I don’t have the title of the CCCC presentation given by Pam Takayoshi, Gail Hawisher, and Cyndi Selfe in front of me, but all three focused on hidden, subordinated, or otherwise alternative literacies associated with computers. I’ll admit that I had just come from a fantastic presentation on mentoring by Emily Bauman, Malkiel Choseed, Jen Lee, and Brenda Whitney, and found myself a bit underwhelmed: the computers-oriented presentations held little of the careful nuance, complex argumentation, and sophisticated reflexive richness of the mentoring presentations, instead favoring a straightforward, unadorned, and eminently practical outlining of real-world research findings. I’ll hasten to point out that this is much more an issue of my own personal preferences regarding academic work than it is any comparison of the relative merits of the two panels: I’ve read enough of the work of Takayoshi, Hawisher, and Selfe to have seen that their scholarship is pretty much unimpeachable. So before I get myself in any more trouble, maybe I’d best just go ahead and describe what I saw.
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Or maybe that title should be, “The Would-Be Encomiast”.

I’m on the internet social-networking space Orkut, at the invitation of a kind and generous friend, who also wrote me what Orkut calls a “Testimonial”. While I know it’s rude to question the product of generosity, I’m not quite sure how to feel about Orkut: it makes me feel like I’m in a very demonstrative and cliquish high school where the accepted practice is to walk around and demand of people: Will you be my friend? If it’s not clear from what I write here, I was never good at that. I’m a big-time introvert. But there’s something interesting going on there, in that closed-off private networked space: people are performing encomia, for no apparent reason.

Why would anyone do such a thing? We review movies, we give books a set of stars, but can we commodify people, reduce them to a value? Well, of course we can. I haven’t yet (written a Testimonial, I mean), because I’m not sure how to start: all the good qualities of the folks to whom I’m networked seem self-evident in their profiles and online writings, so how might I be original in my praise without seeming obvious or redundant? Anyway: the existence of such things on Orkut makes me ask: how common a form is the encomium these days? Letters of recommendation — yes, I’ve written a few of those for students. Political endorsements — yes, I’ve heard a few of those this year. But the first form is hardly public, and both forms seem more deliberative (you should hire this person, vote for this person) than epideictic (praise for the sake of praise). And in the wider world, testimonials themselves seem to hold little purpose other than as the advertising industry’s form of deliberative rhetoric. So I’m led to what feels like a very odd question, one to which I think the answer is less obvious than it might immediately seem: why — to what end or purpose — might we publicly praise people?
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Yeah, I know I’ve been slack about responding to comments, and I’m feeling guilty about it. I’ll try to set aside the time tomorrow; today, I spent most of the day stranded in a New England city an hour from home (more like 90 minutes in this morning’s snow) while I waited for the dealership to try to find the electrical problem in my car that my local garage still couldn’t find after three visits. The good news, I suppose, is that I got most of the way through Andrew Feenberg.

Feenberg, in 2002’s Transforming Technology (Oxford University Press; an updating of his 1990 Critical Theory of Technology), points out that “Although technologies are first and foremost tools for solving practical problems, they are not fully understandable in functional terms. This is especially true in cases where their function is itself in dispute” (107) — and of course this is the very thing I’ve been trying to get at in describing the differences between the liberal and vocational education models and how they connect to computers in the classroom. Naturally, I was pretty psyched to see this, and even more so with what came next.
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Passing_Through raises some interesting issues. First, one might wish that Passing_Through had followed one of Friday’s links, or maybe visited Wikipedia, or even at least attempted to read the rest of the post more closely: the definition Passing_Through offers is simultaneously too slim to be useful, inappropriate to the context, and rather idiosyncratic. Unfortunately, Passing_Through also seems to have a rather impoverished view of writing, in which collaboration does indeed occur as a way for writers to use their experience and skills to assist one another, and which indeed often seeks to solve common problems. (Passing_Through might find Andrea Lunsford’s contention that “Everything’s an Argument” instructive on this topic.) One does indeed doubt that anyone will add another three chapters to Gone With the Wind, just as much as one doubts that anyone will add another thousand lines of code to VisiCalc anytime soon.
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What does one do with the last two tablespoons or so of Crab Mornay from Friday night that didn’t fit into the puff pastry shells and remain in the refrigerator? A rhetorical question: in the spirit of the local Fat City restaurant that offers a phenomenal lobster club sandwich, I toasted two slices of whole wheat, melted some butter, diced some mushrooms and onions, grated some more Swiss, and made myself a Crab Mornay grilled cheese sandwich. And washed it down with the last of the fantastic grassy razor-sharp fruit-bomb Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc and Deutsche Grammophon’s recordings of the String Sextets of Johannes Brahms. Would that all leftovers were this good.

While the Brahms features another Aronowitz — Cecil — on viola, I’m taking a short break from Stanley Aronowitz tonight to check out a recent Computers and Composition article: namely, Jim Porter’s “Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter’s Tale”, from 2003’s issue 20. (Those who follow the journal in question will note that I’ve been silent on the topic of Jeffrey Grabill’s recent article. There’s a reason for this: more on the topic sometime soon.) The questions at the heart of Porter’s article are some of the same ones I’ve been asking:

“How much do these computer-based writing technologies really matter in terms of their effects on writing? Is the computer changing writing in truly substantive, even revolutionary ways? Or is it simply one more writing tool, like the pencil, that aids the writing process but doesn’t revolutionize it?” (384)
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I’m still grading papers, and I’m trying to fight off illness with massive doses of orange juice.

It’s occurred to me that while a lot of people have talked in passing about the geography of weblogging, not many people have really talked about mapping weblogs in any sort of sophisticated way. There have been the various left/right and political compass chartings, but I find them rather one-dimensional and uninteresting. So, too, people have pointed to Web tools that let you give your weblog a geographical identifier tag, so your perspective can show up as a red pin on a world map somewhere — again, not very interesting.

I’m more interested in the way people set up boundaries and communities of inclusion and exclusion in weblogging, and how the liminal spaces get constructed. Some people sort their blogrolls into categories, so there are academic weblogs, political weblogs, design weblogs, tech weblogs, and so on. (Are there personal weblogs, as a category? Or is every weblog somehow personal? What about group weblogs?) And there are groups of New York weblogs, Indonesian weblogs, and so on. There are weblogs that allow comments, and there are weblogs that don’t. But most weblogs I’ve seen, in their linking practices, don’t restrict themselves to a single focus, although there often seems to be a sort of limited constellation of interests. How do those constellations intersect? How many different methodologies could one come up with for mapping weblogs, and what would happen if one superimposed one methodology over another over another, like those anatomical transparencies in old encyclopedias?

I’m interested, in part, because of the economic globalization angle, and the way that the internet was supposed to foster the breakdown of borders and the movement of footloose and transcendent transnational capital. As I’ve noted here in the past, I don’t much believe in that perspective — the economic critiques of the discourses of globalization offered by Porter and others are compelling — and, in fact, I think we’re starting to see the solidification of nascent weblogging communities. Now, “communities” is a word I take care in using, since it’s rarely if ever deployed in anything other than a vague and positive sense, but there’s a point I want to make here: communities have borders, and communities have members and nonmembers and even sometime members. I think the Web is already a local space, and is becoming even more local via the way people construct their webs of links.

And the more I think about this, the more it seems obvious, and the more I’m certain I should have done some more careful Googling before putting this entry together. Jill or Anne or someone similarly brilliant has probably already written something incredibly smart about it.

Back to grading and orange juice.

After a few days, I’ve taken a look back over the dust-up in the comments at the Wealth Bondage thread responding to Liz Lawley’s post about professorial ethics and boundaries. And I wonder: what the hell got into me?
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Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, in their “Introduction” to The Jameson Reader, point to the uneasy intersection of discussions of literature and culture with discussions “of economic and social structures” (1) in Jameson’s work. While a lot of the work that’s been derived from Jameson’s writing makes me incredibly impatient (it seems to me a fine example of what the Tutor has lambasted as the spineless equivocations of postmodern theory), some of Jameson’s ideas are useful, and seem germane to what I’m looking at.
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Worsley talks about “The division within the working class between the ‘rough’ and the ‘respectable’”(316) and notes that when such divisions are coupled to other identity markers — ethnicity, say, or religion — class conflict and resentment can become more intense. A city near here recently agreed to receive (not sure what the proper non-paternalistic verb is here: permanently settle?) several hundred refugees from an African nation. There’s been considerable hubbub, much of it because the community in question is poorer and historically Polish and Puerto Rican and members of those ethnic communities have pointed to the inevitable heightened competition for jobs, apartments, et cetera that will result. In other words, there’s resentment in the community into which the refugees will be attempting to assimilate. This is nothing new — recall the conflicts in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing — but still, it points again to ways in which members of a particular class as economic category will struggle against one another for the same resources rather than engaging in struggle with members of other classes or in attempts to change the nature of the hierarchy.
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From the super-smart Anne Galloway, two links of interest.

“World’s poor to get own search engine.”

Great. So now the world can shunt the poor into slums online as well as offline. Instead of diddling with the symptoms, folks, why not have a go at the causes? Does the assertion that “people in poor countries are short of money but have time on their hands, whereas people in the West are cash-rich but time-poor” strike anyone else as problematic?

Real Life: The Full Review

A nice joke, that’s been kinda done before (check out the site for Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet; the book itself offers some interesting insights, and some less-interesting obfuscations), but most engaging to me for what the review says about the author’s/audience’s view of the world. Would most folks characterize the following quotations as indicative of mainstream American ideology? (It’s an honest question, and given my previous post, I acknowledge that my selective quotation is a form of fisking, although I’d protest that my intent isn’t to demolish whatever I may see as reviewer Greg Kasavin’s “argument” in the joke review, but to ask other folks who might read this for their sense of the prevalence of the ideology behind Kasavin’s descriptions. Not trying to be nasty, Greg; I thought the faux-review was kinda fun in spots.)
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