Here’s the strategies I covered in the ad hoc handout last class:

Audience

To whom does this piece speak?
Who isn’t included in the audience?
What kinds of previous knowledge(s) does the author assume the audience to have?

Kairos
Why is the author writing this piece now?
What events does the piece respond to?
What events/people/ideas does the piece name? Which doesn’t it name?

Ethos
Who is the speaker?
What qualifies/authorizes her to write on this subject?
What predispositions does she admit to holding?
To what communities does she belong?

Pathos
What kinds of emotions does this piece attempt to engender? (Point to a specific place/passage)
Does this seem sincere, or like a kind of pandering?

Logos (Evidence, Argument)
Does the piece supply sufficient evidence to support its claims?
Can you identify an unsupported claim?
Does the piece adequately contextualize statistical evidence?
What other evidence could the author use?

Purpose
Why does the author write this piece?
After putting the piece down, what should I do differently?
Think about the summary verb: describes, questions, asserts, challenges, supports, undermines, critiques, etc. 

Style
Is the piece composed in past or present tense?
Is the piece composed in a personal, first-person voice or in a more objective, third-person voice?
What genre is the piece? Does it do anything to defy genre expectations?
Find a sentence that made you smile. 
Find a sentence that made you frown. 
Find a verb that grabbed your attention. 
Are the similes and metaphors in the piece cool? cliche?

Arrangement
Are all the pieces in the right order?
Would you move anything around?
Did you notice a defective period? Is there a logical jump?
What kind of strategy does the introduction employ?
What kind of strategy does the conclusion employ?
 

I feel like I should justify why I am making you use twitter in this class. So here goes. 

Given that this is a writing class, it is my job to introduce you to a range of tools that help facilitate writing. Some of these are research tools, such as Google Scholar and delicious (which we look at in a previous class). Others, however, deal with distribution. Certainly medium.com does that. But so does twitter. 

A few months ago, an infographic made the rounds detailing which social media technologies top corporations were using. Unsurprisingly, twitter tops the list. Although I wonder about there methodology, since I find it hard to believe that only 4 corporations maintain an active facebook presence. But I digress. My point: in the 21st century, being literate requires a familiarity with a new range of tools. I am reminded of Steven Johnson’s 2005 article comparing the web to ecosystems: if you don’t want your piece to end up unattended, in the desert of the web, if you want it to attract attention, to be a part of the vibrant rainforest, then you need to know how to leverage social media. 

And, thus, we tweet. I imagine that a number of you are already familiar with twitter. But I don’t want to assume that you are all digital natives, and so I will take some time today to introduce twitter and three terms associated with it: timeline, follow(ers), and the almighty hashtag. 

1. Timeline: For those used to facebook, twitter will initially appear like a completely clusterfuck. It can be disorienting. This is because the twitter timeline is simply a running list of all the posts made by anyone you follow (with a few scattered advertisements, or promoted posts, thrown in). Also, some of the feed might seem nonsensical, since it is possible to read only a part of conversations. Recently, twitter changed the way it organized conversations, linking together responses. But even this can be difficult to follow at first. Advice: Just jump in and get used to the chaos. After awhile, it will seem far less disorienting. 
2. Follow(ers): When you first join twitter, your timeline will be empty. You first have to populate it by following people. I have asked that you follow me for this class. I will post links to these daily class notes out via twitter. Also, I will ask that you follow everyone else who is in the class. This makes it easy to ask questions and facilitate discussion. To Do: I want you to send out a tweet with a 140 character description of your topic. 
3. Hashtag: The hashtag is what really powers twitter, what organizes the chaos. Advice: Try not to post anything to twitter that doesn’t contain a hashtag. Rule #1: Every time you read something for your project in this class, or anytime you read something that connects to a project someone else is working on, post it to twitter with the hashtag #enc3310. Got that? #enc3310. Rule #2: Every time you post an essay to medium.com, tweet out a link to the piece with some kind of description. 

Some other pieces of twitter advice/resources:

• Working in 140 characters is tough. It requires concision. If absolutely necessary, you can chain tweets together by numbering them. For instance, check out Mark Cuban’s twitter apology. So, on the first tweet, you have a short title, like Apology 1/5. Then every other tweet just has a different number. This lets people know there’s more than one tweet in the chain. 
• Because every character is precious, we don’t want to waste characters on long links. Use something like tinyurl.com to shorten and redirect links. 

In class today we are going to focus on incorporating direct quotations into writing. Regardless of whether you are working in MLA, APA, Chicago Style, or not, there are general principles of handling sources that can improve the readability, clarity, integrity, and coherence of your writing. 

Essentially, I consider handling sources a 4 part process. There’s the signal, the quote, the summary, and the analysis. While we’ll be using this specifically for direct quotes today and this weekend, this is essentially the undelrying structure for most academic-argumentative paragraphs: a claim, followed by evidence, and analysis. 

• Signal: who, what, where, when. Note that what/where can be a reference to a kind of media [article, book, poem, website, blog post], a genre [sonnet, dialogue, operational manual], or location/event [press conference, reporting from the steps of the White House]. The signal helps create ethos, establishing the credibility of your source, addressing their disposition toward the issue, and positioning them within the context of a particular conversation. 
• Quote: in-line citations use quotation marks and are generally three lines or less. Block citations do not use quotation marks and are indented from the rest of the text. Generally, quotes present logos of some kind–be it in the form of statistics or argumentation. Of course, quotes can also be used in an attempt to engender pathos, or a strong emotional reaction. 
• Summary: especially for block quotations, you need to reduce a block of text to a single-line. You need to put the quote in your own words. Because language is slippery, and your readers might not read the quote as you do. So, offering a summary after a quote– particularly a long one (which many readers simply do not read)–allows readers an opportunity to see if they are on the same page as you. 
• Analysis: Reaction, counter-argument, point to similar situation, offer further information, use the bridge, “in order to appreciate X’s argument, it helps to know about/explore/etc. This is where the thinking happens. 

Here’s an example; let’s say I was writing a blog on the struggles of newspapers to survive the digital transition, I might want to point to the October 15th, 2009 NYT’s article dealing with the Times Co. decision to hold on to the Boston Globe.

In his recent article, Richard Perez-Pena explains that the Times Co. has decided to hold onto the Boston Globe, at least for now. Perez-Pena explains that the Times Co. has been trying to sell the newspaper for the past month, but, since it hasn’t received what it deems a credible offer, it has decided to pull the paper off the market. He writes:

Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University who has closely followed The Globe’s troubles, said it might be better for The Globe to remain with the Times Company than to go to a new owner that might do more cutting or replace top executives. “But the company has its work cut out for it in terms of rebuilding credibility with the employees and the community,” he said.

Perez-Pena explains that the Times Co. has been involved in bitter labor disputes over the past year, as advertising revenues continue to fall: this move, as Kennedy notes above, could be a solid first move in rebuilding an important relationship with one of America’s oldest, and most significant, newspapers. However, I think we still need to be a bit skeptical here: the fact that no one even proposed a reasonable offer for a newspaper that only 15 years ago commanded 1 billion dollars, the highest price ever for a single newspaper (Perez-Pena), does not bode well for the future of the industry. Like many newspapers, the Globe was slow to adapt to the digitalization of America’s infosphere. Time will tell if recent efforts are too little too late.

If you look above, I first contextualize the quote–not only supplying where/when/who it came from, but also providing some sense of what the whole article discusses. Then I focus attention toward a particular point and supply the quote. After the quote, I first reiterate what the quote said (providing a bit of new information). This is an important step that a lot of writers skip. Always make sure you summarize a quote, so a reader knows precisely what you think it says. Then, in the final part of the paragraph above, I analyze the material. I respond to it. In this particular case, I am somewhat critical of the optimism that underlies Perez-Pena’s piece.

A few other small points:

• Notice the first time I reference an author, I use there first and last name. After that, it is sufficient to only use the last name.
• Notice that I don’t have a citation after the direct quotation: the reason here is that it is obvious where the quote came from thanks to my signal. This is an electronic source, so there is no page number citation, were it a print source I would have to include that. NEVER USE A PAGE NUMBER IN THE SIGNAL TEXT.
• Notice in my analysis that I make a parenthetical to the author–its because I pulled the price of the Globe purchase in 1993 from his article. I don’t directly quote it, so no quotation marks.
• Finally, there’s two kinds of quotations, in-line quotations and block quotations. Each have there own rules for academic papers (the dreaded MLA and APA guidelines). We will deal with those later in the course. In terms of blogging: quotes longer than 4 lines need to be blockquoted. Blogger has a button to help you do this. Blockquotes don’t receive quotation marks.

Handling Sources Revisited

Today I want to work on smoothing out the transitions into sources, and share what I call the “magic” sentence. I call this the magic sentence because it does so much for us in such a compact frame. Here it is:

Shakespeare’s Renaissance tragedy Romeo and Juliet documents the titular characters’ intense love and foolhardy demise. Shakespeare’s play leads us to question both the sincerity of young love. 

I came up with this sentence while prepping high school students to take placement exams, hence the literary material. But the semantics of the sentence make it useful for virtually every kind of writing. I especially want to highlight the importance of the verbs in this sentence, because choosing the proper verb often reveals both our appraisal of the source and our thinking on the questions it raises. 

[Author]’s [time period] [genre] [title] [verb] [plot summary]. [Author] [verb] [theme/purpose]. 

Ok, so in reality I have two sentences here. But, when dealing with non-fiction works, they can often be combined into one:

[Author’s] [time period] [genre] [title] [verb] [purpose]. 

As I indicated above, it is the verb that is the silent star of the show here. Consider for a minute the following example:

Malcom Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink exposes how subconscious part of our brain think in ways we are not consciously aware. 

Exposes. How does the meaning of the sentence change if I use the verb:

• suggests
• argues
• questions whether
• supposes 
• explicates
• details
• offers a theory of
• explores

Each of these verb choices subtly alters the way I approach the work discussed. Exposes suggests something secret and perhaps mysterious is being uncovered. Suggests suggests that an amount of doubt surrounds the issue. Supposes implies that I am hostile or at least quite skeptical toward the idea. This subtle indicator allows my an opportunity to softly align or distance myself from the source I am using. Good authors do this all the time to subconsciously prepare readers for their arguments. 

After reviewing the first round of essays, I want to go back and revisit my previous advice for handling a source. As an example, I want to revise a portion of Jess’s essay on gun control. She writes:

“Even gun owners who have never used their guns for self-defense find solace in the fact that the gun is there if needed.” I found this relating to my situation and completely accurate to how I feel about my gun being in my home quoted by Norman Lunger in Big Bang: The Loud Debate over Gun Control.

There are many different scenarios where a child is killed because a gun was left loaded, and not hidden well by an adult and an accident death occurred. But is that really the guns fault for being loaded, is it not the adult’s fault that left it in a non-secure location that was accessible by a child? As mentioned an accident in Big Bang: The Loud Debate Over Gun Control by Norman Lunger “In Florida, two young boys found a shotgun under a bed in their grandparents’ home. A six year old pulled the trigger, and a five year old fell dead.” It seems these things happen too often and how can they be avoided.

Part of what is missing here is that I don’t have an orientation to Lunger–is this a source with which Jess agrees? Or disagrees? Part of my confusion lies from the fact that, while I understand the particular passages, I don’t have any context for them, I don’t understand the purposeful argument of which they form a part.  

Previously, her essay documented her own reasons for wanting a gun: after a terrifying attempted burglary, she wanted a weapon for home protection. She then might use this kind of transition:

Based on my own experiences, I find myself relating to Norman Lunger’s idea that “even gun owners who have never used their guns for self-defense find solace in the fact that the gun is there if needed.” Lunger, in his contemporary [time] examination [genre] Big Bang: The Loud Debate Over Gun Control [verb] [argument/purpose]. 

Without more familiarity with the book, I cannot fill out the rest of the sentence. 

Here’s a second example, from G-Lo’s post on marriage and Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages:

In the book, The 5 Love Languages, by Gary Chapman he makes it clearly evident of common mistakes that men make when trying to show their partner in life how passionately they feel for them. He illustrates our mindset that we think that we, as men, are doing so well in our efforts to please our wives but yet cannot figure out why they aren’t thanking us daily for being so wonderful. That’s because a lot of us have been oh so wrong.

The key to our puzzle is unlocked in this book. “The problem is that we have overlooked one fundamental truth: People speak different love languages,” is a clear statement made by Gary Chapman. What he is saying is that everybody feels love in different ways. This famous and successful marriage counselor describes the five “love languages” as words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.

Here we have a bit more information to work with. What I would like to do here is 1) to make the transition into the quote less wordy and 2) tighten up the summary and response to the quote. So:

Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages makes clear the common mistakes men make when trying to show their love to their partners. […] 

Chapman identifies the key to our puzzle, writing that “the problem is that we [men] have overlooked one fundamental truth: people speak different love languages.” By speaking different languages, Chapman, a famous and successful marriage counselor, means that everybody feels love in different ways. He describes five different ways, or languages, that we must familiarize ourselves with: affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. 

Notice how I am able to describe Chapman in a parenthetical phrase. Notice, too, how detailing the purpose of the work helps us to understand G-Lo’s relation to it. If done properly, I don’t have to use words like “clearly evident” or “clear statement” later. I don’t have to say that I find his writing clear if I show how clear his writing can be. 

One last example: 

On another note, most universities and businesses try to be as racially fair as possible. If I am going to give credit somewhere, it would be here. America does try to be as unbiased as possible when it comes to hiring or acceptance letters. But their efforts to be unbiased towards race has slowly affected their ability to hire or accept applicants fairly.

For instance, there was a case study done by Duke University involving the application process of certain employers: 

Here there is a transition, but I think we can make that transition stronger:

 A recent case study by John B. McConahay, a social psychologist from Duke University, supports my suspicions toward how “kind racisim” affects hiring and acceptance rates:

I wanted to point you towards some non-traditional resources for developing a topic for this class. Assuming you have a general idea of what you want to study, here’s a few tools you can use to begin identifying material. 

Wikipedia

Side-stepping the inevitable debate regarding whether you should use Wikipedia as a source in an academic paper, I do recommend using it to identify preliminary sources for just about any topic. Building from our reading, I am going to pretend that I am researching rape culture. Here’s a link to the Wikipedia page for the topic. Skimming the article, I notice citations to Alexandra Rutherford’s article “Sexual Violence Against Women.” The references section contains a link to the article. 

Scanning the “Criticisms” section, I see the importance of Mary Koss’s 1984 study. 

I also see Christina Hoff Summers’s arguments in opposition to the ubiquity of rape culture and bell hooks’s complications of the concept. 

The references section contains links to at least 25 other potential sources, but I am going to start working with these 4. 

Amazon.com

Amazon can be a great place to begin researching a topic, because their recommendation system can point you to other works connected to your topic. Because I know her work is mostly in books, I’m going to look up Christina Hoff Summers’s work here. I am able to locate the book in question and use the “search inside” feature to find references to rape culture. Sure enough, I find that the book contains several discussions of the term. 

The most useful component of Amazon to a research project is usually it’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” display (although it doesn’t look like any of the books there will address rape culture, so I am moving on). 

Google Scholar

Google Scholar works best with academic sources, but it can also work with non-academic sources as well. The beauty of Google Scholar is that it will show you every other source that has referenced a source. To being with, I am going to try and track down the 1984 Koss study identified in the Wikipedia article. 

Here is the search results for Mary Koss on Google Scholar. Looking through her Google Scholar author’s page, I see several other studies that have been cited even more. Any of these would make for a valuable source for my topic. 

More importantly, however, I can click to see which papers have cited her work. This allows me to “chain” sources together, to get a sense of the ongoing discussion of which they are a part. 

I can also run a search to see what other studies have cited Summers’s Who Stole Feminism?

Of course, once I have these sources I will need to locate them. Most will likely be available via USF’s library (hard copies) or digitally through its databases (such as Jstor). And USF librarians would be more than enthusiastic to help you locate more sources for your study. 

Delicious

A final tool I will show you today is delicious.com, a social-bookmarking tool. Delicious works like any bookmarking tool in a web browser, except it saves and aggregates those sites, with tags and notes, and makes them publicly accessible. So, when I search for “rapeculture” on delicious, I am seeing what other people have saved with that tag. 

Here, I find an interesting blogpost by Greta Christina to compare to the more academic material I have already identified. This might suggest the scope of my paper, to examine the ways in much public discourse reflects (or diverges) from the more academic discussions. 

I also find a link to a reddit discussion on Facts and Myths concerning rape. 

So, in response to the final projects, I humbly try to cobble together a Thomas paper that can put those projects into conversation while threading together some of the themes we discussed throughout the semester. I end up thinking about the legacy of the postmodern. 

I want to thank all of you for contributing to an engaging semester. I hope you enjoyed tackling these readings as much as I have. I also hope they haunt you in years to come as you develop or refine your own problems. If Ulmer is right, if problems b us, then I think these readings articulate a set of problems worthy of being (being addressed, not solved).

Phil’s discussion of objects in Latour caught my attention, especially thinking of objects as things in terms of “concerns.” A thing is a gathering. One thing we didn’t talk about in class was Latour and “black boxes”: that everything is a kind of mystery that collects infinite other actants. And every one of those actants can itself be opened. Black boxes all the way down; there is no one foundational, fundamental substance at the bottom (and here’s a connection between Latour and Burke). Latour talks about black boxes in Pandora’s Hope, and Harman spends considerable time with them in Prince of Networks. It leads to the metaphysical thesis that I did discuss in class: that for Latour something is “real” only to the extent that I can demonstrate its impact on another actant. I see this thesis as highly rhetorical–especially if we read it across Davis’s notion of our originary rhetoricity.

In response to Ryan’s project, I would compare Heidegger’s treatment of aletheia (as revealing, a solitary process?) against that developed by McComiskey in Gorgias, in which he argues that aletheia operates in distinction to episteme as two different senses of knowledge/truth: true/false (an objective or “self”ish standard) vs. true/lie (which requires both speaker and listener, a more rhetorical, and more messy, binary). I did want to both acknowledge and warn caution with his framing of Heidegger and Levinas. He states: “…Heideggerian philosophy of “self” toward a Levinasian philosophy of ethics.”

My warning here: while I agree with you, many Heideggerian scholars would challenge this assumption that Heidegger is caught up in the self. Isn’t he caught up in the self’s relationship to the world, they might rejoinder? That is Levinas’s critique of Heidegger, but that critique is often rejected as a misreading by Levinas. I don’t think it is. And I think this bit about rethinking aletheia (particularly if McComiskey is correct) helps support Levinas’s position: Heidegger isn’t interested in other(s), especially the early Heidegger that frames them in terms of the “they” that Dasein must escape if it is to forge a more authentic relationship with Being.

In terms of Heidegger and the warning against the temptation of destiny (the master, meta-narrative). Derrida picks this up from Heidegger in terms of the terrifying undecidablilty of the future, and the knowledge that the future will judge us; that the present is experienced, under the tyranny of the future’s undecideability, as the will-have-been. This is often a critique of liberals–that while conservatives stare blindly into a past they themselves imagined, liberals are frozen from taking action today because they are so sure of the eventual utopia that lies in the future.

Any small action that might improve conditions today, that involves compromises, are immediately dismissed as not perfect enough. The future will judge us for our compromises. And so we make none. And so nothing happens. And so here is why I am interested in “kynicism,” which I (very idiosyncratically) define as the small actions we can take to make things just a little bit better. They are tactics not strategies. But they are something. Something we can do. I think that picks up some of Johanna’s stress (unfortunately, Johanna’s video isn’t on YouTube)–but certainly not all of it. She asks of herself “have I dared I disturbed the universe?” This is the question we need to be asking ourselves (?) Is this the legacy of postmodernism–the inheritance of the priority of disruption? I wish we had read Davis’s earlier work, Breaking Up [at] Totality. It picks up right here. But, on the other hand, I am glad we worked through Innessential Solidarity, though I think it sends us to a different question.

Caitilin considered the transformation of the public sphere from a physical place filled with (privileged, male, land-owning) physical bodies to something much more distributed, virtual, complex, networked, etc–the way you think about the public sphere via Thomas’s definition of rhetoric and ambiance (as the context in which, through which, we flourish). As we talked about in class–I think this is the wonderful challenge of the 21st century, the possibility of actually cultivating a public sphere–of transforming what was once merely an ideal concept into a material reality. It will be a messy process.

I also was drawn to Anne’s framing of Rice in terms of looking to write differently about problems (unfortunately, Anne’s video isn’t on YouTube). I think this is a great walk away for me. Since I am writing about listening, I see that here–and I think this different/listening is a part of coping with the messy process of actually cultivating an actual public. Our normal, logocentric, way about writing about problems is to hurry (Heidegger might say efficiently) to a solution. If we read Rice with Corder echoing in the background, we need to cultivate a process that includes the time to allow one’s narrative to change, one that opens up the possibility of seeing new narratives, new solutions. Because, I would argue via Levinas, solutions should not begin from the default assumption of persuading the other, but rather should always involve a changing, a reorientation of the self.

Tiffany offered a great–or should I sing “amazing”– one line walk away for Jenny Rice’s suspicions toward feeling and change: “caring about changes and actually effecting change are different things.” Furthermore, I think Tiffany’s work on drag as a mode of critical intervention has interesting implications (even if it sets off my postpedagogical warning beacons–”attention, we are approaching ideological ramming speed!”). 

Zach’s had me thinking all semester, the (post)humanist sitting on my Otherwise [than] Humanist shoulder. He helped with my Levinas/Latour revisions by making me realize that, at the core, I do not believe in Latour’s at least implicit assumption that knowledge will solve (post)human problems. And I do not even believe Latour believes that either. Hence why the older Latour stresses religion, because religion is his way of getting at the non-epistemic elements (the rhetoric) require to move people toward change. That’s where I see his work heading. Levinas is there from the start. Watching his project even more convinces me on this point–that Latour’s interest in the affective stems from recognizing the insufficiency of the logos.

In response to Katherine’s piece on curiosity and education, as much as I support “whole being” and creative education, and work to foster it, I also see an educational system–saturated with corporate desire–opposing its cultivation. The rise of standardization will be the biggest block to creative–and any–education in the 21st century. We need to stand vigilant in opposition. Not that I have a problem with generating and insisting upon a curriculum. But we cannot allow teaching to be a simple unfolding of that pre-generated curriculum, as if it were programming a computer or following a script. This, I think, is the dream vision of education being advanced by those who have never stepped in a classroom. Asimov sensed that vision, and wrote a wonderful response to it, via his short story “Profession.” Worth your time. Seriously.

Because, as Asimov suggests, the infiltration of efficiency into education isn’t new. It has been there for quite awhile.

Cagle brings us to the subject of efficiency. I had not heard, but appreciate, Agyeman’s distinction between sufficiency and efficiency she offers in her talk. Readings frames efficiency, via Lyotard, as excellence. Or, put another way, excellence is a step toward Agyeman’s efficiency. Whether we are discussing teaching, or problem solving, the question Cagle leaves us with (and Katherine, Anne, Rice, Rickert, Davis) is how we cultivate an opposition to efficiency. That, I want to say, is the legacy of the postmoderns. And, hopefully, the legacy of Contemporary Rhetorics.

Recently, the FCC effectively announced that it will rethink its regarding net neutrality, which can essentially be understood as whether regulation of the Internet should be controlled by the government or the free market. For my friends who don’t follow the politics of the Internet, this is a big deal. What if, 100 years ago, the government had decided that roads (the major technological transformation that shaped our economy) were not a public good? What if all roads became, in effect, toll roads. It is almost impossible to imagine how this would have impeded economic growth. 

Many of the same arguments can be made for net neutrality. Sure, we can defend net neutrality in terms of its contributions to democracy. But we can also defend it–more effectively I believe–in economic terms. Essentially, we recognize that the Internet is the new space for economic mobility. We are transferring regulation of the Internet to private telecommunication corporations. A little over 30 years ago, the government stepped in to break up AT&T. But their monopoly pales in comparison to what we are about to hand companies such as Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner. 

The dangerous part is that it is not likely that consumers will see immediate changes. Your internet costs aren’t going to double over night (but recent indications suggest they will slowly increase, see Noonan’s piece at the Motley Fool). But the recent legal decisions and the FCC’s policy changes mean that Internet Service Providers will have the ability to raise prices AND regulate content. And that does not end well. 

So what can we do? A few years ago, facing the SOPA legislation, the Internet essentially shut down for a day in protest. And that had results. But it doesn’t look like that is how it will go down this time, as David Dyden writes in the New Republic, it looks like Google has as much to gain from this move as any of the other service providers (unlike with SOPA, which would have been an incredible pain in the ass for them). 

So what can we do? First, follow and support the EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation), pretty much the only group out there with any measure of influence trying to fight the privatization of the net. The EFF have a feed dedicated to net neutrality. Second, please take a few minutes to submit a comment to the FCC regarding the importance of net neutrality. These are public comments, and as the EFF points out, the FCC is required to post them and respond to them. If anything, you can contribute to a statistic on the number of citizens concerned with net neutrality. If you want, simply copy and paste the statement: 

“Please continue to defend the open Internet and net neutrality. The Internet should be protected as a public good.”

Here’s the submission URL: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display?z=636or

But, third, you can pay attention. You can share news items. The advantage of a digital democracy is that we the people can actually voice concerns. If we are loud enough, then media might actually pay attention. If we support politicians like Bernie Sanders who point to these problems, then others might parrot them (sorry, perhaps too cynical) or actually invest themselves in those projects. It is only hopeless if you think, and act, as if it is.

Net Neutrality: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/net-neutrality

Let me end by revisiting where we started. The syllabus:

I have two primary purposes for this semester. First, I want to expose you to as many new technologies as possible. It is quite likely that you will be called to use several of these technologies in your career as a professional or technical writer. The incredible development of new communicative technologies over the past decade requires writers who can compose in a variety of spaces for diverse audiences with multiple media. 

But I would also suggest that the same incredible development of new technologies transforms more than the ways in which we communicate. So, second, I want to explore how these technologies impact epistemology, ethics, morality, education, and aesthetics. Put simply, what is “new” about new media?

To begin to answer this question, we first must have a sense of what constitutes the “old” media, which we will begin to glean via Walter Ong’s seminal essay, “Writing is a Technology Which Restructures Thought.” We will use Ong’s essay, and its consideration of literacy, as a foil for understanding Gregory Ulmer’s theory of “electracy.” Our semester long exploration of electracy and new media will interrogate the ways in which new technologies prioritize subjectivity, transience, contingency, ambience, dependence, risk, and affect over objectivity, permanence, assurance, abstraction, autonomy, security, and logic. 

I believe the first goal is self-explanatory: this semester we did in fact use a wide variety of technologies: image editing software, web managements systems, video recording and editing, and twitter. Let me be clear: the idea isn’t to master using a particular technology, but rather to encourage an attitude and method toward working with technology. Whatever the technology, google up some tutorials and just start using it. While we cannot predict what technologies you will use in your professional career, we can predict that you will use a number of them. Hopefully, after the disorienting experiences of this semester, you feel more capable of coping with new technologies. 

The second goal is more complicated to summarize. We encountered attitudes toward new media in Ulmer’s work on MEmorials, and again in Rice’s counter-histories of Detroit. Both suggest that navigating the digital world requires a different sense of priorities than schools are accustomed to teaching. What priorities? Or, in other words, what do I think puts the “new” in new media? To answer my own question, I would begin by stressing: change. New media change. And new media changes everything. 

To explicate: unlike old, analog media–be it print on paper or action on film–new media are open to change. A book is forever–whatever was printed there yesterday will remain on the page until the end of tomorrows (of course, one can burn a book). There is no permanence to a new media composition, it can be altered, repurposed, erased. The world is now, at least in part, a wiki. To explicate: the world has always been composed in terms of a struggle over who gets to say what. Always. Books offered us an idealism. They offered an illusion of control. One writer controlling all the choices. Twitter, by comparison, is a chaotic cluster fuck. Yes it is. But so is the world, the real world, the rhetorical world that needs citizens with the talents, ambition, and patience to harness its potential and orient its interests. We can look at the changes initiated by new media as the loss of the literate ideal or as the offering of a new potentiality. 

That is both the danger and the promise of new media. They might no longer carry the idealism of a book–one world controlled by one author ordering an infinite number of readers–but they open us to (re)consider a democracy in which anyone who has access to a computer (which isn’t everyone, of course, we shouldn’t be tricked into thinking that everyone has access and opportunity to enter into the digital world) has the potential to speak and contribute to the chaotic, messy wrangle of the (post)human barnyard. I hope this semester has made you feel more comfortable with the tools that enable such speaking every bit as much as I hope your education as a whole compels you to speak. 

I have three things to accomplish in today’s class:

1. Discussing informed consent and distributing IRB forms
2. Sharing information on putting together a portfolio
3. Customizing a SquareSpace site using CSS code

Informed Consent

Megan McIntyre and I are working on a project called “From Assignments to Problems: Postpedagogy and Technical Communication.” Here’s how Megan and I frame our research project:

Post-pedagogy represents an under-investigated area of technical communication pedagogy.  Post-pedagogy offers an alternative to traditional classroom practices by offering students spaces to create assignments, engage in processes, and produce artifacts that are useful to their educational and career goals. This study investigates the efficacy of postpedagogy in the Technical Communication classroom. We hypothesize that, while postpedagogy might initially disorient students, such disorientation hails a more robust and autonomous learning process.

And here’s our research questions and objectives:

1. How does the implementation of postpedagogy impact students’ creativity, confidence, and self-reliance (three skills we see as key to flourishing in today’s creative economy)?
2. How do students respond to prompts/problems and create digital compositions in postpedagogical classrooms?
3. How does postpedagogy impact student self-perception and engagement?

This study has 2 objectives:

• to better understand student perceptions of postpedagogical technical communicaiton classrooms

• to investigate students’ writing, thinking, and problem solving processes

Putting Together a Portfolio

Here’s an intro guide by Smashing Magazine for developing a portfolio. While the article is geared toward web designers, I think it offers some pretty helpful commonplace advice. It is a good starting point. TechWhirl offers a nice follow-up geared specifically to technical communicators. 

Take a look at the Hicks Design website for inspiration. 

Compare that to some of the top google hits for Technical Communication or Professional Writing portfolios:

• Sue Huckle
• The portfolios featured in this article

Compare those to these portfolios by web designers:

• 35 Professionally Designed…
• I would specifically highlight Dave Bushell’s portfolio. 

Of course, I know you aren’t all professional designers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from them. You want your digital portfolio to not only showcase your work, but also reveal your ability to frame that work. Organize your work into meaningful categories. Write short but rich descriptions of each project, highlighting its particular successes. Learn to sell yourself. 

Customizing Your Site Design In Square Space

Squarespace provides some documentation for customizing your site design. I want us to get a sense for how to insert a background image. Of course, we are all using different templates, so this will be a bit different for each of us. 

It should be helpful to know the basic CSS command for inserting a background-image:

body
{
background-image:url('paper.gif');
background-color:#cccccc;
}

Of course, we probably won’t be inserting our background image into the body. Also, there’s the matter of whether we are targeting a local file (as in the example above, targeting “paper.gif’), or an image on the internet (which would require a URL, and would require that the image we want to use is on the net someplace). 

I’m going to work with this skyline image in class (you are welcome to use your own). 

Today we want to get started working with Adobe Premiere. While the basics of Premiere are similar to programs we have already used, such as Moviemaker and iMovie, Premiere offers a much deeper experience (and a much steeper learning curve). 

Getting a Handle on the Basics

RampantMedia offers a succinct but comprehensive introduction to Premiere’s interface and basic tools: