academic significance of a new idea beyond its potential economic value (par 8).

Kunhardt's argument moves toward the idea that invention should figure in one's tenure and promotion evaluation, but I'm interested in the idea of peer-reviewed invention. Perhaps the blogosphere could be seen as a peer-review system that works really fast. The rapid spread of ideas becomes the peer-review process. Hmmm.

More Kress

As in: Composition , Reading

Another quote I enjoy:

The specificity is the same at one level: the affordance of the logic of time governs writing, and the affordance of the logic of space governs the image. Within that, there is the possibility of generic variation. And the generic variation of the ensembles, in each case, produce an overall difference of a significant kind (115).

and

In that new communicational world there are now choices about how what is to be represented should be represented: in what mode, in what genre, in what ensembles of modes and genres and on what occasions. These were not decisions open to students ... some twenty years ago (117).

Perhaps part of the task writing teachers should be doing is helping students learn how to choose in this multimodal culture. Hmmm.

More Gunther Kress

As in: Composition , Reading

We finished discussing Literacy in the New Media Age on the 15th, but I've just now had a chance to post about it.

We wrestled, at the meeting, with the question of what Kress' ideas—particularly the teaching of design/digital rhetoric instead of more traditional kinds of writing assignments—would get us. I came from the "Of course we should be teaching this stuff" side of things, while another person at the meeting played the "I don't see what all this gets us" role.

The most interesting objection, for me, was that electrate communication has yet to develop the kind of analytical significance/power that literate argument has. My response was that argument is the literate thing—the electrate is something else, something that plays more on affect. I suggested that the power of news media to determine political candidates was one such use of affect.

To return to Kress, I found chapter 10 particularly enlightening. He says a couple neat things (excerpted here for your convenience):

The notion of competence in use will give way to that of interested design. Competence in use starts with that which exists, shaped in the social history of the group in which the user acts. Hence competence in use is oriented to the past. It is also oriented to allegiance to the conventions of the group. Design, by contrast, starts from the interest and the intent of the designer to act in a specific way in a specific environment, to act with a set of available resources and to act with an understanding of what the task at hand is, in relationship to a specific audience. Design is prospective, future-oriented: in this environment, with these (multiple) resources, and out of my interests now to act newly I will shape a message. (169)

Kress, here, seems quite relevant to the recent discussion on WPA. The argument (mostly between Rice and Gordon), seems to rumble down the same old lines. What Kress brings to this discussion is a reasoned assertion (one of many, of course) about what/why we should change what we do. His use of the term design intrigues me. I like the idea of having students consider design (and have done so) because it seems to be an integral part of electrate rhetoric.

Another point he makes in this chapter again reminds me of things I've heard Ulmer say. Kress writes

The new forms of reading by contrast require action on the world: to impose the order of a reading path on that which is to be read, arising out of my interests. Ordering a message entity in the world in this manner is a different form of action—not contemplative but actional, not inner-directed but directed outwardly"(172).

So how do we teach students to write for these readers? I think one of Rice's many points on WPA continues to be that students are already this kind of reader. We need to learn to teach writing for these readers.

One final point. As I write this, I'm reminded of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, in which Toffler suggests that as technology speeds up, we have less and less time to deal with it, something that affects us psychologically and bodily. He suggests that, like a tourist who is "culture shocked" when s/he enters a foreign country and can find no familiar cultural hooks on which to hang her/his mental hat, we will all become victims of "future shock," people living in a world changing so fast that it constantly seems like another world. One answer to Toffler's proposed problem might be that our students, people raised in an electrate world, might feel the sense of change as inevitable, their culture is one that must work at its pace. As such, their communicative strategies will have to be different.

Kress and Semiotics

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

From Literacy in the New Media Age:

It is no longer responsible to let children experience school without basing schooling on an understanding of the shift from competent performance to design as the foundational fact of contemporary social and economic life.(37)

Give the governor a 'harrumph!' When Kress writes passages like this, my inner choir he's preaching to stands up and cheers. He supports this statement with many of the same kinds of arguments I've heard elsewhere. His particular take is that the move from page to screen accompanies/affords a move from alphabetic writing (which is based on speech in its temporal glory) to design-as-writing (based on image). Of course, these are useful formulations of ideas I already like.

However:

...[S]ings are always meaningful conjunctions of signifiers and signifieds; it means that we can look at the signifiers and make hypotheses about what they might be signifying in any one instance, because we know that the form chosen was the most apt expression of that which was to be signified. . . . It entails that all aspects of form are meaningful, and that all aspects of form must be read with equal care: nothing can be disregarded.(44)

I can see why this distinction is useful/necessary for an image-based writing system, but I get stuck making the leap (back?) to speech. Pierce's notion that the sign is arbitrary reigns so strongly in the semiotics I'm familiar with that I can't get my head around the notion that spoken signs are significant in their form. A colleague suggested that Kress doesn't refer here to the sign in its inception, but its use at a given time--when I say tree, it's the most apt way to express 'tree' in a given situation. That helps, but I still don't see why "all aspects of form are meaningful" in that situation. How does the single syllable become meaningful in itself? Is there something in the combination of 'tr' and a long 'e' that embodies 'tree-ness?'