From Kevin, I learned that there’s a new journal titled Media Tropes, the first issue of which is themed around McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” I’m particularly interested in reading W.J.T. Mitchell’s “Addressing Media,” Lance Strate’s “Studying Media as Media: McLuhan and the Media Ecology Approach,” and Twyla Gibson’s “Double Vision: McLuhan’s Contributions to Media as an Interdisciplinary Approach to Communication, Culture, and Technology.”
Among humanities scholars, one of more controversial claims of the OHM Thesis, maybe best represented by the title of one of Ong’s articles, “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” is the idea that technologies such as writing, the printing press, etc., can actually restructure consciousness. “Brains don’t change,” one well-known linguist told me WPA-L discussion a few years ago. “But they do,” I argued, pointing to research from cognitive science.
With that preface, I offer this passage from a Daily Mail article, written by Susan Greenfield and adapted from her book ID: The Quest For Identity In The 21st Century:
Anyone who doubts the malleability of the adult brain should consider a startling piece of research conducted at Harvard Medical School.
There, a group of adult volunteers, none of whom could previously play the piano, were split into three groups.
The first group were taken into a room with a piano and given intensive piano practise for five days. The second group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano - but had nothing to do with the instrument at all.
And the third group were taken into an identical room with an identical piano and were then told that for the next five days they had to just imagine they were practising piano exercises.
The resultant brain scans were extraordinary. Not surprisingly, the brains of those who simply sat in the same room as the piano hadn’t changed at all.
Equally unsurprising was the fact that those who had performed the piano exercises saw marked structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement.
But what was truly astonishing was that the group who had merely imagined doing the piano exercises saw changes in brain structure that were almost as pronounced as those that had actually had lessons.
“The power of imagination” is not a metaphor, it seems; it’s real, and has a physical basis in your brain.
Alas, no neuroscientist can explain how the sort of changes that the Harvard experimenters reported at the micro-cellular level translate into changes in character, personality or behaviour. [Read more.]
From a media ecology perspective, the implications of this are vast. And it raises a number of important questions, such as: Should we include visualization of writing and researching as part of composition pedagogy? What, if any, noetic changes might come about from asking students to imagine themselves within a text? What did it mean to have a memory palace in which one walked through to recall information? Or, for that matter, what affects have our metaphors of memory had on noetic structures? While the classical and medieval metaphor of memory as a container such as a dovecote have fallen out of favor, this research at least implies that their conception of memory as a container may have had tangible noetic affects.
While the article itself points to some interesting research and asks some interesting questions, such as:
What worries me is that if something as innocuous as imagining a piano lesson can bring about a visible physical change in brain structure, and therefore some presumably minor change in the way the aspiring player performs, what changes might long stints playing violent computer games bring about?
I find it a bit too pessimistic. Or, maybe, a better term is too fearful. Consider, for instance, the intro:
Human identity, the idea that defines each and every one of us, could be facing an unprecedented crisis.
It is a crisis that would threaten long-held notions of who we are, what we do and how we behave. It goes right to the heart - or the head - of us all.
This crisis could reshape how we interact with each other, alter what makes us happy, and modify our capacity for reaching our full potential as individuals.
And it’s caused by one simple fact: the human brain, that most sensitive of organs, is under threat from the modern world.
Or this passage:
We could be raising a hedonistic generation who live only in the thrill of the computer-generated moment, and are in distinct danger of detaching themselves from what the rest of us would consider the real world.
The intro seems to suggest that the noetic structures of our current techno-cultural milieu are somehow natural and that new technologies will dehumanize us.
And that second passage, about a hedonistic generation detached from the “real world,” seems too commonplace to even take seriously. How often have I heard that sentiment in other contexts? Playing (non-computer) role-playing games, which, for most, just meant Dungeons and Dragons put me at risk for becoming detached from the real world, or so I was told by a number of people. Same too with reading fantasy. On the advice of my parents, a relative gave me a number of Lancer Paperback Conan books as a gift during the summer between 8th and 9th grade. Said relative took me aside to assure himself that I understood that I lived in the 20th century America and wasn’t in danger of doing whatever it was that said relative imagined Conan did.
I don’t want to make light of these concerns. I’m sure that violent video games are having some effect on who we are and the way we think, but that doesn’t make gamers a hedonistic generation “in distinct danger of detaching themselves from what the rest of us would consider the real world.” This smacks of cliché just as much as my desire to counter it by nodding to Plato’s complaint against writing the Phaedrus is cliché. For Plato, the real world, or, really, our ability to access it, resided in dialogue, which writing did not allow. However, that my nod to Plato is clichéd does not mean that it isn’t appropriate or accurate. And, likewise, just because Susan Greenfield’s concern over digital technologies seems clichéd does not mean we should brush aside her concerns. In making my nod to Plato, what I am doing is pointing out that in a newspaper article which does draw upon a fair amount of scientific fact, its clichéd warnings seem to be gut reactions rather than concerns rooted in research.
Yes, these technologies are changing us, and yes, once we have fully interiorized digital technologies we will not be the same people we were when print was the hight of modern technology any more than the people of Eighteenth Century Britain were the same people as the creators of Stonehenge and Skara Brae.
Despite the dire warnings and ominous tone throughout the piece, Greenfield sort of lightens up at the end. Ultimately her point seems to be Marshall McLuhan’s point (although, admittedly, McLuhan was much more suspicious of technology than Ong was): we need to create an inventory of effects so that we can be in control of our environment. As McLuhan puts it in The Medium is the Massage, “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
What Greenfield seems to be asking in both this article and her book is whether or not we will remain human. And that’s a loaded question. 1 Many of the sadder chapters of human history are predicated on a definition of human as “just like us.” Just because we’re digital–either corporal humans living in a fully interiorized digital techno-cultural milieu or humans who have uploaded their consciousness or downloaded their consciousness into something other than their born-into body–doesn’t mean we’ll stop being human. We won’t be the humans we are now, but, then again, we are not the humans that our grandparents or our grandparents’ grandparents were any more than they were the same humans as those who lived 500 or 1,000 years ago.
Maybe I’m just more optimistic than Greenfield is, more of an Ong to her McLuhan (although she’s much more openly suspicious of technology than I’ve ever found McLuhan to be). In mulling this over, I can’t help but wonder if my optimism stems from my enculturation in science fiction thinking. This is not to suggest that all science fiction is optimistic–cyberpunk, which is largely dystopic and cautionary, is one of my favorite science fiction genres. Rather, I think that as an avid reader of science fiction (and a scholar whose interests reside in the historical and comparative study of traditions), my conception of human is far more contingent than Greenfield’s seems to be.
Not too long after I started having students blog as a regular part of coursework, I decided to add a blog carnival assignment into the mix, with each student doing a carnival blog post once during the term. I originally thought of the ideas as part of a larger “database pedagogy” idea I started playing with while using the now defunt Schtuff.com as a course site. (The idea here being that students use the wiki and blog capabilities of Schtuff to create lots of content which became part of the course and the carnival posts, rounding up a weeks worth of class blogging was one way of doing that. Blog posts, student recorded lecture/discussion notes–this was for a science fiction course, glossary entries, article summaries, etc. were all intended to be used as material for papers and for class discussion.)
This semester, I asked the Rhetorical Theory since 1900 course to blog about the readings and class discussion, and our final carnival blog post was by far the best course carnival blog I’ve seen to date. With Kj08’s permission, I link to the Techno-Digital Rhetorical Carnival. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
I have more to say about this course later. Rather than write a third essay, I asked the class to create a map of the semester’s readings using Anne Wysocki’s “Mapping Readings” assignment in “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings & Justifications.” (Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. 1-41.) I am in awe of what they turned in.
As some of you may have noticed, I didn’t make it to CCCC this year and I’ve been meaning to post a link to Mike Edward’s review of the session I was supposed to be presenting in. It’s good stuff and I really wish I had been there to hear what Kathie Gossett, Andrea Davis, and Carrie Lamanna had to say. If you haven’t already seen it, you might want to take a minute or two to read Mike’s review of Rhetorical Memory and Delivery 2.0.
From the CFP for the first issue of Technoculture: A Journal for Cultural Studies of Technology, a new journal edited by Keith Dorwick and Kevin Moberly:
For the first issue of a new journal, Technoculture, we seek papers from a broad range of academic disciplines that focus on issues that could be briefly summed as “technology and society,” or, perhaps, “technologies and societies.” Technoculture is an online refereed scholarly journal, published annually, which will include online forums for sections of the journal such as letters to the editor, and for each article or review published, making Technoculture a highly interactive journal with the ability for readers to comment on each section. In addition, we will provide fora for announcements of interest to academics who study technology and its impact on society; and job announcements in this growing field. (For those who would like to see this in action, we have a mockup of the site available). [Read more.]
I hope this journal takes off in a big way, and I should think about sending something their way. If not something on memory (the canon of memory is, after all, the technologizing of memory), then something on Ong (or more broadly orality-literacy studies), or something on science fiction. What I particularly like is how Keith and Kevin define technoculture, which Keith first told me about when he and Kevin sent out the call for their technoculture special issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities. In the Technoculture CFP they write:
In particular, we’re interested in a conception of “technology” and the “humanist impulse” that pushes beyond contemporary American culture and its fascination with computers; we seek papers that deal with any technology or technologies in any historical period from any relevant theoretical perspective. We are not interested in “how to” pedagogical papers that deal with the use of technology in the classroom. Style should be jargon free and accessible to a general audience as well as to scholars in a number of disciplines.
From Vincent Casaregola’s “The Text is Always Technology: Assessing New Technologies as Environments for Literacy” (TNT: Texts and Technologies. Ed. Janice R. Walker and Ollie O. Ovideo. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003. 205-239.):
Taken together, the work of all three scholars, along with those they have influenced, might be described briefly in what I would call the “OHM Thesis” (indicating the first letters of each name, Ong, Havelock, and McLuhan). That thesis might be stated as follows: “technologies of representation, communication, and mediation, when adopted widely in any cultural setting, and maintained over at least a generation or two of use, begin to alter fundamentally the cultural epistemologies and discursive practices of that culture.”
I’ve been meaning to blog this for a long time as I refer to the OHM thesis from time to time. I don’t think the term’s gained much purchase, but it’s ingrained for me. Vince introduced me to Ong as rhetorician and his wife, Vicki, physically introduced me to Fr. Ong himself.1 I’ve heard the OHM thesis referred to in class, heard it used in discussion, and was asked to write about it in my comprehensive exams. Often, when I use the adjective “Ongian,” I’m really referring to the OHM thesis, which is a better term because it acknowledges the role McLuhan and Havelock play in the idea.
From a Pew Internet & American Life Project press release dated 24 April 2008:
Summary: Teens do not consider a lot of their electronic texts as writing They see considerable benefits to using technology in their school and non-school writing and say they would welcome even more writing instruction
Lead Paragraph:
WASHINGTON – The state of writing among teens today is marked by an interesting paradox: While teens are heavily embedded in a tech-rich world and craft a significant amount of electronic text, they see a fundamental distinction between their electronic social communications and the more formal writing they do for school or for personal reasons. [Read more.]
Much of this has been reported elsewhere or is showing up in various discussions anecdotally. Among the bullet points in the press release is the widely known phenomena of chat, texting, and IM conventions and practices slipping into formal writing assignments:
64% of teens admit that they incorporate, often accidentally, at least some informal writing styles used in personal electronic communication into their writing for school. (Some 25% have used emoticons in their school writing; 50% have used informal punctuation and grammar; 38% have used text shortcuts such as “LOL” meaning “laugh out loud.”) All of this matters more than ever because teenagers and their parents uniformly believe that good writing is a bedrock for future success. Eight in ten parents believe that good writing skills are more important now than they were 20 years ago, and 86% of teens believe that good writing ability is an important component of guaranteeing success later in life.
I don’t want to rip on this too hard, because it is a press release and I haven’t read the whole report which may frame the issue differently. That said, I’m interested in the idea that “good writing” doesn’t include “text shortcuts.” Anyone engaged in medieval paleography, and especially Latin manuscript paleography, is quite familiar with “good writing” full of text shortcuts, including texts that carry the “Great Books” label. Text shortcuts, emoticons, and even failure to follow whole swaths of punctuation and grammar rules or adherence to informal rules don’t make writing bad by virtue of their existence. They make writing bad when they’re not used rhetorically, which is determined by context.
What this section of the press release suggests to me is that we need to teach rhetorical awareness, something we’ve always needed to do. Far too often, what gets taught instead are prescriptive rules and conventions. Prescriptive rules (as opposed to descriptive ones–Joseph Williams’ chapter on correctness in his Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace is one good introduction to this issue) are often taught arhetorically, and, in fact, are taught so that rhetorical awareness, a much messier concept, can be avoided by all parties. In reality, there is nothing natural about prohibiting emoticons, informal grammar, and text shortcuts from “good writing.” We do so out of convention and we ought to recognize this even if we decide they are conventions we want to keep.
And this gets to the second issue I want to address: These conventions of “good writing” are conventions of print-logic, of print culture, and the teens in the study are growing up in a print-secondary orality-digital transitional culture. Since there’s nothing natural about the writing conventions they’re violating, there’s no reason to assume that some of these conventions won’t become accepted as “good writing” at some point in time. As I once wrote in an email posted to either TechRhet the WPA-l, language change happens (something linguists and philologists know but many writing teachers don’t seem to realize). In that post I offered what I called “John’s Rule of Language Change,” which went something like this: Living languages evolve. An unchanging language is a dead language.
A good reminder that I need to pay more attention to already-known sites like GMU’s Center for History and New Media Resources. Their collection of digital tools has grown extensively since I last looked. A post to TechRhet about Streetprint Engine brought me back.
Wikipedia editors are once again arguing that the electracy entry ought to be merged into the information and media literacy entry. (Which is, I guess, a much better fight to be having than when some Wikipedia editors decided the term should be killed altogether.) To help make the case, Ulmer posted the following passage to the Invent-L discussion list, which I post here for my own archival purposes:
The upshot of this bottom-up method is not ‘literacy,’ a knowledge we already ‘know,’ but a set of behaviors Gregory Ulmer calls ‘electracy,’ a knowlege citizens of networked cultures ’see’ and ‘do.’ Agile operators, willy-nilly, of computer keyboards, ATMs, cell phones, PDAs, Gameboys, iPods, and the other devices of our digital epoch, we are already, in an unreflective fashion and in various degrees, at ease with digitality. ‘The nice thing about having such a term,’ Ulmer tells Talan Memmott, ‘is not only the efficiency, but the categorical effect it produces. For one thing, it helps us see the difference between [electracy] and media literacy ([a term] whose goal is to protect from or defend against electracy by means of forms and practices specific to the previous apparatus; the equivalent for an oral person calling literacy alphabetic orality’). (6)
From: Morris, Adelaide. “New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write.” New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Eds. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss. MIT Press, 2006.
The George Washington University WID Studio blog has a great introduction/round-up post of Web 2.0 tools for teaching and research. Well worth taking a look at or bookmarking to pass on to others. From the post’s introduction:
The resources presented below take the perspective that the merging of technology, writing, and research has brought new opportunities for involvement, collaboration, and distribution as well as new challenges for conducting responsible research. These challenges require one to understand what is happening online where vast amounts of information are not only accessible, but the space between users, audience, and authors has merged and blurred and content is shared and mashed-up. Consequently, this wiki embraces the ideas and technologies of Web 2.0 as we present responsible research resources for the GW community. To get a better understanding of what Web 2.0 means, watch this informative video titled “Web 2.0, The Machine is Us/ing Us
,” by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.
The tools presented below assist the researcher in taking advantage of the collaborative and socially connected nature of online information gathering and sharing in a Web 2.0 environment. [Read more.]
Via a TechRhet post by Robbin Zeff.
