Let Them Lie Before Us

Paul Heilker and Jason King. "The Rhetorics of Online Autism Advocacy." Rhetorics and Technologies. Ed. Stuart Selber. U of South Carolina P, 2010. Print. 113-133.

I’d like to speak exactly to the above article, which I have chosen because we divided articles in part two of Rhetorics and Technologies for this week. Heilker and King made the easily-understood point that people affected by autism, who exhibit a wide range of symptoms which might be broadly classed as communicative anomalies, might be taught to function better within society if they were methodically trained in rhetorical listening practices. Using an analogy from Ratcliffe, the authors of “The Rhetoris of Online Autism Advocacy” suggest that educators invert the term “understanding,” which comes pre-loaded with pathos, to “standing under,” with the connotation that social communication presides over all of us, and we must learn to look up and function within it.

King and Heilker outline the tenets of rhetorical listening with three points:

First, that “rhetorical listening is a trope for invention,” as opposed to just the apprehension of written, spoken, or visual language.

Second, that rhetorical listening is “a stance of openness,” not just a practice.

Third, that rhetorical listening can itself affect change, more so than understand changes (125-6).

Reading the section on Emily Perl Kingsley’s “Welcome to Holland,” regarding Down’s Syndrome, and Rzucidlo’s “Welcome to Beirut,” referring to autism, I was reminded of the situation of a former mentor, SB, of Murray State University. He published a non-fiction piece in the New Madrid journal about his feelings upon finding that his daughter, who came along late in SB’s life, was born with Down’s. The piece is vivid, and it catalogs his emotions standing with his baby carriage on a high bridge over Kenlake Marina in The Land Between the Lakes national recreation area. He seriously considered pushing his daughter over the bridge into the water. I admired his honesty, and I wondered often if his daughter would admire it as much.

My best friend was diagnosed early with autism. His mother became a nurse and stayed home to nurture him into social function. My buddy BW could not talk until he was six, but decades later, he has a BA, works two jobs, admires Victorian and Elizabethan literature, and is of all things a professional actor.

These authors principally wish to convey that rhetorical listening is a practice which involves logos more than pathos, even asserting that positive attention for individuals with autism, which often appears in the media with celebrity figureheads and pathetic stories, have the opposite effect than that desired by the Aspies for Freedom group desires—by eliciting emotional responses for individuals, public attention provides an outlet for feelings rather than inducing listeners to build tension and apprehension that those afflicted with Aspberger’s or autism suffer today—the pressure for a cure (119). Heilker and King make the case, particularly at the end of the article, that autism has progressed and proliferated into a situation of ethos, where a substantial minority of the world population desires ethical treatment.

Their most salient point, in my estimation, asserts that autistics comprise an entire culture, not just a group of individuals. By soliciting emotional responses and requesting sympathy for individual sufferers, we make a series of assumptions:

/- Autism is a pitiable disease, the symptoms of which cause the autistic to suffer in society.

/- Some exceptional subjects of autism develop uncanny mental abilities, aligning them with idiot savants.

/- To be integrated with society, the autistic should be treated as individuals and judged by social criteria.

These authors instead would advocate considering the autistic as a notable contingency of society. They believe that autistics can be addressed as a legitimate segment of the population, rather than as a herd of individuals to be separated, cajoled, and treated.

As a related non-sequitur, I offer a tutorial that partly destroyed my week.

How to (or not to) install a water heater.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFwj0bas6Bk

Soundtrack for Comp Next

Alejandro Escovedo. “Guilty,” from Bourbonitis Blues. 2005.

The Believers. “Railroad Spikes and Shotgun Shells.” From Crashyertown, 2005.

Bruce Springsteen. “Does This Bus Stop at 82^nd Street?” from Greeting from Asbury Park, N.J. 1973.

De Phazz. “Trash Box,” from Death By Chocolate. 2001.

Jim Reeves. “Bolandse Nooientjie,” from Moonlight and Roses. 1964.

Jimi Hendrix. “Radio Once,” from the BBC commercial. 1967/1998.

Nickel Creek. “Out of the Woods,” from the self-titled 2006 (but released earlier).

Otis Redding. “Come to Me,” from Definitive Soul, re-mastered 2006.

Rage Against the Machine. “Guerilla Radio,” from The Battle of Mexico City. 1999.

Shuggie Otis. “Aht Uh Mi Hed,” from Inspiration Information. 2006.

Son Volt. “Loose String, from Trace. 1995.

Soundgarden. “Searching with My Good Eye Closed,” or “Rusty Cage,” from Badmotorfinger. 1991.

Van Morrison. “Give Me My Rapture,” from Poetic Champions Compose. 1987.

Language is to Technology as they are to Culture

Selber, Stuart A. Rhetorics and Technology. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina P, 2010.

We do understand technology as “either an intrinsic or inescapable aspect” of our culture, but I have been trying to figure out whether this qualifies as a “postcritical intellectual stance” (Miller 5). Everywhere I turn I encounter 1) the use of technology, 2) complaints about our (personal) reliance on technology, and 3) complaints about (others') use of technology. More than one of our authors this semester has mentioned that teachers in some schools are not permitted to take away students' cell phones. I have heard two reasons for this: first, that phones are an extension of the student's body, not just personal property; second, that the phone is the student's constant link to the outside world, and that cutting students off from it is a violation of their personal rights. Ignoring for a moment that no one was too worried about my personal justifications fifteen years ago, and that teachers and principals felt quite right to take away my (let's see), pager, PDA, earphones, or cell phone—almost as if I were carrying a cutting torch to school—it seems the problem with cutting off students from technology is worse than just their divided attentions. Assuming that the domain beyond the walls of the school building is “outside” is counter to the foundational ideas of the Academy, the university philosophy, or the ostensible purposes for education. Schools shouldn't have to worry that they will be viewed as their students' jailers. I haven't been to a college which feels like a jail, but I did attend and teach in such a high school. I worry rather that students' attention is divided because they see no motivation to concentrate on the material at hand.

Cooper paraphrases Davydov, “In the process of human anthropogenesis, a break occurred between organic needs and the means of satisfying them, that is, human beings lost their instincts” (17-18). She makes the case that during the Enlightenment, people began to see technology not as a tool or an extension of the body, and instead as a force that, while necessary, is inaccessible and incomprehensible to the population. Enter the idea of the engineer, or today the guru. I believe that Cooper's real argument, using Wittgenstein, Clark, Derrida, and Latour, shows that people use language as a tool and technology as a tool in the same sorts of ways. Wittegenstein's idea of a protolanguage, that the block, pillar, slab, and beam, and the signs that indicated each one to fellow workers, is a form of both technology and language. Language is, in short, our technology.

Technology cannot be viewed simply as a binary, a simple off-and-on, any more than language can be learned or taught simply as speak-or-not-speak, fluent or ignorant. Cooper follows Maturana and Varela in comparing biological evolution and cultural evolution (22), which she believes are both co-evolution. In light of, for instance, Karen's and Craig project in our own class, I'm interested in what makes up cultural evolution, and how it can be compared to constant changes in language and in technology. The most puzzling or provocative excerpt I found in this week's reading comes from Latour, who explains that utterances are like delegations. We send our language out into the world to perform an act on our behalf, rather like a diplomatic mission. His riddle calls human co-evolution a “transcendence that lacks a contrary,” as Cooper points out (24). The question appears to be this: what do we leave behind, for better or for worse, when we evolve as a culture? If there is no “contrary” to transcend, we can assume that evolution only moves us forward, never abandoning practices or knowledge that would be useful in the future. Perhaps I misinterpret. It would be wonderful if cultural, linguistic, or technological evolution proceeded in this straightforward fashion—and if so, we should abandon all conservative or conservationist practices with haste.

I have understood study in general, not just of history, but of language (hurry before it becomes extinct), culture (hurry before it becomes extinct), or technology (don't leave that most innovative idea in the dust), as a balance between development of new ideas and the development of existing ideas. This is why the “design approach” to communications seems important: it integrates what we already know of communication with the body and with technology to create 1) more texts, which are 2) more readable, by 3) a greater variety of readers. Johnson-Eilola points out, “Reading is no longer the invisible consumption of text but a semipublic performance” (53 ), and that is thanks to technology. We are so surveilled, so involved, and so interconnected that the most solitary activity has become a chance for community.

Tutorial:
I know very little about video composition or editing. This many-part guide has a great deal of information I could stand to learn—and practice.

http://lifehacker.com/#!5785558/the-basics-of-video-editing-the-complete-guide

Eilola on Techno/Composition

Compo-Techno-sition?

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Among Texts.” Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2010. Print. 33-55.

“” “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004. Print. 199-236.

"We have passed up that view of technology as a tool from classical times, passed up the Enlightenment view of technology as alien and separate from human bodies and human minds, and arrived in a space where people view technology as part and parcel of the body, mediums, and learning” (Marilyn Cooper in “Being Linked to the Matrix” 29).

I was fascinated by this post-industrial version of our interaction with technology, because I can scarcely sense the way that a late-nineteenth century or early-twentieth century worker would view the emergine machines. We have come to view technology as not a time-saver or a crutch but a connective tissue, a lifeline, a bug-out kit. I thought I would write a little bit about the Johnson-Eilola chapters—in Writing New Media “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation,” because that was my chapter to study for last week, and in Rhetorics & Technology “Among Texts,” because I enjoyed that chapter even more.

Eilola makes a straightforward list of emergent forms of writing from pp.213-225, including blogs, databases and search engines which I would put in a single category, and nonlinear media editing and web architectures, both of which we have experimented with a bit already in our class.

The chance for us to teach rhetoric (or speech, design, or literature) through new technologies depends on our ability to get students to work through those texts as neither producers _nor_ consumers, but instead as readers and analysts of a medium for which there is no teaching precedent--Writing New Media offers new theories, whether systems theory or aesthetic theory, but also gives teachers of new readers exploratory tools of pedagogy, so that we can all come to the experiment with competence.

Eilola surmises that postmodernism allows any object or idea to be treated as pages of a book; He then quotes Geoffery Rockwell's idea: "What if we treat pages as matter?" (AT 34 ). People can write books about anything, but not every object can be a book. Films are regarded as texts, and the definitions of literacy have expanded beyond reasonable bounds but with solid justifications. Everything I can think of on the Web falls pretty easily into both modern and traditional definitions of texts. Proposing that pages can be treated as matter sounds asinine, and Eilola knows it. Pages obviously are matter, but they are also ideally transparent, with the text representing both with its medium and beyond it. New Media, we were told last week, is a text which does not discount its own materiality—and this is where Eilola is heading. If pages are physical matter, and technology is a physical medium, then what we produce on-screen has the ability to make itself as invisible as any written text—to give meaning without materiality, but with a conscious design of the way that window is framed.

Discussing informatics and explaining the potential for spimes, Eilola takes stock to say, “Books are wondrous things, but ultimately they do not do what we want them to do” (AT 34). I responded to his earlier reference to postmodernism and this about books, in terms of my classroom experience,

Books matter

All by themselves,
They leave no child behind
And every child has to have a computer
And access to a library, but every child does not have to have a book.
Books are what political organizations pass out for propaganda.
They are full of dogma, and handing them to children makes an action committee look better.
So we don’t need computers in books or books in technology, but we do need ideas dispersed.
Because matter is books, we think.
We all need access, and our children need access, but
Children don’t have to learn to love a book
And books we can safely leave behind

How would I make this sound if I were spinning records?

First line a cappella but not just spoken, then

Harmony the whole way.
Bass arpeggio will carry the rhythm
(I'm imagining 1-3b-5, 7-2-4, 1-3b-5, 5-7-1 %)
(In C that's roughly Am G Am G(E) arpeggios)
All major scale (some 7ths)
I imagine beats falling synchronously with the last words of lines.
Music drops out in the last line, but harmonies stay.

I have more to say about “The Database and the Essay,” and Eilola's interesting way of addressing search engines as texts, if we have a chance to talk about it in class.

Tutorial:

I was interested in this tutorial, because I often have my students with cell-phone cameras take a picture of the blackboard or whiteboard, which usually contain lists or charts of what my students think of the lesson—which I could type up, but which I also think the students will remember better with the original graphics intact. I have been considering using video for a similar purpose, but without setting up a tripod, I suspect any text would be entirely too hard to read.

This video explains how Youtube's built-in editor can un-shake such videos for us.

http://lifehacker.com/#!5786091/stabilize-your-handheld-videos-with-youtube

Project Proposal: The Impact of Creative Commons Licensing on Composition

In the midst of the 1995-2005 free-for-all of copyright violation, where end-users by and large felt justified in copying music and texts rampantly, lawyer and author Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons. Its purpose was to encourage authors, performing artists, academics, and film producers to share their own creative work to the extent that they wished to share it, while feeling secure in the protection of those writers' rights they wished to maintain. With my project, I want to perform two operations: to make a reference article for those educators who are interested in employing materials protected by these new forms of copyright, including licensing their own classroom materials; the second task will show how Creative Commons, the next stage of evolution in both our laws and the cultural conception of the artist, can influence both the teaching of writing and the production of compositions.

Bas Bloemsaat and Pieter Klave, in their article “Creative Commons: A business model for products nobody wants to buy,” that since Creative Commons licenses are not legally sanctioned internationally, a plagiarist feels free to violate CC licenses with impunity (248). I disagree that art projects offered “to the commons,” in Lessig's terms, are those that are otherwise unwanted and unpublishable. Bloemsaat and Klave worry that an ill-intentioned distributor could apply for a CC license on works belonging to others (248). This demonstrates a misunderstanding of the legal basis for Creative Commons, but more importantly, it spreads the word that CC licensure is not safe or profitable for writers and artists.

Henry Jenkins' work argues for a change in the U.S. copyright law that appeals not to mass culture and its capitalist aspirations, but to the folk culture that had arisen by the end of the twentieth century. He recognizes that the masses have always influenced the style and marketing of artists; he also believes that media consumers are engaging with texts in a manner that is incompatible with rigid copyrights pre-dating the establishment of this country. In the heyday of Napster, according to Jenkins, when millions of listeners and readers copied texts to their hearts' content, “nobody minded, really” (140-141). With the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, publishers and artists' unions such as BMI-ASCAAP sought to solidify copyrights that “should last forever” (141).

Jenkins encourages us to view those consumers of texts who also produce texts as “contributors” rather than “pirates” (198-9). He carefully distinguishes between the types of Fair Use which were deemed legally appropriate, with particular attention to the different between derivative work without defensible purpose and parodic interpretations, which change the thrust of a work sufficiently to become works in themselves. This seems particularly germane to a composition teacher, since one quite well-known traditional composition assignment includes studying the irony in Swift's “A Modest Proposal” and emulating it in the very first essay for a freshman composition class.

Lessig claims the U.S. Constitution does not mention IP, intellectual property, but does mention 'exclusive rights' to 'writings and discoveries,' which Lessig refers to as monopolies (260). I’m not at all clear on how writings and discoveries are monopolies, even if one holds exclusive rights to the ideas within them.

I am convinced that today's college freshman is familiar with many forms of copying and copyright violation, from cutting-and-pasting, manipulating bibliography pages to avoid the detection of piracy, and which peer-to-peer programs offer the greatest selection of (illegally) shared music. My students today were about ten years old when colleges nationwide banned the use of resident P2P programs on the college network. They grew up, in other words, half in the years of piracy, but for the last half of their lives, they have seen instead a proportional increase in copyright control and threatening language as a preface to every textual medium. Universities mandate the printing of similar messages on every syllabus.

This attitude appears outdated, hegemonic, and flailing, futile, perhaps pitiful. While I don't agree with Lessig that the younger generation has been demonized by Interpol, the FCC, and BMI-ASCAAP, I do believe that a productive approach to derivative texts is 1) traditional, 2) effective, and 3) may be harnessed in newer and more fruitful ways than we are currently exercising in the classroom. It has worked in music, it has produced academia as we know it, and it will work for creative writers in ways we have yet to imagine.

I plan to begin with questions of piracy and plagiarism, as music careers and college composition courses so often do. For instance: claiming not to have written something I did write is plagiarism.

Today authors are sued for plagiarism, but in the past, publishers were held responsible (even through James Frey's notable case from 2003-2005. Publishers are held responsible for their artists' plagiarism. This was true five years ago in UK's CATS Center, where the facility was enmired in problems when a paid tutor helped a funded student write a paper a bit too much.

Emily Apter, in her article “What is Yours, Ours, and Mine,” traces the questions of plagiarism through the history of literature. After developing that history, Apter asks a series of poignant questions in the end of her 2008 article. Hers question are effectively those I wish to answer with my project, with respect to composition: “How will knowledge production be

affected by the shrinking field of free intellectual property at the very moment

when planetary access to the open source has expanded and when apparitions

of anonymous, de-owned, collective intellectual property (blogs, Wikipedia,

group art) are legion?” She does not venture to answer these questions, but the hermeneutic Apter sets up will serve to guide my essay.

Working Bibliography

Apter, Emily. “What is Yours, Ours, and Mine: Authorial Ownership and the Creative Commons*.” October [magazine] 126 (2008): 91-114. Print.

Bairstow, Jeff. “Great ideas and digital barbarism.” LaserFocusWorld (June 2009): 96. Web. 5 Apr. 2011. .

Binder, Terry, Eva Brandt, and Judith Gregory. “Design Participation (-s) – a creative commons for ongoing change.” CoDesign 4.2 (2008): 79-83. Print.

Bloemsaat, Bas and Pieter Kleve. “Creative Commons: A business model for products nobody wants to buy.” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 23.3 (2009): 237-249. Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group. Print.

Buranen, Lise and Alice M. Roy, Eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany, New York: SUNY P, 1999. Print.

Coley, Gerald. [Texas Instruments.] “Take Advantage of Open-source Hardware.” EDN 20 Aug. 2009): 20-23. Print.

Doctorow, Cory. “With a Little Help.” Publishers Weekly 19 Oct. 2009: 28-31. Print.

Flew, Terry. “Sovereignty and Software: Rethinking cultural policy in a global creative economy.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 11.3 (2005): 243-260. Print.

Geach, Neal. [University of Hertfordshire.] “The future of copyright in the age of convergence: Is a new approach needed for the new media world?” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 23.1-2 (2009): 131-142. Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group. Print.

Hilton, John III and David A. Wiley. [Brigham Young University.] “The Creation and Use of Open Educational Resources in Christian Higher Education.” Christian Higher Education 9 (2010): 49-59. Print.

Jones, Richard. “Technology and the cultural appropriation of music.” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 23.1-2 (2009): 109-122. Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group. Print.

Jones, Richard and Euan Cameron. “Full Fat, Semi-skimmed, or No Milk Today – Creative Commons Licenses and English Folk Music.” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 19.3 (2005): 259-275. Print.

Kelty, Christopher M. [Rice University, Houston, Texas.] “Culture's Open Sources: Punt to Culture.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (2004): 547-558. Print.

Kleinman, Molly. “The Beauty of 'Some Rights Reserved': Introducint Creative Commons to librarians, faculty, and students.” College & Research Libraries News [C&RL News] 69.10 (Nov. 2008): 594-7.

Leaver, Tama. “Book Review: Brian Fitzgerald (ed.), Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons.” CATLyst 1 (May 2007): 33.

Leaver, Tama. [Curtin University, Australia.] “Creative Commons: An Overview for Educators.” Screen Education 50 (2008): 38-42. Print.

Marandola, Marco. “El Sistema de las Creative Commons.” El profesional de la información 14.4 (2005): 285-289. Print.

Meyer, Katrina A. [University of Memphis.] “What's Yours is Mine: An Investigation of Current Copyright Policies of Education Journals.” Innovative Higher Education 34 (2008): 3-18. Springer Science + Business Media, LLC. Print.

Salpeter, Judy. “The New Rules of Copyright.” Tech & Learning 15 Oct. 2008: 33-36. Web. 4 Apr. 2011. <www.techlearning.com/article/14522/>.

Valenza, Joyce Kasman. “Opening Gates: On Celebrating Creative Commons and Flexing the Fair Use Muscle.” Library Media Connection Jan./Feb. 2009: 30-32.

Valenza, Joyce Kasman. “Tools of the Trade: Creative Commons.” Library Media Connection Jan./Feb. 2009: 50.

Yoshida, Junko. “Creative Commons.” Electronic Engineering Times 3 Mar. 2008: 60. Proquest Computing. Web. <www.eetimes.com/>.