I am writing this blog post on Valentine’s Day 2018. It is my first Valentine’s Day as a husband to my wonderful wife, who plays a critical role in this week’s blog post. While we do not usually buy into the hyper-consumerist approach surrounding what would otherwise be just another freezing and frigid day in central Illinois, I was feeling romantic since it was our first Valentine’s Day as a married couple, so I brought home some chocolate covered strawberries last night. After dinner we landed on the couch, turned on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I and divulged in the strawberries. At this point, I did not know my night was going to dominated by the rhetorical agency of algorithms.
My wife directed my attention to a picture of a woman holding a giant champagne bottle and told me Facebook suggested her as a friend. Okay—I thought—what is interesting here? Then my wife showed me another picture on her phone of her with the woman and the giant champagne bottle at a bar on my wife’s birthday. I thought about how best to approach this situation. I had just finished Jessica Reyman’s article, “The Rhetorical Agency of Algorithms” in which she explains how algorithms function to provide “more ‘personalized’ and ‘responsive’ experiences across the web” for users. My understanding of algorithms still in its infancy, I decided to abandon attempting to explain the rhetorical agency of algorithms to my wife. Not because she wouldn’t understand, she is a nurse, and is in fact smarter than me, but because I did not want to come off as a know it all, especially with the strawberries involved. My wife chalked up the coincidence to Big Brother watching, claiming the FBI Agent in her computer must have time share in her cell phone. Alas, I wanted to say something—I was experiencing a kairotic moment I could not pass up. I attempted a brief explanation. Later that night, I was lying in bed scrolling through my Twitter feed (I always ask myself, “What happened to reading a book to go to sleep?” Then I remember, we live in what John David Bolter calls the “late age of print” and I turn back to my zombie-like attention back to my screen, anyway,) I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and I saw a tweet that read: “Two MIT grads wrote an algorithm to match you with wine. Take the quiz to see your matches” and a link: https://www.brightcellars.com/ It was there, so obvious, so blatant. Algorithms. Wine. My wife. What I had to do was clear to me. I immediately tweeted the quiz to my wife. It was not until the next day that I truly understood the dramatic, situational, verbal irony (all the ironies) of my situation. Here I am, a student in a digital rhetoric class who has just read an article about algorithms when my wife brings up an instance where algorithms are obviously manipulating her user experience on the internet. What did I use to explain myself? An article about an algorithm that was presented to me based on algorithms. At least it was about wine, right?
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I begin this blog post by saying I enjoyed the readings for this week. I found all of them accessible and, frankly, quite engaging. The selections from Adam Banks’ text Digital Griots had the greatest influence on me concerning my positionality as a student in this class and as an instructor who continues to develop a pedagogy informed by the implications of accessibility. The title of my thesis, written for my master’s degree program: “credo quia absurdum est: Redistributed Race and the Neo-Soul Aesthetic in the Works of Percival Everett,” was a literature thesis, so my scholarly background is in literature studies. However, once I began teaching, I found myself leaning, often quite heavily, toward the field of rhetoric and composition studies. Now that I have situated myself as a rhetoric and composition scholar in the ISU PhD program who would like to work within the realm digital rhetoric, it was thrilling to read a text which firmly connects to the previous work I have done in the literature realm. In my estimation, the study of digital rhetoric is, to borrow a term from Banks (who he borrows from elsewhere [boom! boom! —a remix]) post-everything, so the connections to my studies in African American literature, and specifically Percival Everett (and Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed)—all author’s I associate with the post-modern tradition—are inherent, blatant, and most of all, welcome. Banks sets out to create a remix which defines the digital griot as well as African American Rhetoric 2.0, His primary sources are Black Theology—highlighted by the meshing of ideologies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, a theological perspective which emphasizes a resistance to the dichotomic—DJ culture and the defining of the DJ as a digital griot, and the work of influential black scholars ranging from Cone to Royster. I believe Banks is successful in his argument. One early highlight in the text is when Banks purposely slips the needle from the record and begins a fiery sermon in the tradition of the Reverend, a crucial figure within the development of African American culture, African American rhetoric, and African American literacy. The Rev (a la Rev Run from Run DMC; for an updated vision, see Aaron McGruder’s transformative televisual cartoon The Boondocks) may be identified as a cultural forefather to the concept of the digital griot Banks posits in his writing. Banks presents his translingual perspective and is dogmatic in his assertion that “at this moment in 2011, anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is a problem for black students…it’s time for those folks to be retired” (Banks, 15). James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. would be proud. As Banks continues throughout his text, his argument reminds me of an article by Ellen Cushman, “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research” which details The Public Intellectual, a term Banks draws upon, as a scholar who develop a pedagogy informed by service learning and activism. One quote from Banks, drawing on Stull, stuck with me as I develop as a rhetoric and composition scholar and writing instructor: “the study of composition can, should, help set the captives free and give sight to the blind” (Banks, 112). I think this quote could serve as a foundational idea for me as an instructor of writing but find myself worried about the implications. That is, by abiding by the quote, am I framing myself as a master of knowledge? A gate-keeper to the truth? This is not the position I take in the classroom—I instead see my role as instructor as simply the facilitator of a space where meaning and knowledge are created collaboratively through intellectual inquiry and productive discourse. (Perhaps my concerns here mimic the “dual consciousness” asserted by W.E.B. DuBois.) The Banks readings are truly transformational in two ways. First, his argument concerning copyright, plagiarism, and intellectual property—all aspects of remixing—dictate further attention due to the constantly evolving landscape of digital technology use in the academy. Second, I am transformed as a scholar. Perhaps it is precocious of me to muse, but further investigation into the marriage of African American rhetoric (and the rhetoric of other systematically marginalized communities) and digital rhetoric is a scholarly place I want to be. Finally, the I am drawing two connections to my own interests and Banks’ text: development of a pedagogy informed by the tenets of The Public Intellectual and the concept of digital heirlooms, both of which Banks addresses. I can not wait to dig further into this work. ARCHIVE FROM MY PREVIOUS WEBSITE
I found the articles for this week extremely engaging, and as someone who continues to develop interest in digital rhetoric and technical communication, I found them helpful in continuing to establish themes and subject-areas of study within the field. Michael Warner’s piece, “Publics and Counter Publics,” while dense, is extremely beneficial to me as a scholar and a teacher. I am teaching ENG 145: Writing in the Academic Disciplines this semester and their first project is a public argument. The assignment calls for the composition of a polemic for the class or opinion editorial for The Vidette, ISU’s student newspaper, or another public forum, possibly digital, in which they wish to publish (even if they do not submit their work for publication). Of course, I want the students to consider rhetorical concepts such as purpose and audience, but Warner’s article has given me so much to think about in terms of how I present the idea of the public argument in the composition classroom with consideration to what a public really is and how publics function in society. I drew a similar connection to “Kairos and the Public Sphere” by David Sheridan, et al. I was thinking as I was reading how to present the different perspectives of Kairos to a class such as my 145 class, for I think they would enjoy discussing the different perceptions of Kairos. Basically, I think the discussion would be more fruitful than the discussions in my 101 or 101.10 classes where I introduce Kairos as a more the “opportune moment.” In expanding the Kairos conversation, students might find more comfort in this assignment as they choose the type of argumentative strategy and the public forum in which to pursue publication. James J. Brown’s work from Ethical Programs also gave me a great deal to think about concerning the ethical implications of digital communities, something which I hope to learn more about as this semester continues. I am glad that these readings are not only enhancing my work as a scholar within the field of rhetoric and composition, but that I am also able to draw parallels to the work I am doing in the composition classroom. Moreover, these ideas are informing my pedagogy, which, in turn, makes me a more engaging, innovative instructor. I mentioned above that Warner’s work was dense, and I stand by my assertion; however, I did appreciate the numerical layout of the different points which define a public. Sheridan et al. and Brown were easier reading, but the ideas presented within were no less enlightening. While I was perusing Brown’s work, I could not help but think of the singer James Brown, due to the similarities in their names. So, to borrow a well-known song lyric from “the Godfather of Soul” James Brown, I feel like now is the time to “Say It Loud”: I think I am a Digital Rhetoric/Technical Communication Scholar. And it feels good to be finding my place in the field of Rhetoric and Composition studies! ARCHIVE FROM MY PREVIOUS WEBSITE.
After the first week of Technology and English Studies, which explores the field of composition and rhetoric studies known as Digital Rhetoric, I thought to myself: "This stuff is so interesting, does anything else even matter?" Of course, I was being facetious. As a first-year PhD student, and a student who had not taken a class in 4 years, I have remained open-minded to the different areas of composition and rhetoric studies to find my niche within the discipline. So, my comment from above does carry a great deal of weight in that I feel a though my interests have narrowed a bit, for now. As a student new to digital rhetoric, I am glad that the readings for this week grounded many of the terms that we will be using in discussion of the different theories, methods, and practices associated with digital rhetoric scholarship. I found interest in the updating the rhetorical canon of delivery to digital delivery in the article “Digital Rhetoric and Public Discourse,” by Laura J. Gurak and Smiljana Antonijevic, specifically in how “digital technologies provide new rhetorical forums where speaker and audience come together without regard for physical distance. Still, delivery does not disappear in cyberspace but rather changes form, developing into digital delivery” (525). I drew a connection between digital delivery as posited by Gurak and Antonijevic to the rhetorical situation as explained by Lloyd Biter, a rhetorician who Douglas Eyman draws upon a great deal in the second chapter of his book Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice. Eyman’s second chapter focuses on the digital rhetorical theory from both a historical perspective and a methodological perspective, and uses “three key elements: exigence, audience, and constraints” of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation to construct a digital rhetorical theoretical methodology. The connection I found was in thinking about how specific exigences, different audiences, and established constraints affect digital delivery and how this shapes our identity. One of the themes I discovered in all of the writings thus far is that many of them focus on identity in some way, such as the separation of the physical identity and the digital identity, or conversely, the meshing of these identities together. I appreciated Hess drawing on Kenneth Burke to form the idea of “technological unconscious consubstantiality” (that is a mouthful) and agree with the author in highlighting identification, not identity. As I worked through these readings, I identified a few of my novice interests in digital rhetoric, of which I hope to explore more this semester. I am interested in how taking part in digital communities forms our identity; I am interested in how digital rhetoric created by digital communities reshapes, reforms, redefines larger social and historical concepts; I am interested in the implications of a pedagogy informed by digital rhetorical methodologies on the composition classroom. Considering the unfortunate reality of the current political landscape of America, it is inspiring to know that early digital rhetoric scholarship was rooted in a discussion around the implications of technology on American politics. |
Charles WoodsPhD student focusing on Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Archives
October 2019
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