] My English 101 teacher didn’t tell us we had to do that [
Warnick, Barbara. Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2007.
I’ve been interested in meetup.com for a couple of years, principally because it helped a good friend of mine get un-depressed by forming some new alliances in his hometown. It also has potential to bring more of rural America to the ‘net, and, for instance, to bring more residents of nearby cities together. Elitism is the exception on Meetup, but I’ll note that one Lexington hiking group refuses any members who are not already participating members of Lexington’s other hiking group. My advisees last year started a Meetup group to get players outside the university to attend their local role-playing games. That’s only unusual because the “townies” were more willing to respond to a meeting within a mile of Richmond’s little downtown by reading about it on-line than they were to respond to flyers posted on telephone poles in the same area. I also know that Meetup has formed its base of employees by capturing defectors from Google. Writers groups exist in Lexington for several genres on Meetup, and they are much more active than, for instance, the Lexington meetings of current and former MFA students with whom I have worked.
( This link by CEO Scott Heiferman explains their hiring mission relative to Google’s. It’s worth looking over. https://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg2z5whw_41cb322p&pli=1 )
While I’m just getting the hang of this, I was interested in Warnick’s assertions about the texts on the Web as wholes where the reader anticipates a single author confiding in a comparatively intimate audience. She uses Barthes to support this argument (48), paralleling the way that texts always emulate and link up to other texts with the intended structure of hypertext. I noted that she seems almost immediately to contradict this (bottom of 48-49) with research she says agrees that web readers do not look for single authorship or even for a unified presentation. She uses that verb from deconstruction, “decentering,” as the action that hyperlinking performs, the work of cross-feeding from multiple texts to create a younger and more specific article on the topic of a web author’s choice. Warnick further employs Barthes to describe the primary (or the more trusted) sources for the knowledge that specific websites pull together: “ ‘... quotations from innumerable centers of culture.’” My concern has been that my students are not able to find those primary sources and judge whether either the primary or the tertiary sources are worthwhile. As they lose the author in a swamp of anecdotal information, they also have no luck establishing the authority of a work. There is no better place than the Web to equalize the authority of sundry writers. In the last five years, in my research experience, it is becoming easier to authenticate works through university libraries, while it has become much harder to track down initial sources for much-quoted material on personal (and professional) homepages.
Two examples from this semester include some lines from Dr. Seuss I was only narrowly able to track down on-line—they were often recycled that no one seemed to know in which book they were written—and the several encyclopedia sites which function by vapidly copying a recent version of a Wikipedia article and placing in on sites with advertising masked as more veritable resources. What takes away those sites’ credibility most quickly is that they don’t offer user editing of the articles.
If my students were earnestly interested this year in tracking down the sources for an encyclopedia article they found on-line, they would soon find that these derivative articles were lifted whole-hog from a wiki. If the information sounds solid and is not credited to a particular person by either source, they would be two-thirds of the way to that heinous rule of thumb: “If you can find it in three sources, it’s common knowledge.” Since neither of those sources had clear authorship (by MLA’s 2009 manual, for instance), they might also assume that a third and credible source existed elsewhere. At the moment, I can explain all these problems to my classes. Project this problem out a couple of years, though, and I doubt that they will have an “academic integrity” to fall back on, or that I will understand the web of cross-referencing involved.
This discussion is related to the way Warnick applied Toulmin outlines to IMDb and medical sites, which section I enjoyed very much. She explains twice that users of IMDb are interested in finding a clear set of information quickly and without accreditation. She does not say that the service is also designed to be accessed through automated scraping services, not just individual users, or that as with the medical field, the users do care that the information be accurate. That raises a good question for any research writer: what is the different between data that is correct and data which is credible?
Since I had a Meetup account but not a Twitter account, I thought I would share these two tutorials:
How to create a Meetup group: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3yLvqYD3XI
Twitter for Business (first in series): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IIKs9QRY-U
Mike O’Neil on Meetup experts in business:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5wS_vanfCI&playnext=1&list=PLF959B61AE70AF8EE
Since deconstruction came up in Warnick, I want to share one of the research resources I use to teach my students about subaltern studies, alterity, gaps, differénce, and decentering.
Just today I went to that site to give a definition that they might understand better than Gayatri Spivak’s:
http://www.logic-classroom.info/study2.htm
Their diagrams allow me to explore a couple of points about logical successes (rather than logical flaws) with them, and they get more out of the diagrams than they do from Derrida.
(I am sorry to the class and to Dr. Adam for not posting this earlier. It was my mistake: I knew to read Warnick, but I thought we were saving the blog entries for later. I look forward to reading the rest of yours. --Glenn)
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