This semester I learned some important and practical concepts about digital technologies and digital rhetoric.  Of all of the topics that we covered, I most enjoyed discussions that involved the changing ways that we must assess and teach rhetoric in our classes. In addition, I enjoyed some of the research interests of my classmates: gaming, comic books, remixes, and digital storytelling  now don’t seem so foreign to me, and I hope to incorporate these digitally within my teaching praxis.

I do hope in the future to work on a web text (maybe even this summer), and it seems that I’m putting together an online course for a version of digital Ulysses for a work study project –hopefully it all works out.  In all, I think that this class helped me to reflect upon the ever-changing ways in which we transmit language.  Digital rhetoric requires us to reflect upon  how we persuade, and how we teach students to persuade in today’s technologically mediated culture.   The idea of a remix or a digital project as rhetorical argument, bolsters students’ thinking and creative expression in all the right ways. I’m so curious and interested to be a witness to how college writing and English programs may change in the future to more readily include these methods of expression.

I will continue to research Marianne Moore, and her meticulous attention to the editing process. I’m hoping that my dissertation uncovers the interactions among modernist poets, modernist magazines, and women editors who still remain hidden behind modernism’s masculine impetus.

And finally, this is the first class I’ve taken with people who are teachers and students within the Writing Department, and I really enjoyed their candid, unique remarks. I think sometimes academic classrooms stifle students’ responses (especially when you are surrounded by students and professors who believe in certain academic performances). I felt really comfortable among these students, and my experience has been really fruitful. Thanks everyone for being so great.   Have a nice summer.  Thanks Professor Davidson.  I enjoyed your class!

A meme embodies the spreading power of an idea. Its mutations and variations emerge from the “big data” and information that circulate the web. James Gleick describes the mutating qualities of memes: he claims that memes “are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organisms….Memes are complex units, distinct and memorable—units with staying power.”  The “staying power” of memes becomes linked to traces of thought and the effects of a variety of ideological and technological influences.

Perhaps we can even think about memes as having an alchemic composition; like a chemical solution, memes recombine and refigure, defining the very notion of an idea through the flexible iterations of digital information.

The impetus of memes impacts social activism, social media, and online interactions. The film We Are Legion focuses on how memes accentuate the raw website 4chan. The site’s anonymity allows threads to explode, mobilizing and archiving attention-getting images and views. The movie describes 4chan as a “a breeding ground for Internet culture.” The group “Anonymous” cultivates the growth of the site, spreading ideas as open expression:  the group represents a fusion of limitless, subversive voices. The mien of 4chan and also “Anonymous” represents, then, both the positive and negative consequences of “hacktivist” sites.

In addition, this movie illustrates how memes  function as digital rhetoric. The persuasive power of memes reinforces the influence of “Anonymous.” What began as a small Internet group, eventually became characterized as the very power of technological transmission and intelligence: moreover, “Anonymous” seeks to encapsulate the  stratification of what “chaotic” means.  The movie poses the question as to whether or not  “Anonymous” successfully creates a form of electronic civil protest on the site 4chan: is this just a virtual form of what Thoreau deems to be a bit of civil disobedience?  Does the discursive work done on 4chan illustrate an electronic sit-in at its finest?  The movie concludes by foregrounding the important ways in which the Internet is changing what “protest” means especially when we think about the unique ways that the Internet allows  “protest” to become faceless and ubiquitous. 

In addition, I think that “green memes” are some of the most influential memes out there. I think that the Internet is one of the most important places to spread the word about environmental activism: the combination of image and language allows people to understand pressing issues about the Anthropocene.

Finally, this is a moving meme that circulated after African American Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman.  “Hooded Memes” like the one below were created by many people, illustrating national solidarity and a stand against the murder of Martin. 

I think that wikis are an important and fun method to incorporate into the classroom. To start, wikis allow students the flexibility of a cooperative, online learning environment. They also provide students with the opportunity to self-publish, fostering a sense of pride in a finished product that can be viewed online. Thus, wikis allow for the individuality of self-learning in a cooperative environment. In addition, by creating a crowd-sourced model of learning, wikis also create a platform which follows the theory of the Socratic method: students “debate” or “discuss” through both print and visual rhetoric through wikis. Here is a wiki that I like from Skidmore College about Greek Tragedy:  http://academics.skidmore.edu/wikis/Greek_Tragedy/index.php/Main_Page 

According to Kevin Parker and Joseph Chao, wikis also create opportunities which support constructivist learning: “Constructivism is approached from a variety of perspectives in wiki research, including reflective activity and communal or social constructivism” (59).  This type of reflective learning allows for the growth of metacognition in important ways, and I also think that it allows learners to become more in-tune in general with their strengths and weaknesses as both learners, and perhaps too,  people.   There are so many effective uses of wikis, and I think that by incorporating them within the classroom you are not only exposing students to a greater learning experience, but you are also acclimating them to an online environment that they must learn how to traverse in order to be successful in the future.

In addition to wikis, I also think that eportfolios are a useful online tool to utilize within the classroom.   I’ve actually seen teachers link individualized eportfolios to a classroom wiki too, which I think is an effective way to display the work of a group of students over a period of time.   Again, like wikis, eportfolios help students develop a sense of ownership and pride in their work. In addition, eportfolios enhance procedural learning, helping students understand learning as a process over time.  I enjoyed thinking about all of the ways in which eportfolios can be used as cited within the Parkes article.

I especially think that allowing students the ability to problem-solve becomes a very important asset of using eportfolios and most types of online methods.  The article states, “With increasing opportunities to share and collaborate in class and out, with the use of blogs, the discussion threads, and e-mail communication, students often problem-solve issues and find and share solutions rather than just make a ‘one-stop’ learning goal, such as, ‘What is on the test next week?'”(108). Thus, students become accountable in new and important ways, and they have the agency to think outside of the box in order to find solutions.

The use of online teaching tools such as wikis and eportfolios also suggest the ways in which the classroom is changing in prominent ways. Linked to this discussion, of course, are the changing discourses and methods required in understanding how the Internet and online learning are modifying the ways people think and interact. The BBC episode “The Virtual Revolution” unpacks that very issue: the episode asks, “What are the web’s revolutionary effects on human beings?” The episode investigates whether or not contemporary society, and especially children, are becoming consumed by the Internet.  Accordingly, living with “generation web” involves understanding the social interactions that social media cultivates, and in addition, understanding the feedback loop which requires a constant movement of action and reaction between person and machine. The episode then examines whether or not generation “Homo Interneticus” is indeed drowning in a sea of information, or perhaps growing from the associative linking that is crucial to Internet interactions.

Understanding both the benefits and weaknesses of “hyperlinked” associative learning becomes a crucial part of this discussion: does associative linking keep our brain “jumping” in productive ways?  The web’s associative platform allows students to interact and work together in new ways, creating a global learning environment; thus what emerges is the notion of a global brain.  In all, “The Virtual Revolution” highlights the importance of studying the impact of the Internet on current and future society. It highlights how the Internet holds a mirror up to human nature, allowing us to reflect upon the good and the bad. Furthermore, studying the Internet and its impact also allows us to perceive how the newest generation is indeed evolving. Thus, the episode’s resounding message asks whether the Internet will change human nature for the better. I am hopeful that it will.

In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853), Melville constantly manipulates the reader’s expectations. A self-reflexive commentary on the life and death of reading, Bartleby’s letter-reading and life-writing (or not-writing, because, after all, Bartleby “prefers not to”) critiques our understanding of reading and a nature of “work.”  We find ourselves today refiguring our work and practice in the digital age. As teachers and scholars, it becomes important to situate reading and learning by teaching texts anew: we need to move ourselves away from Melville’s dead-letter office, and rather, posit learning within moving texts and contexts that define modern life.

Douglas Eyman covers a range of methodological and pedagogical forms for digital rhetorics in the final section of his text. His concerns regarding the engagement of multiple platforms and methods emphasize not only an expanse of differentiation techniques, but also reaffirm his assertion that the multimodal and individualized perspectives of digital rhetorics must be accounted for within teaching practice.  The digital rhetoric courses that Eyman describes in order to give a range of views highlight the principles and practices of instructors who focus on both theory and production.   Of the three courses depicted, I like Eyman’s own course the best; with a focus on production, Eyman’s method immerses students into the actual theoretical and experiential space of inquiry. Thereby, students become acclimated through  constructive educational practice. By experiencing the multiple perspectives of digital rhetorics, students have the ability to uncover theoretical and practical facets of their own production and practice within the expanding field of digital rhetorics.

Eyman also cites Jim Zappen’s article “Towards a Digital Rhetoric” in order to highlight the ways in which Zappen’s focus coincides with his own; Eyman delineates Zappen’s main aims: “refiguring rhetorical traditions for digital texts, defining characteristics of new media, developing digital identities, and forming online communities.” By focusing on the categories of work within digital rhetoric discourse, Zappen also depicts the field of digital rhetoric production, practice, and theory as a method of inquiry. I think this is also an effective way to think about digital practice and discourse because of its variable nature. The digital world provides a valuable infrastructure to so many parts of our lives, and understanding the  infrastructures of discourse and rhetoric relies on online communities of learners who understand and engage the mercurial nature of those infrastructures.   Plus, this type of engagement also calls for a continued inquiry into the affordances of new media texts.

In addition, Eyman’s philosophies also stress the mobility of the learner by grounding method within interactivity which he renders through the work of several scholars.   Aside from focusing on student interactivity, the final sections of Eyman’s text focus on a variety of remix projects along with works that underscore creative appropriation and editing. He reinforces the creative works of scholars and students who are engaged in rescripting and refiguring texts and media into new forms.   The multimodal content of the projects are pretty impressive.  After reading this text in its entirety, I think that Eyman effectively demonstrates the ways in which classical and contemporary rhetorical aims come into play when thinking about constructing theories and methods for digital rhetorics.  I also like the ways in which this website by Claire Lauer of Arizona State University deals with understanding and defining digital rhetorics through a rose metaphor attributed to Juliet’s famous “What’s in a name?” soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:  http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/17.1/inventio/lauer/index.html

The emphasis in this week’s class on digital storytelling, also, I think brings to light Eyman’s aims of remixing new and old. Digital storytelling seems to be an important area to situate teaching practice because it reinforces digital literacy, multimodal forms, and a visual/textual forum that promotes creativity. Also, it can be used within a variety of classes for a variety of reasons. 

Also, as a teacher, I think that the procedural phases of learning that are associated with such a project are beneficial. Students have the opportunity to reflect upon their own creative process while revising as they go. This most mirrors a real-life work space where people are able to reassess and reconsider their own weaknesses.

Finally, this blog by Scott Garbacz offers some great teaching ideas about how to man “the digital divide” in the classroom: http://bloggingpedagogy.dwrl.utexas.edu/content/canvas-tutorial-or-how-not-enforce-digital-divide

“We are as free as birds. Only the birds aren’t free. We are as committed as birds and identically.” —John Cage

Thinking about the heartbreaking story of Aaron Swartz this week calls to mind the John Cage quotation mentioned above. Aaron’s activism and groundbreaking work in media and technology which results in his tragic fall highlights the corruption that governmental controls have on access to education and information. Aaron’s story is one that stresses how  different types of crimes can be conflated in unjust ways; or, how society restricts civil liberties.

In addition, the mourning of Aaron’s life also brought to mind John Durham Peters’s recent book, The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Part of the argument in Peters’s book brings to light the ways in which media has become part of an infrastructure that not only discloses information and messages, but also reflects the ways in which existence and expression merge. Peters argues how media embodies Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures (one word): thus, communication becomes a disclosure of being, and Peters investigates how this reconstructs the ways we think about the intertwining of nature and culture (and other binaries that follow suit). Thus, for Peters, media crafts existence, reinforcing a movement from the figure to the ground.

I thought about Aaron’s life in conjunction with this book because of the ways in which his existence became so strongly documented by his online presence and by his information activism.  Like Peters, it seems that for Aaron, media held ecological, existential, and ethical imports. Moreover, the “marvelous clouds” that represent the ethereal conditions of Peters’s notions about media, also represent Aaron’s lasting legacy as “the internet’s own boy.”

Certainly, Aaron’s story can be used as an example when discussing some of Lawrence Lessig’s claims in Remix: most notably how notions about copyright must be redefined in our current age for younger generations: “In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal?” (xviii).  Lessig calls for a remapping and remixing of our “cultures of creativity” in order to take into account what creativity and autonomy mean in our technological moment and the future (18). 

Throughout the text, Lessig’s movement among market economies, changing technologies, and cultures past and present develops an extraordinary lineage of the transitory faces of culture.  In addition, I think his position on the current hybrid nature of creativity, and the “remixing” of art forms through technology shifts our current ideas about what it means to be in what has otherwise been called a culture of consumption, or “copying.”  Furthermore, thinking about remix as a collage or montage of creativity also suggests a primacy of meaning  leveraged by the motivation to synthesize and build something new (76).   To consider art and culture this way fosters a way of thinking about individual expression within a community of ideas. I think this book is great.

The controversial issues surrounding gaming praxis question  whether or not gaming can foster experiential realities. Despite the many positive educational attributes of gaming, as supported by James Paul Glee, Tom Bissell points to a dark, stereotypical realm of gaming that he likens to his own cocaine addiction. I think that part of Bissell’s intent is to point to gaming’s superlative reach past dated deconstructive theories that interrelate the reader and the writer—his assertion that gaming cultivates a sense of liberation and autonomy that even brings about, in his words, “soul-scouring questions,” however, becomes skewed through the addictive tendencies of his practice; this further interrogates whether gaming is more hurtful than helpful, and more addictive than educational.

The ethics of gaming intricately interweave virtual hyper-reality with existential and ontological complexities, forthrightly placing precedence on the dislocation of active versus passive existence. I am interested in the ways in which gaming specifically alters psychosocial dimensions of actuality; and more importantly, how gaming affects the displacement of offline activities and social relationships.

One complication of Bissell’s article “Video Games: The Addiction,” delineates the ways in which Bissell himself seems to have a generally unstable, addictive personality—even without the games.  He depicts himself as a loner who moves from city-to-city with no stable network of family or friends: an ideal candidate for video game addiction. His claim that video games provide what nothing else can—except maybe cocaine—however, becomes weakened when he explains his obvious reservations about Grand Theft Auto IV: “There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years, times when I think of it as an unsurpassable example of what games can do, and times when I think of it as misguided and a failure. No matter what I think about GTA IV, or how I am currently regarding it, my throat gets a little drier, my head a little heavier, and I know I am also thinking about cocaine.”

Dovetailing cocaine and games certainly does emphasize gaming’s unstable relationship to healthy human habits. This seems emphasized when checking out Niko Bellic of GTA IV: yikes!

However, thinking about Bissell’s life, maybe there are some positive attributes to his gaming addiction: gaming seems to uncover Bissell’s denial of some of his own personal problems.  His downfall into gaming addiction, perhaps, points out addictive facets of his personality that were just floating beneath the surface of life: as he states, “Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.” Thus, I wonder whether or not “the pointing” that gaming does for Bissell becomes a revelation of sorts.

I also think that there is an important difference to be made between gaming engagement versus gaming addiction. Part of our discussions about gaming and its educational advantages point to the constructive mental motivation and communication that gaming provides its players. However, I think that when gaming activity is specifically used to alleviate loneliness or to put off real world tasks then it complicates its efficacious advantages. If gaming begins to foster feelings of dissociation and distortion, and thus, further defer negative feelings associated with real-life activity then it becomes nothing more than an escapist activity that postpones underlying personal and social problems.

I do think that the dissociative imagination that develops through gaming activity can be extremely interesting and important. Gaming has become such a worldwide phenomenon that it is regarded as an athletic activity, a sport of sorts.

The reality of cosplay and competitive gaming is a very true reality:  http://www.vice.com/video/esports-part-one

In addition, Bissell does make some really interesting points about the important intersections between gaming and storytelling in this interview in The New Yorker.   He describes his experience with the game The Witness as virtually literary: “It’s an incredibly personal, strange, and moving work of art. It’s a first-person walker, I would say, in that you have the typical first-person viewpoint but you don’t have any tools or items. You have only your virtual eyes and your non-virtual brain to help you out.”  

In the interview, Bissell accentuates not only the immersive qualities of contemporary video games, but also their divergence away from the games of the past: “whatever is happening in video games is going to split these two kinds of games off from each other, and so storytelling games are, eventually, going to become their own thing.”

So, my thoughts on the topic of gaming in general are still pretty mixed. I think that in some ways gaming hyperbolizes the complexities of our world in crucial ways.   In addition, its focus on engagement and interactivity are extremely useful in terms of aesthetic creativity and expression.  Gaming can also point to important emotional intelligence that drives emotional reasoning. Most critics even claim that the emotional engagement of gaming trumps that of novels and film.  The video below supports this by showing a group of senior citizens playing the game, The Last of Us.

However, I am always afraid of gaming’s addictive elements and the possibility that it is an activity which can promote unhealthy behaviors.

Questions:

1.) Are video games art? Explain. If yes, how do the performative aspects of video games complicate our relationship to art? State some advantages and disadvantages.

2.) In the article, Bissell claims that he has deferred his writing activity for his gaming addiction.  How can these activities be used in conjunction to foster creativity and growth?

3.) Bissell claims, at one point, that the violent nature of Vice City’s subject matter has inspired crime sprees. Can we counter this argument?  Have you heard other arguments that support or refute Bissell’s claims?

4.) When describing the differences between film and games, Bissell claims that gaming alters moral perception because of the ways it converts narrative into active experience.  However, in what ways can this active experience create unwanted stress?

David Eyman begins this chapter by acknowledging that the digitized version of Aristotle’s faithful old rhetorical triangle mirrors a system of interconnectivity rather than a static, threefold framework.  He asserts that methods of digital rhetoric must “take into account the complications of the affordances of digital practices, including circulation, interaction, and the engagement of multiple symbol systems within rhetorical objects.”  The relationship among rhetor, audience, digital text or discourse, and contexts reveals a dynamic circulation which can be theorized as an activity.  This follows the current trend in circulation studies, which according Laurie Gries is “an interdisciplinary approach to studying discourse in motion” where “…scholars investigate not only how discourse is produced and distributed, but also how once delivered, it circulates, transforms, and affects change through its material encounters” (333). Although Gries’s concern is methodological — that is, she develops a specific method, called iconographic tracking–-she ultimately argues that rhetoric is “a distributed process whose beginning and end cannot be easily identified. Like a dynamic network of energy, rhetoric materializes, circulates, transforms, and sparks new material consequences, which, in turn, circulate, transform, and stimulate an entirely new divergent set of consequences” (346). Eyman does acknowledge the dynamic flux of discourse digitized; however, he recognizes that  traditional rhetorical methods act as a foundational framework within digital contexts: thus, in this chapter, he suggests ways to adapt traditional rhetorical methods into a digital milieu.

Eyman begins by delineating the differences between the New Critical method of “close reading” with Franco Moretti’s contemporary supposition of “distant reading.”  Close reading—methods of analyzing the formal qualities of a text—has traditionally been associated with print text; yet, Eyman claims that it nearly always acts as a fundamental method within digital contexts. As an aside too, digital contexts have expanded our abilities to close-read; check out Amanda Visconti’s dissertation on Ulysses.

However, Eyman also claims that instead of reading the “text-as object” as most New Critics might, reading the formal qualities of a digital text must “include those [qualities] specific to different media.”

Eyman also describes the inverse of close reading—Franco Moretti’s concept of “distant reading.”Eyman explains that “distant reading takes a long view, examining the text as one among many and considering a much larger corpus whose contexts and relationships give rise to different forms of meaning.”  Seeing reading, according to Franco Moretti, as “a condition of knowledge” allows scholars to form a methodology that creates connections between computational analytics and data visualizations.

It also seems that Kurt Vonnegut did, however, have his own view of “distant reading” before Moretti: check it out!

Also, one of Moretti’s visualizations shows the emergence of the market for novels in Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria between about 1700 and 2000 (see graph). The wild spikes in popularity look like fish hooks, even as each country’s bibliophilia caught on at different times. So computation plus visualization allow us to get a more complete view of cultural trends than intensive reading of a few works lumped into a canon.  Despite criticism of Moretti’s work, author Jonathan Franzen argues that seeing literature as a cultural artifact reveals its agential qualities:  “To use new technology to look at literature as a whole, which has never really been done before, rather than focusing on complex and singular works, is a good direction for cultural criticism to move in. Paradoxically, it may even liberate canonical works to be read more in the spirit in which they were written.”  I think it’s an interesting conversation also to make us think about the evolution of reading and rhetoric in the digital age: How do we read images? What counts as “text”?

The evolving field of digital composition engages multiple modes and media; thereby digital composition and rhetorics emerge as collaborative activities that provide broad opportunities for publication and circulation.  Eyman recognizes, then, that from professional writing and research, digital rhetoric follows two research traditions: genre studies and usability.

Genre studies privilege “a multilayered approach of both micro- and macro-level interactions,” while usability takes both system and user into account and therefore “provides a methodology for studying both writing practices and writing pedagogies.”  By engaging these methods, Eyman contends that theorizing new digital methods will account for modes of professional composition and rhetoric as well as the multimodal, multimedia networks of the digital world. Thus, Eyman notes an increasing amount of research that suggests, obviously, that the very definition of writing and composition have changed in the digital age.

In addition, Eyman suggests that Heidi McKee and Danielle DeVoss’s , Digital Writing Research:Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues is a prominent collection because it reveals the broadening scope of writing activities, and it also considers a cyborgian and networked view of human communications and also includes theories of triangulation (texts, contexts, and users) and ecological metaphors of digital texts and contexts.

The chapter concludes by explaining a variety of interdisciplinary methods that may be appropriate for assembling digital rhetoric methods. I have listed them below.

1.) C.O.D.E and Network Administration Tools: the study of the networks of digital rhetoric both material and immaterial. C.O.D.E. stands for “Comprehensive Online Document Evaluation,” and unfolds both the geographies and owners of networked systems.

2.) Studying Web Usage via Server Log Analysis: this method analyzes the log files of users; server log analysis reveals quantitative data that shows the change in a site’s traffic data. This shows the relationship between a digital text and its audience.

3.) Social Network Analysis: this is a research approach that focuses on patterns of relationships among people, and it studies relationships in context with other relationships in a network.

4.) Hypertext Network Analysis:  HNA is a form of social network analysis that only looks at nodes and ties of digital texts as instantiated in websites and web links. Basically, it analyzes hyperlinks.

5.) Bibliometrics and Cybermetrics: these methods trace the use and value of texts through citation analysis.

6.) Content Analysis: this method is similar to social network analysis, except it focuses on the relationships within an individual text rather than between texts.

7.) Data Visualization: a method used to structure data in ways that visually reveal patterns.

Despite the fact that Eyman is hopeful that many of these methods can be assimilated for digital rhetoric methods, he does cite a few complicating factors. First, he identifies accessibility as an issue: “Accessibility can be impeded by intellectual property gatekeeping (restricted access to networks and texts that circulate in  and through those restricted systems, as well as cost-prohibited fees on certain content), but it is also an issue when considering the format of the rhetorical objects themselves.” Second, Eyman also claims that the ephemeral nature of digital texts makes tracking and tracing difficult.

Questions:

1.) How do some of Nakamura’s claims complicate the theorization of digital rhetoric methodologies?  What other elements should we consider here?

2.) The lack of traceable exigence within digital rhetoric seems to be a problematic factor. The inability to trace origins fosters a synthesis of roles within immediate rhetorical situations. While classical or modernist views of rhetorical situations rely on the stability of such categories as “rhetor,” “audience,” and “message,” postmodernist and immediate views of rhetorical situations assume these divisions are arbitrary and in constant flux.

How can our methodologies account for this? How does the lack of origin change the ways in which we study rhetoric? Explain.

3.)  How might a consideration of these methods help us to do the work of defining Digital Rhetoric as an emerging field?

4.) Eyman’s move towards interdisciplinary methods suggests collaborative, cross-disciplinary research.  Yet, how do these methods complicate global versus local forms of knowledge? Can you think of positive and negative consequences of this?  How does this affect the field of the humanities in general?

5.) Do you have any specific concerns regarding any of the methods outlined by Eyman?

Works Cited

Gries, Laurie E. “Iconographic Tracking: A Digital Research Method for Visual Rhetoric and Circulation Studies.” Computers and Composition 30.4 (2013): 332–348. ScienceDirect. Web. 15 Nov. 2013.

“The Nine Souls of Wilde Cunningham” presents an optimistic portrayal of the ways in which the dialectic between the virtual world and the real world redistribute flows of information that socially construct identity.  The startling avatar of Wilde, “with their bulky body and their orange skin, and red hair jutting in every direction from their balding head,” virtually creates an embodiment of multiple identities and multiple viewpoints. Wilde also expresses a unique voice: they give a group of physically disabled people—otherwise marginalized within society—a mode of expression that depends on the erasure of the physicality of the real body. The Second Life presence of the group appropriates the ways in which technology initiates opportunities of communication for people with disabilities. In addition, by creating an avatar, the group’s expression supports some of the theoretical claims of N. Katharine Hayles in that the identity of Wilde is created through the pattern/randomness of the codes of text that the group expresses, instead of the physical presence of their bodies; the amalgamation of codes allows them to form social and physical interactions through a new representation of physical consciousness.

The example of Wilde, too, raises awareness regarding forms of inclusion and access for people with disabilities. Wilde’s philosophic message “so be kind to others in spite of their flaws. Every soul has its disabilities” emerges as a way to reconstruct disability within a dimension which, perhaps, permeates outward and fosters awareness in order to cultivate social interactions within real life.  Moreover, virtual worlds and new media provide access to life experiences otherwise unavailable to people with physical disabilities. According to Kel Smith,  “For people with disabilities that prevent them from engaging in real life physical activities, virtual worlds present a unique opportunity for users to replicate the experience at an immersive level” (4). This supports the ideological immersion that virtual reality creates for its users; in fact, Smith also notes that aside from providing social therapies, “virtual reality applications have been used to augment rehabilitation therapy for patients struggling with the loss of a limb. Research demonstrates that the brain’s perception to pain can be reduced when it is “tricked” into operating a replicative appendage” (4).   Here, Smith claims that virtual reality espouses both physical and mental rehabilitation.

The advantages of utilizing new media among persons with disabilities also connects to the ways in which marginal voices find agency in cyberspace.  In her study, “Marginal Voices in Cyberspace,” Amanda Mitra claims that through a heteroglossic and hyperconnected digital voice, marginalized persons create a metaphor of voice that “has the potential of producing a call that the dominant has a moral obligation to acknowledge.”  Thus, Mitra recognizes the ways in which the creation of voice in cyberspace, a dialogic metaphor produced through technology, problematizes  the relationship between the marginal and the dominant in real life by recognizing a crisis of acknowledgement.  Hence, the refraction of voice that occurs through a cyber-heteroglossic voice recognizes a struggle of apprehension that supports Mikhail Bahktin’s assertion that  “In the act of understanding, a struggle occurs that results in mutual change and enrichment.”

Mitra, Amanda. “Marginal Voices in Cyberspace.” New Media and Society 2002 (March): 29-49. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 February 2016.

Smith, Kel. “The Use of Virtual Worlds Among People with Disabilities.” http://tcf.pages.tcnj.edu/files/2013/12/kelSmith_virtual_worlds_disabilities_032409.pdf

In How We Became Posthuman (1999), N. Katherine Hayles interrogates the shifting representations of the body in societies enmeshed within information networks: “Different technologies of text production suggest different models of signification; changes in signification are linked with shifts in consumption; shifting patterns of consumption initiate new experiences of embodiment; and embodied experience interacts with codes of representation to generate new kinds of textual worlds” (28).  The “body-in-flux,” or what Arthur Kroker describes as the notion of “body drift” that Hayles correlates with the dialectic between the pattern and randomness of flows of information renders a dematerialization of representations of both textual and human embodiment. Identifying a shift between signifier and signified, Hayles theorizes the ways in which a “flickering signifier” “brings together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman” (33).  Thus, Hayles delineates the ways in which flickering signifiers are “characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions” that occur within material-informational exchanges (30).  Hayles recognizes the ways in which these “flows” or “interchanges”  that occur through various types of technology depend on our abilities to understand the shift from “presence/absence” to “pattern/randomness,” not as a way of disregarding the material world, but as a way of understanding shifts of visibility.  She argues that “The pattern/randomness dialectic does not erase the material world; information in fact derives its efficacy from the material infrastructures it appears to obscure” (28). Thus, this illusion of erasure should be a subject of inquiry, not a presupposition that inquiry takes for granted.

In her discussion of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), Hayles underscores the novel’s metafictive impulse: “The text operates as if it knows it has a physical body and fears that its body is in jeopardy from a host of threats, from defective printing technologies and editors experiencing middle-age brain fade to nefarious political plots. Most of all, perhaps, the text fears losing its body of information” (41). Like Hayles suggests, Calvino’s text reinforces its own version of Jorges Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” and Calvino’s development of the interrelationship between reader, writer, and text depicts the dissolution of the modern subject that must constantly be reborn through the reading process.

In addition, Calvino juxtaposes the disorder of human relationships with the disorder of his narrative text.  However, he recognizes that within this disorder, there can be a recognized order: through the symbol of the labyrinth, Calvino metaphorically gives modern man a way to maneuver through a postindustrial, technological world.  He recognizes that the only way for modern man to survive is to move from one labyrinth to the next, the same way that the novel moves from one incipit to the next.  According to Calvino’s essay, “La sfida al labirinto” (Challenge to the Labyrinth), he argues, “What literature ought to do is to define a stance for the best way out, even if this way out will entail going from one labyrinth to another.  It is the challenge of the labyrinth that we want to save, it is a literature of challenge to the labyrinth that we want to enucleate and distinguish from the literature of surrender to the labyrinth” (qtd. in Weiss 71).  Calvino’s labyrinthine incipits are related, yet they evoke difference.  This difference, or as Jacques Derrida would say, différance, can also be represented through language.  Because deconstruction displaces notions of presence and absence through the randomness and patterns of a network of discourse that is only always a deferral, Calvino’s labyrinth provides no clear beginning and end.  His readers are constantly negotiating their roles and the ways in which the text can be interpreted through its empty center.  Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler pleasures the reader both inside and outside the text (or so Roland Barthes might say); the text’s labyrinth tropes on the internal and external fluidity of information, creating a fluid methodology of reading.

Like Calvino’s novel, the “pattern/randomness” that dominates the computer interface and seeks to replace the “presence/absence” dualism, however, can prove problematic when thinking about the loss of actual material things (i.e. the environment). If we continue to think about the world through flows of informational patterns and relational ontologies, “a dynamism of randomness,” then we also have to be wary of the frightening disappearance of the material world by man—the epoch that has been termed the Anthropocene—and our roles in that disappearance.  I think one way to think about the poststructural/linguistic and ecological/material problems can also connect on a larger scale to the ways in which new materialists articulate concepts of networks of narrative agency. Moreover, Hayles argues that material-informational exchanges depict how “boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction”; therefore, thinking about embodiment within a material world becomes “paralleled and reinforced by a corresponding reinterpretation of the natural world” (3, 11).

Calvino, Italo. If on a winter’s night a traveler. Trans. WIlliam Weaver. New York: Harcourt                  Brace. Print. 1979.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Visual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature               and Informatics. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1999. Print.

Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. ColumHayles, N. Katherinebia: U of South                          Carolina P, 1993. Print.

David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin’s article “Remediation” delineates the notion that, increasingly, modes of mediation depict a multiplicity of forms while simulating a direct transmission of consciousness that yokes together ontological and technological perception. They suggest that the term “re-mediation” signifies this “double logic”: “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation” (2). Bolter and Grusin’s exploration of contemporary virtual reality renders how a flux of images construct both our “real” and “virtual” worlds while simultaneously noting the interchangeability of visualization and “big data.”

One example that fits into their framework of “remediation” is the virtual reality of Google Earth.  A network of cyber globes and maps, Google Earth reenacts the places and spaces of “real life”: our perception “moves” with the screen, and Google Earth imparts the illusion that the interface is indeed a place that translates the real world into the virtual world, and vice versa.

The film “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” highlights an interchangeability between virtual and actual worlds as conveyed by Google Earth. I’ve linked it here if anyone wants to watch it:

This film seems to interrogate the frightening chiasmus that haunts our current reality: the real world constructs the virtual world and the virtual world constructs the real world. Also, the ways in which the video transitions to convey a sense of hypermobility appropriates a multivalence that engages various sensory modes—aural and visual—while also blending cultural constructs. The film, thereby,  also relates aesthetic transportation to actual transportation through a visual interface: the computer interface itself–the visualization that we see–becomes transferable as an aesthetic form: yet, it is a performative form, relating and reenacting the “real” world.

Also, the temporal and spatial experiences of Google Earth are prominent: it distances the viewer from his or her current reality, transferring experience to another place; thus, the computer controls how we experience that place both in time and space. In addition, the sensation of movement that we experience also becomes a decentering, and subjective experience becomes vulnerable while we are also, paradoxically, enclosed within the safety of our own “technological device.” Therefore, the computer allows us, in a sense, to live within two worlds at once.

Finally, I want to think about the idea of “remediation,” too, through Bolter and Grusin’s final delineation of it as a “network”: “It would then be fair to say that the refashioning of a network of relationships is what defines a medium in our culture. Remediation in one dimension of media hybrids always seems both to suggest and to be suggested by remediations in other dimensions” (32). The metaphor of a network here implies not only a multiplicity of interchangeability and layering—a palimpsestic experience—but also constructs a nonlinear framework of information and knowledge.  The synthesis of surface and depth that exemplifies the symbolic realism of the interface structurally transforms representation.  Plus, the confluence of visual and  linguistic communications further emphasizes a fluctuating boundary between visual and semiotic representation.   Thereby, this further reinforces the historical connection between a person’s tools and his or her expansion of knowledge that might represent something like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of a “rhizome” which, perhaps, might look something like this:

If, indeed, remediation fosters the flexible movement of knowledge, then, it also underscores the ways in which associative thinking creates webs of knowledge. In his article “As We May Think” (1945), Dr. Vannevar Bush argues that men or women of science extend the powers of the mind through new sciences and technologies; he believes that science reinforces the need to develop relationships between the associative nature of our thinking and the sum of our knowledge.  After directing researchers and scientists to create weapons during the Second World War, Dr. Bush wrote this article to persuade scientists to make available their “bewildering storage of knowledge.” Bush uses the metaphor of what he calls a “memex” to develop the notion of the world’s first informational memory system: “a sort of mechanized private file and library” which “may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

Credited with the idea of the first “computer,” Bush confronts notions of technological determinism while correlating  the changing technologies of culture with the changing mores of humanity: therefore, Bush argues how we control the technology that we create.

Finally, to think about networked nodes of thinking and knowledge advocates for multimodal teaching praxis. The use of multimodal texts within the classroom simulates  real-world interactions with changing forms of knowledge while also fostering the creation of a  rhetorically-flexible mind–a mind that reads and synthesizes in various ways while also engaging in linguistic  code-switching. If our world composes forms of technology that are perpetually creating experiences of nonlinear information acquisition then it is important that our teaching methods reflect the cultural world that we live in–for ourselves and for our students.