Our notions of what counts as literary shift constantly, a theme woven throughout much of the work that has happened in courses I've taught this semester. Sometimes as these shifts play out, it can be difficult to recognize the emerging forms among an evolving landscape formed around stalwarts like Shakespeare, Faulkner, Austin, Morrison. We need podcasts like this to help us make such identifications.

My first thought after landing here was, what a great Web site. Who would put so many resources into making something so kitschy? I still just had a great time poking around, but after eventually jumping to the corporate sponsor, I'm thinking, what a slick example of contemporary advertising--slick in both a good design and a watch your wallet kind of sense.

[via funny pages]

From the Washington Post comes this piece about corporations playing fast and loose with images found online. The article is of interest to writing teachers working with new media for its illumination of fair use principles. If one of the four lenses through which we might view fair use is the potentially commercial nature of the use, it's tempting to look at the "photonapping" of images by corporations and argue for more flexibility when applying the profit criteria to use decisions. This, however, might not be true to the phenomenon reported in the piece. It's not that the uses by the corporations are fair. The article quotes Lawrence Lessig, who points out, "There's really no excuse for [these companies] except that they think it's not important to protect the rights of the amateur." For educators, these legal dimensions might be discussed as part of a broader conversation about how to make decisions about using materials in projects. I put a screen shot of the Post article above to serve as the link to the article, which I've attributed and which I'm discussing in terms of educational uses of media. Is it fair? These questions are sometimes complex.

Lessig's quote and the rest of the article, more interestingly, get at what is behind much of the trend of companies wanting to appropriate amateur materials from the Web:

"Authenticity is the new consumer sensibility," says Joe Pine, a business consultant and co-author of "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want." It is the criterion "by which people decide what to buy and who to buy it from."

It's a byproduct of the user-generated world: the trustworthiness of YouTube, the realness of Facebook. Above all else, we believe ourselves. "People don't want to buy the fake from the phony anymore," Pine says. "They want to buy the real from the genuine."

If nothing else the trend asks us to continue thinking about the power of citizen media as reflected in the desires of corporations to be like Mike, or Allison, or Tracey.

Jeff made a post about memory and the fit between blogging and reflecting with pleasure. In that spirit, I offer two items. The first is from my personal collection, an official KGBS CB Radio Guide. I actually sent off the SASE to have this thing mailed to me--must have been 1977. The second is a link to my own television memory item. No comment.

Not much going up here lateley, so how about a poster posting to represent the current state of things. [via David's playlist]

I think I prefer to read this one silently, though I believe in poetry being performed aloud.

Is it just me? At first I was worried that I had picked up a quirky habit when I caught myself prefacing most statements last week with the phrase, “I mean.” Since then, though, I’ve noticed lots of people saying it. Even an interviewee on the local NPR show this morning saw fit to begin his answer by assuring listeners that it was indeed he who was expressing the views and that he did indeed mean them. I suppose the phrase is just one of those phatic tags designed to create a pause or simply indicate that something relevant is about to be said. I guess these phrases keep the conversational wheels humming. I wonder, though, what it means when they seep into the mediated now by virtue of moving from an individual’s quirk to a common cultural styling. I mean it’s like every other sentence now begins with “I mean.”

To get a better feel for the actor-network adaptation assignment to which I’ve been subjecting the students in the summer school class I’m teaching, I spent a few minutes trying to put together my own flatland map of some social stuff on campus. I went with a free association approach, spotting a lot of people wearing sunglasses in the morning and using that item as a kind of anchor-point for my collection. The people and other items that made it on to the grid are what struck me as I continued to observe individuals wearing glasses. Laying everything out in the grid, and then trying to create the connections between them is helpful for spotting inconsistencies and relationships—e.g. some professors carry computer bags/briefcases while some carry backpacks.

My next step in conducting the assignment, then, was to think about possible labels for the linkages between items. One thing that’s nice about the Cmap program is the way it asks for a label for the links between bubbles. This lends itself perfectly to the kind of connection/translation thinking that I see as a key to the actor-network approach. I took the blank labels and tried to find an interpretive term that describes the link. One question I have regarding the ANT approach and interpretation is the timing of putting in these kinds of labels. At the risk of over-distilling, at some level I think what Latour is saying is as simple as “just withhold judgment.” So, adding a label like between the items feels premature and leads to stereotyping. Still, it feels like the next step in making sense of the observation is to assign some meaning to the connection. Maybe it would be best to leave these labels blank or fill them in slowly while gathering more information.

The real challenge, though, with the assignment we are working on is the requirement to select songs to serve the function of the label. I guess this means I have another step to go in the translation process, so the premature labeling of the links may not be a problem after all. I have no idea, however, whether using songs for these spaces will be doable or what it might lead to.

I thought I'd open the window and let people peer in while I try to figure out how to construct an assignment for a summer school class that just got up and running. The task is to figure out how to translate some of the ideas behind actor-network theory into an assignment for a first year writing class. I'm working very much without a net here, and the pace of summer school means I've rolled out the assignment before knowing exactly how it will play out or before having everything about it conceptualized.

If you look at the assignment so far, you'll see that I've tried to adapt a playlist assignment into something a bit more social and networky. The playlist assignments work well, but generally I try to make a direct substitute with a familiar form--instead of a profile essay, give me a playlist about the same figure. I've decided to use the same paradigm, select and contextualize songs instead of writing a paper. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't translate, but there are some challenges:

Challenge one: I just don't know what these actor-network accounts are supposed to look like. Having never created such an account or taught the process of making one. To get a better idea of what is involved, I made a map of what such an account might touch on in terms of concepts under study. This is taken from my partial understanding of ANT gleaned from Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social. I've started with the assignment, compose an account of something social, and then tried to offer some strategies that might translate into methodologies for the write a social account assignment. Some of them are reasonably straightforward and, I think, can be translated into specifics through the assignment--something like take a group, and then look at controversies, how boundaries relate to the group, what anti-groups say about the group. It seems like with things/objects or matters of concerns/ideas the process can work as well. One bit of confusion I have, though, relates to the use of the term actor to designate individuals. I sometimes sense that Latour applies the label, actor, to all kinds of entitites--a microscope, a pamphlet, a concept could all be actors. At other times, though, it seems as if the term agent really applies more to these entities that participate in the actor-network. I don't think this confusion will cause huge problems for the assignment, but I note it to help think through the concepts.

Challenge two: The mediators/links. My understanding is that what an account would really trace is not the landscape of groups, actors, things, or ideas, but the connections between all of these entities. I added these mediating links to the map and you can see it is getting pretty messy. Not really a problem, but it makes me realize that the account assignment needs another layer that will take it beyond the typical comfort level of first year writing assignments. Instead of asking writers to describe a group or a set of objects that help define a group, the assignment needs to ask them to trace the relationships between the group and its objects. The question becomes what makes up these links and how can one write about them. Here's where the assignment is likely to either take off or crash. I've asked writers to use the song selections of the playlist to represent these links. The idea is to identify a song that performs the function of the link between the two entities. In this space between the entities we'll see how possible it is for music to play a descriptive role, to create an account.

I have some concerns with the assignment. The actor-network conceptualizations may be so messy that it just makes it hard to figure out what one is supposed to do in the assignment. The logistics of identifying the entities may be hard to sort out. I've tried to borrow some ethnography starting points--go to a place, look at a group, examine an artifact--hopefully these will get students up and running with observations that can help them identify entities and connections. I'm also unsure about identifying songs that fill in the gaps between the entities. It's hard enough to make a good playlist when trying to find songs to represent a person, asking the songs to capture a process of translation between entities may be too much.

I'm eager for suggestions for tweaks to the assignment and will post updates with adjustments and when the first playlists come in.

I saw this video detailing Jonathan Coulton a couple of weeks back on the N.Y. Times and just had a chance to read through the related article. I like the way the piece illustrates media transformations through examples of viral musicianship and alternative modes of interacting. The combination of DIY recording, Internet distribution, and second Web social promotion has clearly had an impact on the way music gets made and shared. I like the way the Times puts it, “This confluence of forces has produced a curious inflection point: for rock musicians, being a bit of a nerd now helps you become successful.” Coulton’s “Codemonkey” is a perfect example. The number of YouTube entries for the song is impressive and you can hear how the song itself resonates with lots of inner geeks.

Beyond making me want to cheer for Coulton and his online crew of viral fans, the article makes me think about the way these transformations might also play out in other contexts. A big concern pointed out in the piece is the breakdown of public and private lives wrought by extending the artist into the social Petri dish of the Web: “In many ways, the Internet’s biggest impact on artists is emotional. When you have thousands of fans interacting with you electronically, it can feel as if you’re on stage 24 hours a day.”

Clearly the level of public transformation is not as extensive, but similar concerns can be raised about all kinds of activities as they move toward the 24/7 mediation of the Web. I’m thinking of even the added exposure that teachers or students experience as they become posters, bloggers, participants in online culture. Really we’re looking at new kinds of rhetorical situations in which boundaries must be constantly broken down and re-established. Relating the experiences of Tad Kubler, guitarist for Hold Steady, the piece points out that “Kubler has cultivated a skill that is unique to the age of Internet fandom, and perhaps increasingly necessary to it, as well: a nuanced ability to seem authentic and confessional without spilling over into a Britney Spears level of information overload.”

None of this is that surprising, but it is interesting to see the kinds of decisions artists now make about how they compose their public persona. But there’s one more layer to the piece that complicates things even further. It’s not just that these new modes of being public have created a kind of supercharger for voyeurism that complicates artist’s lives. The environment actually pushes back in a way that alters the basic paradigms of art and creativity.

For many of these ultraconnected artists, it seems the nature of creativity itself is changing. It is no longer a solitary act: their audiences are peering over their shoulders as they work, offering pointed comments and suggestions. When OK Go released its treadmill-dancing video on YouTube, it quickly amassed 15 million views, a number so big that it is, as Kulash, the singer, told me, slightly surreal. “Fifteen million people is more than you can see,” he said. “It’s like this big mass of ants, and you’re sitting at home in your underpants to see how many times you’ve been downloaded, and you can sort of feel the ebb and flow of mass attention.”

Again, some of this is evolutionary change—it's not that different from anticipating and adjusting compositions for either an addressed or evoked audience. But some of it does represent a shift. The artist is no longer working in supposed isolation; now literally bombarded by feedback mechanisms, the artist and the composition are shaped more forcefully than ever by listeners and viewers.

But there is an even bigger shift. Much of the creative production for the larger phenomenon of artistic projects is now off loaded to the crowd. The online crew churning out Codemonkey videos, remixing and amplifying the work of artists like Coulton represents a serious shift in how creativity happens. At this point, I doubt that those who study composition have begun to consider all of the implications for such social creativity. I wonder if these developments can be used to leapfrog some of the hangups in place already when it comes to formalized writing instruction and creativity. Compositionists are quite keen on the social. Perhaps that fancy for the social can be used to smuggle the creative back into writing classrooms.