Response to Lessing's Remix

First, provide at least TWO questions about/around/surrounding Lessig you want to discuss in class (realizing your peers may respond as well). Second, and this is purposefully very open, what do you think so far of Lessig's points?

Question 1: How will the merger between RO and RW change the way that we approach the teaching of writing? Will we work to add to Selfe’s idea of composing in different modalities with a sprinkle of what Johnson-Eilola speaks about in regards to synthesis/articulation?

Question 2: In his discussion about RW as important, Lessing says, “It is the history of literacy --- the capacity to understand, which comes from not just passively listening, but also from writing” (106). To me, Lessing gives much credit to writing, but what about listening? What about hearing? As teachers and future teachers, what do we really count as literacy?

Lessing’s discussions about RO (read only) and RW (read/write) cultures are provocative because he brings up so many relatively current online spaces that participate in what he calls “sharing economies.” From Flickr to Wikipedia, Lessing outlines how people use these spaces, “people participate in the economy are terms not centered on cash. In each, the work that others might share is never shared for the money” (172). His reasoning is that people simply want to; these people have a desire to be intellectually simulated and sharing helps to curve the craving (173). I am not sure that I buy this idea of intellectual stimulation. It sounds more like control to me (and I don’t mean it in a bad way). Really, I think that those who are able to change or add to a database in a significant way are trying to control how they are viewed. They are trying to leave a digital mark or footprint for others to see. I guess that if we think about the function of academia, particularly at a research university, we work to gain some type of footing, too. We are told to present at conferences, to try to publish, and to make a name for ourselves. I’m sure that we are here for intellectual stimulation, too, but that is not all. In other words, I think that Lessing is being a bit modest with this idea of sharing communities. Even if there is no immediate monetary gain, people participate for more than just intellectual stimulation (or we could say that they participate for different types of stimulation).

The chapter that begins with hybrid economies (ones that marry to commercial and the sharing) is interesting as well. One economy cannot exist without the other, Lessing notes, but the differences between the two have to remain the same. One example that he provides is YouTube. I found it thought-provoking that he quotes Tim O’Reilly saying that YouTube’s fame “wasn’t because [people] thought it was cool. It was because YouTube figured out better how to make it viral. Viral is about making it serve the people’s own interest, so that they’re participating without thinking that they’re participating” (qtd. in Lessing 224). So, this idea of thinking, but not, is intriguing to me. Does this mean that people who participate are passive users? Has the notion of thinking been remixed? Is a certain type of thinking only relegated to those who can create/maintain the interface (I am totally thinking of Selfe and Selfe…and Gramsci here). What, then, does critical thinking mean?

Week 5 Post

First, do your best to sum up what you see as the key arguments from these three readings. Second, see if you can make any connections between these key arguments and A) Weinberger, B) any other course readings we've done.


After reading Johnson-Eilola’s piece about symbolic-analytic work/fragmentation/articulation, I have decided to experiment with my blog. The bullet points will serve as my short summaries of the key arguments for the three texts that we’ve read for this week. The rest of my prose will be my attempt at making connections to our previous course readings.

 Johnson-Eilola’s piece, "The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation,” works to show how writing is social and the ways in which intertextuality informs our writing practices. The author posits that articulation theory and symbolic analytic work should be used to explain writing in tangible ways (not as just ideas or abstractions). Johnson-Eilola goes on to talk about how capitalism in regards to copyright/intellectual property has become apart of academia that cannot be denied.


 Sorapure’s article, "Web Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities for Research in a New Medium," speaks about the need for teachers to teach students how to understand, interact, and compose in different modes, particularly when it comes the World Wide Web. The author provides reasons for why students should be permitted to use the Web as a primary source to broaden perspectives about the Web’s potential as a research tool. She also discusses how students should have rhetorical awareness and how the mode impacts the message being sent.


 Sidler’s piece, "Web Research and Genres in Online Databases: When The Glossy Page Disappears," outlines five steps to help teachers encourage and provide meaningful ways to teach students about online research. The author explains how teaching metaphors for research on the World Wide Web could help students become more familiar with how the research process works in academia. She notes that students could look to the Web as a type of “textual marketplace” in which they can shop or evaluate different merchandise.

For me, the three readings coincided with Weinberger in different and important ways. The most significant was Johnson-Eilola article. Her work is relatable to Weinberger’s idea about knowledge and fragmentation. Weinberger notes that “Indeed, we are making knowledge our new currency. But everything touching knowledge and everything knowledge touches is being transformed … Is knowledge being fragmented? Are we being fragmented along with it (200)? This sentiment speaks to Johnson-Eilola’s claim about intertextuality and how writing is very much a social act. Although this notion of fragmentation is often pitched as a postmodern argument (which Johnson-Eilola alludes to) I think that it is important to discuss how interconnected writing is to the social, the political, the economic, and the personal. Even Weinburger speaks of knowledge as currency (as quoted above), and Johnson-Eilola’s writes extensively on how intellectual property battles have become more economic than ever.

Sorapure’s article parallels Adam’s Bank’s discussion in Race, Rhetoric, and Technology and other writers that we have encountered, especially when she says “The Web is unfortunately like the typical academic library, and like most of academia, in that it reflects and perpetuates inequalities of language, nationality, ethnicity, gender, and class. To these biases, the Web adds a heavy dose of capitalist values and consumerism” (348). Sorapure, then, brings up a systemic problem in academia that infiltrates the core of our studies. The issue of critical/meaningful access comes up (in my mind) and the ways in which capitalism (and the other isms that fuel it) cannot be dismissed from how we think about any of the issues that she outlined in the quote.


Sidler’s piece reminded me much Selfe and Selfe’s argument about the interface as a map of capitalism and privilege. Sidler talks about power and how it “comes from the use of space, and even the power ‘to control textual space’ … changing the contexts with which documents are reproduced and as such, the possibilities such texts may have”’ (352). This idea of power, then, controls how certain information is presented and defined in a virtual space. Sidler wants students to use metaphors for understanding their position in a virtual world by looking at themselves as consumers, as people who can shop to evaluate the sources within the online structure.

The connections that I see with these readings all point back to Weinberger’s idea of miscellany/fragmentation/metadata. However, in order to really make strides to see how these things work, I think that our readings are forcing us to confront how capitalism (and other isms that fuel it) work to exclude many demographics. Weinberger talks about how sharing knowledge is important to reaching an understanding, but what if all ideas about what constitute knowledge are not heard? Well, there is a problem. He notes that organizing knowledge will be varied, “Some ways of organizing it—of finding meaning in it---will be grassroots; some will be official. Some will be small groups; some will engender larger groups; some will subvert established groups. Some will be funny; some will be tragic. But it will be the users who decide what the leaves mean” (230). This would be a great idea, a democratic thought in many ways. But, it seems to me that what Weinberger brings up is a continuation of a hierarchy that excludes many voices. I think that we have to be optimistic as teachers about what is happening, but at the same time, we have to be real, too.

Foucault, Selfe, and Ohmann

Describe how Foucault can help us engage with the issues that Ohmann and Selfe raise and/or describe how Foucault can help us with the issues we've discussed so far in 597. In sum, use Foucault as a lens and see where it gets you.

Many things came to mind this week, but Ann Petry’s novel, The Street, is what I thought about most while reading Tuesday’s articles. The protagonist, Lutie, laments throughout the novel “If only I could get a leg up.” It’s a naturalist novel, and I see it as one that has been and continues to be the story for so many people. This “leg up” that Lutie refers to is her inability to pull up her bootstraps, no matter how hard she tries. In a world with changing technologies, she had to resort to extreme measures for her family (which did not prove to be successful for her). I will not regale you with the intricacies of that novel, but my point is that access has always been an issue for those who are not afforded particular opportunities. Cynthia Selfe’s discussion of access to materials is quite lucid as she provides a thorough critique of what counts as literacy in society. She paraphrases Graff as saying “official literacies usually function in a conservative, and reproductive fashion --- in favor of dominant groups and in support of an existing class based system (103). Selfe goes on to say that “the national project to expand technological literacy has not served to reduce illiteracy … rather, it has simply changed the official criteria for both ‘literate’ and illiterate’ individuals, while retaining the basic ratio of both groups” (103). Ohmann concurs with Selfe as he talks about the history of the words literacy and illiteracy, noting that they had a “global and qualitative meaning ---well read and civilized, or the reverse --- rather than indicating a line that divided those who could read and write from those who could not” (20). Thus, history tells us that being well-read was the same a being civilized. So if someone simply read what was available to them, what did that make them? Although the definitions have changed (rather slightly), the fact is that this issue is one of binaries, literate or illiterate, which creates problems that have and will continue to hinder and perpetuate class systems, as was the case with Lutie.

So, there is a real divide that continues to grow with this notion of new literacy, technological literacy. The fact is that division, marginalization, hegemony, power, and social hierarchies have always been around. Foucault in "The Eye of Power" mentions that “power is quite different from and more complicated, dense and pervasive than a set of laws or a state apparatus. It’s impossible to get the development of productive forces characteristic of capitalism if you don’t at the same time have the apparatuses of power” (158). Here again, is this notion of access. So, like Foucault, Selfe and Banks, I see a real divide that did not just start with technology, but serves as the same mechanism that has worked to keep hegemony in place. What we have here is just a remodeled panopiticon used as a “privileged place for experiences on men, and for analyzing the complete certainty the transformations that may be attained from them” (Panopticism 204). This “gaze” is able to watch society and we, as scholars write about the truths that we see. After the damage is done, however, there is always hindsight that says, that was wrong. But, for example, the hundreds of men who were unknowingly injected with syphilis had already suffered and died. My point is that the damage is often realized when it is too late. Now that we have "discovered" that many students are being left behind, what can we do about the students that did not have access to information? In that same vein, what can we do about binaries as the definition of literacy changes as technology changes?

Foucault reinforces that there are problems all around us, not just in academia. However, reading him in conjunction with Selfe and Ohmann did provide a nice sounding board that reaffirms the need for larger view of the past as to understand how structures and teachings are re-inscribed in different ways. As I commented last week, I think that Selfe’s approach is one that is very radical, almost grassroots type of political action. As teachers, she calls on us to appreciate the many literacies that our students bring to the table. We must also be able to show them how to compose in different modalities to best convey their literacy (if that is what they choose) to be able to compete in an changing society. Reading Foucault, at the same time, with Selfe and Ohmann, raises many questions for me, too. How do we change perceptions of what constitutes literacy? How can we, as teachers, provide a space that does not reinforce hierarchies (especially if those hierarchies are the basis of our own profession)? How can teaching with technology work to reinforce Bentham’s panopticon? How do we counter this idea of surveillance, especially if we are involved in writing, recording, and publishing within and out of new media?