12. Learning to Serve

Mirabelli, in "Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers" was asking just how rhetorically demanding waiting is.  In the introduction he addresses a lot of stereotypes that have been formed about waiting as an occupation.  He mentions the claim that to wait requires just a ninth grade education.  The ethnography basically serves to counter these sorts of claims by saying that waiting tables requires a variety of different types of literacies.  Waiters must be able to read the customers as well be familiar enough with the menu to answer any question asked about it.  Mirabelli conducted all of his research at the diner where he worked for some time.  He studied  conversations between the waiting staff and the customers and carefully broke down the various techniques used to construct meaning.  The main thing that he found was that waiters are required to practice a lot to acquire the linguistic skills and knowledge of the kitchen's capabilities to succeed in the field.

11. Proposal: Discourse Community Ethnography

I'm planning to write my Discourse community ethnography about the juggling community.  This refers to anyone engaged in the study and practice of juggling.  In blog post 10 I explained how the juggling community, according to Swales' 6 criteria, is a discourse community. To reiterate, the juggling community agrees on a specific set of common public goals. The most important common goal is each member's personal skill development.  Another goal of the juggling community is to invent new juggling techniques. A third goal of the juggling community is to make the non juggling public more aware of what jugglers do.  The juggling community has mechanisms of communication between members.  Members of the juggling community are always trying to learn new types of juggling, so the most important type of communication is communications which can help a juggler to understand how a particular juggling pattern works.  Face to face communication and being able to physically see people's tricks is the best, so if you are willing to travel the necessary distance juggling conventions are the perfect place to communicate about juggling with other jugglers.  The internet with its capacity for showing videos as well as facilitating social networking allows for workable communications over long distances as well.  The juggling community mostly satisfies the third criteria, that participation is mainly to provide information and feedback to each other.  This information, the educational discourse can appear in all of the media that I just discussed. The online sources dish out feedback real directly through discussion boards and the like, and in person juggling communications are even more open to feedback what with the conversational nature of such interactions.  The juggling community utilizes a variety of genres in it's discourse as well.  There are the two major genres of juggling, sport and entertainment; as well as the subdivision of circus arts in the family such as diabolos, devil sticks, cigar boxes, contact juggling, kendamas, and so on.  Juggling has also developed it's own lexis through the plethora of props, trick names, and of course site swap notation.  Swales' final criteria for being a discourse community is that there are at least some members with a wealth of knowledge in the field to share with all of the novices and hobbyists.  While the infinite nature of juggling's possibility, no one is completely an expert, but anyone who knows how to do anything that a juggler hasn't yet figured out can be a teacher.

I've been learning to juggle for the past two and a half years, and I've become more acquainted with jugglers from all over the place since I began.  While attending University I stumbled across the local juggling club and joined.  Shortly thereafter I started watching juggling videos on YouTube.  People would post tutorials for juggling tricks, compilation videos featuring various techniques, performance videos, and sport jugglers put up a lot of their competition videos.  I've attended some juggling conventions, and in doing so, I've learned a lot about juggling that I never would have even imagined possible.  Now I'm the vice president of the juggling club and we are about to host a convention right here in Athens.

I figure I will be able to interview a few people at the convention for my Ethnography.  Jugglers from around the globe have told us that they will be there, so I can't imagine it being terribly difficult to find a relevant voice on the subject.

I have some printouts from a few workshop that I, and some friends of mine, have attended in the past.  I can look at the approaches to discourse used on them.  I will also look at a few examples of video tutorials.  There will also be a bit of discussion concerning the digital juggling animation programs that have been showing up on the interwebs lately.  I might even try to get my hands on a copy of The IJA's magazine about juggling to look at how the more traditional use of written discourse plays out in the juggling community.

10. The Concept of Discourse community

I've been learning to juggle for the past two and a half years, and one thing that has struck me as interesting throughout that time is how much of a cohesive community jugglers around the world have formed.  It sort of went against the archetypal notion of lone self taught jugglers that I had come to expect in my childhood.  While attending University I stumbled across the local juggling club, and I was amazed.  It was a large group of people with members at a variety of skill levels all hanging out together building skills.  The learning process of juggling from the simplest motions to the far more complex tricks was visible for the first time and this inspired me enough to join.  When it got to be too cold for the club to hold meetings outside, we would still juggle every Friday in one of the school's lecture halls with high ceilings and giant projector screens connected to the internet.  While there I was introduced to the magical world of juggling videos.  On YouTube people would post tutorials for juggling tricks, compilation videos featuring various techniques, performance videos, and the sport jugglers have their competition videos.  These were my first glimpses of what is the greater juggling community.  There are several common ways to approach juggling, as a hobbyist, a competitor, or an entertainer.  All three of these categories come together though in juggling clubs just like mine in cities, and schools all over the place.  These clubs frequently hold conventions which bring in an even wider array of the juggling community.  Its a worldwide network of communicating individuals influencing each others development, and informing each other of their apparent innovations, but can this group be described in terms of the literary notion of a discourse community?

John Swales Defines a discourse community along six specific criteria.  According to Swales, a discourse community must agree on a specific set of common public goals.  The juggling community is made up of a bunch of members who each want to better their own juggling skills and most of which are perfectly happy to teach what they do know to others.  Having access to each other's advancements makes it easier for everyone to make their own advancements.  Another goal of juggling is to make the non juggling public more aware of what jugglers do.  Swales says that discourse communities all have mechanisms of communication.  Face to face communication and being able to physically see people's tricks is the best, so if you are willing to travel the necessary distance juggling conventions are the perfect place to communicate about juggling with other jugglers.  The internet and its capacity for showing videos of decent quality, as well as the many social networking sites allow for workable communications long distance as well.  He claims that members of discourse communities participate mainly to provide information and feedback to each other.  In juggling, the relevant information are the juggling methods which a juggler watching might someday want to learn.  This can be communicated via video, site swap descriptions, digital site swap generators, and verbal descriptions of what exactly is going on.  Feedback shows up on the internet in video comments and on both sides of any discussion about juggling.

The fourth criteria that Swales mentions is that discourse communities make use of one or more genres to reach its goals.  The two major genres of juggling are sport and entertainment.  There is even a great deal of contention between the two approaches.  Sport jugglers are always focused on doing the most difficult possible juggling tricks, whereas entertainment jugglers focus more on doing the most visually dazzling or unexpected tricks.  There are also a whole mess of circus arts which are in the family of juggling such as diabolos, devil sticks, cigar boxes, contact juggling, kendamas, and so on.  The prop being used by the juggler could very much be said to govern the genre of their juggling.  Another requirement Swales mentions is that the community must acquire some lexis.  Jugglers have the plethora of trick names that few people out side of the juggling community would recognize.  Every pattern has a name.  There is even something known as site swap notation which assigns a number to each of several types of throws.  A "3" is the type of throw you use for standard three ball juggling, a "4" is the type for four ball, and so on.  A "1" is a quick pass from one hand to the other, and a "2" is a 2 beat hold.  What the numbers actually mean is the number of beats between the ball's being thrown and it landing assuming that there is one throw every beat and that the throwing hand alternates between left and right.  Because the throws alternate, even numbers land in the same hand and odd numbers land in the opposite hand.  With site swap we are able to create patterns like 441, 56780123, and 97531.  To juggle said patterns you must first figure out the number of balls necessary which you can do by taking the average of the numbers.  The first pattern isfor three balls, the second for four, and the third for five.  You then find a comfortable beat by running the standard pattern for that number, and then start making each throw follow the sequence of said site swap pattern.  Swales' final criteria for being a discourse community is that there are at least some members with a wealth of knowledge in the field to share with all of the novices and hobbyists.  Juggling certainly has that.  There's no limit to what a juggler can learn.  No matter how good you are, you can always add another object, or learn a new variation, and there are people around the world on the cutting edge of that fractal.

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.