I wrote this a few weeks ago, and wondered how we might think about this after reading Nicholas I. Cordova’s “Invention, Ethos, and New Media in the Rhetoric Classroom” as he describes ethos as a dwelling place:

Let me toss this out for consideration: Online communication forums (CMC) remediate ethos, situated ethos. In the same way that it remediates the embodied subject (as is shown so dramatically in Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace”), it remediates the rhetorical subject, albeit differently. In both cases, the subject becomes less transparent, somewhat in the way that modern art makes its media come into focus (rather than it just being a means to representation). In both cases, the embodied subject behind the online one has deliberately chosen elements to represent themselves online (their avatar, their constructed profile and actions in the MOO, the documentation that contributes to their reputation in a USENET group). Constructed identities push the older, “natural” subject up a notch as those older identities become more visible, more scrutinized–less transparent.

So what happens in this process of “remediating” the “human” presence? What are we making? What are we abstracting here?

What do you think of Cordova’s “reaffirmation of rhetoric as architectonic practice of lifeworlds” which “emphasizes the centrality of ethos as dwelling terrain from which a liberatory praxis of design can be launched, one ‘crucial for reading Available Designs and for Designing social futures’ (NLG 1996, 81)”?

Are Selfe/Takayoshi and Shipka also concerned with ethos as a dwelling place?  (Think about Shipka’s “history of this space” exercise.) What have we discussed during the last two months that might also serve as an example of Cordova’s remediation of ethos (which, if it is new, is also very old)?

The five pillars of Cordova’s multimodal literacy pedagogy are:
fragmentation and modularity;
articulation;
circulation and dissemination;
convergence;
and interface. (153-155)

Quote from “No Secrets” by Raffi Katchadourian (The New Yorker, June 7, 2010)

 He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

 The Wikileaks network is structured a great deal like the Internet itself, an information network with no center.  Because it has no center, it cannot be taken down as a whole, only in parts.  Like a creature with its brain spread out all over its body, cutting off its head will not kill it.

In the battle of individual versus institution, as Assange sees it, where do networks fit?  Even networks without reliance on a center?  Most of the readings and viewings this week show a dynamic tension between individuals, institutions, and networks.

 Some rights reserved by altemark (photo credit)

During our first class, I believe I told you that this class was going to be like one of those travel-Europe-in-a-week structured tours, except the continent in this case was digital rhetorics.  The digital text presentations were pretty much proof of this.  They were diverse, and engaging, and exciting samples of what the digital world has to offer, and you were all outstanding tour guides.

The presentation technology was awkward, but we still like the intimate conference room better than the vaultlike SINC.  As one of you put it, “this room is home.”  Learning to deal with challenging technology is the mark of an educational expert these days, and you are pros, or well on your way. (To paraphrase Michael’s presentation, it’s our very own Dark Souls challenge.) In related news,  I think I may have found a suitable space for our final presentations!  And someday not to far off in the future, we may be able to design a 21st-century seminar room that works on several levels.  But enough of that.

What I came away with is that you all have so much to contribute to the realm of digital literacy, no matter what your current major or interest or career path.

We had Allison’s eye-opening critique of a Common Core literature text with a digital interface, complete with real student feedback; Scott’s analysis of a virtual memorial on Facebook; Ryn’s queer reading of Sherlock’s Irene Adler episode and Nicole’s discussion of embodiment and cyborg theory related to the same; Deborah’s analysis of two different music websites and observations of engagement and interactivity therein; Mària’s rhetorical visual and auditory analysis of Tim Blais’ music video on string theory, “Bohemian Gravity” (which I have since been insufferably running around showing everyone, including all the Writing faculty and TLT director Chuck Powell); Michael’s argument about how a difficult game like Dark Souls could be used as a model for challenging middle-school students facing difficult Common Core curriculum; Bryan’s courageous descent into Grand Theft Auto V and analysis of how the game implicitly teaches social stratification; Anne’s analysis of the Google Poetics blog, which demostrates a literal evolution of William Carlos Williams’ statement that “A poem is a machine made of words;” Aneela’s analysis of a preservice teaching blog and examination of the concerns of preservice teachers about online public presentation as they enter the competitive job market; and Libby’s analysis of a virtual music idol from Japan, Aimi Eguchi, within a framework of cyborg and remediation theories.

As we move forward into the second half of the semester, I hope that we can all benefit from considering, along with which of these areas we may want to deepen for the final project, how our own networks and associates with other can be informed by the kind of work you have done here.

What drives educational professionals to play video games these days?  I’m not talking about the young-uns who have been playing since they got Mario and Pokemon in grade school (who are now all grown up and in graduate school), but people like Gee, Nardi, and myself, who never touched a video game until 2010, unless you count Second Life, which I went into in 2006.  Second Life is another bag of goodies altogether, although some of the principles of gaming discussed by Gee hold for virtual worlds.  The Sims falls somewhere in between.  (To me, The Sims seemed like a watered-down Second Life without any real interactions, since you don’t play with other people.)

The answer for me was patently “for research” at the beginning, but I realize now that this was a lie.  It was more for what Bissell described as “experiences.”  It wasn’t for the thrill of uninhibited activity where I could do whatever I wanted with few or no consequences, either.  I am a very boring virtual player by those standards.  I act as morally in Second Life as I would in real life, for the most part, which is not saintly but certainly not lacking in inhibition or moral standards.  In WoW, of course, I kill NPCs and monsters on a daily basis, but take no pleasure in antagonizing fellow players or treating them worse than I do people I meet in the flesh.  Like many, I roll my eyes at those who do so, the trolls as they are called.

I think it was to have the experience of embodying a gamer.  How do gamers feel about playing?  How do games affect their lives?  And I found out, like Nardi and Gee, that games can compel one to devote time to them.  One will find time to play, despite many other personal and professional obligations.  In an MMORPG, where one plays with other people, one feels obligation to keep up with the Jonses of one’s affiliation.  And you miss them if you don’t check and and play.  Gaming, although not usually physically taxing, can be fatiguing.  It takes energy.  It also gives back energy in a rush when something wonderful is achieved.

Like Nardi, I have found the virtual worlds are beautiful.  They may be an acquired taste; compared to the breathtaking vistas of the Grand Canyon, they may suffer a devaluation.  But they are art, no matter what Roger Ebert (rip) said about them.  Crafted with devotion, they drive one in a moment of reflection to appreciate the beauty of a plant or animal, not just visually, but the animations and sounds as well.  Real talent, skill, and hours of labor go into these environments.

In WoW, I am not a good raider, but I’ve done it enough to appreciate the skill and intelligence of a good raid leader.  While gamers are frequently stereotyped as socially inept, some of the most astonishingly patient leadership I have ever seen has been in WoW.  (I’ve seen plenty of mistakes made there, as well.)  You ask why I don’t lead raids?  I can’t.  I’m too busy trying to stay out of the fire and poison pockets.  In the meantime, the raid leaders are watching everyone in the raid, noticing the fall of a sparrow, so to speak, and saving our arses more often than not by reminding us to MOVE out of the path of wrath. Many of the raid leaders are military or former military personnel, by the way.  This gives a small glimpse into the complexity of military leadership to someone like me who has only heard or read about it, or seen it in the movies.

One thing that both Gee and Nardi mention is that games can teach one to appreciate the diversity of human intelligence, that people from all different cultures, educational levels, and walks of life can play (and work–here the boundaries are definitely blurred) together, if not always successfully,  often.  There is drama and conflict, too, but probably less than you encounter in the day to day world, if you pay attention.

This quote from Bonnie Nardi in My Life As A Night Elf Priest:

At a workshop on “productive play” sponsored by the National Science Foundation and hosted by Jason Ellis, Celia Pearce, and me in May 2008, virtual worlds pioneers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer touched on the debate, remarking on what they called the “tyranny of emergence.” They observed that we all hope that online communities will emerge in bottom-up fashion from participatory activity, and we approve as participants take whatever technical affordances they are offered and appropriate them to their own ends. But at the same time these veterans cautioned that we cannot forget the “hand of God” that is the software artifact and the power of designers to shape activity (see Nardi et al. 2009). As Kallinikos said, it is the “right proportions” of the relative contributions of users and software we seek to apprehend.

Pickering’s (1995) notion of the “mangle” is a distinctive formulation of the relative contributions of user practice and technology. Unlike Farmer, Morningstar, and Kallinikos, who urged attention to the primacy of software rules and their directive force, Pickering proposed that a mangle—a mélange of user practices, socioeconomic conditions, and technologies—produces experience. This vivid metaphor suggests the entanglement of diverse elements; taking the metaphor at full face value, the conceptual mangle “mutilates” the varied elements it passes over, pressing them into one another.

…just fascinates me, especially the notion of a mangle of contributions from the user and the technology.  Remember Marshall McLuhan and “the medium is the message”?  Well, apparently there’s something to that but it’s stated too much in one direction.  When you combine Dewey’s activity theory with technological determinism, you get something that looks like a mangle.

I had a discussion that took an odd turn (I say odd because it wasn’t what I wanted to discuss, it just came up) in another class this week as we discussed James Paul Gee’s sixteen learning principles of good games, and students resisted it on the basis that people cheat in games so they can get to the “reward”  (in this case, blowing stuff up).  A long discussion of online cheat codes and cheating techniques ensured.  In such instances, perhaps the mangle is very evident as players try to rip apart the black box of the game’s technology.  I can tell you that these students seem to have a lot invested in games being considered “mindless,” which is interesting in itself.

I find myself wanting to go deeper into drawing parallels between technologies and human systems, such as educational systems.  Of course, there are problems with doing this because there are serious differences.  Gee does this to a degree that is stimulating, without proposing too tight an alliance, in his learning principles, such as the “pleasant frustration” that optimizes game progress for a player, and that he believes should accompany classroom learning, as well.

Bureacracies are similar in that there is often a parallel to the “mangle” discussed here. Nardi discusses how guild leaders help players negotiate some of the difficulties that are hard-wired into a game.  But it is also important to remember that play inhabits a magic circle:

1. A subjective experience of freedom
2. An absence of social obligation and physical necessity
3. A subjective experience that is absorbing, compelling, or pleasurable
4. Occurrence in a separate realm sometimes referred to as the magic circle (Nardi 102).

Digital storytelling is a putting into practice of new media literacy, no matter how you approach it.  As Hull and Nelson describe their work with Japanese students in “Self-presentation through multimedia: a Bahktinian perspective on digital storytelling,” we see a creative struggle between the need to signify unique experience and the need to ensure an audience’s response.  This isn’t particular to working with visual media, as it reminds me of writing poetry.  As a poet, I often felt the need to hone an image that would be so personally iconic that it would not likely be repeated elsewhere!  It’s not very realistic, but that was part of the impulse to write poetry, I think, for me–although patterning ourselves after famous poet’s work and taking them as models was habitual–was this idea that we could be a unique semiotic brand.  The goal was not to write in a vacuum, but to active seek and find audiences that would recognize that brand and affirm its worth.

I see these impulses at work in Ying’s digital story.  His story of his move to the US and stunning success in academics and the arts  is unusual by the standards of many people his age, but the narratives stresses the ordinariness of a stable and happy family and friendships.  The story fights to make him seem like everyone else, while many student’s digital stories strive to show their “unique brand,” what makes them different and special.  The images of babies show the universal nature of emotions and that he has them.  Such images evoke a connection with the storyteller through the simplicity and innocence of one-year-olds having emotional reactions of pleasure or distress.  The best digital stories i have seen are very aware of the need to provide stimuli that evokes emotional connection to the story, often at the expense of exceptionalism.

Postscript: Looking ahead to next week’s reading, on seeing Ying’s story, I am also reminded of John Dewey’s words quoted in Bonnie Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest:

 Dewey formulated aesthetic experience as participatory engagement in activity that is organized in distinctive stages and in which a satisfying completion is the end point of actions which are themselves pleasurable. To invoke concepts such as “pleasure” or “satisfaction” is to invoke an active subject for whom pleasure and satisfaction are products of a particular personal history rather than inherent characteristics of a set of actions. Aesthetic experience for Dewey required collective expression; it connects us to others in relations of community and “common life.”

So Ying’s story sets out the telling about this aesthetic experience, which is more than the events or the accomplishments that were achieved.  It is also the story of how the experiences connected him “to others in relations of community and ‘common life’.”  (Nardi invokes Dewey’s words while describing aesthetic experience through the playing of a MMORPG.)