My attitude about Detroit and my attitude about Computers and Writing aren’t the same at all. This was my first time at C&W, and it was all kinds of fun. (After we got through presenting, anyway.)

I’ve finally made peace with the fact that my deafness makes me a lousy conference blogger, though. I’m always too busy listening and filling in the gaps of what I hear to actually take notes or report back on anything. But I can say that the several panels do stand out in my mind:

• first Ong panel, during which Michael Day critiqued his own earlier work in such as way as to give hope to grad students everywhere
• the Saturday panel with Jim Ridolfo, Doug Eyman and Jake McCarthy. (Jim’s presentation was particularly strong).
• Matt Barton and Bob Cumming’s talks on Wikipedia. I appreciated Matt’s observations about the organizational differences between Wikipedia a few years ago and the way it’s working these days, with a more guild-like arrangement.
• Steve Krause, Robin Murphy, and Kimberly Lacey’s talks on Blogging, News Communities, and Rhetoric. Steve’s new project on EMU-Talk is interesting, and I like the fact that he’s still working with Bitzer. All sorts of folks have noted Bitzer’s flaws, and his idea has been rehabilitated in various ways. This project seems to provide a lot of room for extending it in a way that can account for audience agency, and for fluid movement between audience and author status. I’ll be curious to see what Steve’s come up with a year from now.

I probably won’t go to C&W next year, because it’s an RSA year and I do dearly love that conference. Plus, I haven’t been to Seattle yet. But I’ll most certainly be at C&W again in the future.