9. From Pencils to Pixels

Dennis Baron's essay does a good job of putting the computer into perspective in the long history of communication technology.  As computers become a larger and larger part of what people devote their attention to, there tends to be an awful lot of predictions about what effect this will have on general human development. People think that literacy has become monstrously different in the age of new media, but Baron points out that literacy is a constantly evolving notion, and that the computer is just one among many developments in the history of communication.  He points out that people have made assumptions about the possible negative results of each of these many technologies.  The fact that pencils could be erased made teachers fear that students might be less inclined to learn how to write consistently, and that the possibility of revision brings about it's necessity. There was the concern that the advent of the calculator would make students less stimulated to learn how to do the math that the calculators accomplish. One might be inclined to read Baron as though he is downplaying the influence that computers are having over the general population's literacy.  I'm inclined to take something else out of it though.  Who is claiming that those worrisome teachers of the past weren't rightfully concerned? Maybe we do write more recklessly because we are able to erase unwanted text. Maybe we loose some of our ability to revise effectively because we no longer train the ability to carefully formulate what we really want to say. The whole "if this doesn't work we can fix it later" mentality has perhaps made it's way into other parts of our lives too and the consequence is devastating. Computers and their internet lead to the accumulation of a wealth of supposed information, but what is going to stimulate members of the population to read this information critically and live their lives differently on account of their learning it, and furthermore what, besides money is inspiring people to contribute to it? Just because change is an inherent part of the evolution of communication technologies, doesn't mean that every change is always good.  We should look at the consequences of our doings and progress conscientiously.

8. The future of literacy, a reflection about the influence of visual and technological learning in my education

Outside of school I have been using computers for quite a while.  My dad taught computer science at a local high school and his interest in the technology made computer use at least available to me at a young age. For some reason however I never really learned too much about the code and logic that makes their functioning possible, which is slightly disappointing to me.  I'd just use computers for the little games they had on them and occasionally a bit of word processing.  My elementary school didn't really teach us much of anything about them.  They just expected us to be good enough at typing to do all of the writing assignments so I eventually learned.  As far as my visual education goes, that is something I've focused on to some degree.  I enrolled in a high school which allowed me at least two hours every day to focus on the visual arts, and while there I learned quite a bit about the many approaches to making images and what to look for in them. Most of my output was through physical media, but I did make sporadic use of computers to these ends too and I have rather mixed feelings on the subject.

I used Photoshop quite a bit to abstract some of the pictures I had taken and some just to practice confusing the technology into creating interesting textures, patterns, and sometimes even illusory three dimensional spaces and objects.  I included an example of this to the right.  I took one class at an art college in 3-d modeling and animation with computers, but I didn't stick with it long enough to make anything notable. Throughout this time I've always sort of seen computers as a bit of a battle.  I don't really like to use things when I don't understand how they work. They have always been a sort of tool to me, rather than a sort of defining characteristic of my education as the case studies seemed to frame them as. To my eye, computers have the effect of removing the individual from a lot of what we do. The visual arts, music, and even text based media have been dominated by computer use in the recent past.  They make it simple to do extremely complicated calculations that mathematize artistic output.  They provide us with shortcuts and because of it everyone's art sort of looks, sounds, and feels the same. When we see a Photoshopped image or a landscaped rendered on Maya, it doesn't have the same effect as a work where every marking or physical occurrence is the direct action of some artist making their thoughts real.  We just see the program.

Reflection essay: Wikipedia is alive

Wikipedia has always been there for me.  Every well developed Wikipedia page I’ve encountered, even those for topics in which I consider myself fairly well versed, has always had at least some tidbit of relevant information of which I had been unawares prior to my reading the page.  The information is so various because there are so many contributors with so many different backgrounds.  Everyone has a different approach to prioritizing relevance and accordingly what ends up on Wikipedia is whatever the contributors have enough patience to find sources for and write about.  In this sense anyone can contribute as much or as little as they want to.  What we’ve ended up with is a massive collection of sources in most imaginable fields all summarized into concise and pleasantly readable format.  In my opinion it’s pretty enthralling literature.  At the very least, if it isn’t internally consistent, syntactically correct, and understandable then the army of frustrated wikipedians will plow though it with edits until it meets the community standard.  While I’ve learned a great deal from Wikipedia, I had never been fully able bring myself to work through the editing process.  The idea has always appealed to me, but I never before felt quite like I had nearly enough authority in any given subject.  Just knowing that people around the world would critically assess my writing and make it into something different was intimidating.  When I received the assignment I felt rather apprehensive about how it would go.  It was just a little bit too close to home.  I have an awful lot of expectations from Wikipedia articles that I’m sure others also have and I couldn’t help but worry that I not might find anything true-seeming enough for me to comfortably post it on a website that prides itself of acceptable truth-likeness.

The information on Wikipedia is rarely if ever exhaustive and it’s always at least somewhat dubious.  Members of academic institutions often cite these as reasons to ignore Wikipedia’s use as a source of information.  These dismissive claims about Wikipedia’s value require the unfounded assumption that academic works don’t have these very same faults.  To be fair however, Wikipedia, with its talk of verifiable information, is guilty of the very same presumptuousness.  I gave up on epistemological realism a long time ago.  So far as I am concerned all knowledge is purely hypothetical.  The closest thing to truth we have access to is logical consistency between the inherently fallible beliefs that we choose to assume.  No matter what I’m reading, watching, or listening to, I will not only call that information into doubt, but also any knowledge that I previously assumed which would contradict my new prospective learnings into doubt.  We’ve all got a sort of working explanation for the world around us based on our judgments about the empirical data we’re presented with.  As the present unrolls and new empirical data slips into our system we’re left to process it in contrast to our knowledge and make decisions about which parts of both we can reasonably hold on to.  In most of my writing I’m able to make it very clear that what I’m saying is counterfactual and I invite everyone reading my work to question my work and get back to me on their concerns.  Wikipedia has people write in a very definitive so called “neutral voice” which is a concept that upon beginning the assignment I found a little overwhelming.  I don’t trust my knowledge enough to just openly tell people to believe it.  I am uncomfortable with people taking my writing or anyone else's without that proverbially prescribed grain of salt.

Our minds are constantly revising their content, physically building connections between related items, and keeping track of the things it’s decided against believing and why.  It’s our learning process, but if you think about it Wikipedia learns the same way.  It’s constantly presented with differing viewpoints that people will read and choose to either accept or deny.  If anyone’s denial of a claim is normative enough to serve as exigence, then they will take the necessary steps to revise the inconsistency.  This much is true in the process of discourse as Grant-Davie’s essay, “Rhetorical Situations and their Constituents”, describes it.  The process works just a little differently on Wikipedia.  While people are still motivated by exigence to engage in discourse, the discourse itself doesn’t take the same form as typical academic writing where an individual or organization of people will author a work with the interest of motivating others to adopt their proposed perspective, but rather the authors and the swayable audience become the very same entity.  Everything on Wikipedia is written as though it were true, but this is ok in this situation because we are all allowed the opportunity to change it to be more consistent with our own working conception.  Wikipedia behaves like the human mind so much because all it is, is a collection of human minds taking turns making decisions for it.  Wikipedia is the collective unconscious.  In this sense it takes on a much different form than typical academic writing.  Instead of being a document of motivation, it is a document of consensus.  Before Wikipedia existed if we wanted access to informational consensus we had to study a cross section of the world’s endless supply of documents designed to pull the reader over to a shared understanding.  Once we had read enough of these works that we could be considered an academic authority and our writings would begin to carry a smidge of clout in the academic community.

Becoming an academic authority takes a long time though, and even they are affected by human bias and personal agendas.  Wikipedian text is constantly changing and anything especially opinionated will be eventually removed or put into neutral voice if enough people read it.  If an article is strikingly inadequate then that inadequacy will ideally serve as exigence for many and the article’s weakest bits will be covered up with fresh research.  People don’t need to write motivationally to have an impact on the collective unconscious anymore because now there is a single place where all information is welcome and anyone can directly change it.  When I received the assignments however, I was put into an interesting position.  I had to actively search for exigence.  After a good deal of flipping through the pages in line with my own interests I ended up only learning more about my own interests. There were certainly gaps and things I’d gladly change, but nothing for which I could imagine writings up more than a couple sentences in neutral voice.  Neutral voice is Stressful for me.  As it were I didn’t finish the assignment until the Wednesday after its due date because I simply couldn’t find anything I was certain enough to write about definitively without those little statements inviting people to doubt my statements.  It was strange. I had never had a problem with deadlines before, but for some strange reason I just couldn’t get myself to commit to any statement.  I was lost in a discourse community that I didn’t feel worthy to contribute to.  I already have a great doubt in my own epistemology, I have even less trust in external sources because there are so many things that can influence a writer and all I can do is guess the motivation behind a document.  Taking the information at face value is almost universally undependable and I just wanted to put disclaimers by every statement of fact.  Eventually I was able to get convince myself that that doubt is built in to the very nature of Wikipedia, and after making absolute sure that my text was in line with my sources I submitted it. 

6. "Rhetorical Situations, and their Constituents"

In Grant-Davie's article "Rhetorical Situations, and Their Constituents" he frames for us a construct by which we may approach rhetorical discourse.  Integral to his system is the notion of exigence.  Exigence is anything which motivates rhetors to engage in discourse.  This includes a prospective rhetor's ethical principles and the interactions those have with current events in the perspective rhetor's perceived sphere of interest, any desire to "better" said sphere of interest, or any idea for which the prospective rhetor is emotionally charged.  Exigence even includes things that a rhetor is assigned or payed to care about.  As long as a thing triggers someone to become a rhetor, that thing is a sort of exigence.

There is another party involved in rhetorical situations according to Grant-Davies.  This is the audience.  The audience includes anyone who's actions the rhetor intends to change after their interaction with the rhetorical situation.  The audience, as the rhetor perceives them, puts the rhetor under a whole slew of constraints because the rhetor is writing with the intention of speaking to the perceived audience.  These constraints as the rhetor sees them shape the way the rhetor approaches the exigence.  There can be constraints in the environment outside of the audience such as censorship laws and events in the rhetor's own upbringing, but a thing is a constraint as long as it has an influence over how the rhetor approaches the exigence.  While this imagined audience plays a strong role in way the rhetorical discourse appears in written form, it is only once a real audience reads this writing and behaves in some actual way that the true nature of the rhetorical situation can be seen.  Sometimes audience members themselves will become rhetors after engaging in the discourse.  They might agree or disagree with the nature of the previous discourse.  It is important to keep in mind that an audience member's decision to disagree with a piece of discourse is just as much a result of that discourse as their hypothetically agreeing with it.

5. "Shitty First Drafts"

Anne Lamott's article encourages us to buy into one particular construct when it comes to our writing.  She claims that writers only hurt themselves if they expect acceptable text to come out of a single sitting.  Her solution to this is to frame writing as a revisionary process.  The first step of this process is to just start writing.  What this comes down to is getting our ideas down on paper as they come to us.  She wants us to load up our text with as many thoughts as possible while understanding that the vast majority of what we write will be waste material.  This is alright though because we can always dispose of this waste material later.  What matters is that those little nuggets of applicable information, intriguing imagery, and enthralling wordplay will stand up to the test of revision to be expanded upon later.  Lamott's argument is that if you don't give yourself this opportunity to get all of this on the paper in a form just as saturated with shit as your prose is inclined to be, then you won't even be able to find those useful tidbits.  Writing with an endpoint in mind leads to way too much self criticism which, while it might succeed in doing away with unnecessary text, will result in the good text never even getting recorded.  Feeling like your writing will be permanent just makes it extremely difficult to commit to writing anything.

The approach to writing encouraged by Wikipedia involves a great deal of refinement and revision.  Lamott describes first drafts as a place to just jot things down without worrying about criticism from anyone but yourself.  This is the purpose that Wikipedia's "Sandbox" serves.  Its where you can draft all of your work without having to deal with the criticism of others because the moment something is published on Wikipedia it is subject to being revised by anyone who comes across it with a critical eye.  The post publishing stage revisions are also very much in line with Lamott's writing process, just with less emphasis on the idea of writing being something of a personal process.  Some people might not use the sandbox to it's full potential, and when that happens a lot of shitty text ends up tumbling through the pages of the heftiest compilation of human assumptions available.  This is just plain dangerous without good people like you and me hopping around from page to page shaping that shit up. 

4. "All Writing is Autobiography"

Donald Murray's "All Writing is Autobiography" calls us to doubt the importance one writing construct often stressed by teachers.  That is the idea that it writers should remove their own visible presence from their work in order for the content to have a more universal appeal to it.  Students are often told that they should refrain from constructing their arguments, assertions, imagery, and what have you in terms of their own opinions and feelings.  We are often directly taught that self referential language in general should be avoided unless we are specifically writing a personal narrative.  Murray feels that this is a very unnatural and constricting way to write simply because it is impossible to completely escape your own perspective and it tends to just alienate the readers when you try.

Murray points out that the reason good writing happens is that the writer is at the very least interested by the subject matter.  He states "My pages reveal my obsession" (59) as he recounts all of the growing experiences that have shaped his own interests.  He gives examples in his writing of passages which are clearly the product of his pains, losses, and misguidances of his past.  He says that it doesn't matter whether the writings are fictitious, poetic, or meant to be taken quite literally; the content of ones writing the exactly what that persons mind was focusing upon and concluding during it's being written.  This not only implies that the text itself will be substantially shaped by the predispositions of the writer, but also that the writer's own thought processes are greatly changed by the things that that writer has written in the past.  Writing is a very focused process, and to be comfortable with something that you have written you must have a certain degree of confidence in the conclusions that your writing illustrates.  Murray even gos so far as to say "We become what we write.  That is one of the great magics of writing.  I am best known as a nonfiction writer, but I write fiction and poetry to free myself of small truths in the hope of achieving large ones."

3. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community"

Porter's article addresses a view of writing as a constructive process.  In his paradigm, it isn't an individual text being written that is the focus of this construction, but rather the collective knowledge of some broader community.  He describes all texts as being pieces of a discourse community in the like which govern the qualifications for good writing.  Every work within these communities must appeal to previous works in order to have merit.  These communities of course include academic subjects of writing what with their available collection of directly citeable works, but also included are the more creative contexts of writing such as poetry and fiction.  This is because these forms of writing would simply not exist if not for the linguistic constructs that they appeal to.  The language itself and all of it's applicable rules must be used when someone spews any unit of literature.  This paradigm isn't limited to literature though.  Porter gives an example of someone borrowing from the discourse community of fictional film in an advertisement which presented alien life forms in a way which greatly borrowed from a Spielberg film.  Basically all art forms, visual, musical, or as we've already discussed conceptual, appeal to the cannons of their genre's history.

With this in mind, you can't help but ask, where do these cannons come from and why should we see them as a normative force when it comes to our own writing?  After all, to assert that all ideas in writing are just borrowed from those already there seems rather question begging because those ideas must have had some sort of origin.  Furthermore if all ideas are combinations of old ideas then how do we look at situations where one idea will challenge those ideas accepted by the discourse community in question?  Where do new ideas come from?  Porter answers these questions along the lines of 'you can't break the rules until you understand them'.  He argues that the people who make great breakthroughs in the discourse communities are the very same people who have spent some time being a part of that community.  They've gone through the process of closely examining the old technical cannons, arguments, and conclusions, and then finding problems with them before they actually present any differing solutions.  Porter claims that many young writers see the presenting of their individual conclusions as coming more important than understanding the old ones and this ends up with a lot of writing that cycles through previously addressed issues and makes a lot of basic logical mistakes.  He concludes that we should all strive to become productive members of some discourse community if we ever want to become one of the great game changers.