Her: I need a Deep Roy! I need an Oompa Loompa to do research!
Him: Hell, we need a whole herd of research Oompa Loompas.
Her: Wouldn’t it be fabulous? We’d get so much done.
(pause)
Her: Wait a minute. Graduate students are Oompa Loompas.
Him: We’re Oompa Loompas.
I asked a newly pseudonymous blog-friend for a reading list on the History of the Book, and he obliged me. And then he blogged it so I can link it in my blog-files! If you happen to be knowledgeable about this area, both of us would like to hear your thoughts.
Tagging a couple of older things here so I won't lose them:
Collin on "Mecology Revisited"
Knowledge Management: Social Network Analysis (I'm not sure where this one came from, but I suspect I nabbed it from Ton Zijlstra.)
Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: A Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (Statement of Bruce Lehman. Pointed out to me by John Logie.)
Update: Also Johndan Johnson-Eilola's After Hypertext.
Clancy's reminded me of yet another item on my Interweb To-Do List: resuscitate the wiki.
My wiki has a rather twisted history. Mister Boyfriend, the SysAdmin around here, was playing around with wikis as a mapping tool last Spring and set one up for me while he was at it. I became convinced that it would be an excellent tool for organizing my thesis chapter on the history of copyright. Because the university thesis guidelines demanded that I be the sole author of my thesis, I password-protected it with the intention of removing the password after my defense. (According to Matt Barton's article Embrace the Wiki Way, this is both a very good and very bad use of a wiki. As an attempt to organize encyclopedic information, it's good; as a single-author project, it completely subverted/perverted the entire spirit of wikiness. At least I had the decency to feel bad about it at the time.)
Wiki-ing the history of copyright proved to be a great way to organize the information for that chapter, but the wiki bit me in the ass because of its ability to expand ad infinitum. If I wanted to add a section on the history of French copyright, I could. If I wanted to make individual pages for each century of development in the Italian judicial system, I could do that. The encyclopedic air of a wiki makes it so tempting to want to stuff everything you can in there - especially since it's for the benefit of all humankind! Not so good when your chapter is supposed to be The History of Intellectual Property and the Internet in 20 Pages Or Less so you can get to theories of authorship, which is what you're actually on about. Eventually it became clear that if I ever wanted to move on to anything else in the thesis I was going to have to abandon the wiki, write the damned chapter straight up, and get on with my life. So I did.
Sometime during the weeks that the wiki sat unused, it blew up. I'm not entirely sure what happened - and neither is Mister SysAdmin - but I blame the host. I was able to recover the text files but not the structure, and the whole thing has been sitting on my hard drive since we moved this summer. It seems like a useful thing, though. There's other wikis on IP out there: the Intellectual Property Wiki, infoAnarchy Wiki, IP Law Wiki, and the relevant pages on Wikipedia. All of these briefly discuss IP History, but none of them really get into it. It seems like an IP History Wiki would be a needful thing, and there have to be other geeks like me out there who actually think IP History is fun. So sometime between now and the end of the year, I'm going to work on rebuilding the wiki that I had and reoffer it to the world in a properly unprotected state. And then we'll see what happens.
Note to Clancy: I'm using PMWiki, and it works fine. Except for the part where it doesn't currently exist, but that's not the wiki's fault.
T.A. Rickard, writing in 1910:
Yet each man possesses some little bit of knowledge, whether as observation, theory, or experience, that is his very own. Thus each can contribute something to the general fund; and seeing how much he owes, it is asking but little that he give cheerfully what he can. Of course, narrow minds still continue to fondle the mean belief that to give information gratuitously is to throw away a stock in trade, and that to keep secret the professional or technical experience of a life is to possess an added weapon in the arena of industry. But this is a pitiable fallacy scarcely worthy of castigation. If adopted universally we would be today as the Hottentot or Eskimo; civilization has been evolved by the free exchange of thought and the frank transmission of experience. Whether we be advocates of free trade, fair trade, or reciprocity in matters of national industry, let us at least reject the shriveling policy of protection as applied to the worldwide traffic in ideas.From A Guide to Technical Writing, qtd. in Spurious Coin: A History of Science, Management and Technical Writing by Bernadette Longo.
(Written back on July 5 and never posted.)
So I'm sitting here watching From Stargate to Atlantis: A SciFi Lowdown and pondering the fact that the new Wraith bad guys look like alien Marilyn Mansons and basically seem to exhibit the same characteristics as the Dementors in Harry Potter, only they suck life forces instead of merely good thoughts. Total derivative works.
The Illustrated History of Copyright by Edward Samuels.
(via Boing Boing)
(Research Note)
Michael Moore was quoted in the Sunday Herald today as welcoming the free copying and distribution of his film on the 'Net for noncommercial use. The activist, author and director told the Sunday Herald that, as long as pirated copies of his film were not being sold, he had no problem with it being downloaded.
"I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that," he said. "I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world, to change. The more people who see it the better, so I'm happy this is happening."
I 've always thought it odd that people so often can't remember their defenses. How could someone not remember such a momentous occasion? Now, of course, I have to eat my words. I had intended to write a recap of the whole thing today but ... I already can't really remember any of the details.
I do remember that it went well, and several people even came to it. (This is somewhat of a rarity for summer defenses in my department.) I was able to answer all of the questions, and actually enjoyed most of it. The Graduate Dean was available to sign off on it immediately afterwards, so all that is left to be done is the printing, binding and filing. Mister Boyfriend and I made a celebratory trip to Office Depot last night.
I appreciated everyone's encouragement and comments yesterday. It was nice to feel all fuzzy for a moment before the nervousness set in!
So I'm officially defending the thesis this afternoon at three. Since so many bloggers provided encouragement and texts for this project, it seems appropriate to replicate my Acknowledgments page here. Many thanks!
For interested parties: the full thesis will be available here in PDF later in the summer after I do some site reorganization.
Mike is always willing to be more blunt than I am about things, and he stays true to form in his response to the recent discussion on copyfighters and their use (or not) of open-source applications:
Those who've studied the radical tradition might acknowledge that the first sign a cultural or political movement has become genuinely widespread is its politicization in the development of a party line. [...] I might suggest that drawing a party line -- telling people that if they're in favor of open source, they have to use open source software -- is a fine way to get people to say, "OK. I guess I'm not in favor of open source, then."As George W. Bush demonstrated to the United Nations with his "with us or against us" rhetoric, if you draw an exclusionary line, people will cross it. Only they might not go in the direction you want.
Go read the rest here.
When you were working on your thesis or dissertation or book or other long-term project, did you listen to something compulsively throughout the period you worked on it? And was it just some random thing that you latched on to, or was there a reason?
I've been listening to Strange Little Girls by Tori Amos and Annie Lennox's Medusa as I wrote my thesis. The first one is understandable, but I'm not a particularly huge Annie Lennox fan. All the time, I've been wondering: why these CDs? Why not Tom Waits? Ramones? Patti Smith? Talking Heads? I PhotoShop to Cadillac Tramps. Why can't I write to them? I figured never mind - these CDs were working, I was writing, things were good.
This morning, it finally occurred to me that both of them, being albums of covers, are derivative works. Since my project focuses on the intellectual commons, that makes perfect sense. I'm wondering why I never noticed it before.
Since this quote isn't going to make it into my thesis after all, I'm preserving it here for future reference:
Business, let it be said, is no more a villian than a lion whose metabolism needs gazelles. Companies are in the business of maximizing competitive performance in the market, and use of the commons simply represents an available resource and frequently a path of least resistance. That is why fortifying the commons is not equivalent to attacking the market, which clearly generates many important benefits for our society.
...the issue is not market versus commons. The issue is how to set equitable and appropriate boundaries between the two realms - semipermeable membranes - so that the market and the commons can each retain integrity while invigorating the other. That equilibrium is now out of balance as businesses try to exploit all available resources, including those that everyone owns and uses in common.
Bollier, Silent Theft, 3-4.
From Die Duckomenta, an exhibit of mash-ups that incorporate Donald Duck (and a few compatriots) into canonical works of visual art.
(via Boing Boing)
Still having cough-syrup-fueled dreams, still obsessing over the thesis. I finished a book on Australia a couple of evenings ago, and put myself to bed with a lecture: "Don't think about the thesis. Don't think about the thesis."
I dreamt that I wrote an Australian version of my thesis that had to do with Australian digital intellectual property law (something I know almost squat about). And it sucked. So much so that it woke me up. I lectured myself again, went back to sleep, and dreamt that I wrote a thesis about the Australian desert rat kangaroo.
In search of topological maps of the Net yesterday, I wandered into TouchGraph's Google Browser. It uses google searches and a java applet to construct maps of blog linkage. Infinitely useful for what I'm up to at this particular minute.
Also helpful: cybergeography.
Closing in on revisions of the thesis. I was thinking today about how I always assumed I would blog it here; in fact, that's why I kept the blog open after the original Independent Study was done. And I've hardly written any of it publicly, except for little research snippets that I wanted to file electronically. Maybe I'll feel like talking more about it when it's finally finished.
The Canadians have always been more rational than we are about copyright law. I hope they don't change now. (via Boing Boing)
There's a petition against Canada's proposed DMCA-like copyright law up at the Digital Copyright Canada Wiki:
We, the undersigned residents of Canada draw attention of the House to the following:
THAT the Copyright Act is properly recognised as being a careful balance between the rights of creators and the rights of the public (including viewers, readers and listeners);
THAT the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously affirmed this view in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada;
THAT digital technologies have recently given copyright holders the ability to upset the balance in the Copyright Act by preventing Canadians from accessing works for purposes that have been legally granted to them;
THAT the creation of original works is nourished by wide accessibility of earlier works, including a vibrant public domain;
THAT dissemination of cultural ideas requires that they be preserved in a form that is accessible to future generations; and
THAT historically, consultations regarding changes to the Copyright Act have mostly taken place with creators, intermediaries and only some special users (such as educators and librarians)
THEREFORE, your petitioners call upon Parliament to ensure generally that users are recognised as interested parties and are meaningfully consulted about proposed changes to the Copyright Act and to ensure in particular that any changes at least preserve all existing users' rights, including the right to use copyrighted materials under Fair Dealing and the right to make private copies of audio recordings. We further call upon Parliament not to extend the term of copyright; and to recognise the right of citizens to personally control their own communication devices.
If I were teaching a course on Intellectual Property and headed for a discussion of Creative Commons, I would use this piece as an example of a derivative work by a vernacular artist. (In fact, I bought it for that eventual purpose.) For me, one of the best things about Bobbi's work is her use of serendipitous found texts.
(It's part of new series entitled Feng Shui Rules: Paper Objects for the Home up at cobaltika : gallery. Run and look.)
I swiped this quote verbatim from Copyfight, since I can't improve upon it:
This has been around now for awhile in Britain, but AT&T Wireless is the first carrier in the US to offer Shazam's song identification service. If you hear a song you like (or don't like, as the case may be) but don't know who it's by, you can just dial #ID (or #43) on your cellphone, hold the phone near the speaker for at least 15 seconds, and then moments later you'll get a text message with the name of the song and the recording artist. They say they've got a million songs in the database, and that for right now you can try it out for free, though later it'll cost 99 cents a pop. (Engadget)
I'd be curious to know if/how AT&T is handling the copyright issues for this service. Are they instructing their customers to make digital retransmissions of copyrighted sound recordings? What about the "million songs" they have copied into their database? Is this infringement? Will the RIAA sue? Inquiring minds want to know...
At this year's CCCC-IP, there was a lot of talk about the strangle-hold publishers have on author's rights. There was a lot of talk about using Creative Commons licenses as a means of protest, of scribbling in desirable language on publishing contracts, of drafting a letter to publishers stating exactly what an informed copyright should consist of. All of this was good talk, productive talk, but as of right now, it's still just talk.
Meanwhile, Johndan Johnson-Eilola just hauled off and made his whole new book available to the world as it goes to the publisher. (It's common to post working drafts as feedback, as he's been doing. It's pretty uncommon to leave the whole thing up as it goes to press.) The publisher will most likely demand the text be pulled shortly, so check it out while you can.
*Hat-tip to Mister Boyfriend for bringing this to my attention.
AKMA has been busy while we were gone! It occurred to a number of folks that performing Lessig's new book would be a great (and legal) way to facilitate distribution of it in the digital commons. AKMA's aggregating links to the chapters here and here. You can still participate by recording a chapter, and I would myself if I weren't rushing to get a thesis chapter to my chair this week.
Update: more here.
Charlie's blogged the essentials of this year's CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus.
I met Karl Stolley briefly a couple of years ago during a visit to Purdue, and was impressed by his intellect, geniality, and insanity. We haven't had occasion to talk since.
Then, today, a professor I'll be meeting next week emailed me the syllabus for the introductory colloquium he's teaching for first-year PhD students. They're discussing developing professional sites, and the first site on the reading list was Stolley's. Of course I had to look, especially at his current research. And this is apparently what he's been doing in his spare time.
Karl's thinking about the web as rhetorical space, and doing it in a visually interesting way. And then writing about it:
"Writing can take all types of new directions in the digital realm. That idea is certainly not new; there's hardly a scholar studying the Web who hasn't said something along those lines at some point. But despite the fact that we know that (though "nobody knows anything"), why aren't people in the field of rhetoric and composition, and others, doing it? Writing on pictures. Using animation, hyperlinks, databases--rhetorically? ...
I want to examine if and how, using a model of performance/performativity, one could make the leap of conceiving visual design not as a translation of tried-and-true bookmaking and other paper-publishing design techniques, but rather as a whole new phenomenon, that of re-embodying the rhetor in cyberspace. If possible, such a re-embodiment would drastically alter the way we "read" and understand (and create) digital texts."
Fresh and exciting stuff, and there's more of it. Run and look.
Support Grey Tuesday and help make the world safe for derivative works.
This is also a thesis note, natch.
(Via purse lip square jaw.)
Update: Lessig on Grey Tuesday.
So I didn't accept any invitations for Orkut because I didn't need yet another way to procrastinate on writing the thesis. The only problem is that I want to use Urkel and Orkut as an example of Genette's notion of hypertextuality, and I need a screencap of an Orkut homepage. I still can't bring myself to sign up, because I know me and I know what will happen.
So I'm hoping that one of you fabulous readers will step in here. You are all so smart, and so nice, and so good-looking! Would one of you be so kind as to send me a screencap of your Orkut homepage as a .jpg file? Please? I will love you forever and will also proclaim your benevolence in the acknowledgments page of this thing once it gets done. I promise.
I finally figured out what the problem is with getting started on this thesis. I have parts of chapters three and four written, and two is in my head. However, it seems silly to really begin without chapter one, which is a history of my subject. My original self-set deadline for this chapter was January 30. Instead, I started on January 30. A chapter is just an essay, more or less, right? And I have written quite a few essays by this point, all of which got good grades. Except one.
That one was the only history paper I ever wrote. It was twelve years ago, in a course on US History Since 1877. I wrote about Charlie Chaplin's political persecution, and I got a C. After that, I took six more required hours of History of Civ, and that professor assessed by essay exams, which I nailed. No papers were required, and I've not written anything deeply history-related since. Regardless, I'm reminding myself that I'm doing my research and making notes, and I have twelve more years of academic writing under my belt now. I can do this.
The house is clean(er), I'm blogging consistently, and I've voluntarily cooked dinner almost every night this week. Can you tell that I'm deliberately not working on my thesis?
Thesis Note:
French author Franck Le Calvez is suing Pixar for stealing his small, clownfish children's-book hero. He claims that Finding Nemo is too similar to his 1995 book Pierrot the Poisson Clown.
(Via metamorphosmism. Mig's entries are always much funnier than mine.)
Update 3/15/04: French Judge: Nemo Not Pierrot
The products of art and science owe their existence not merely to the effort of the great geniuses who created them, but also, in one degree or another, to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. No cultural history has yet done justice to this fundamental state of affairs, and it can hardly hope to do so.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935 - 1938. 267.
(thesis note)
Arie Jongejan, CEO of Elsevier's Science & Technology Division, argues that the open-access movement rests on three myths:
(1) that traditional publishing models hinder access
(2) that open access is a free and egalitarian business model
(3) that the current publishing process adds very little to the content being published
Synopsis link here at Open Access News. Original article available by subscription only.
Rather incoherent thesis note to self:
Taking a bath, and singing the Gay Bar song because it's stuck in my head, and thinking about a section from Alberto Manguel's Into the Looking-Glass Wood, in which he writes about
I have to leave right now this second for a meeting, but I wanted to write these (tenuous) connections down before I forgot them. Will think more on this later.
Thesis Note:
I almost missed the Stanford CIS's website report about the Somma Case.
It seems that children's author Emily Somma has written a derivative work of the Peter Pan tales entitled After the Rain. Although original creator J.M. Barrie's copyright is long expired, folks who hold copyrights on other Pan derivative works are suing Somma. The Stanford Center is defending her case pro bono.
Just emailed from my thesis chair: a link to The Free Expression Policy Project. I haven't had a chance to go through it thoroughly, but I wanted to link to it so I can find it again in a few days. So more on that later.
More thesis linkage:
William Fisher III, Director of the Berkman Center. There are several helpful PDFs in his pub list:
Theories of Intellectual Property
Intellectual Property and Innovation: Theoretical, Empirical and Historical Perspectives
The Growth of Intellectual Property: A History of the Ownership of Ideas in the United States
And an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Promises to Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment, is available in PDF from the publisher.
(The next few posts are links for thesis research.)
The U.S. Copyright Office has a fairly straightforward website, which handily contains Copyright Law of the United States and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code.
I've had these quotes sitting around for several days now, and been convinced that I was going to turn them into a nice tidy post. It's finally dawned on me that it's not going to happen, since I'm snowed under with projects at the moment and have no hope of relief in the next week and a half. So I'm posting these puppies up anyway in the interest of preservation and filing them in the "Meta-blogging" category. I'm sure most of you will see why they belong there.
All of this is from Bruffee's "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind," which is in my "Cross-talk in Comp Theory" text.
"We are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. … Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance."
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, quoted by Bruffee
"The range, complexity, and subtlety of our thought, its power, the practical and conceptual uses we can put it to, and the very issues we can address result in large measure directly from the degree to which we have been initiated into what Oakeshott calls the potential “skill and partnership” of human conversation in its public and social form" (Bruffee, 399)
"The first steps to learning to think better, therefore, are learning to converse better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sorts of community life, that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value" (399).
Been reading Deleuze and Guattari’s Introduction: Rhizome lately. If one is studying digital discourse, then one must read it. Them’s the rules. So I did, and now I’m thinking. Maybe I’ll manage to find enough time to blog it in the next couple of days. But right now, I want to foist the introductory paragraph of that essay upon my non-theory readers, the ones who think this stuff isn’t any fun at all. Reading this is like being a fly on the wall, watching a couple of guys tossing words back and forth and generally enjoying themselves. (And since I’ve been knee-deep in collaborative theory lately, it adds a nice levity to that train of thought as well.)
“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point, where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.”
Here are some D&G links, most, if not all, of which are via Wood s Lot. (Does anyone else around here feel that Woods reads their minds, or at least anticipates their every need? That aside, the man just runs a damn fine blog.)
Rhizome@Internet: Using the Internet as an Example of Deleuze and Guattari's "Rhizome"
Deleuze & Guattari Online Resources
Rhizome: About Deleuze & Guattari and Their Trees and Rhizomes
I've happened upon a couple of interesting links lately that I need to preserve here for future reference:
Cybersoc.com, which purports to be "sociological and ethnographic research of cyberspace." It's run by a PhD student out of Liverpool, but looks like it hasn't been updated in a while. Still, there's lots of interesting stuff here that I haven't had a chance to go through yet.
and:
These are just a few excerpts from Small Pieces Loosely Joined that I wanted to preserve here for my research purposes.
BODIES AND THE WEB:
“Our idea of knowledge, however, has consistently moved away from the truths of the body. Knowledge, our tradition of thought tells us, is universal, dispassionate, eternal and objective – exactly what bodies are not. The truths of the body are even taken to be the enemies of knowledge. This basic stance comes with the Greek origins of knowledge: we need the discipline of knowledge because bodily perception can be misleading. Knowing has ever since struck us as a pursuit for ascetics, virgin professors, and nerds uncomfortable in their own skins. Knowing, we’ve come to believe, is the type of things that a machine – a computer, or a robot – might do. And it is no accident that the voices of authority that try to shut us up – whether a bad government, a bad teacher, or a bad boss – do so by implicitly claiming to be ‘realistic,’ a code word for the claim that the authority sees the world more ‘objectively’ and without the ‘distortions’ of perspective and interest.
“It would be ironic, then, if the Web, a world our bodies cannot enter, were to return knowledge to the truths of the body: tied to an individual, oriented by a particular viewpoint, rooted in passion (139).”
COMP AND THE WEB:
“Nevertheless, the Web’s character comes from text, and that’s not likely to change in the foreseeable future. Words build the place in which the other forms of media are embedded. Words are the stuff of the Web.
“Words impart their nature to the Web. Although words are pineal, they aren’t mainly physical and ‘merely’ meaningful. Quite the contrary. They can be words only because they are units of meaning … Words have always built worlds, just as they build the Web (164).”. More on page 165 that is too long to type.
MISC.
“On the Web, there’s only passion, words, and the presence of others, in grand, shifting, ineffably messy relationships. … The virtual world of the Web exposes more clearly the truth of our everyday lives (171).”
I have gotten so tired of happening upon articles about "Queering Whatever." These used to be sort of pertinent - I remember "Queering Democracy," for instance. I'm as much for queer visibility as anyone, but I have two problems with this: 1) I think people are pretty much just people, regardless of orientation, race or creed, and 2) "queering" has become a buzzword, one of the memes that Baldur's been carrying on about. I swear to God, I fully expect to see articles on "Queering Bronchitis" or "Queering Ring Tones" next. Somewhere out there must be a piece on "Queering the Web," but I hope never to lay eyes on it. One of the things I've always valued about the web is its possibilities for genderlessness.
So of course I was discussing future joint presentation topics with a professor, and we got to talking about androgyny in the context of web classes. I've been contemplating that, and wondering how much bodies play into the web at all, while reading Weinberger. These passages suddenly became pertinent:
"We are showing one another how the world looks from our perspective - a truth of the body. We are doing so because we care about the world and our place in it - a truth of the body. We are doing so with the urgency of passion - a truth of the body.
"We never escaped these obvious truths of the body. How could we? We may ignore them at times because that lets us achieve the goals of science or even because it lets us lord it over others, but science and petty oppression are still realized through embodied people in a world of intelligent bodies. In a truly ironic way, the bodiless Web reminds us of the bodily truths we have always lived" (142).
"The Web is a written world. ... The knowledge worth listening to - that is worth developing together - comes from bodies, for only bodies (as far as we can tell) are capable of passionate attention, and only embodied creatures, their brains and sinews swaddled in fat and covered with skin, can write the truth in a way worth reading. The bodiless Web is fat with embodied knowledge that could only come from the particular people - smart, wise, opinionated, funny, provocative, outrageous, interestingly wrong - to whom we're listening" (145).
Obviously, some of these particular people -these bodies - are queer. That would make the web, my beloved bastion of androgyny, queer. So maybe this does have a bearing on things after all. Must contemplate.
From Small Pieces Loosely Joined, by the illustrious Mr. Weinberger :
“But the modern concept of knowledge surfaced in Athens, a city of talkers. In the hubbub of voices heard in every market and on every corner, some were saying true things and others were lying, mistaken or fooling themselves … The Greeks needed to decide who to listen to, who was expressing the hidden truth of the situation, for their government was run by the power of speaking … and of listening. …
“Knowing means more than being right. Plato nailed it when he defined knowledge as ‘justified true belief’” (129).
I wasn’t thinking much about Social Constructionism when I was reading Classical Rhetorical Theory, but I am now. Between watching my web-based classes develop and having a professor who’s in the final throes of a dissertation that relies heavily on these theories, I can’t not be thinking about it these days.
“The Web also returns knowledge to its roots in heated arguments in the passageways of Athens. Knowledge isn’t a body of truths stamped with a seal of justification. Knowledge on the Web is a social activity. It is what happens when people say things that matter to them, others reply, and a conversation ensues. Unless the conversation is nothing but a set of insults, each person does the human thing of stating why she thinks she’s right. That’s justification. But the justification may not be canonical” (140).
Obviously, blogging (among other things) is what happens when “people say things that matter to them, others reply, and a conversation ensues.” Blogging can indeed be related to the social structure that fostered Symposium and the sophistic texts. And somebody else thinks so too, which is always reassuring.
"Kaufer and Carley (1994) have begun to develop a theory of proximate and distant communication that focuses on a comparative assessment of oral, written, and electronic communication. Their theory implies that each mode of communication may be more or less effective for different tasks and that writing (and by extension, electronic communication that is text based) is particularly well suited for communicating over geographic and temporal distance. In fact, they point out that it was the development of writing that has made organizations, which must coordinate members' actions over time and space, possible at all. They suggest that writing classrooms, which are currently organized around interaction with individuals who are proximate in time and space, should be organized to reflect the distance characteristics of written and print communication that students are likely to find relevant in their professional lives."
Harrison, Theresa M. and Susan M. Katz. "On Taking Organizations Seriously." Foundations for Teaching Technical Communication. ed. Katherine Staples and Cezar Ornatowski. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1998. 23 -24.
I've been groping around for a thesis idea for a year now. First there was the RAWA thing, which dates so quickly and is so depressing. Then there's the Straight Transvestites Writing & Healing on the Internet thing, which goes across way too many theories and is too big and I don't think anyone would take it as seriously as I would. Everyone would see it as a glimpse behind the freak show curtain, which isn't how I view it at all.
So now I'm starting on this Independent Study and wondering what the larger use of it is. (Not that I think one can ever go wrong studying this stuff. I just want to be efficient with the Big Scary Project, that's all.) And then I'm sitting in Theory of Tech Comm the other night and hearing about our Theory & Application project, and thinking about the fact that this is my second semester teaching on the web. (And my first teaching writing in that medium. Hell, my first time teaching any writing at all. I'm glad to be tucked under Chuck's wing for this go-round.) And orality, and how we make meaning differently in this sort of space than we do with a book. And all that turned into a conversation with a friend last night, which harkened back to a conversation I had with Rich a while back. Both of us obviously can read books and understand them, but neither of us can read books on the web. The only time I ever use an e-text is when I need a searchable text. And even then, I always have a hard copy handy.
So what, then, changes when we move classroom pedagogy onto the web? What has to change in the way we present information? Last semester, a goodly portion of my Astronomy students failed the class, and it was because they never did the work. But here's what I want to know: did they not do it because they were lazy, or did they not do it because of the way the work was presented? (I didn't design the website or the lab layout or the texts, although I'm tinkering around a bit in them this semester.) How does orality figure in, or does it? There's something here, I just don't know exactly what it is. Must read. Must contemplate.