In watching the aftermath of the recent discussion of humanism and anti-humanism (now there’s a fine reductive binary that could use some deconstructing, no?) at Invisible Adjunct, I was startled by the apparent hostility of the fisking performed by Robert Schwartz. Certainly, others in the discussion engaged in a bit of fisking, but none to Schwartz’s degree. It got me thinking about fisking as a genre particular to the net, and so I did a little googling. Imagine my delight at seeing that fellow traveler Dennis Jerz was far, far ahead of me, and even included a link that I see now, long after the fact, as demonstrating quite well that the recent discussions of “the postmodern” (as I think most of the participants understood) were hardly a new topic. (Now there’s a clunker of a sentence structure.) But thinking about fisking (definitions here and here) raises some interesting questions for me about the instrumental view of technology.
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Cross-posted as a response at Kairosnews in slightly abbreviated form.

cel4145 at Kairosnews has posted an interesting story featuring two links (PDF warning on both) from Educause, an organization that I feel really ought to have a .com domain, or at the very least a .org, but definitely not a .edu: after poking around their site for a bit (check out the corporate stuff), it’s pretty obvious these guys are total shills for corporate technology in education. Not that it’s really surprising, given the tenor of the articles, or even the organization’s motto (”Hello, tech support? Yes, the state has cut our budget, there’s a cheating scandal in the Physics department, the adjuncts are trying to unionize, the English faculty has been snacking on continental philosophers again, and our quarterback’s in jail; we’d like our university bugfix service pack 4.8.3b, please”), but worth noting, since both articles demonstrate unproblematic alliegance to the philosophies that (1) technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods is an independent and value-free force driving social change, (2) universities in providing education qua consumable good must respond to that technological advance as the production of ever-more-sophisticated consumer goods, (3) universities in their responses to that technological advance should serve corporate/consumer culture. To be even less surprised, check out what Educause says about their readership and their corporate sponsors and advertisers.

Maybe you can tell that I didn’t much care for what either article had to say.
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I used weblogs yesterday as an example to make a distinction between for-profit and for-pleasure writing. As usual, I was a little hasty. Consider what Glenn Reynolds had to say this morning:

“You can blog for the money — in which case you should be very glad that Andrew [Sullivan] is raising the bar, and generating a general sense that it’s okay to donate. Or you can blog for fun, in which case why should you care if he’s getting some bucks out of it?”

Reynolds goes on to talk about his reasons for blogging, and has some interesting points and links; his perspective helps me to see that maybe, as with the tentative answer to that question Catherine Gammon asked me, the motivations might not matter as much as the act itself. For me, this is a small step towards one way of thinking about the production of writing, within and outside of the composition classroom. At the same time, it raises other questions.
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The Movable Type templates (which I’ve only so far modified very slightly for this weblog) include a section for Creative Commons licenses, which I’ve thought about using here, in particular an attribution license. However, the smart points folks have made in the Creative Commons discussion at Metafilter caused me to stop and think a little; I still haven’t made up my mind.

Compositionists who do research in their classrooms, furthermore, are expected to respect students’ writing as the property of the student, and to take considerable care around issues of permissions before reproducing that writing. And student anonymity and permissions around writing and representation are why I’m being weird about self-identifying on this weblog.

What I’m trying to lead into, I guess, is my focus for this post (the thing I didn’t quite make it to yesterday) on the concerns associated with an understanding of writing as property.
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There’s an interesting post about weblogs and discourse over at Kairosnews; I found the attitudes evidenced in the linked Blogtalk conference paper considerably more engaging than the ideas. And cel4145 even mentions Kenneth Bruffee.