Filed under: Literacy, New Media | Tags: 1999, Digital Literacy, Johnson-Eilola, technology, Wysocki
Wysocki and J-E begin with the proliferation of “literacies” (computer literacy, media literacy, etc.) and ask a series of questions about the trends – “What are we likely to carry with us when we ask that our relationship with all technologies should be like that we have with the technology of printed words?” and “What other possibilities might we use for expressing our relationships with and within technologies?” (349). The article then historicizes thinking about literacy as obvious in two big “bundles” or threads of thinking about literacy. It is either represented as:
1)solution to social/economic/political/cultural ills (the literacy myth) – which create the notion that literacies are “some basic, neutral, context-less set of skills whose acquisition will bring the bearer economic and social goods and privileges” (352). This notion is a “bundle” embedded in the idea of literacy itself – carried over to these “new” sites of technology when we use the word literacy.
Figures cited to establish this trend –
- Clinton – nationalist press releases from Clinton,
- Glenda Hull pointing out our tendencies to imagine literacy as ideologically neutral,
- Walter Ong’s notion that literacy “fulfills our destiny” - Ong is quoted as writing “Literacy … is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science of also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed of the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself” (351)
- Marshal McLuhan’s suggestion that readers “do nothing” – print causes nationalism/capitalism, print causes homogeneous repeatability, print causes linearity (351)
- Harvey Graff (with Ruth Finnegan) in establishing the literacy myth – the belief that literacy will bring us everything the stories above promise” (353)
- Brian Street – the idea that literacy is autonomous, “whose acquisition necessarily causes progress, has played a part in the practice of national and international literacy programs” which, Street concludes, means that the grand claims for ‘academic literacy’ “are merely those of a small elite attempting to maintain positions of power and influence by attributing universality and neutrality to their own cultural conventions” (354). Street calls autonomous models of literacy hegemonic.
- Stuckey (Violence of Literacy) argues that the mythology that literacy is neutral comes from a similar place in American psychic that suggests the mythology of a classless society (354). She writes “Far from engineering freedom, our current approaches to literacy corroborate other social practices that prevent freedom and limit opportunity” (354).
- Ruth Finnegan – argues that the literacy myth plays an “essential ideological function for the governing social, political, or educational order… So when people might want, for example, houses or jobs or economic reform, they are instead given literacy programs” (355).
- John Dewey – who argues for the importance of education and literacy because they thought that ‘lacking education the ‘people’ are inherently incapable of governing themselves” (355). Wysocki and J-E write “When people aren’t literacy – it is because of some (inherent?) failure of their own” (355).
The literature review allows them to conclude, asking that if literacy is a deceptive promise of basic skills that will “fix” lives and society then why would we use the term anew? (355)
OR
2)literacy is often depicted as love of books – as wrapped up notions of selfhood, public/private, subjectivity, etc. that the dawn of print and books as objects in particular provoked (356). They suggest, ultimately, that the book it constructed as who we are, how we behave, and who we should be (359). Figures and their big ideas –
- Mignolo’s “Literacy and the Colonization f Memory” – the love of books in Spanish culture caused massacres of Mexicans
- Sven Birkerts’ – Gutenberg Elegies – sees reading of books as locations of “private, unsocialized, dreaming self” and hypertext as a false sense of liberation from author (357)
- Habermas – who argued that “a necessary step in the development of a critical public in the 18h century was that men read to themselves in the privacy of their reading they developed a sense of individuated self, a self that could hold a position in the public sphere” (358)
- Robert Romanyshyn – argues that linear perspective in the renaissance shifts our thinking even before the 18th century as Habermas suggests. Romanyshyn argues that the book comes to be mass produced just as maps and images are being laid out in geometric grids – suggesting that the “linearity of the geometric world will find its counterpart in the linear literacy of the book, where line by line, sentence by sentence, the chronological structures of the book will mirror the sequential, ordered, linear structure of time in the sciences” (358). – Both Habermas and Romanyshyn argue about the invention of the interiorization of a self (358).
- Wysocki and J-E point out that McLuhan, Ong, and Birkets accept that books “ask us to think of ourselves as selves” (359).
So – “what else might be – or be open to – if we did not see ourselves and our world so defined in books?” (359)
“why are we using literacy as a metaphor for everything else? If we have unpacked “literacy” at all adequately, we hope we can now argue that ‘literacy’ gets put behind ‘technological’ or ‘computer’ because ‘literacy’ is already used to encompass everything we think worthy of our consideration: the term automatically upgrades its prefix.” (360).
“do we want to use a word that contains within it a relation to a singular object that we use to narrow our sense of who we are and what we are capable of? Do we want to continue a relationship that is externalized, linear, private, visual, static, and authoritative?” (360).
They offer two bundles to think through these questions and offer alternative conceptualizations –
1)literacy via postmodernism – Postmodernism contributes the notion of space, collapsing a sense of time through conceptualizations of space. Postmodernism allows for “imagining what literacy might be if we conceived it primarily as a spatial relation to information” (362). Literacy changes if we prioritize space over time (362). For the postmodern viewer is, according to Jameson, called on to “do the impossible, namely, to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference” (362). Prioritizing space removes origins, futures, progress and brings about a feeling of simultaneity once we are wired. It revolutionizes ideas of intertextuality – which instead of being understood as a network of references becomes material, visible, naviagable. “Literacy – if we describe it as some set of skills that allows us to work with the information structures of our time – then becomes the ability to move in the new technology spaces of information, the ability to make the instantaneous connections between informational objects that allow us to see them all at once” (363). It begins to be about the arrangement of information in new ways – via imagination (Lyotard). Space becomes something we work within. This shift toward privileging space over time unbinds history from subjectivity and makes single, unified, subjects of literacy impossible (365). And new opportunities arise to live among sign systems. We aren’t just moving through information, but “margin and changing conscious constructions of it as we go” (366). We become active participants in how information gets arranged, juggled, etc. to make the reality of different cultures.
2)literacy reconsidered through new terms – such as Stuart Hall’s idea of “articulation” – dualistic – idea of uttering, speaking and also the ways things connect. This term allows literacy to be about relationships – “we could describe literacy not as a monolithic term but as a cloud of sometimes contradictory nexus points among different positions. Literacy can be seen as not a skill but a process of situating and resituating representations in social spaces” (367). It brings with it notions of disconnection as well as connection. It offers ways of “re-presenting literacy” – just one of many terms we might try one.
Filed under: Literacy, Methodology, New Media | Tags: 1999, Digital Literacy, qualitative research, Selfe, technology
Selfe argues that we need to attend to literacy first and technology second, unpacking the simplistic notions about both technology, but more importantly literacy given the public understandings and discussions of technological literacy. She surveys documents from the government (Clinton admin), industry/business, education, and parents as agents of technological change. She examines the ways that these forces are working to maintain the simplistic notions of literacy that, Street argues, makes it difficult to see/confront the complex political realities stemming from Literacy. Accessing to technology is not as liberating or empowering as we might assume it to be. We can ultimately learn lessons from these four discourses – 1) we can remember the literacy myth and the ways that technological campaigns expound then, 2)we can remember that literacy education is highly political – and can’t be misunderstood/misdirected as apolitical work with skills, 3)remember the dangers of romanticizing technology as a simple solution in a complicated world, 4)we can recognize our own role within the cycles of literacy/illiteracy and make careful decisions about the part we want to play. We, as educators, can recognize and circulate “situated knowledge” in ways that help us transform technological literacies to critical technological literacies which convey an awareness to reflexivity and consciousness. We need to teach students to do more than consume technologies – we need to do more than require faculty to use technology. We need to teach the new implications of technologies as communication tools. We need to involve stakeholders in decisions about how we create technological spaces, how we use our funding, how we think about geopolitical digital literacies, etc. When we don’t think critically about how literacy is defined, taught, enacted, valued, etc. it can become violent and violence. We need to intercede – and help bridge the false gap between science and humanism as we move forward.
The definition of technologies of literacy- the idea of competency with computers – limits ideas of literacy as multiple.
We need to bring the complexity of the links between technology, literacy, power (socio-economics, access, etc.) to the forefront of our discussions. We need to consider the four cultural forces – government, education, business, and parents – to understand the existing configuration of technological literacy and alter it. We need to “pay attention and work toward productive change.” We need to change –we need to learn about these new technologies, confront the ways power is operating within this new arena, and develop complex ways to see the connections.
Studies the Technology literacy Challenge issues by Pres Clinton – which “aimed to create a citizenry comfortable in using computers not only for the purpose of calculating, programming, and designing, but also for the purposes of reading, writing, and communication” (5). The way the campaign plays out simply continues the replicating habits of literacy/illiteracy within society – those going to poor schools have less access to technology and remain “illiterate” and capital-less.
Definitions of technological literacy – the ability to use computers to improve learning/productivity (10). Common definition.
Selfe’s definition, drawing upon Street, says that “technological literacy refers to a complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved in operating linguistically within the context of electronic environments, including reading, writing, and communication” (11). This means imagining technological literacy as event and practice.
“When practices of technological literacy are studied closely, they reveal complex sets of cultural beliefs and values that influence – and are influenced by – collective, individual, and historical understandings of what it means to read, write, make meaning, and communicate via computers and within on-line environments” (12).
Selfe argues that a false binary (dividing those who invest technology and are ostracized and those who distrust technology and so discount it) exists that, either way, makes technology problematically invisible.
Filed under: Literacy, New Media, Pedagogy | Tags: 2004, Digital Literacy, Hawisher, qualitative research, Selfe, technology
Selfe and Hawisher conduct massive interviews with volunteers, asking about their life history as it intersects with what they call “technological literacy.” They select 20 of these case studies to share in their text, co-authoring with each subject in the chapters in which they are highlighted. They select case studies as a way to present “cultural tracing… of how personal computers found their way into the lives, homes, schools, communities, and workplaces of some people within the US during the period we are studying” (in the last 25 years) (4). They sought technological literacy autobiographies, drawing upon Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives (2001) technique of mixing oral history and life-history methodologies. They worked hard to contextualize each participant – and so created a matrix of various factors that influence literacies on a micro-to-macro scale. They worked hard to textually present their subjects – their interviews and their writing – accurately, considered with adhering to feminist methodologies in terms of ethical representation and co-authorship. They call their own method ethnographic co-authoring, ethnographic autobiography, ethnographic fiction, qualitative mixed-methodology, etc. They were concerned with the problem of memory and “collaborative fictions” (17). They recognized their own work as historiographic in nature, especially as they recount family histories, individual histories, histories of the Internet, histories of technology educational history, socio-economic and political history, etc. They wonder if their methods are a means of controlling – controlling their subjects, their findings, their inquiry (21). Ultimately, they are interested in “everyday literacy experiences” that, in what Margaret Mead calls a ‘prefigurative’ society, help guide teachers who are operating, essentially, without a curricular vision because future literacies are being developed as they teach. They argues that literacies are faced with competition with one another and can fade as new literacies rise. They argue that once literacies become established and practiced they tend to become invisible, too enmeshed in actual practice to be seen. They suggest that this is becoming the reality of technology literacies. They emphasize the role that class, gender, and race play in not only access (they coin the term gateway access - technological gateways) but manifestations of literacies. They argue for the importance of “local cultures” in shaping not just literacies but attitudes towards them. They argues that technological literacies “must be able to cross national borders, time zones, language groups, and geographic distances; to resist the limitations of a single symbolic system and its attendant conventions. They must communicate on multiple channels, using visual, aural, and kinesthetic elements as well as alphabetic components” (208). They also agree with Brandt who argued in her 1995 article, “Accumulating Literacy” that “literacy in an advanced literate period requires an ability to work the borders between tradition and change, an ability to adapt and improvise and amalgamate” (130 – 660 in Brandt).
They point out eight themes that emerge from their research (careful to point out that they are merely observations) –
#1 – Literacy exists within a complex cultural ecology of social, historical, and economic effects. Within this cultural ecology, literacies have life spans (212). Some fade away. Some literacies have limits.
#2 – Although a complex set of factors has affected the acquisition of digital literacy from 1978 to 2003, race, ethnicity, and class too often assume key roles. Because they are linked with other social formations at numerous levels, and because their effects are often multiplied and magnified by these linkages, race, ethnicity, and class are often capable of exerting a greater force than other factors.
#3 – Gender can often assume a key role in the acquisition of digital literacy, especially when articulated with other social, cultural, and material factors (219).
#4 – Within a cultural ecology, people exert their own powerful agency in, around, and through digital literacy, even though unintended consequences always accompany their actions (221). Such as movements.
#5 – Schools, workplaces, communities, and homes are the four primary gateways through which those living in the US have gained access to digital literacy in the decades since the invention and successful marketing of the persona computer (223).
#6 – Access to computers is not a monodimensional social formation. It is necessary but no sufficient for the acquisition and development of digital literacy. The specific conditions of access have a substantial effect on the acquisition and development of digital literacy (227). – Home, School, Community, Workplace.
#7 – Some families share a relatively coherent set of literacy values and practices – and digital literacy values and practices – and spread these values among their members. Information about, and support of electronic literacy can flow both upstream, from younger to older, and downstream, from older to younger members of a family (229).
#8 – Faculty members, school administrators, educational policymakers, and parents need to recognize the importance of digital literacies that young people are developing, as well as the increasingly complex global contexts within which these self-sponsored literacies function. We need to expand our national understanding of literacy beyond the narrow bounds of print and beyond the alphabetic (232).
Terms/ideas of the text –
Technological literacy or literacies – “the practices involved in reading, writing, and exchanging information in online environments, as well as the values associated with such practices – cultural, social, political, and educational…. Literacies of technology is an all-encompassing phrase to connect social practices, people, technology, values, and literate activity, which, in turn, are embedded in a larger cultural ecology” (2)
Cultural ecologies – social, cultural, political, ideological, and economic factors influence literate activities – and are crafted by literate activity.
Cultural ecology of literacy – the notion that it is “important to situate technological literacy in specific cultural, material, educational, and familial contexts – in particular contexts characterized by varied levels of support (social, economic, educational, technological) for electronic literacy efforts” (5)
Gunther Kress – as arguing that “the single, exclusive and intensive focus on written language has dampened the full development of all kinds of human potentials, through all the sensorial possibilities of human bodies, in all kinds of respects, cognitively and affectively, in two and three dimensional representation” (233 – 85 in Kress’s 1999 articles)
- as suggesting (2003 text) that literacy is an inappropriate word to link with terms not specifically aimed at ‘making messages using letters as the means for recording that message” (1 -23 in Kress).
Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s 1999 idea – that by using the term literacy and speaking about it as if it is “basic, neutral, contextless set of skills, the world keeps us hoping… that there could be an easy cure for economic and social and political pain, that only a lack of literacy keeps people poor or oppressed” (1 – 355 in their article).
Filed under: Literacy, New Media | Tags: 2004, Digital Literacy, multiliteracies, Selber
Selber creates three categories of literacy that, if we attend to them as educators, will help us to encourage multiliteracies within our students. Selber works to 1)rescue/reconceptualize functional literacy which, at present, is damaging in the ways it presents literacies as value-free, acontextual skills, 2)describe ways that we can help students achieve critical literacy, 3)define a rhetorical literacy that redefines rhetorical literacies as design choices (such as designing a website interface as a rhetorical act). Selber’s concepts work out on metaphorical, subjective, and objective levels. To be functionally literate is to consider computers tools, students as users of tools that help them become employable. Critical literacy considers computers as cultural artifacts, students as questioners of technology that ultimately produce critique. Rhetorical literacy imagines computers as hyptertextual media – students are producers of technology so as to engage in reflective praxis.
The book is meant to offer ways to conceptualize programs and curriculums to attend to all levels of literacy – making them all useful in producing multiliterate students.
Filed under: Feminism, Literacy, Public Discourse | Tags: 2007, Donehower, globalization, Hogg, rural literacy, Schell
The Introduction to the anthology argues for a reconceptualization of “rurality” and literacy – so as to better understand and serve those living in rural American, which, it is suggested, are mostly marginalized folks. They draw on Brandt’s notions of literacy sponsorship to suggest that Composition encounters opportunities to sponsor rural literacies all the time. One way to sponsor it is to reconsider our use of the “city” metaphor – imagining our classrooms as cities, imaging our students as urban, imagining literacy as urban. They challenge us to think about how we define literacy and rural – and what the implications are for our students. They spend time developing 1)the idea of sustainability (in contrast to preservability), 2)public pedagogy via Giroux as part of critical pedagogy, 3)representations of rural life in context of globalization. They begin with a definition of literacy as “skills and practices needed to gain knowledge, evaluate and interpret that knowledge, and apply knowledge to accomplish particular goals. In this sense, ‘reading’ refers to the ability to gather and process knowledge from a variety of ‘texts’; writing means the ability to transform knowledge to achieve a particular purpose, just as writers transform ideas and information to accomplish rhetorical goals” (4). Rural is defined as “a quantitative measure, involving statistics on population and region” (2). They argue that we are already involved in these complicated networks of stakeholders, global citizenship, public pedagogy, rhetorics, representations of rural life and rural literacy, and must develop more sophisticated, complicated ways of understanding and conveying rural literacies to others.
The book then houses an analysis of media representations of farm life and farm failures (Eileen), etc.
They call, ultimately, for more qualitative research on rural literacy.
Filed under: Comp History, Feminism, Historiography, History of Rhetoric, Literacy, Methodology | Tags: 2000, Royster
Literacy is a subjective tool in generating action (43).
Preface – The journey of the research has taught her how to do qualitative research on African American women. She suggests that – “the territory of literacy is both text and context, not one or the other; and that, in being so, literacy also connects more generally to other symbolic systems of representation” (ix). In this way, it allows for a conceptualization of literacy as “communicative practice… underscoring the notion that literacy functions rhetorically as part of the sociocultural fabric of our lives” (ix).
Introduction – Driven by reactions of shock to the presence of African American women using literacy as social action for change, Royster has two subjects of study – African American women of the elite, professional classes of the 19th century and the nonfiction prose they wrote, often together in women’s clubs, to bring about social change. She is particularly interested in their acquisition of literacy which she calls “a dynamic moment in the lives of African American women, as people with desires for agency and authority in the use of written language” (5). She suggests that uses of writing (acquisition and then application) express self, society, and self in society; uses of writing reveal a community’s material conditions. She’ll trace the “stream that is visible as evidence of the sea that until now has passed unnoticed” in American history and conceptualizations of literacy (5). We gain an understanding of literacy when we study literacy in particulars – “placing the ‘thick descriptions’ of the literate practices of a particular group in the company of similar descriptions of other groups” (6). This allows for a “more concrete sense of human variety in the use of literacy” (6). We need a “kaleidoscopic view” to understand literacy (6). Therefore she looks to her “subjects” for an understanding of general patterns of behavior – not to essentialize but to begin a long project of rescue (7). They are sites from which to make connections to what (who) came before and after them. They will help us to make visible what is often invisible (8). She will theorize about a methodology she calls historical ethnography. All of this is an effort to call for new ways of reading – to create a new paradigm in research and scholarship.
Chapter 1- Origin point with Alice Walker’s In Search of My Mother’s Garden.
Chapter 2- Begins to conceptualize literacy. Royster writes that literacy is used “as an instrument for producing spiraling effects to both sociopolitical thought and sociopolitical action. Literacy has enabled African American women to create whirlpools in the pond of public discourse, such that educational opportunity became for them the epicenter by which change could occur” (42). Literacy, in the context of this study, is not just an “autonomous objectified artifact of education and refinement but also a fundamentally subjective tool, made meaning within systems of belief” (43). Therefore Royster has three tasks – 1)analyze and interpret ways that written language and action systemically converge, 2)document rhetorical habits and choices of individual writers, attending to ethos and context, and 3)identify and examine emerging patterns – so as to theorize what their rhetorical preferences “indicate about connections between this group, a worldview, and their deliberate uses of written langue to meet sociopolitical purposes” (43). Acts of literacy are therefore subjective in two ways – 1)they embody the rhetorical “prowess” of an individuals “vision and voice”, 2)language use, even an individual’s language use, is still a cultural production (43).
Filed under: Higher Education, Literacy, New Media, Pedagogy | Tags: 1999, Digital Literacy, Hawisher, Selfe, technology
Our imagine as professors who live and teach away from technology is outdated. We find ourselves in great need of “models that offer strategies for acting productively in the face of social change” (3). The Introduction offers three dominant terms in the collection – literacy, text, and visual (12).
Baron – “argues that the information technologies are invented for a limited purpose and are the property of a small group of initiates… Once accepted, new technologies come into their own, as humans – experiment with new – and previously undreamed of – modes of communication” (5).
Douglas Hess – argues for an expanded understanding of the essay as a technology itself.
Sarah Sloane – shadows a first year student reluctant to use technology in her education – are argues, through her experience, that we all experience “medial hauntings” and “apparitional knowledge of earlier writing experiences”. She takes up the notion of genealogies. She argues that those researchers engaged in case studies ought to attend more explicit to genealogies.
Gunther Kress – invites us to challenge current notions of literate activities which invariability exclude considerations of the visual. Literacy is translated into other languages as exclusively tied to the alphabet – and emphasizes that “the visual is not so much new in itself as new in the recent history of representation where display and arrangement are taking on new meaning and are often neglected in English courses… the latest relationships between text and image demand a new theory of meaning” (6).
Diane George and Diane Shoos – argues for a reconfiguration of the role of the visual in literate societies in a postmodern age. We need to learn to value the visual as a “fundamental part of literacy” and come to “focus on images as they embody meaning and force intertexutal play at multiple levels and in multiple ways” (6-7).
Marilyn Cooper – echoes Faigley’s call for us to attend to the material conditions involved in crafting a postmodern pedagogy.
James Porter – uses communitarian ethics as a heuristic for cyperwriters and the ethical dilemmas they will face – esp at the hands of “liberal individualism”
Hawisher – looks at the ways that women are represented on WWW. They “describe how women writer, authorize, and control the electronic spaces of the Web page” (9).
Selfe – analyzes the advertisements for technology – software/computers – she finds in print media. These ads represent women as “beauties” and men as “computer geeks” and we ought to work intentionally to change these stereotypes.
Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola – ask why our culture uses the metaphor of literacy for “everything else”?
Filed under: Literacy, New Media, Pedagogy | Tags: 1998, Digital Literacy, Fitzsimmons-Hunter, Moran, technology
F-H and Moran, like many in the collection, begin with Hawisher and Selfe’s notion of “the rhetoric of technology” and join then in a call for critique. Yet F-H and Moran critique not the utopian, uncritical attitudes of teachers in adopting technology in the classroom, but the “unequal distribution of technology” and the inherent assumption that the distribution of technology – the access to technology of diverse groups – will somehow take care of itself. They argue that two threads of thought create this misguided idea – first the “rhetoric of a social revolution” suggests that the problem of access happens on the macro level – and so it must be solved there, leaving little for teachers to do but wait. The other thread of thought is the rhetoric of technology which “assumes that somehow technology will itself solve the problem of its own distribution” alongside, again, the “rhetoric of social revolution that assumes that without the redistribution of wealth/technology across our society the technologically rich will vault still further beyond the technologically poor and there is nothing that anyone can do to halt that process except actively call for the revolution” (159).
F-H and Moran argue that we ought to take up the approach they call Freirian inspired – “rhetoric of enablement-through-technology” (159). This rhetoric suggests that 1)teachers and students, given the opportunity, are agents of change, 2)initiating change on the micro level, in the classroom, can begin institutional, macro-change (159). They experiment, altering ideas of “access” by bringing in teachers to workshops that provide them with technology like Smart Boards. They also create “lending programs,” buy new stuff for their own programs, etc. The result was increased access and increased used. Most teachers who borrowed materials were able to demystify things for themselves and then effectively argue for its acquisition in their own schools.
This happened, they reflect, because – 1)they focused on teachers and not on hardware, 2)they introduced technology as practice rather than abstraction, 3)inexpensive, low-end technology is a good place to start (168).
Their ultimate claim is that technology will only “revolutionize education” via the principle agents of educational change – teachers. (168)
Filed under: Literacy | Tags: 1998, Digital Literacy, Johnson-Eilola, technology
J-E argues, via explanations of process theory writing as ultimately product driven, that we need to reconceptualize many concepts -
1) our notions of text (moving from our current sense of it as bounded, defined to vast and infinite),
2) our notion of author (moving from our lingering ideas of Enlightenment towering genius authors to multivocal, collaborative, socially constructed writing of writers),
3) our notion of arrangement (moving from now marginalized into merely document design, etc. to meaning-making),
4) our notion of hypertext (moving from contextualizing a primary object to an associative heuristic],
5) our notion of text as complete/fragmentary, our notion of portfolios [moving from a series of products to representations of many voices collaborating],
6) our notion of collaboration [moving from group thinking together to group writing together – and embracing the notion that writing is a series of fragments and original Authors don’t exist],
7) our notion of connection [moving from conceptualizations of products as the ultimate end to connections as the ultimate ends – that externalize notiosn of subjectivity]
8) and adopt the idea of cognitive maps – Jameson’s approach to “juggling enormous amounts of information that seem to act through an externalization of at least some portsion fo identity” (24). They, in Jameson’s words, “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (24).
Ultimately, J-E argues that we rethink of writing as about the arrangement of connections - valuing the arrangement of information more than the typical notion of valuing what the writer “adds” (31). We need to navigate carefully between enlightenment ideas of authorship and postmodern ideas of fragmentation and dispersal.
Claims -
9) Subjectivity – “subjects no longer battle it out within the recesses of their individual and somewhat fragmented minds, but ‘out there’ in culture” (24)
10) Connectivity – we need to recognize the values of “an associational-social viewpoint” because it 1)connects individuals to social contexts, helping them to see forces at work in the world and respond to them, 2)our pedagogy values the idea of connection while we don’t practice those values (25).
11) Connection ought to be seen as an “eminently creative act” - We need to reconfigure writing as “social connections” (26).
12) Ulmer argues that connectivity is the ultimate heuristic – arguing for the concept of information as spatial – arguing that linear writing reveals colonality in that writing is then choreographed as “always potentially colonialist, especially in seeing citation as occupying or taking another’s space” suggesting that the act of quoting might become a kind of violence. Regardless – it transforms texts into social, ethical responsibilities – turning information spaces into places where discourse communities can form (27).
