Borrowman discusses his writing process through place and through writing technology. He pulled his title from this sentences: “a range of scholars ask and answer questions that matter about technologies that walked the cutting edge to bluntness” (xi). Borrowman also discusses the use of papyrus as a permeant writing surface in Greece. He notes that the pages would be rolled so that it would be unrolled and unrolled every time it was read. “When scholars wanted to locate a particular passage in a work, it would be necessary to unroll the papyrus until the passage was located, reread and perhaps copy the passage, and then reroll the scroll…The wear and tear this would cause is clear, and thus it is not surprising that two scholars quoting from the same source would differ widely – even wildly – both from one another and from the original: better to rely on sometimes faulty memory for a quotation than to move a manuscript one unroll and one reroll closer to destruction” (xvi).
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Enos argues that scholarship has mostly focused on the “best of writing” in Athens, so he wants to look at “everyday, functional rhetoric” (4). He looks at four categories of pragmatic writing:
In ancient Greece and Rome, “getting students to school is no trivial matter; there needs to be sound infrastructure and accouterments of travel…Unquestionably, the history of the literate mind – the history of rhetorical education – is caught up inextricably with the history of transportation (and all the equipment necessary for traveling) whether it means getting the student to the teacher, the teacher to the student, or both to a common locality…In order for the educative process to occur (no matter what the medium), three elements – the student, the teacher, and the facility – must converge” (15). Schooling began in the home and eventually, as scholars began traveling, schooling moved outside the home. This came with the issues of safety and equipment needs to for traveling on foot and by sea. The technologies required included improvements on shoes and roads and the use of the walking stick. For safety, students traveling short distances walked with a procession. “As well as a security benefit, there was a pedagogical benefit to the procession. The procession allowed the student some time to prepare himself mentally for the rigor of the school day” (19). Fredrick emphasizes that travel is still important to rhetorical education, though there are now options for education to occur across distances. He wonders though “whether the convergence of the student and a live mentor is an integral part of education” (27).
Rawnsley asserts, “Writing technology did not develop as a result of benevolent and philanthropic [art and philosophy] proposes, but was the result of market conditions that simulated creative minds to develop ever more productive ways to write and reproduce written material for profit” (30). “If there is no economic incentive to keep a technology extant, any technological innovation reaches a standstill and ceases to exist” (34). “Understanding the true stimuli for the development of writing technology helps us better see the eventual benefits it holds for our students” (30). He defines writing machines: “Simply put, writing machines are different from [other writing technology] because they supply an essentially unlimited supply of letters and/or symbols to the writer without the necessity of the writer creating each individual character [by hand], and they generally reproduce texts in a mutable fashion for revision and editing before final output or transmission through electronic media” (33). “The success of writing machines since the invention of movable type requires improvements in the speed or convenience of input and/or text manipulation [revision and editing capabilities] to be successful” (36). Also, because these are “machines of convenience and efficiency, so the development of an efficient inputting system that did not require too much time to learn, or too much time and energy to operate, was important to their intended function” (44).
Fullmer maintains, “For many educators, the typewriter embodied both a means and a method for improving learning and teaching. A method of teaching characterized by a ‘form-al’ approach to writing instruction – with emphasis being on the form of letters, the form of paragraphs and sentences, and the form of accepted styles and models” (53). The typewriter, in other words, was used to continue and facilitate current teaching pedagogies rather than to bring in new ones. Also, he shoes how social ideology influences pedagogy and how technology is used in the classroom: “Mowry’s rhetoric reverberates with industrialist ideology…Following form-alist pedagogy, the entire class becomes a well-oiled machine, rhythmically reproducing sentence after sentence after sentence” (63). This use of the typewriter, then, mimics assembly lines. To sum up, he writes that “‘technology is subservient to values established in other social spheres…, that technology is a tool society uses in various ways to support existing cultural practices, and that technology influences and creates epistemological and ontological aspects of society” (69).
Yancey looks at handwriting as “a way to define and reveal the self” and as an attempt at “corralling the masses” (75). In terms of the latter, she articulates that handwriting was a method of controlling the body in order to control the person, much like Foucault’s docile bodies. She states that “handwriting was writing, an equation whose implementation yoked one’s ability to form correct letters to one’s ability to compose” (76). The assumption was that if one could not write attractively, then one did not have something to say. She concludes by stating that “like other artifacts and behaviors, handwriting is shaped by culture…[and] the force of handwriting, its power as a technology shapes us” as individual people (82).
In the early to mid 1900s, secondary English teachers were work toward professionalizing their identities and to break away from the idea that secondary school is only meant as preparation for college. “An aspect of establishing a professional identity includes determining and claiming what is necessary to do one’s work, and high school teachers’ appropriation of emerging audio-visual technologies reflected their move toward a fuller professional identity” (88). “Audio-visual aids were vaunted as a means of capturing student attention, showing them sights they’d never see, and providing them images from books they showed little interested in” (91). They were also used as a means of “cultivating ‘proper taste’” (91). “What often occurs when teachers defensively appropriate new technologies, however, is that they minimize many of the creative possibilities of those technologies by using them primarily as additions to existing, conservative teaching practices and curricula…In other words, teachers often used audio-visual aids to act upon, rather than interact with, students” (92).
Rankins and Roen examine the important texts from the classical period to the present. They argue, “Textbooks include language that facilitates the communication of the values and practices of discourse communities, of whole cultures…As such, they often encapsulate the standard wisdom of the day” (98). We can study these textbooks, then, to gain a sense of the values and practices of particular time periods.
The authors examine the field’s leading journals for the ways in which non-computer technology is discussed. They come to two conclusions: “First, and probably foremost, the discussion is not uniform across the discipline. In certain journals the discussions of technology is almost nonexistent, while others, generally those considered more pedagogy-based, the discussion of technology is continuous and thorough. Second, we noted that frequently teachers and scholars explained the use of a particular technology in the classroom without examining the impacts of that technology on their individual theories or on the field’s collective praxis” (116).
Thompson and Enos “posit…first a way of seeing (the palimpsest), next, a way of reading (the embrace of ambiguity), and last a way of writing (ingenium and Corder’s generative ethos)…We propose that kairotic ethos is comprised of the following components:
DeVoss, Danielle. “Mothers and Daughters of Digital Invention.” The New Work of Composing.6/21/2015 DeVoss “explor[es] the ways in which women (and, in some cases, their intellectual property) are at risk in digital public spaces and the ways in which women are taking hold of these spaces to craft new products, make new knowledge, and contribute to a robust new media landscape. The implications of this constellation point toward the ways in which digital networks potentially provide a space where women make new knowledge; identify and craft affiliations with other producers; and anchor themselves as creators, writers, and artists.”
First, she lists four themes from scholarship on women and technology:
She wants to look ways “women are deliberately avoiding the formal, official, and legal systems in crafting and sharing their work. We have more ability to do so today and to make that work distributed and visible in part because of contemporary digital tools and networked spaces.” She argues, “Sites like Facebook, and, moreso, 30reasons, are interesting and problematic because when users post materials to social networking sites, they lose some control of that content—technically and legally. It can be downloaded, otherwise stored, and tagged by other users. And, obviously, just because someone clicks the checkbox indicating that they have permission to upload a photo doesn’t mean they actually do—or that there are any repercussions for behaving as if they do. Likewise, the content uploaded can be databased and archived indefinitely by the sites themselves…At the same time that control and ownership over women’s bodies, voices, and representations must be addressed, we can’t—nor should we—commit all of our energy to critiques and warnings. To enact a progressive feminist agenda in digital spaces, especially where intellectual property issues are concerned, it’s crucial that scholars and researchers also adopt an approach where attention is paid to fissures in the digital intellectual property regime, and how women multimedia authors are exploiting those fissures.” On another note, Howard Besser makes an interesting claim about the digital divide: “the next digital divide…is the divide between those who merely use digital spaces and those who produce, those who have the rhetorical and technical agency to not only consume digital media, but produce, share, and publish digital media.” **This is a fairly standard webtext – a kind of print text split into pages. The digital lets her add images, videos, and links, but none of the lines connect content from page to page. They either send the reader further into one of the pages or outside the webtext. Garrett, Landrum-Geyer and Palmeri make claims about invention, particularly that invention is juxtaposition, embodied and social.
Invention is juxtaposition
Invention is embodied
Invention is social
The authors also claim:
**This webtext makes use of video, video and audio recorded dialogue, and audio overlapped in video. Scholarship is presented in linear text under the opening videos. George, Lawson and Lockridge argue, “Linearity, quite frankly, has become our latest taboo.” In a linear text, they explain, the author “tell[s] readers what they are supposed to get out of the article, what’s important, and in what order those ideas should be read. They provide a kind of summary of the argument.” However, the authors write, “To fixate on the linear, we would argue, misses the point of what it means to compose and produce texts using the technologies currently available -- not to mention those that will inevitably replace what we have to work with today…[T]he new work of composing and production, like the old, is deeply and should be consciously rhetorical. It is not enough to admire (or study) new media as objects of inquiry or poetics. We must perform the work of rhetoricians. Any given composition is not good or bad, relevant or not, by virtue of the way it embraces or shuns linearity. Rather, relevance is (as it has always been) determined by using the most appropriate medium and genre in the most appropriate manner available given a contingent audience, purpose, and rhetorical situation.”
“The ‘new work of composition and production’…is far more complex than knowing how to handle the latest digital technology. The new work of composing, like the old work of composing, is about deciding what you want a text to do, what audience you want to reach, and where and how you want that text to appear. More than that, the new work of composing is about responsibility: understanding new technologies’ countless possibilities as well as its limits…This new work, then, isn’t focused on the technologies of production, but rather the ways in which we apply those technologies.” They also call for more scholarship by asking, “What, we would ask, are our responsibilities with the new work of composing, and how might we see those responsibilities as opportunities to understand more about composition and production of all sorts?” Additionally, the authors explain the reading has always been hypertextual because readers jump around the page and, occasionally, around the entire text. Thereby, “[i[f the new work of composing is hypertextual, the new work of reading is much like the old work of reading -- highly individualized and often unpredictable.” **This text is linear, very literally. It have arrows that allows the reader to move the pages up or down, rather than moving side to side like maybe webtexts. Ralston argues that “place, or at least the narration of place, moved to the screen as social media designers and founders picked up on users’ identification with place and communities built around places and neighborhoods. This webtext explores how we, as social media users, compose ourselves through place narratives, narratives that take the form of hyperlocal content.” Neighborhoods are typically built less on geographic location and more on similar affinities and interest; neighbors, in this sense, build identities together. Neighborhoods, she argues, “gives users a sense of place, of belonging, but it also motivates users to connect to others and to contribute to social media in significant ways…In/on/through social media, identity is defined through relationships, collaboration, and participation. Therefore, using neighborhood as a metaphor conveys the kind of comfort and intimacy necessary for users to create relationships, to participate in and share themselves with digital communities. As a metaphor, neighborhood evokes community, familiarity, shared space, and often an assumption of shared values.” She also explains that the digital allows people to intensive their collective identities because they can spread out over multiple locations – having the same friends on Facebook and on Twitter, for instance.
Finally, Ralston argues that “user-generated content is part of the reputation economy. In a reputation economy, users work (generate content, archive information, collect links, providing troubleshooting advice) for reputational rather than economic gain. Social reputations are contextual and complex, particularly for members of a group or community. A reputation economy works as part of what Pierre Bourdieu called social capital. Social capital describes the circumstances in which individuals can use membership in groups and networks to secure some kind of benefit.” **This webtext is a blog, full of hyperlinks between posts and to outside spaces. It allows multiple ways of reading through tags and through chronology. Part of the purpose of this edited collection is to discover how “print books work transferable (or not) to digital books.” So, the editors think of the book in three ways: the book as a material object, the book as a technology, and the book as a genre.
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