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.