FoolsCap

Someone’s been reading my mind again, or at least my blog. . .which might mean the same thing lately.

Anyway, way back when, in my very first post, I had a call out to everyone’s favorite seventeenth century English diarist.  Now someone out there has started transposing Sam Pepys’ diaries into a blog.  No witty commentary here, just a nice little reminder of my early genius.

Haha!  There’s something to be mentioned about blogs and diaries and technological evolution or something.  But I’ll leave that to others.

. . .when I LOST my MIND!!  I, too, am on occasion obliged to cover the Gnarls Barkley hit "Crazy."

So I found my way to Swivel today.  As the Tour describes it:

Swivel lets you explore data and share your insights with others. Swivel has data about politics, economics, weather, sports, business and more.

Furthermore,

If you’ve ever wondered how two different things are related to one another like happiness and health, crime and poverty, or home prices and climate then you’re a Swiveler at heart. With Swivel, you can compare all kinds of data with a few simple clicks and Swivel will let you know how well the data is related.

If you see something interesting it might just be a coincidence or it could be something more. Comparing data is simple with Swivel so you can try a whole bunch of comparisons until something brilliant comes along.

At first, I admit, this sounded sort of like gimmick, a site that was happily riding on the coattails of the Freakonomics paradigm.  But, after thinking about it, the Swivel model suggests (or maybe recalls) an interesting invention strategy: the assembly of apparently unrelated data into one space as an attempt to make some sense of the relationship between them (and the writer’s relationship to that effort as well).  What I find appealing about Swivel’s explanation of itself is the emphasis on serendipity, luck, and contingency: "you can try a whole bunch of comparisons until something brilliant comes along."  There is no call for or guarantee of certainty or of brilliance, but rather an implication that there is something of value in making the effort to think about these data in context with one another.

Hmm.

In response to another of Jeff’s posts:

Well, first a caveat.  Let’s not start thinking I’m some sort of Ricean sycophant or something just because two posts today were in reply to Jeff, while another name-checked him.  I just happened to find things worth replying to on his blog today.  So there.

Jeff responds to an article in the Chronicle; the article (unread by me) is a lamentation of technology’s negative influence on students today.  Jeff nicely dissects the argument, finding it ultimately lacking and poorly argued.  All well and good, but here’s the bit that got me thinking.  Jeff wrote, drawing on a particular bit of the antitech rant:

I don’t need to repeat the response: even the quill was technology. We know that counter-argument already.

Here’s my thoughts.  What Jeff doesn’t mention here (although brilliant scholar that he is, I’m sure he thought of it) (okay, maybe a little sycophantic, haha) is that technology comes with its own ideology, right?  Our idea of technology contains a narrative of progress and development that perhaps goes unquestioned more often than it should. 

And, like any ideology, the technology one is naturalized, so that those technologies we take for granted hardly seem like technologies or ideologies - here, for example, the quill.  So the technology narrative is founded in two parts: one, the assumption that progress is good, makes life easier, better, faster.  But it also contains (this is the unspoken part of Jeff’s argument, as I read it) a counter-narrative, in which technology is distracting, a nuisance, and needlessly complicated - things were simpler in the good old days.

Of course, one could probably choose any technology and find the counter-argument against it.  I remember reading in high school (although the exact source has since faded from memory) turn-of-the-twentieth-century fears that the fountain pen was going to cause schoolboys to forget how to sharpen their quill pens with their pen-knives.  So perhaps technology always brings fears of obsolesence - that the technologies we hold dear (and the ideologies they embody) will be rendered obsolete. . .and if they can, we can.

So, this teaching racket might pan out after all.

A serendipitous moment of realization during class discussion the other day: intertextuality as invention strategy!  Which is, of course, part of the motive behind Text Book anyway.  But, here’s what came out of discussion:

Intertext is not just about overlapping texts or texts in dialogue with one another, but also about the spaces where the overlap doesn’t quite fit or where the dialogue falls silent–these spaces are places for invention, to add to the intertext with one’s own contribution.  Not a breakthrough, really, but given my muddle lately trying to think of my own approach to invention, I was quite zipped to have this come up in discussion. 

Thanks students!

I was trying to whip up some ideas for articles or research or something.  I failed, but I started thinking about something else in the process.  I asked myself: Looking at the work of the scholars who’ve made an impact on you lately (that is, the scholars whose work made me interested in moving from lit/cult studies to rhet/comp), what does their work have in common?

An interest in metaphor is the answer I arrived at.  Consider the way these shcolars play with metaphor:

• Geoff Sirc: Virtual Urbanism vs. the Virtual Academic.  Writing as space for exploration and wandering.
• Geoff Sirc again: Box-Logic.  Writing as space for collection of curios and artifacts.
• Cynthia Haynes: Ungrounded, homeless refugees.  The writer as someone unsettled and unresolved; the essay as the search for a place to stand.
• Jeff Rice: Hip-hop pedagogy.  Writing as juxtaposition, sampling, reorchestration and mash-up.
• Greg Ulmer: the Mystory.  Writing as site for personal exploration and revelation, as method of discovering patterns in one’s life.

While I don’t think any of these scholars thinks of writing only in these terms, this little thought-experiment made me ask: What’s My Metaphor?

I’m not sure I have one yet (not that I need to), but it’s something to think about. . .maybe even as assignment idea in the future.  As the previous post mentions, I am drawn to the idea of writing-as-web–but that’s not really my metaphor, just one that I find compelling.  What I do like about the idea of the web is how it accomodates the models of the above scholars in various ways.  (Well, maybe not Haynes, but the others certainly.)

So, reader. . .what your metaphor?

Something Jeff wrote got me thinking. . .

In his post, Jeff describes a sort of pleasurable drift through the content on YouTube, comparing it to Benjamin’s <i>Arcades</i> or Barthes’ drift.  At one point, Jeff uses the phrase "fascinating Web" to describe his pleasure in such drifting. 

I find something engaging in this phrase.  With a slight tweak, "Web," capitalized and heralding the WWW, can become simply "web" and for me thus retains more metaphoric value.  The "fascinating web," then, as metaphor for writing: a place of connection and connectedness (if the two can be understood as unique).  I like the idea of web-as-writing for a number of reasons (I’ll know what the number is when I’m done writing):

1. Connections.  As I come to understand more how all writing is intertext, one thing that fascinates me is how ideas/words/practices are repeated through different levels of disourse.  Nothing new here, but I’m always geeked by this phenomenon anyway.
2. Connectedness.  To sound maybe a little too meta for a moment: The distinction between connection/connectedness, for my purposes, is this: connection is simply the fact of the connection, the raw data behind a link between two sites/cites, while connectedness is our awareness of and ability to exploit/manipulate/use that connection.
3. If we think too of what web is biologically, we can expand the metaphor even further.  Of course, one bio-web is that of the spider–a trap, a sticky lure.  Writing depends on that sticky lure, right?–the promise of pleasure and fascination is what hails us to those subjects we write about.  (And yes, I know that the spider’s web is also a sight of consumption and destruction, but I admit I haven’t really thought the metaphor all the way through.)
4. In biology, there’s also the idea of the food web, a model that supersedes the linear food-chain to emphasize the mutlivalent, expansive relationships between produces and consumers.  (Some of that language–producers and consumers–I note is echoed in some composition theory.  I’m looking at you, Trimbur.)  Our web–those of us who are rhet/comp scholars rather than biologists–is the textual web.  While certainly there’s a text-chain as well, the text-chain is just the linear strand that makes up one radius of the text-web
5. Of course, the WWW is part of this metaphor too–hypertext as conscious exploitation of the connections between sites and texts.

All of this as a serendipitous prelude into my next post. . .

Some further thoughts from the recent Shaviro lecture:

First: the uncanny valley:

Though originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to robotic design, the concept expressed by this phrase is equally applicable to interactions with nearly any nonhuman entity. Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.

 This chasm—the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori’s thesis—represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting. The first peak, moreover, is where that same individual would see something that is human enough to arouse some empathy, yet at the same time is clearly enough not human to avoid the sense of wrongness. The slope leading up to this first peak is a province of relative emotional detachment—affection, perhaps, but rarely more than that.  [Read more here].

If we assume that MMO environments will continue to become more immersive in their interfaces, at what point do the inhabitants of MMOEs (since not all MMOs are RPGs) have to confront the Uncanny Valley?  If the MMOE experience eventually moves into a fully sensory immersive interface (which admittedly is still probably a decade or more away), and the visual representation of the interface becomes increasingly photorealistic, what happens when the MMOE is indistinguishable from offline existence?

Is the uncanny valley sort of an instinctual protection against such experiential simulacra?  That is, are we somehow inherently programmed to recognize the distinction between artifice and genuine precisely at the point the division between the two begins to break down?  If the valley is instinctual, why do we have such a bizarre instinct–an instinct predicated on the anticipation of the unnatural? 

Second: Realities, virtual and otherwise

As Shaviro notes, the difference between online experience and offline experience for Second Life users is not one of virtual/actual but one of first/second.  Shaviro observes that this implies the incorporation of Second Life into the First Life; transactions (social or economic) are no longer distinguished as real or virtual, but merely through what sphere of the metaverse they are conducted in (Of course as Shaviro also describes at length, real dollars can be exchanged (electronically, i.e. virtually) for Linden dollars, which can be used in Second Life for further transactions).  

Is the division between first/second in the Second Life metaverse numerical or hierarchical?  That is, is the second life assumed to be a subservient subset of first (i.e. "real") life, or is it assumed to be rather just another life–in addition to the first?  The dream of gamers and techies used to be VR–virtual reality.  But if Second Life is any indication, the virtual part of that ambition is fading: the online experience is now incoporated into and made equal to the "real" reality experience. 

So what is the value of "reality" then?  IF the virtual/online metaverse becomes accepted as extension of the real/offline universe, is "real" still the ideal?  Is realism–as aesthetic or ideal–still a going concern? 

There’s more to be said on this (and more has been said by more artful critics, I’m sure)–I haven’t gotten to Benjamin and aura and reproducibility.  But I’m sick of typing.