Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2008 Reader/Writer/Text: Katherine Hayles and 21st Century Composition Rebecca Furlow Skinner

Follow this and additional works at the FSU . For more , please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

READER/WRITER/TEXT: KATHERINE HAYLES

AND 21ST CENTURY COMPOSITION

By

REBECCA FURLOW SKINNER

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2008

The members of this Committee approve the Thesis of Rebecca Furlow Skinner Defended on November 3, 2008.

______Kathleen Yancey Professor Directing Thesis

______Kristie Fleckenstein Committee Member

______Douglas Fowler Committee Member

Approved:

______Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English

______Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii

In loving memory of Anne Donaldson, my Honors

English teacher. She recognized a rebellious tenth grader who was worth educating. And to Ben Thompson, of Antioch College,

who offered invaluable insights into the Learner and the

Learning Process.

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Kathleen Yancey, whose razor-sharp criticism and unflappable optimism were so helpful in this project. I’d also like to thank Kristie Fleckenstein for her crystal clear grasp of argument; what it is, and what it is not-at-all, if done poorly. Thank you again for helping me hone mine. Michael Neal provided me with a larger context, by deepening my understanding of the history of research methods used in the rich and evolving discipline of Composition. I am honored to be associated with the program in and Composition at Florida State University.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... vi

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

1. CHAPTER 1: THE REVIEW...... 6

Literature...... 6 Key Terms...... 13

2. CHAPTER 2: PRINT...... 21

Study I: Computers and Composition...... 21 Analysis...... 30

3. CHAPTER 3: ONLINE………………………………………………………………………41

Study II: Computers and Composition Online...... 41 Analysis...... 56

CONCLUSION...... 61

WORKS CITED ...... 67

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 70

v ABSTRACT

READER/WRITER/TEXT: KATHERINE HAYLES AND 21st CENTURY COMPOSITION An examination of three major works by Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, and Informatics (1999); Writing Machines (2002); and My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005). These deal mainly with the materiality of reader/writer/text; formations of identity and subjectivity in the digital age; and with the history of Information theory as it relates to epistemologies of the posthuman. I argue that the key terms: materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology, found in these books, are crucial to understanding the digital revolution, and that Katherine Hayles’ work is invaluable to 21st century , as we seek to orient ourselves in the landscape of electronically mediated discourse. To illustrate this I apply these terms as a critical lens to different instantiations of a refereed journal: Computers and Composition (print; Volume 23.1: March 2006)) and Computers and Composition Online (Spring 2006) and show where Hayles’ ideas appear or do not appear across these platforms. I look at the contrast between in these examples of discourse about, and with computer mediated forms. I conclude that Katherine Hayles gives us new ways of seeing these key terms, and that they can be used to understand and explore the digitally networked territories that Composition studies will inhabit in the 21st century, also called the era of the “posthuman.”

vi Reader/ Writer/ Text:Katherine Hayles and 21st Century Composition “Eventually, everything connects.” Charles Eames

INTRODUCTION

What are the questions facing us as the discipline of composition studies moves into the 21st century? The main questions concern the human-machine interface. What does this new configuration of readers/ writers/ texts mean for the practice of writing, the teaching of the practice of writing, and for the ways that the reception and production of texts in the 21st century will help to construct our identities as literate citizens? The shift from print-centered to digital modes of communication signals a need to rethink our most basic assumptions about information and knowledge. How might Kathryn Hayles’ work, which examines this human machine interface, contribute to composition studies? Does she offer terms that help us orient ourselves in unfamiliar territory? Yes, and I argue that Kathryn Hayles give us containers to put new works in, something like a portmanteau, or a Mary Poppins bag of innovative devices with which to examine the changes that are upon us. Hayles addresses the materiality of texts, the human identity/ subjectivity issue, and the larger frames, or epistemologies, of 21st century communication practices in helpful ways. If the author is dead, and has morphed into a cyborgian amalgam of human and machine, and if texts no longer represent the disembodied transparency of words on a page, devoid of design and separate from context, are we made less human by this? Seventeenth century Enlightenment subjectivity held the position that words were a transparent medium; it was all about the content, and ideas were bodiless. (We were still aligned with Plato, and striving for abstract and ideal dissemination of pure thought.) Could the human/ machine interface reproduce the liberal subjectivity of brain-in-a-jar text producers? Since our subjectivity shifted in the Enlightenment to an objectivist view of the universe, knowledge became something that was both pure and verifiable. In the print tradition, considerations of design were an affront, a gimmick, and a side show. Contextual considerations of gender, race and sexuality were long

1 deemed a muddying of the waters. Then post-modernism happened—The Beatles and Derrida, everything once stable was interrogated and de-constructed. Composition as a discipline saw a resurgence in the turbulent 1970’s, and has picked among the post-modern fragments for 40 years, lobbing theories first one way then another--guide students to go within to find self-expression and authenticity—then, accumulate data from them to claim professional credibility and academic respect. From Bakhtin we understood that language is a bridge, and with Burke, most agreed, that all writing is local and situated. Yet, today, our sense of self (identity) and those constructions of subjectivity remain incoherent and fragmented, as new configurations of reader/ writer/ text enabled by digitally mediated forms of communication, including concepts of virtuality, collaborative intelligence, and distributed cognition, complicate the already confused picture of, now, 21st century sensibilities. Just who are we now? The world is changing so rapidly; borders are shifting, populations are shifting, weather is different, ice is melting, the dinosaur juice is almost gone--- it feels like time itself is running out. It is crucial to ask: who would we like to be? Can we envision ourselves, and our human enterprise, 25 years, or even 50 years hence? New technological realities of connectivity and speed are changing global politics, societies, economies and cultures, notwithstanding the frames of rhetoric and composition: methods of arrangement, style, delivery, memory and invention are going digital, and of course this affects what we mean when we talk about voice, audience, author, reader, teacher and text. We are re-ordering priorities, changing our subject position, and indeed questioning the relevance of academia and its longstanding attitudes about who, what, where, when, why and how we learn. Our purpose as educators is still to help produce the good (hu)man speaking, (writing, communicating) well. To foster the development of engaged, critically informed citizens capable of processing information and participating in a 21st century democracy we must interrogate the shifting frames through which we understand and culture. Since the ancient Greek roots of the academy and through ecclesiastical influences of succeeding centuries we have grappled with the larger goal and purpose of education. Now, more than ever, we must consider the means and materiality of communication practices.

2 Just who is “speaking” -- who the rhetor, when we compose? Who is our audience and what is the means of delivery? What does it mean for education that we now have instant access to much of our archived knowledge? Plato would no doubt find all of this astounding, and having warned us that writing was an Egyptian to steal our memory, would be absolutely stunned by the six gigabyte jump drive in a teenager’s pocket. We are capable now of invention that draws from the repositories of all of our history, and we educators must encourage a broader perspective, and facilitate the means to draw from this knowledge if readers/ writers/ texts are to be equipped to tackle 21st century problems. After the print revolution settled down and mass-produced texts –- words on a page-- became the standard way of receiving and disseminating ideas, we rocked along that road for several hundred years. The look of the text was downplayed, the body of the author discounted, the site of reception immaterial. Closed between the covers of a book our conventions were tailored to that mode. Now, after television and most emphatically, after the internet and the proliferation of computers, we must ask ourselves again: What is the goal and purpose of education, of communication in the New Millennium? What is ahead for human society, given the changes digital technology brings daily to human culture, and the simultaneous changes in our planetary systems? We must resituate our texts and ourselves in this new landscape, and in order to do that we must have tools to navigate by and to orient with. Our students must become aware of themselves as collaborators, primarily, and as co-creators of solutions; this is the epistemology, or cultural frame they must inhabit if they are to accommodate the future. When we think of evolving new forms of subjectivity, we are leaving the liberal Enlightenment (disembodied – de-contextualized – white male) subject behind. But what does it mean to say we are now “posthuman”? Kathryn Hayles asks these questions of us, and of our . She has been working in this arena for 25 years, offering concepts and terms that help us to grapple with the world as it is becoming. One way she does this is by looking at the literary of , and connecting the many futuristic projections made by authors to our present and potential reality. She also offers us history, of the information age at its inception, which becomes another type of container to put ideas into. Throughout the

3 past two decades she has been publishing work that makes thoughtful engagements with multiple pathways of literacy, as shaped, increasingly, by computation and connectivity. No one visiting from outer space would think any of this settled; any intelligent being with the perspective to view our planet as a whole would observe that voices in many languages and societies of varied construction are resisting, embracing, or just trying to keep up with technology. When Lester Faigley, in his 1996 CCCC address, announced that “a significant new medium of literacy has come into existence with the Internet” (37) and that “With the coming of the Internet and the World wide web, another major negotiation of pedagogy and authority is now in progress” (35), he was talking about the digital revolution. He said of his institution: “We are committed to teaching the great majority of our writing courses in networked classrooms by 1998” and “The Division of Rhetoric and Composition and the University of Texas administration believe that college students should be able to use the media of literacy that they will likely use in their later lives” (37). Can we/ must we teach this now? It is very difficult to grasp the profundity of the changes we are in the midst of. Kathryn Hayles work does give us terms to think with, and containers to put them in. She offers new and interesting lenses to look through as we contemplate the landscape and seek to look ahead. Mark Zamierowski (in his chapter from Voices on Voice) said of “Foucault’s descriptions of discontinuity and rupture in the succession of historical epistemes” that “Foucault’s analyses at least had the security of historical distance on their side” (277). That hindsight represents not only security, but luxury; it is something we do not have right now, as we seem to be at least hip-deep and mid- stream in revolutionary changes. Hayles, in the three of her books that I examine, gives us markers we can use to orient ourselves in new terrain. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999), Writing Machines (2002), and My Mother was a Computer: Digital subjects and Literary Texts (2005), all pertain to this new territory, and all offer considered, thoughtful examinations of the arc described by digital technology as it becomes increasingly imbricated with human subjectivity, and of the implications of this for us as producers and receivers of texts. In the interest of brevity and clarity I will refer to these works respectively as PH (Post Human), WM

4 (Writing Machines), and MC (Mother Computer) when citing them, as the ideas they examine cross and re-cross, weaving a narrative that looks more like a web than a chronological trajectory. I will examine these three books with a focus on three key terms: materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology. Then I will look at issues of two different instantiations of the journal Computers and Composition—one in print, and one online, to see where Hayles’ ideas can add something to the conversation about digitally mediated composition in the 21st century.

5

CHAPTER 1 THE REVIEW

Literature Hayles’ ideas and concepts that focus on this new digital terrain loop through and around each other, playing slightly differently from the vantage points of these three texts. How We Became Posthuman might be said to focus on subjectivity, and introduces us to the idea that we are entering an age of the posthuman, Writing Machines could be said to focus on the materiality of bodies and texts as they interact and change each other, and My Mother Was a Computer could be said to focus on epistemology, or our larger frame of knowing what we know. How We Became Posthuman provides an historical overview of information theory and the science of informatics which came out of the think-tank that came to be known as the Macy Conferences of the 1940s – 1950s. The original thinking about computers and their human interface was focused on war, and specifically the prosecution of the Cold War. As Hayles tells us, human consciousness was factored to zero as much as possible in order to simplify the algorithms necessary to design and build computational networks. The shift away from examining the X factor of human subjectivity at the time of the Macy conferences may well have blunted perception of the effects computers would eventually have on society. In the thinking of many of the original designers of computational systems, ““objective” was associated with being scientific, whereas “subjective” was a code word implying that one had fallen into a morass of unquantifiable feelings that might be magnificent but certainly were not science” (PH 55). Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman, unrolls the story of how various players argued for and against treating human consciousness as a necessary part of the design of computational systems. In this debate about how to treat the human factor, the victorious faction (in the US), according to Hayles, did not want to take human subjectivity into account at all, regarding it as a “blurred and messy instantiation of the clean abstractions of logical

6 forms” (PH 57). John Stroud, of the U.S. Naval Electronic Laboratory in San Diego in the sixth Macy conference (1949), analyzed the role of the human operator “sandwiched between a radar-tracking device on one side and an antiaircraft gun on the other, asking “‘what kind of machine have we put in the middle?’” He called man “‘an input-output device’” spliced into the feedback loop of radar/man/gun. Fremont-Smith, organizer of the Macy conferences over three decades, pointed out that this feedback loop was also being observed by a human being who changed the system by making input into this “man-in-the-middle”, to which Stroud replied that while the human observer was an imperfect instrument, “‘noisy and erratic... you have to work with them until something better comes along’”. Fremont-Smith countered by saying that no matter how horrific a prospect it was for scientists to factor human consciousness into theories about information flow, they would be wise “‘to make as much use as possible of the insights available as to what human beings are like and how they operate’” (PH 69). How could these designers have imagined the many ways in which ubiquitous computing would affect culture? At the time of their development, computers were a tool for scientific warfare, and laptop toting students, connected to the internet and making friends on Facebook, were never part of the equation. These conflicts between the early formulators of information processing systems tell part of the larger story that Hayles calls “How information lost its body” (PH 2). She says “I understand human and posthuman to be historically specific constructions that emerge from different configurations of embodiment, technology, and culture. My reference point for the human is the tradition of liberal humanism; the posthuman appears when computation rather than possessive individualism is taken as the ground of being, a move that allows the posthuman to be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines” (PH 34). Posthuman is an umbrella term describing a new epistemology, while the term flickering signifiers (1999) comes under it as an aspect of this way of knowing. This is another concept Hayles explores and it is what she uses to describe how the digital interface is changing our fundamental relationship to language. “Flickering signification brings together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman” (PH 33). She states:

7 information technologies do more than change modes of text production, storage, and dissemination. They fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier. Carrying the instabilities implicit in Lacanian floating signifiers one step further, information technologies create what I call Flickering Signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions. Flickering signifiers signal an important shift in the plate tectonics of language. (PH 30) Although Lacan said “Language is not a code” Hayles reminds us that “in word processing, however, language is a code” (PH 30). These coding chains act as “linguistic transducers” and create a “textual fluidity, which users learn in their bodies as they interact with the system” (PH 30). Hayles locates this body within the information age. This shift from floating to flickering signifiers Hayles argues results in a “rethinking of the processes through which texts emerge” (MC 8). This “entanglement of the bodies of texts and digital subjects” (MC 7) is just one example of why “Needed are new theoretical frameworks for understanding the relation of language & code; new strategies for making, reading, and interpreting texts; new modes of thinking about the material instantiation of texts in different media” (MC 11). Taking the definition of our species as being: Man the Tool-Maker, Kenneth P. Oakley’s work, published by Trustees of the British museum,1949, declared that the ““Employment of tools appears to be [man’s] chief biological characteristic, for considered functionally they are detachable extensions of the forelimb.”” Hayles points out that if this description marked the epoch of the human, then “the construction of tool as prosthesis points forward to the posthuman” (PH 34). Hayles references Donna Haraway’s vision of us as cyborgs with the potential to disrupt traditional categories. Fusing cybernetic device and biological organism, the cyborg violates the human machine distinction; replacing cognition with neural feedback, it challenges the human-animal difference; explaining the behavior of thermostats and people through theories of feedback, hierarchical structure, and control, it erases the animate/ inanimate distinction (PH 84) and Hayles follows this line of thinking as she explores the promise and perils of belonging to what she refers to as the Regime of Computation. The Regime of Computation is not a dematerialized theory” it “presumes and requires materiality at the

8 same time that it transforms our understanding of the nature of materiality” (MC 218). “I wanted to consider the Regime of computation as both means and metaphor, the complex interaction of “what we make” and “what (we think) we are” (MC 216). She continues: changes in cultural attitudes, in the physical and technological makeup of humans and machines, and in the material conditions of existence develop in tandem. For example, upright posture and the use of tools are considered by anthropologists to have coevolved dynamically in synergistic interactions. Walking upright made tool use easier, and tool, use considerably increased the fitness advantages of bipedalism. Moreover, tool use is associated with the beginnings of human culture. Along with language, the development of artifacts and technologies are routinely considered as distinguishing characteristics setting humans apart from other primate groups. (MC 216) A very rich source of terminologies that describe digital landscapes is Hayles book Writing Machines, created along with designer Anne Burdick, for the MIT Press Mediawork Series (2003). She enlarges what Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter have called Remediation, the cycling of different media through one another. One term put forward to describe these complex relationships is Medial Ecology. The phrase suggests the relationships between different organisms coexisting within the same ecotome, including mimicry, deception, cooperation, competition, parasitism, and hyper-parasitism (WM 5). Intermediation, another term Hayles employs, describes the “complex transactions between bodies and texts as well as between different forms of media” (MC 7). Writing Machines is an unconventional book by any standard, and it deserves my attempt at a description of its physical manifestation because it embodies hybridity and synthesis. It is both analog and digital, owing its textuality both to page and screen. Restricted by the Mediawork Series parameter which holds authors to a length of roughly 100 pages, this small volume does not contain the usual footnotes, endnotes, or references. For these and much additional information, a reader may visit its companion text online. The hard copy is printed on thick paper which has a glass-like feel, and is heavy for its very small size – only five and a half inches by seven and a half, and a quarter of

9 an inch thick. The blue and white cover bears the alternating thin and bolded vertical stripes of a bar code running down its right half with a text box occupying the center. This box contains lines of type that are inscribed and re-inscribed – palimpsested to illegibility - across which the title WRITING MACHINES floats, in an odd-looking font I can only call machine-like. These two words are curved and shadowed to look as though they are stretched across the slightly convex surface of a computer monitor (at least, a computer monitor in 2003, before flat-screens became ubiquitous). Inside the book the barcode stripes are repeated on every page, with the text appearing inside a white box. Periodically, several sentences distort. The font is larger and stretched in the center – tapering smaller at the edge, giving the illusion of a screenic interface. Key terms appear in capital letters, bolded and underlined; these correspond to the Lexicon Linkmap, which is a glossary in the e-text supplement (mitpress.mit.edu/ mediawork. Look for Hayles). The extreme outer edge of each page-- right hand vertical, if the book is face up in “reading position”-- contains random- looking black marks. These actually form a palimpsested text with the word “WRITING” and “MACHINES” overlaid. The opening edge of the book (opposite the spine) turns into a flip-book. From the front, flip the pages fast and “WRITING” becomes very clear; from the back, flip to front and read “MACHINES”. There are illustrations throughout Writing Machines and the grey margin around the text on each page makes, it too, seem to float in space. The format of Writing Machines is particularly effective in the literature review chapters which look at one-of and small series artist’s books, also technotexts, and hypertextual fiction, all of which exemplify the way that these works, which draw attention to the medium of their instantiation, help to expand definitions of textuality in very medium-specific ways by foregrounding rather than downplaying the differing affordances of material production. The look of Hayles’ text morphs in response to this material. The font sizes change playfully. Quotations, illustrations, and screenshots from the examined works are used in a collage-like fashion, allowing the reader to feel something like the experience of navigating through and viewing digital texts. Besides the web supplement, on the media worksite, there is a slideshow with selections from the book and an interactive book review by Erik Loyer, called a WebTake.

10 Writing Machines was created by Hayles in collaboration with designer Anne Burdick who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts and is a core-faculty member in the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. She won “The Most Beautiful Book in the World” prize at the 2001 Leipzig book-fair. This award was for an unconventional, 1,056 page dictionary written in collaboration with a team from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Anne Burdick also designs and edits the online literary journal electronicbookreview.com. In addition, she works as an author and consultant. In the designer’s notes, Burdick says of the Writing Machines project: “Kate’s critical framework challenged me to create a book that re-presents itself, over and over: as a tool for storage and retrieval, as the first home of Literature, as a navigational device, a writing space, and a representation of knowledge” (WM 140). Referring to the electronic supplement, which contains the Lexicon Linkmap, the Source Material, Affordances, and Word Maps, she continues: “these refractions make visible different aspects of the writings’ internal rhythms, organizational logic, and theoretical orientation” (WM 141). Burdick, hearing different resonances in the personal, theoretical and what she calls personal-theoretical threads of Hayles narrative, elected to embody three different “voices” in Writing Machines by using three visually distinctive fonts. She brought software designer Cynthia Jaquette on board to work out a correlation. Says Burdick: “she located Cree Sans for the personal and Egytienne for the theoretical. Then she melded the two to create Creegyptienne, the synthesized voice of the personal-theoretical (WM 141).” Burdick, always keeping the “complex relationship between showing and telling” in mind, says of Writing Machines: it is “a book that embodies its own critical concepts – a technotext – it is imperative that the design evolves in tandem with the text.” The cooperation of all parties “allowed me”, she says, “to work as a designer with words rather than after words,” calling the collaborative process “a pleasure, a learning experience, and an honor” (WM141). This book, and its web supplement (also the electronic response to it, Erik Loyer’s Webtake on the mediaworks website) performs the idea that medium makes a difference. Engagement with these textual elements (page, screen) enacts a different type of reader/ viewer who must choose, navigate, and experience the work in physical ways different from the ways a body/ mind/ brain reads a traditional codex book.

11 Reading/ viewing becomes a journey when we interact with the machine interface. One deploys the long code-arms of the piece to reach out and grab things, or perhaps one goes out to get them? It is complicated. The reader performs actions that animate the text, causing portions of it to reveal themselves, or to hide. Images and words shift positions, associating and disassociating themselves in complex arrangements when the viewer/ user’s body moves. When combating “unrecognized assumptions specific to print,” Hayles points to the need for Media Specific Analysis or “criticism that pays attention to the material apparatus producing the literary work as physical artifact” (WM 29), asking readers to consciously ask: “what difference the materiality of the medium makes?” (WM 30). She continues “In attending to the materiality of the medium, MSA explicitly refutes the concept of the literary work that emerged from eighteenth century debates over copyright, which stated “paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance” (MC 31). This legal opinion” helped to solidify the literary author as a man of original genius” fittingly, “print literature was widely regarded as not having a body, only a bodiless speaking mind” (WM 32). This loops back ironically, Hayles says, to the construction of the posthuman subject, with which the liberal subject has erasure of embodiment in common (PH 4). While the liberal subject was supposed to produce pure thought: “Identified with the rational mind, the liberal subject possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body. Only because the body is not identified with the self is it possible to claim for the liberal subject its notorious universality, a claim that depends on erasing markers of bodily difference including sex, race, and ethnicity” (PH 5). In addressing the issue of identity in the digital age, it is clear that materiality and epistemology are woven together with subjectivity; this amalgam becomes what is called the posthuman subject, who uses prostheses as extensions of both the body and the mind to interface with the culture. This then becomes what is ‘natural’, in terms of the self, forging a new, partly human/ partly machine entity. Hayles does not feel nostalgic for the loss of whatever “human” meant: In tracing these continuities and discontinuities between a “natural” self and a cybernetic posthuman, I am not trying to recuperate the liberal subject. Although

12 I think that serious consideration needs to be given to how certain characteristics associated with the liberal subject, especially agency and choice, can be articulated within a posthuman context. I do not mourn the passing of a concept so deeply entwined with projects of domination and oppression. Rather, I view the present moment as a critical juncture when interventions might be made to keep disembodiment from being rewritten, once again, into prevailing concepts of subjectivity. (PH 5) And she therefore sees the current moment not as a chance to flee the body, but as an opportunity to replace the already disembodied liberal subject with an instantiated and specific 21st century flesh one. She continues, saying: Hence my focus on how information lost its body, for this story is central to creating what Arthur Kroker has called the “flesh-eating 90s.” If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. (PH 5) This critical approach to an era of computation, or the posthuman Hayles believes we are already touching, and that we increasingly move towards, is part of what makes Hayles’ vision so distinctive. Neither Utopian nor dystopian, she looks at culture, particularly at literary expressions of texts: the cyber text, hypertext and science fiction as well as multi-modal compositions. She sees us on a cusp and capable of shaping a future we can inhabit, but only if we become aware enough to leverage the paradigm shift to advantage.

Key Terms: Materiality, Subjectivity, Epistemology. These three books by Katherine Hayles deal with very complicated ideas, so in order to simplify these ideas to better understand them I have selected three key terms: Materiality, Subjectivity and Epistemology to act as signposts. These terms can be seen

13 as lexical nodes, or intersections where concepts converge; they might also be viewed as larger containers within which related terms can cluster. Breaking down and classifying, like labeling and categorizing, become increasingly difficult when part of what we are studying is the connectivity and reflexivity inherent in systems.

Materiality: or, the physical substrate of bodies and texts. In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles locates our new attention to materiality in history, and the context of cold war military strategies. She sketches the beginnings of ubiquitous computing by looking at the first, second, and third waves of “cybernetics”, or, “the theory of communication and control applying equally to animals, humans, and machines” (PH 7) which was developed by scientists, mathematicians, psychologists, anthropologists, and physicists who attended annual conferences sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation from 1943 to 1954. These meetings, as Hayles tells us, resulted in “a new way of looking at human beings. Henceforth, humans were to be seen primarily as information- processing entities that are essentially similar to intelligent machines” (PH 7). Ironically, this new theory resulted in a furthering of the disembodied subjectivity inherent in 17th century Enlightenment thought, and in the values of liberal humanism stemming from that beginning, which include belief in “a coherent, rational self, the right of that self to autonomy and freedom, and a sense of agency linked with a belief in enlightened self-interest” (PH 86), or, the belief that the body was only a vessel to hold the mind, the same way that text was nothing more than a transparent window through which to see ideas. According to this epistemology, the mind, and pure thought were all important. It is easy to see how some could want to place the digital transmission of knowledge in this same old frame of dematerialized and disembodied thought. Hayles insists however, that computational machines are not the enemy, but rather represent an ally in our efforts to transform society, because of what they allow us to do and be. Intelligent machines are in us and among us now; “we must seek out understandings that recognize and enact the complex mutuality of the interactions. “What we make” and “what (we think) we are” co-evolve together; emergence can operate on an ethical dynamic as well as a technological one” (PH 253). Hayles traces

14 the history of information theory in part to show “the complex interplays between embodied forms of subjectivity and arguments for disembodiment throughout the cybernetic tradition” (PH 7, italics Hayles’) How do we get from here to media specific analysis and the importance of materiality to the production, reception, dissemination, and storage of texts in the 21st century? In 1948 Claude Shannon defined information as “a probability function with no dimensions, no materiality, and no necessary connection with meaning” (PH 18).This was an important idea in first-wave cybernetic theory. But what would that that idea mean for the Information Age? The posthuman subject is an information processing system not dissimilar from an intelligent machine, and the utopian perspective sees computers as liberators because “Information viewed as pattern and not tied to a particular instantiation is information free to travel across time and space… The great dream and promise of information is that it can be free from the material constraints that govern the material world” (PH 13). Hayles’ strategy in narrativizing the science that led us to our current technology is to replace abstraction with specific accounts of personalities, motives, competitions and disagreements that occurred between human beings in an actual time and place, as they tried to articulate computation, and what it might mean for society. The three waves of cybernetics-theory development she identifies are: 1) homeostasis (1945-1960), or, stable, closed systems: 2) reflexivity (1960-1980), or, systems are changed by the observer: and 3) virtuality (1980-now), or, system and observer are mutually constituted. She says, about her reasons for exploring the scientific beginnings of computers, in-depth, in this book: “I hope to replace a teleology of disembodiment with historically contingent stories about contests between competing factions” (PH 22). Hayles’ focus on materiality is in part a form of resistance to the Cartesian duality of the past. In Hayles’ view, the mind/ body split is an illusion, and always has been – but it was, nonetheless, a powerful epistemology that fostered much disharmony and led to many bad practices. Those who wish to continue along the path of disembodiment must be countered, in part, by our insistence that materiality matters, and in fact, is not less, but more important as we become posthuman. When we think of posthumans as systems rather

15 than separate autonomous entities we begin to move “away from the grounding dialect of presence/ absence and toward the dialectic relation of pattern/ randomness, since that is the way that information moves through code” (PH 29). This shift is what Hayles is referring to when she posits the idea of “flickering signifiers”: “In informatics, the signifier can no longer be understood as a single marker, an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists as a flexible chain of markers bound together by arbitrary relations specified by relevant codes” (PH 31). Bodies and texts interact through information technologies in a complex web that Hayles calls “informatics”, and (following Donna Haraway) she takes this to mean “the technologies of information as well as the biological, social, linguistic, and cultural changes that initiate, accompany and complicate their development” (PH 29). Hayles points out that “As the emphasis shifts to pattern and randomness, characteristics of print texts that used to be transparent (because they were so pervasive) are becoming visible again through their differences from digital technologies (PH 28). In Writing Machines Hayles picks up this thread stating: “Print is a medium and not a transparent interface” (WM 43). She also says that “computers are simulation machines producing environments” and that interactions with these constructions also constructs the user. She calls this interface where user and machine interact the “mindbody” (WM 48), a new zone of materiality “which creates new connections between screen and eye, cursor and hand, computer coding and natural language… these connections perform human subjects who cannot be thought without the intelligent machines that produce us even as we produce them” (WM 63). The computer human interface externalizes part of our cognition – essentially we become part of a feedback loop within which the text responds to us, just as we respond to the text. Hayles reminds us that the “computer is also a writer, and moreover a writer whose operations we cannot wholly grasp in all their semiotic complexity”. Reading becomes “an active production of a cybernetic circuit and not merely an internal activity of the human mind” (WM 51). Referring specifically to Talan Memmot’s technotext, Lexia to Perplexia, an interactive hypermediated work of fiction, Chapter Four, in Writing Machines, parses this book in great detail and Hayles’ analysis here is fascinating. Much of her commentary on Memmot’s work however, is applicable to general questions concerning

16 the human machine interface. Hayles says, reiterating her own stance within this posthuman landscape, that whatever the future holds “it will not do away with materiality or the constraints and enablings that materiality entails. Amidst these complexities, what is clearly established is not the superiority of code to flesh, but metaphoric works that map electronic writing onto fluid bodies” (WM 63). In My Mother Was a Computer Hayles speaks of materiality as “a junction between physical reality and human intention… the constructions of matter that matter for human meaning” (MC 3). As Hayles points out, it is no accident that, in the eighteenth century, the universe was described as a clockwork – now, because of our current technologies, it is imagined by many as a computer. If the posthuman can be seen as part of the “Regime of Computation” then, we are now straddling a shifting space that includes the posthuman and all led up to it. We can look at “making (language and code), storing (print and electronic text), and transmitting (analog and digital)… as modalities related to information; they also help constitute the bodies of subjects and texts” (MC 7). A word Hayles uses when talking about this is “‘intermediation’, that is, complex transactions between bodies and texts as well as between different forms of media” (MC 7). However, no matter how far out, or deep into, the literary formations of digitally mediated texts Hayles travels, she balances the two ideas of analog morphology, or the human, with digital disembodiment, called by some the posthuman—seeing them as imbricated and inseparable. She reminds us: “media effects, to have meaning and significance, must be located within an embodied human world.” In refusing an either/ or choice between “media effects and a human lifeworld”, Hayles insists we think about materiality, now, in terms of “multiple casualties, complex dynamics, and emergent possibilities” (MC 7).

Subjectivity: or, perspective, point of view and identity. This is another key term Hayles uses in addressing digitality. In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles posits that subjectivity becomes a function of authorization, “constituting identity through authorization codes” within computational systems. This creates a subject who exists and is recognized because of knowing the codes... we become the codes we punch” (PH

17 46). This reinforces the idea that in the realm of flickering signifiers, the subject becomes fluid, a part of a circuit of information acting within a reflexive system of interpretation. Then, says Hayles, “what binds the decoder to the system is not the stability of being a member of an interpretative community... Rather, it is the decoder’s construction as a cyborg, the impression that his or her physicality is also data made flesh” (PH 47). This view of subjectivity exemplifies reflexivity: the observer becomes part of the system being observed—or, becomes a participant in a “cybernetic fusion of language and technology” (PH 221). In Writing Machines this concept of subjectivity, or identity, as being constituted in part by our very inscription practices, is further explored. When the reader is “Interpolated into the circuit, we metamorphose from individual exteriorized subjectivities to actors exercising agency within the extended cognitive systems that include non-human actors” (WM 51). Hayles says subjects are thus “remapped and reinterpreted by intelligent machines working within networks that bind together our flesh with their electronic materiality. In this posthuman conjunction, bodies of texts and bodies of subjects evolve together in complex configurations” (WM 51). This evolutionary aspect is part of digitally mediated subjectivity. In My Mother Was a Computer Hayles says that “what calculus has been to physics and mathematics, the digital computer will be to understanding complex systems, evolution and emergence” (MC 26). This moves us away from the concept of subjectivity as residing within an individual agent, to a framework of subject as part of a system of distributed global intelligence. The expanded notion of subjectivity as a type of collective intelligence leads to questions about the nature of learning, of what constitutes knowledge, and where we each stand in relation to what is knowable. These questions and answers belong in a larger container, they require an epistemology.

Epistemology: or, the paradigms through which we view the world. This key term is also addressed in all three books. What the digital revolution brings, according to Hayles in How We Became Posthuman, is “an epistemic shift toward pattern/ randomness and away from presence/ absence” which “affects human and textual bodies as a change in body (material substrate) and as a change in message (code of representation)” (PH 29).

18 Citing anthropologist Gregory Bateson, one of the original Macy conferees, Hayles offers his statement: “We are our own epistemology.” Bateson was “looking for an epistemology that would proceed from the world’s complexity” (PH 79). He wanted a way to describe what he called the “cybernetic nature of self and the world” (PH 77), or, an epistemology of stable states (like bodies), and fluid states (like systems), that could account for “the individual, the society, and the larger global ecosystem in which both are embedded” (PH 77). As Hayles says of authors/ readers/ texts in Writing Machines: “To change the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading... but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring the relation of word to world” (WM 23). In My Mother Was a Computer, Hayles critically examines differing accounts of the epistemological frame of the posthuman, or, as she also calls this realm: “The Regime of computation” in which “code is understood as the discourse system that mirrors what happens in nature and that generates nature itself” (MC 27). She is not swayed by various postulations of how, under this new order, we can, should, or will leave the body; she insists that in order to understand these changes, we must reject old binary frames of either/ or, of either human/ or machine. Hybridity is an apt metaphor for the imbricated nature of posthuman consciousness: “Code is not the enemy, any more than it is the savior. Rather code is increasingly positioned as language’s pervasive partner. Implicit in the juxtaposition is the intermediation of human thought and machine intelligence, with all the dangers, possibilities, liberations, and complexities this implies” (MC 61). More than answering, Hayles, in these three books, poses questions about what it means to be posthuman. She explores the history of cybernetics to show “how the ‘new kind of science’ that underwrites the Regime of Computation can serve to deepen our understanding of what it means to be in the world rather than apart from it, comaker rather than dominator, participants in the complex dynamics that connect ‘what we make’ and ‘what (we think) we are’” (MC 242). We are already posthuman, and our worldview is increasingly shaped by the human/ machine interface. Rather than focusing on the boundaries between what we conceive of as self, and what we understand as world, we need to look at the connections.

19 As Hayles underscores in her texts, we are feedback loops in systems, inseparable from them; we are fluid, connected, reflexive beings, made posthuman by this awareness. What of the old print tradition, or legacy medium, as it is sometimes called, is worth keeping, and carrying forward? What makes us human and how can we channel the posthuman in positive ways that do not re-inscribe past failures and blindnesses? These are the big questions Hayles addresses: questions we must ask ourselves and try to answer in this new century. To explore some of this new landscape of materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology described in Hayles’ three books, I will look at two instantiations of an academic journal focused on the uses of computers for education: Computers and Composition, the print version, and its electronic companion, Computers and Composition Online. How might Hayles’ ideas play out across these two platforms, and how do they fit within the context of conversations about electronically mediated pedagogy, theory, and analysis taking place within the computers and composition community?

20

CHAPTER 2 PRINT

Study I: Computers and Composition print, since 1983 First I will examine the print journal: Computers and Composition, Volume 23.1: March 2006. This number is titled: “Special Issue: Distance Learning: Evolving Perspectives”. The editors are Gail E. Hawisher (University of Illinois-Urbana- Champaign) and Cynthia L. Selfe (The Ohio State University). There are eight articles, plus announcements and calls for papers. This issue runs 165 pages, and articles range in length from 28 to 14 pages, though most are closer to 20, and all frame aspects of online learning and its associated practices, results and potential as an educational resource. Table of Contents for Volume 23, Number 1, 2006: Introduction: a “Letter from the Guest Editors”, Jane Blakelock and Tracy E. Smith, outlines the purpose of this special issue: “to address the shift in the interest of DL teachers from the basic principles of how to teach online to research regarding effective online pedagogies and methodologies”; they list some areas about which they would like to see more empirical studies: assessment, student demographics, additional comparisons of pedagogies and methodologies, and cross-disciplinary studies that look at psychological and philosophical reasons for attitudes about the use of these educational technologies. 1) “Synchronous Online Conference-based Instruction: A Study of Whiteboard Interactions and Student Writing” by Beth L. Hewett, 4-31. 2) “Paying attention to adult learners online: The Pedagogy and Politics of Community” by Kristine Blair and Cheryl Hoy, 32-48. 3) “Designing Efficiencies: The Parallel Narratives of Distance Education and Composition Studies” by Kevin Eric DePew, T.A. Fishman, Julia E. Romberger and Bridget Fahey Ruetenik, 49-67.

21 4) “The Price of Free Software: Labor, Ethics, and Context in Distance Education” by Colleen A. Reilly and Joseph John Williams, 68-90. 5) “Determining Effective Distance Learning Designs through Usability Testing” by Susan K. Miller-Cochran and Rochelle L. Rodrigo, 91-107. 6) “Writing Power into Online Discussion” by Bill Anderson, 108-124. 7) “Complexity, Class Dynamics, and Distance Learning” by Kate Kiefer, 125-138. 8) “Distance Learning: From Multiple Snapshots, a Composite Portrait” by Jane Blakelock and Tracy E. Smith, 139-161. In addition, the “Announcements and a Call for Papers” section includes requests for nominations for these awards: the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field; the annul Hugh Burns and Ellen Nold Awards for scholarship, research and teaching; and the Distinguished Book Award for substantial and innovative contributions to the field of computers and composition. There are also calls for Kairos’ CoverWeb (an online journal) texts. Titled “Classical Rhetoric and digital Communication: A Canon Blast into the Net”. (The issue under construction here was number 12.1, 2006, and the frame for this issue was the classical canons of rhetoric and how they have been adapted for digital communication.) Also in this section is the call for books to be published in the Hampton Press series: New Dimensions in Computers and Composition Studies. (Series Editors: Gail E. Hawisher & Cynthia L. Selfe). This is a series “devoted to publishing groundbreaking scholarship” on computer- based composition, including topics such as , and Visual Literacy.

The eight main articles are briefly sketched as follows: 1) Beth L. Hewett, in “Synchronous Online Conference-based Instruction: A Study of Whiteboard Interactions and Student Writing” conducted a small-scale empirical study, using 52 online interactions from 23 students enrolled in her first-year English classes at Pennsylvania State University (2001-2003). Requiring her students to use the synchronous, or real-time, online tutoring service “Smarthinking, Inc. at least once, early in the semester, because the branch campus she taught at did not have writing center, Hewitt also encouraged them to use it often throughout the course. She then

22 looked at the student/ instructor interactions that took place when using this real-time shared writing space. Hewitt tracked the ways that participants: the 14 different professional online tutors, all with qualifications of PhD, MA, or related graduate studies, and these first- year college English students communicated while using the electronic whiteboard, and she identified the types of exchanges that students engaged in, coding the samples to track whether their discussions were about the actual text under scrutiny, about the workings of the technology they were using, or about the social relationships they were constructing at a distance. Students initiated the tutoring sessions, and most (85%) were idea-based; these requests were for general help (“brainstorming”41%) and specific thesis development (“Does my assertion sound clear?” 32%), while a smaller portion, (15%), focused on surface-based, or mechanical and formal issues. Hewitt’s study describes these synchronous tutoring sessions as largely “writing-task oriented”, finding that they did help student writing, though not dramatically, and that the shared interaction within this online writing space did foster collaboration. A pedagogy for synchronous online whiteboard instruction does not translate directly from traditional writing instruction, Hewitt notes, “however logical that transfer might first appear” (6). Instructors must have strong, flexible verbal skills, and be creative enough with their language use to make up for the missing aspects of physical presence, such as body gestures and facial expressions, and the pitch, tone and emphasis of speech. In what becomes a visual form of thinking out loud, posting text to the whiteboard can make students uncomfortable initially, so instructors must be able to develop the identity of the classroom space as a collaborative site of community in which participation is safe and welcomed. Calling whiteboard “the most under studied of synchronous platforms in the context of writing instruction” (7), Hewitt also found that the use of synchronous platforms is an area, just beginning to be analyzed, in which the “notion of instructional success is, as yet, difficult to delineate” (25). Hewett uses the linguistic function of talk as a lens through which she is able to look closely at student writing and revision within this distance classroom space. She calls for further research and empirical study of the continued development of “robust learning models” (26) associated with synchronous platforms.

23 2) Next: “Paying Attention to Adult Learners Online: The Pedagogy and Politics of Community” by Kristine Blair and Cheryl Hoy calls for “rethinking online writing pedagogies to be more flexible to adult learner needs” and states that we must also “recognize the impact of adult online education on faculty workload” (32). They note that differences between adult and traditional students complicate ideas of community and authority. Adult learners in the study liked the privacy of email and utilized that often to talk with instructors. This involves teachers in a lot of work that is essentially ‘off the clock”, work which is unseen by supervisors, administrators, and course evaluators. The “more public concept of a virtual community” must be extended to cover these exchanges, say the authors (34). Kristine Blair co-developed the course used for this study: English 207, Intermediate writing, with Stan Lewis (Bowling green State University’s Director of Adult Learner services) in 2001. ENG 207 maintains a consistently smaller enrollment (usually 10 students) than other English classes because of the necessary attention students must receive in order to produce the portfolios by which their performance is assessed at semester’s end. Cheryl Hoy, a graduate student, was asked to teach the course in its second year when the administration at Bowling Green decided that using tenure track faculty to teach such a small group was just too expensive. Blair and Hoy saw this as an opportunity; Cheryl would be “the first graduate student in the English Department to teach a fully online course” (37). The administration did not understand the workload in a traditional writing class, much less one like this, in which the instructor conferred, via email, with students, in what became many writing center- type tutorials (34). Teaching and learning, then, are taking place in not just public, but often in private spaces. This results in what the authors call “invisible technological labor from course design to increased student contact hours” (37). The “neighborly dialog” (41) established in the private email discussions between student and teacher had a large positive impact on learning, but this type of “work” remains largely unrecognized by school authorities, say the authors, pointing to faculty compensation as a major area of misunderstanding in the delivery of online classes. Given what English 207 has taught the instructors, plans are in the works at Bowling

24 Green for more of an independent study model, reminiscent of writing center conferencing. Along with the need to re-think course designs to better serve students, comes the fact that teachers must be rewarded and recognized for the labor they do, both visible, and that which remains invisible. 3) Then: “Designing Efficiencies: The Parallel Narratives of Distance Education and Composition Studies” by Kevin Eric Depew, T.A. Fishman, Julia E. Romberger, and Bridget Fahey Ruetenik, takes up the conflict between “values of efficiency—in cost, medium, communication, and pedagogy—that often conflict with disciplinary standards for instruction in writing and rhetoric”, likening some rationales for distance education to 19th century correspondence courses (50). This article looks at how DE should be developed and managed to “embody the best practices of writing instruction” (65), and not fall back into a mode of current-traditional rhetoric and the brand of thinking that it serves, privileging “the objective report that eschews interpretation” and that disregards “the negotiation of meaning” (52). Aligning some models of distance education with practices of “the assembly line” and “mass production,” the authors cite efficiency theories, like those of Otto Peters in the 1980s and 1990s, which declared that the delivery of education online must resemble: (this quote from Teaching and Learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education; M. Simonson, et al., Eds., 1999) ““the “industrial production of goods”” (51). Depew, et al. call these metaphors problematic, and “part and parcel of the positivist epistemic” (53) that complicates online course delivery. The challenge, these authors say, is to design progressive, social-epistemic pedagogies in “an environment in which efficiency is valued” (53). To counter this bias toward a mechanized frame of thinking, some distance education programs “have already moved to complicate notions of an efficient computer-mediated writing process by incorporating visual and , which both create awareness of and question assumptions about technology in rhetorically grounded ways” (53). The authors stress that “drawing attention to materiality helps students understand the media in which they are learning, writing, and communicating” (63). Besides the expense of the best technology, and the tensions that this creates, labor is another factor in the distance education cost/ efficiency equation, with many schools

25 using nontenurable faculty to teach these courses. Unless we understand the history and “embedded ideologies” of distance education, and recognize the conflicts “between what is most efficient and what is most instructionally robust” (64), the authors conclude, best practices will not be implemented in distance education. 4) “The Price of Free Software: Labor, Ethics, and Context in Distance Education” by Colleen A. Reilly and Joseph John Williams, tackles the considerations of choosing software – open source vs. commercial, and uses a case study format to examine the perceived “benefits and problems of specific applications” (68). This article looks at both individual and organizational/ community motivations for using open-source software. In an informal survey conducted by the authors, members of WPA-L and TechRhet listservs said that “ease of use” was more important than politics or pedagogy. Many respondents also said that they chose to use institutional/ commercial software because it was “easier for students to learn only one tool” (72). Installing open source software without institutional support is problematic, to say the least, and involves, most likely, unpaid, unrecognized labor on the part of faculty, as well as a steep learning curve to handle the IT support issues. Open source software, such as Drupal, offers much more flexibility in its look, feel, management options, and connectivity to the Web—(Charles Lowe says: ““Drupal is like a big, 1,000 piece box of Legos””) -- but the many options available make it much more difficult to learn (76). None of the five distance writing instructors in this case study use open-source technologies, giving “Institutional labor practices and other pressures” as reasons. The authors of this study have located a definite disconnect between “the professed support for open-source applications and the extent of their use for delivering writing courses in a distance-learning format”. Evidently, people tend to favor the idea of open source, but often use the institutionally supported software because of labor factors that make “free” software just too expensive (88). 5) This article: “Determining Effective Distance Learning Designs through Usability Testing,” by Susan K. Miller-Cochran and Rochelle L. Rodrigo explains results of usability testing and the implications for effective distance learning involving the design, delivery, and assessment of web based writing courses that grow increasingly more popular as alternatives to the traditional classroom. In the English department “at our

26 college forty-four sections were offered in the Fall 2005 semester,” (92) say authors Miller-Cochran and Rodrigo. While focusing their study on the design of their own first- year Web-based writing course, the authors also developed a framework with which other instructors can assess the design of their own distance education courses, including what data to gather, how to interpret it, and what to do with the results. The study also gives “guidelines for course design using Web-based technologies” (93). The heuristic used in the study was based on hour-long, one-on-one observations of students performing seven Web- learning tasks, and using a “think-aloud protocol” in which the “participants explain what choices they are making and why” (95). Students also completed a short demographic study and an exit interview. The most important finding of the study was “simplicity”; navigation should be easy, and important course information should be clearly visible. Also very important is a design that has a user-friendly organizational flow (104). Some future questions raised by the study include functionality and the retention of students in online courses, the possible relationship between user -friendly online courses and other measures of student success, as well as what usability testing offers for the assessment of online courses which have English as a second language students, and how these type of tests done with enrolled students might correspond to studies of students not in the course. Usability testing methodologies are valuable, say the authors, as more “scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition are beginning to look at the theories of rhetoric and composition and those of usability and human-computer interaction” (105). 6) “Writing Power into Online Discussion,” by Bill Anderson, deals with students’ personal agency in online asynchronous learning situations. Anderson looks at the social context of interactions between students, online groups, and instructors “around the argument that the power individuals have to give effect to their intentions is always in relation to the powers of others and structural constraints” (121). The purpose of this study is to advance the effective design of online learning environments that will empower and enable students to “transcend their situatedness and bind themselves to a wider group-- to stretch themselves beyond the constraints of time and space” (121).

27 This case study was based on interviews with 25 students--a demographic slice representing the overall make-up of this distance program in teacher education. The students in the program are mostly non-traditional (30-45 years old), and 91% of them are female; all of them have two or three years experience as full-time distance learners. The questions for the study centered on five areas: posting/ not posting, reading/ not reading, impact of responses, responses from lecturers, and time. The format of the class allowed for a large degree of personal agency, as students could choose when to read/ not read, and post/ not post messages to the classroom discussions. Both small group and whole class discussion forums, as well as private email were utilized by the participants. This study shows that this online learning environment can foster a sense of student-ownership of education, through the mediated connections that students forge with classmates, instructors, and their own time management. The students are very conscious of their choices to initiate conversation or not, to reply to other’s posts or not, and they budget their time between life’s contingencies (remember, these are mature students, mostly, with responsibilities of family and work) and school with a heightened sense of control regarding their education. Many do express feelings of frustration with the technology at points, and all mention time as a factor affecting their engagement with the class. Anderson says that students use the framework of the class “in discriminating ways,” ignoring some posts and replying to others to “create their own bounded virtual study space” (115). Although this space is not without pressures: ““Bottom line: you’ve got to be seen interacting”” (student, Heidi, 117), and-- says Anderson, “five of the students spoke directly about the influence of the authoritative gaze,” or that sense of being surveilled which (student, Dianne) ““makes you circumspect about your input”” (118). For these distance learning students, Anderson says, “time and technology act as both a constraint and resource”; for while the technology was sometimes a stumbling block, it also let them balance school and life, allowing them to enter a community of learners while still fulfilling the other responsibilities of complicated lives. Anderson concludes by saying that teachers must be aware not only of technology’s allowances and constraints, but must pay attention as well to the social context for learning, in order to maximize educational outcomes. If online classrooms are designed and organized in

28 ways that encourage students to establish their own norms, they can become very helpful sites of learning. 7) The next article is “Complexity, Class Dynamics, and Distance Learning” by Kate Kiefer and this looks at “problems of creating effective dynamics in distance classes” (126). She quotes DePew and Weber (1995) on complexity theory: “Systems that have a large number of components that can interact simultaneously in a sufficiently, rich number of parallel ways so that the system shows spontaneous self-organization and produces global, emergent structures.” (127). She applies this idea to the composition classroom, saying they too are “complex adaptive systems” (128), and not controlled by the teacher’s central authority. In online classrooms she finds power is more distributed, and each participant “bears a much greater burden for creating any sense of collective personality for the class.” (131). Keifer notes that one pattern worth watching concerned timely response – students who posted early to blackboard and responded quickly to drafts had a strong positive effect on the class as a whole. Students who gave good feedback and were supportive encouraged others to become involved. What she noticed also is that the way the instructor sets up the course builds in opportunities for a dynamic classroom to evolve, but the students own participation created the shape of that particular experience – it evolved from their interactions within the structure. She advocates that “we step back from a “self” centered view… and look instead at the system dynamics”, saying that this process should “fall clearly on the interface and electronic technologies that allow us to communicate with our students and students with each other” (137). Thinking of the “classroom as a complex adaptive system” (137) allows, (as she references M Taylor: 2001) us to design effective education for emerging network culture. 8) And finally, “Distance Learning: From Multiple Snapshots, a Composite Portrait” by Jane Blakelock and Tracy E. Smith. This article is an overview of the current state of distance learning and looks at attitudes, demographics, technology, and aspects of course design, ending with potential research questions of the future. The authors used a survey of DL instructors at a broad spectrum of institutions across the United States and include that data in this article. They state: “The point where educators’ ideas about

29 tool use and technologies converge with their attitudes toward distance learning may be the concept of technologies as either separate from, or part of, the self.” Whether a tool is, or is not, part of the user reflects a humanist, an antihumanist/ constructivist, or posthuman stance, with posthuman meaning: “the subject is not separate from technologies used to observe it, yet conclusions reached by the observer have not altogether abandoned values derived in some sense from an earlier humanist appreciation of tools” (152). The authors conclude that distance learning represents an expansion of the borders of the institution but must be executed with an eye to the ecology of the system; to the development of cooperation and teamwork, to best practices and pedagogies, as they continue to evolve, and also to consideration of what appropriate compensation for the teachers who develop and deliver these courses might look like.

Analysis: A Haylesian Lens on the print journal. Given this synopsis of concerns in Distance Education as represented in this print issue of Computers and Composition (March 2006), where does Hayles appear? What of Haylesian thinking, about the importance of materiality to the formations of reader/ writer/ text, about the digitally mediated construction of subjectivities, or about the epistemologies that address our complex interactions with intelligent machines is evidenced here, or perhaps is not demonstrated? First, I discuss five examples from this series of articles that show the potentiality of Haylesian thinking, rather than its enactment. Second, I’ll consider two articles that do more than evidence potential. To begin, I look for ways that the idea of materiality appears in this medium- specific issue focused on Distance Learning. Beth L. Hewett’s article “Synchronous Online Conference-based Instruction: A Study of Whiteboard Interactions and Student Writing” is focused largely on the computer interface as a specialized means for the production of text. While this study is an example of medium-specific analysis (or MSA, a component of Haylesian materiality) by the fact that this Whiteboard discourse is only created in a particular way because of the constraints and affordances of its medium of instantiation, the focus is not particularly Haylesian in the way that Hayles employs materiality. Hayles uses this term, materiality, to describe “an emergent property

30 created through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies”; and as the “junction between physical reality and human intention” (MC 3). In Hewitt’s article, by contrast, materiality is addressed primarily as a technological means of delivery that may allow, facilitate, or encourage the production of student texts. As Hayles points out, “electronic textuality can be used as something other than a simulacrum of print” (citing McGann, MC 99). The question Hewitt investigates is: Does Synchronous Whiteboard conferencing function well in the teaching of writing at a distance? While this study does ask questions about how online interactions that are mediated by computers might assist in the teaching of writing, the methodology employed to examine this platform is a textual analysis that “codes for linguistic function and types of communicative utterances” (18) much like that which could be used to examine a speech or a traditional print text. And while it does blur “the sharp line between representation and the technologies producing them” by looking at “the material basis of literary production” (WM 19), what this article does not do is to focus, in any Haylesian sense, on the signifying components of electronic texts which make them different from print texts, such as instability, mutability, sound, animation, motion, video, kinesthetic involvement, colors, images, icons, fonts, or in fact design at all. Hewitt says “Most Whiteboards have text-based affordances like font, size, and color adjustment, as well as graphical drawing tools like lines, circles, arrows, and mathematical or scientific symbols” that might appeal to [italics mine] “visual learners”(8). Hewitt’s analysis then, shows a print bound notion; she foregrounds the medium of inscription (Synchronous Whiteboard), but sees the user-interface as mainly a means to efficaciously deliver/ receive conventional writing instruction at a distance. Hewitt likens the Online Writing Instruction (OWI) mode to “a traditional chalkboard”, with the extra advantage that the work done on this platform can also be saved and “archived as a study aid” (11). Hewitt frames the OWI pedagogy as one that is designed to “teach through text” (6). The difference between this form and that of traditional face-to-face tutoring is represented as being largely one of material/ technological specificity – i.e. the technology considered here is mainly valuable because it facilitates learning at a distance and gives the added benefit to students of increasing their technological skills.

31 As Hayles says, “A critical practice that ignores materiality, or that reduces it to a narrow range of engagements, cuts itself off from the exuberant possibilities of all the unpredictable things that happen when we as embodied creatures interact with the rich physicality of the world” (WM 107). Still almost in spite of herself, Hewitt found an interesting feature in this form of exchange (the Synchronous Whiteboard); it expressed a certain significant degree of hybridity in a discourse that, while written solely, “resembles oral dialogue in its give-and-take talk characteristics” (23).This observation begins to approach what Hayles talks about as “complexity of intermediating processes” and the need to pay attention to “what is left out of account when embodied materiality is reduced to inscription” (MC 210). Here we see an indication that the technology fostered a type of exchange that seems to be hybrid, so the Whiteboard itself is a complex intermediating process. Hewitt is observing an emergent property of the interface of the machine/ human, and in a Haylesian analysis this would represent an important juncture and provide evidence of materiality in a Haylesian sense, but Hewitt does not pursue this. The Synchronized Whiteboard Instruction (SWI) described in Hewitt’s study represents a material/ technology affordance, a tool in effect, in the sense of Kenneth P. Oakley’s defining “detachable extensions of the forelimb” (PH 34), but not prosthesis, in the Haylesian sense of being integrated with the body and subjectivity of the user. The machine interface detailed here is an adjunct to print-centric education, used for the purpose of replicating the physical writing conference virtually, including specific considerations of time-for-use (an office appointment) and the writing space available (like formatting a document) on the board. What is not examined here, but is in fact marked out by Hewett for possible further study are “how the conferences may influence student thinking” and “differences between simple text versus text that engages the spaces, graphics, and presentation tools available on a white board”(25). Briefly mentioned is the idea that some students may feel challenged by the public exposure they experience when “instantly visible text” (7) that they write to the Whiteboard is viewed by the entire class, instead of a one-to-one exchange between student and instructor (as is sometimes the case), although again, this splicing of public/ private writing personas is not really taken up.

32 Explorations of these intersections of human/ machine and alternations of public/ private writing personas would lead more toward the territory Hayles has staked out for digital reader/ writer/ text interfaces, by beginning to engage with epistemological questions and the formation of subjectivities of reader/ writer as these are changed by productions of different kinds of texts. While the material frame of this article is mainly a measure of this technology’s (SW) suitability as a device to facilitate student production of conventional print texts -- only in this case, remotely-- some of the questions Hewitt raises open potential avenues for the use of a Haylesian lens with technologies like Synchronous Whiteboard. This study identifies entry points for Medium Specific Analysis, and while it does not go there, it is evidence of growth in that direction. Another article that addresses materiality in a way similar to Hewitt’s is “The Price of Free Software: Labor, Ethics, and Context in Distance Education” by Reilly and Williams. This article focuses specifically on the practical considerations surrounding the adoption of open-source software for use in delivering Distance Education courses. The materiality of these open source-based technologies has ethical, ideological, and pedagogical implications because the non-proprietary status of open source software allows for knowledge sharing and building which in turn encourage collaborative development; and “because open source code is freely available and customizable and the resulting products are available to all without the burden of royalty fees it helps to advance the educational commons” (Hepburn, 2004; Jesiek, 2003 cited 69). The material constraints of the institutional setting however, according to this study, impinge on these values and so these do, as in the example discussed here – the case study of four distance learning instructors –have ramifications for the materiality of the medium (software) that serve to restrict choice. Instructors recount problems with being compensated by institutions for the time necessary to design original customized courses in open source platforms, they also cite difficulties of mastering the technology, and they point out the convenience and ease of use for their students as the main reasons they all four use the institutionally supported proprietary software such as Blackboard for teaching their Distance Learning courses. This article provides an ethical and philosophical framework for choice of software but considers technology mainly in terms of cost, efficiency, or like in Hewitt’s article,

33 functionality, and does not reflect the Haylesian idea that materiality is more than inscription technologies or modes of production. Hayles cites Wendy Hui Kyong Chun who says “‘software is ideology’”, using Althusser’s definition of ideology as “‘the representation of the subject’s imaginary relationship to his or her real conditions of existence” (MC 61). Clearly there is something more to be mined here. Materiality in a Haylesian sense includes not only attention to the medium of a text’s instantiation, but also attends to the user, and how that user is changed by, or adapts to, the text which is itself shaped by the interaction. Also similarly, Miller-Cochran and Rodrigo’s “Determining Effective Distance Learning Designs through Usability Testing” is an empirical study of the material affordances of specific course designs, with the aim of developing websites for Distance Learning courses that will enable students to navigate them easily and efficiently. This study found that certain assumptions on the instructor’s part about where the students would enter the course and in what order students would access various parts of the site created confusion. The parts of the site that were simply designed, with little visual clutter and with “clear directions for navigation” (99) were helpful to students. The study found that students randomly surfed the site to familiarize themselves, “looking at particular areas of the course in no particular order” (100). This focus on materiality concerns the structure of the website from the stance of functionality and usability, but does not really address the possible ways that the user interactions and methods of reading the site--of entering and leaving it-- were in some ways reconfiguring it as an educational space and also reconstituting the users of the space. What Hayles might see as the reflexive property of mutual construction of text and reader was not addressed; there is no sense here of a Haylesian interface. To consider where, or whether Haylesian ideas about subjectivity in computational environments -–the ways that these environments shape and construct the reader/ writer/ text-- appeared in this print journal, I looked at “Paying Attention to Adult Learners Online: The Pedagogy and Politics of Community” by Blair and Hoy to see where any of Hayles’ words like mutability, fluidity, or flexibility might show up. This article focused on the ways that students interacted in the course and how they became “neighbors”(41) when they worked in pairs, developing a more intimate bond: “it is important to complicate the concept of community to allow for a significant

34 amount of private opportunities” (42). These adult learners were forging school identities in a virtual classroom against a backdrop of “employment and family obligations that affected their performance and participation.” (42). The private email exchanges used in this setting between student and instructor mixed the “professional and the personal” – the instructor became like an empathetic “neighbor and friend.” (43). The type of community that evolved in this particular course balanced in a space between public and private, through public group work and private email conversations, effectively equalizing the status (Fortune and Eldred, cited 45) of literacy and orality, melding citizen/ friend into a community member who is also a student. The authors describe this mode of course delivery as moving toward a “student- centered, teacher-as-facilitator model” (45). In this article, not only the adult student’s subjectivity is observed to be shaped by the distance learning experience, but a new type of instructor is called into being by the dynamically intersecting factors of technology/ design/ status in this educational context. The instructor becomes an innovator/ advocate who possesses technology expertise and the political savvy to negotiate fair compensation for the time that is invested in the invention and delivery of online courses. Looking at this virtual intersection, or, that site which constitutes the Distance Learning classroom from a Haylesian perspective, it is clear that ordinary structures have been changed; both students and instructors in this online course are developing new subjectivities in part because the digitally mediated environment exists as a hybrid space outside of ordinary situations. Another place where the issue of subjectivity appears is in Bill Anderson’s Writing Power into Online Discussion, which looks at the ways that individual students develop a sense of agency as they inhabit a distance learning “classroom” located within “relationships that enclose it,” resulting in “power and negotiations” that shape and “choreograph” students’ lives (109). These distance learners, Anderson says, forge an empowered self through their exercise of control; an effect of the classroom’s virtuality is the students increased freedom to decide the time and pace of their interaction with the class. They remain in their own physical place and also develop political space within their online community through this exercise of choices about how and when to interact with the community in whole-class, or small-group, discussions; whether to

35 post, or not; whether to read or not read the posts of others pursuing “paths of self- interest in discriminating ways” (115). The concept of agency assumed here is equated with the enlightened self-interest of the liberal subject. A Haylesian perspective sees that posthuman agency has a “collected heterogeneous quality” that “implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with each other” (PH 4). Hayles also says that “distributed cognition of the Posthuman complicates individual agency” (PH 4). This study identified that “many participants may in fact lead two lives” (117), and in response to the socializing effects of the cohort, one participant said: “you sort of feel like they are watching you too much” (118). According to Hayles, “the interpolation of the user into the machinic system does not require his or her conscious recognition of how he or she is being disciplined by the machine to become a certain type of subject” (MC 6). Here Hayles points to an opportunity to address pedagogically the ways that subjectivity is constructed in the human/ machine interface, but in this study it represents unexplored territory. However, the student’s comment (from the study, noted above) flags a good place to begin to address this. As Hayles says: “It is not coincidental that the Panopticon abstracts power out of the bodies of disciplinarians into a universal, disembodied gaze. On the contrary, it is precisely this move that gives the Panopticon its force, for when the bodies of the disciplinarians seem to disappear into the technology, the limitations of corporeality are hidden” (PH 194). Students exhibited both open, challenging personas and cautious, restricted ones, depending on their comfort level with the forum; this is an example of subjectivity being mediated by the technology. The larger class-wide discussions tended to result in flattened, normalized discussions, while the small groups had more thought-provoking exchanges. How might a complicated, posthuman, concept of agency be applicable to understanding digitally mediated learning communities? Not only this public/ private tension affects virtual subjectivity, but also the fact that individuals remain physically embodied, located somewhere in time and space, even while enacting virtual personas. According to Hayles, “because embodiment is individually articulated, there is also at least an incipient tension between it and hegemonic cultural constructs” (PH 197). Through the discernable traces of status or

36 race or gender that they project, individuals, even in virtual settings, always participate in a complex web of power relations. While literature is cited (111) that addresses the persistence, presence, or visibility, of individuals’ life-contexts in virtual exchanges within virtual communities, the power dynamic of body/ embodiment/ disembodiment is not addressed in this study. Given these realities, participants, who are seen here as being able to “transcend their situatedness and bind themselves to a wider group” (121) develop a sense of agency that is described as political, but this is mainly in relationship to the (largely unexamined) mediated structure of the classroom. Ownership becomes personal time-management, resistance consists of noticing that they are under surveillance, choice comes down to deciding when to speak or be silent. The subjectivities examined here do not engage Hayles’ discussions of subjectivity or the body/ embodiment relationship that works to construct identity within a cultural frame. My first move was to show how these five articles each present opportunities for, but do not actively pursue, the complex interweavings that a Haylesian analysis might yield. When it becomes important to explore the imbricated notions of materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology that develop as we interface, increasingly, with digitally mediated forms of communication in the classroom and the world, the traditional print- centric methods of analysis may not be able to get at the complexities of these evolving relationships. My second move, by way of contrast, will show a Haylesian frame of epistemologies that is evident in two articles from this issue of Computers and Composition. Kate Keifer’s “Complexity, Class Dynamics, and Distance Learning” is one. Here she applies non-linearity and emergent self-organization-- terms from complexity theory-- as a lens to examine the composition classroom. Keifer draws the analogy between a classroom and a complex adaptive system, or a system with many parts interacting in multiple ways that change in response to the environment. Classrooms too change as their elements interact. These systems are non-linear and exhibit emergent self-organization. What this analysis points to is that the instructor does not control the emergent dynamic of the classroom and that small changes within the system may create large or unexpected consequences. By thinking about these properties of systems, understanding that virtual classrooms present problems for the development of

37 community, Keifer was able to structure student interactions in ways that fostered an interactive class dynamic which in turn activated its inherent self-organizing behavior. In the virtual class Keifer discusses, one eager student, and then three more who followed her lead of energized thoughtful contributions to the peer review forums and journal postings had a non-linear affect on the class. Their participation added up to more than the sum of its parts and was contagious, or viral in nature, and so spread their engagement and enthusiasm to the class overall, changing the class in an unpredictable way. As Keifer explains, the teacher does not dominate but does orchestrate, and “elements in a complex system interact independently of a central controlling authority” (135). Complexity theory allows for “a fuller appreciation of writing situations” and positions the distance learning classroom, and education in general as offering opportunities for successful learning within the larger frame of “emerging network culture” (137). Useful in this context is Hayles’ epistemology of emergence as properties that do not inhere in the individual components of a system; rather, these properties come about from interactions between components. Emergent properties thus appear at the global level of the system itself rather than at the local level of the system’s components. Moreover, emergences cannot be predicted because the complex feedback loops that develop between components are not susceptible to explicit solution (MC 25). Another place we see Haylesian thinking about the larger philosophical frames for writing classrooms is in “Distance learning: From Multiple Snapshots, a Composite Portrait” by Blakelock and Smith. This article looks at Distance Learning in composition holistically, with data gathered from the 37 Distance Learning instructors across a wide spectrum of institutional settings who responded to a detailed informal survey. The central thrust of this article is to provide reportage of what is “‘going on in the trenches’” (140) and to reveal the current position and status of Distance Learning through feedback about working conditions for DL instructors and the political climate for DL at various institutions. The authors also conducted personal interviews which, together with the survey data, help to create a composite picture of the current climate for teaching online writing; with about half those surveyed indicating a growing institutional acceptance of Distance Learning (143).

38 Interesting, from a Haylesian perspective is the overview of the philosophies that the authors draw from in order to position DL within an epistemological context. While Hayles is not cited, the authors apply a Haylesian lens. What emerges from the study is that these various epistemological attitudes – whether the “tools are seen as separate or inseparable from the user” define a philosophical continuum regarding DL “that progress from humanist, to antihumanist/constructivist, to posthumanist regard” (152). The view that new ways of seeing ourselves as positioned within – both shaping and being shaped by – a technologically mediated learning environment is crucial to 21st century pedagogy. As Selfe and Hawisher (2004) say if literacy educators continue to define literacy in terms of alphabetic practices only, in ways that ignore, exclude, or de-value new media texts, they not only abdicate a professional responsibility to describe the ways in which humans are now communicating and making meaning, but they also run the risk of their curriculum no longer holding relevance for students who are communicating in increasingly expansive networked environments (cited on 152). Likening Distance Education to “growth that takes root along the borders of more dominant environments and develops its own unique characteristics” (159), the authors point to the adaptive characteristics that will enable DL to continue to evolve. The Haylesian frame of the posthuman positions DL as an environment that constitutes individuals and the machine interface in an emerging dynamic system that in turn creates non-linear changes in the system itself. The print journal tells us about what is happening with composition in the computer-mediated realm of Distance Education. It explores issues of identity and individual agency; examining the social contexts within, and outside the classroom. Some of the questions addressed in these articles concern the dynamics of a learning community and how students participate and see themselves in terms of membership, time management and ownership of their education. This journal looks at ways that students and teachers fit into systems of digitally mediated communication and what that technology interface means for the student writer. The journal also explores limitations and possibilities of these technologies, looking at the hidden costs of “free” software, and the administrative pressures felt within Composition studies when it is taught across these platforms.

39 Institutional attitudes about Distance Learning, and computer mediated composition in general, are high-lighted in the discussions of time management, course design, assessment, and instructor compensation. Special attention is given to questions about who is teaching these courses and why. Sometimes seen within the institution as appropriate assignments for tenure-track faculty, computer mediated courses are often viewed as expensive to produce because of their relatively small class sizes, and so the teaching of these is given over to adjunct faculty or grad students. Perhaps Distance Learning and computer mediated education is still seen as a novelty within much of academia, not well understood in terms of the investment of the instructor’s time that is necessary for the design, development and delivery of effective online education. The value of the fluidity, flexibility, responsiveness, community- building, and student ownership of education that are made possible with networked computing and other digital modes of communication is perhaps not yet widely recognized. This journal also examines some of the issues surrounding teaching with technology in a digital age, examining what digitally mediated technologies offer for composition in particular, and by inference, for education across disciplines. The information presented here in print form describes, yet does not perform the types of computer-mediated discourse that it explores, nor are the epistemologies of the posthuman used to identify changes in subjectivity that arise in digitally mediated environments. The way that reader/ writer/ text is reconfigured by the material practices associated with digital media are not really addressed. Instead, these mediated environments are being evaluated mainly using print-bound notions of readers and writers and texts.

40 CHAPTER 3 ONLINE

STUDY II: Computers and Composition Online: An International Journal online, since 1996 Now I will look at the refereed journal Computers and Composition Online, inside the Spring 2006 issue, published around the same time as the previously examined print version. The editors are Kristine Blair and Lanette Cadle. The journal is organized by navigation tabs. Click on any of the tabs arranged across the top of the page horizontally to reach the journal’s structural elements: pages for Editorial Staff, Submissions, Resources, and Archives – or see the content of the issue by choosing any one of the six vertically presented tabs in the left hand column. This menu lists: Theory into Practice, Virtual Classroom, Professional Development, Print to Screen, or Reviews, with the last tab being a link to the Blog. This tab/ label design is consistent across all issues, and it offers the reader a chronological path to follow if they want to see changes in a specific area over time. The Spring 2006 edition consists of five articles and four reviews. The articles have roughly 10 to 15 screens with many embedded links to other materials. Inside each section of this issue is the following set of contents: Theory into Practice, which features “(Re)Wiring Ourselves: The Electrical and Pedagogical Evolution of a Writing Center” by Andrea Ascuena and Michael Mattison. Also in this section is “The Rhetoric and Discourse of Instant Messaging” by Christine Hult and Ryan Richlin. The Virtual Classroom section has one article : “Databases and Collaborative Spaces for Composition” by Matt Barton and Charlie Lowe. The Professional Development section features “Making Blogs Produce: Using Modern Academic Storehouses and Factories” by Jen Almjeld, and also “Chaos: An e-Interview with Johndan Johnson-Eilola” by Robin Murphy. The Print to Screen section features the latest abstracts from the print version of Computers and Composition, including those from the March 2006 “Special Issue on Distance Learning” previously examined. The Reviews section contains four: Technology and : Innovative Professional Paths (James Inman and Beth Hewett, Erlbaum, 2006) reviewed by James

41 Schirmer; Profcast (new software) reviewed by Paul Cesarini; The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Kurzweil, Viking, 2005), reviewed by Adam Ellwanger, and Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency: From Manifesto to Modem (Rhodes, SUNY Press, 2005), reviewed by J.A. Rice. The tab for the Blog allows readers to register and join, then read and post comments in the ongoing conversation that centers around the topics addressed in the main body of the journal. In the Theory into Practice section, “(Re)Wiring Ourselves” (Ascuena and Mattison) examines the re-design of the Boise State Writing Center’s online tutoring service, which was launched in 1995 and then discontinued due to problems with technology, lack of student traffic at the site, difficulty training staff to tutor online, managing staff schedules, and turnaround time for responses, among other things. In 2003-2004 the idea was reconsidered, given the large number of commuter students enrolled at Boise State and their consistent requests for the writing center to stay open longer. Because the center was already operating 58 hours per week, the administration thought, if well designed, an online tutoring service could be tried again. This article is the account of how that was accomplished. On the first screen, or the Introduction circuit, there are hyperlinks to the homepages of several university writing centers. This allows the reader to immediately situate Boise State’s program in a larger context; this article also has links to the reference pages throughout, (which in turn may include other links) such as “note 2” which offers a viewing of some of Fordham University Writing Center’s samples of student writing. Clearly the reader has a choice of levels – and opportunities to dig deeper. After Introduction and Context, there is a page called Circuits. This page contains what looks like a key pad, or grid of buttons, named for the sections they link to, and this is also the central schematic, or map, for the article. This arrangement enacts the concept, (Re)Wiring, for the piece, and is explained thus, in text beneath the circuit board: “Each circuit on the right will take you completely through that particular wiring concern, only occasionally linking to another (to keep from crossing too many wires). Yet each page within a specific concern provides a link back to the circuits page, so you may return as you wish until all the rewiring has been completed.” The three main concerns: Technology, Administration, and Pedagogy are each major circuits, and each of these circuits have subsections. The circuits represent paths

42 between parts of the article, and they are clearly laid out here in this interactive diagram of contents. The Technology circuit begins with Theory – in this case, the principle of simplicity is fore grounded, and the idea that the technology must “get out of the way” (quoted are Miraglia and Norris, 2000) so that the site’s usability can be framed within a designed space that both facilitates and encourages use. This Technology: Theory screen offers a choice of two buttons at the bottom of the page, Circuits, which will always loop the reader back to the main circuit board, or Design, which allows you to read on. Technology: Design is focused specifically on the parameters for student writing submissions, and thinks about the way they will be handled, breaking the challenge into these chunks: Submission forms --what information should be solicited on these? Format-- which file extensions should be allowed? Should we use a dropbox system for receiving the drafts? Length--what about 7 double spaced pages, or 2250 words for a holistic examination of texts, but only three pages, or 1000 words, if the concerns are specifically grammar? (And the dropbox therefore will not accept papers over these limits.) Turnaround time--should we put an emphasis on speed, and include a “Quick Questions” box for simple questions, and the fastest return-service? All these and other considerations went into the re-design mix at Boise state. The third loop of this circuit, Technology: Testing explains how the center’s tutors tried out the design before final implementation by submitting drafts and commenting on them in-house, allowing bugs to be worked out before launching the new service, saying: “Our web pages begin our relationship with a writer; they establish the tone of our interaction.” This thought points onward, to the Administration circuitry, and concerns about the “ethos” and attitudes of the tutors, as well as management issues—the center went from handling nine requests during the first semester of its revival to 150 in the second. In private email consultations there is a loss of the “overhearable talk” (cited from Healy) that acts as a community-establishing force within the writing center. This change was balanced, the authors feel, with the accountability and pride-in-work established by the practice of saving and archiving the email tutoring sessions; tutors would log “up to seventy-five double spaced pages in responses--- in one semester”, and students (from the Pedagogy: Attitude circuit page) also had a ““permanent blueprint” (authors cite Mabrito, 2000) to use when revising”. In this pedagogy loop the three-

43 pronged focus of communication, conversation, and collaboration is explored through links called Pedagogy: Attitude/: Practice/: The Letter (which explains the tutors’ form of response to student submissions) and / Response Example (which illustrates this). The map of circuitry created by the authors of this article organizes and links the screens, or pages, in a logical way, and on the Conclusion screen the authors, Ascuena and Mattison, find much positive growth in their carefully designed and thoughtfully implemented (Re)Wiring project at Boise State. “For Amy” (an online tutor) “the computer screen … was a place where she could be, in her words, “tactful, positive, and clear.” Instead of, what some feared would be “dehumanizing consultations, it might be more appropriate to consider that email consultations “re-humanize” them.” The scheme of this article is both creative and coherent. The reader performs the circuitry, and embodies this metaphor of computer mediated communication. The second article in this Theory into Practice section deals with the rhetoric of instant messaging (Hult & Richins). What is it? How is it similar or different from other forms of discourse? How do students use it, and how might this use by student writers “bleed over” into other genres of writing? The authors again present tabs, or a map of their article. The tabs are: Home, Abstract, Introduction, The Study, Conclusion and Works Cited. They organize the piece and appear in each section, offering the reader easy return to any segment. The Introduction situates IM in a social context, by demographics: 93% of 13-17 year old internet users also use IM, “and popularity” 76% of to the online population use IM, according to Business Wire (2003). The online periodical new.architect called IM a “virtual watercooler” (from Panetteri 2003), and PC magazine described IM as a mix of slang and acronyms “with some text graphics (called emoticons) thrown in for good measure” (from Munro 2003). “Munro terms this new language “EZ Interaction”” say the authors, and give examples (from Ten 2003): “UR means “you’re”; SITD means “still in the dark”; GWTP means “get with the program”; HTH means “hope that helps”; “in fact” say the authors “ ten IM abbreviations have made it into the Oxford dictionary: BBLR “be back later”; HAND “have a nice day”; CUL8R “see you later”; RUOK “are you OK”; H8 “hate”; GR8 “great”; IMHO “in my humble opinion” happy face emoticon; sad face emoticon; LOL “laughing out loud””. Citing Grinter and Palen (2002) who found that teenagers use IM to build community, and to learn “how to be a communicator,”

44 the authors point to concerns raised (NEA 2004) by teachers that this “electro-speak” will invade all forms of discourse. While “some writers will apologize for their mis- spellings in IM conversations, being acutely aware of the persistence of the written medium and the speech-like nature of their IM prose” (referencing Voida et al., 2002), the authors looked at Issacs et al. (2002) who found that ““frequent IMers have longer, faster-paced interactions with shorter turns, more threading, and more multitasking relative to infrequent users.”” Other examinations of the practices and effects associated with various modes of “electronic language” make a frame for this study, especially the work of Kwang-Kyu Ko (1996) on the Deadalus InterChange system (a study of “an early version of text messaging conducted in a networked classroom in real time”, a form of “synchronous chat” between teacher and students in a classroom setting) as compared with both spoken and written data; also Naomi Barton (2002), K. C. Boone (2001), Rodney Rice (1997), Patricia O’Connor (2003), Charles Moran (1995), and Lewis and Fabos (2005). The authors acknowledge that varying “constraints of the electronic environments” create large differences in the forms of electronic discourse; while an email letter can look just like a formal print letter, a text message composed on a cell phone will be materially constrained and consequently altered radically from a Standard English communication. For their purposes, the authors situate all these varieties, or modes, as examples of electronic communications that challenge standard conventions of English usage. Many questions, raised in various studies about the effects of these forms of discourse can apply specifically to Instant Messaging use as well. If people converse routinely in ways that are fast, brief, sloppy, choppy, symbolic, and seemingly anarchic compared to standard rules, then what might this mean for traditional and academic forms of discourse? Does the practice of these modes of electronic communication ruin their users’ ability to execute texts in Standard English? Could Instant Messaging use have any positive effects in an academic setting, or does it represent an erosion of standards? This is the thrust of this study. The authors “hypothesized that using differing media to write, particularly using electronic language, will result in differing discourse features and rhetorical moves that will be seen in a close analysis of the

45 rhetoric and discourse of the writing itself as well as the processes used to generate the writing” and they used these four research questions: 1. How do the linguistic structures of IM compare to those found in other types of writing? (modeled on Herring 2004) 2. How do students describe their IM experiences? (Interviews) 3. What does IM look like? (Lab Observations) 4. In what ways might the widespread use of IM be influencing how written English is understood and practiced by student writers? (Speculation) They first reviewed the literature on electronically mediated discourse, and then conducted text analysis, interviews, and observations in order to answer them. Four undergraduate students and their 13 correspondents were studied. The samples of IM use were taken from both home and school computers. An archive of IM use by each student (2 weeks in January 2004) was analyzed, along with an essay that each student had previously submitted for course credit. Two of the essays were for freshman writing, and two were for mid-level courses, one of which was Political Science. The authors applied Kwang-Kyo Ko’s analysis of 28 linguistic features of speech and writing by which he was able to show the InterChange mode of discourse to be something in between speech and writing, a hybrid form with features of both. His study (1996) recognized that InterChange communication” (such as IM) “was fostering some behaviors and inhibiting others” supporting “the view that the physical mode of communication shapes language use” (Ko). Although, unlike Ko’s research which was focused in an academic setting, while the IM conversations in this study were “personal, dyadic, and socially oriented”—there was still an academic angle, through the use of the student papers. Some findings from their use of Ko’s (1996) linguistic lens (which the authors describe as an “attempt to understand how computer mediated communication systems may change the very nature of language itself”) as applied to their sample of Instant Messaging use are these: it is used mainly for social connection; all users multitask while communicating with IM; and almost all use abbreviations, which most said helped communication. While half said IM could be confusing, this was due partly to the equipment (slow response

46 time) and mostly to the lack of ability to discern the “tone” of the message. In all but one instance the students said IM style did not affect their writing in an academic setting. However, the authors did find evidence to the contrary; “the sample of student essays shows signs of more informal language” demonstrating more “speech-like as well as more “instant message-like”” patterns, with fewer new vocabulary words in these longer papers as compared to the IM chats than the authors expected; they also found fewer nouns and adjectives and prepositional phrases than they thought they would see. “Pointing out” say the authors “the unsophisticated, informal use of language by these student writers.” These patterns cannot be directly traced to Instant Message use, however, because there are just too many variables, the authors say. To further explore the rhetorical moves and writing processes of IM the authors conducted 30 minute observations in the Usability Research and Evaluation Lab at Utah State University. Citing Naomi Baron’s (2004) point that different forms of computer- mediated communication need to be examined individually, the authors compared IM to discourse in other modes, looking at both rhetoric and process. The 30 minute sessions held in the lab are illustrated in this article with screen shots of the user’s computers as they perform IM and multitask-discourse, most having several other applications open such as email and Word. Observed in these sessions were some consistent features: language was “speech- like and personal” and “language short cuts and short hand” were used while “speed of production over depth of analysis may be seen in all types of writing” (However, this is also an “impression” the authors got as well from the written essays, citing “lack of subordination and extensive use of BE verbs” in these as a suggestion that students may “sacrifice depth in favor of speed”, but the finding of this is “not conclusive” These student essays also “revealed a relative unfamiliarity with the conventions of formal, written discourse,” but again, the authors do not find this conclusive, stating “this impression may only be an artifact of the particular mode of essay these students were producing” – more descriptive and less informational.) In Conclusions, the authors find that English prose is evolving, as it has for a “century and a half, according to Baron (2002) “towards “more casual and speech-like” forms. Helping “students to be more self-reflective about all the writing they do” is still a major goal in education, say the authors. They reference Farmer (2005) who called IM,

47 by nature “a collaborative tool. This collaborative nature is what makes IM ideal for learning environments.” Farmer suggests, and the authors agree, that these “legitimate, if different, genres of writing that merit ongoing analysis, discussion, and experimentation.” The authors also say we need to uphold standards “effective communication practices in other genres, such as formal essays” making sure that students can discern the differences between them. The Virtual Classroom section features “Databases & Collaborative Spaces” (Barton & Lowe), an article which explores the browser-based content management systems (CMS) that expand the “rhetorical situation of the classroom by moving student writing onto the public internet.” This article is introduced, and organized with a menu listing the titles of its 11 screens. There are many links embedded in the text of this article which offer the reader multiple paths to explore in order to situate the discussion within a larger frame, including a link to a blog “Evaluating Open Source Content Management Platforms”. Open Source, which considers difficulties and benefits of using open source course management systems to build classes, including the ethical values of their communal and collaborative nature, as well as additional features not available on WebCT or Blackboard, like “Who’s Online”, and dynamic sidebars on every page- and available to the whole class- with links to most recent posts to blogs or forums. Not the “teacher’s administration Panopticon” that user tracking features exist as in blackboard. The article offers links to Purdue, Digital WPA, CultureCat, The Where Project, Kairosnews, Interversity, weblogs@upei, and Academic Commons – among others, and gives indepth reviews of Microsoft Sharepoint’s pros and cons. The context for this discussion is made clear and real by seeing this network of interrelated sites and topics. Barton and Lowe encourage course designers to look deeply into CMS, and to decide the impact of maintenance and administration requirements, comfort of use, and long-term commitment of system designers to its present and future upkeep. There are many choices and many reasons to consider carefully – This article lets a reader investigate, in smart ways, the ramifications of choosing a CMS, by way of both anecdote and example. The Professional Development section contains two very interesting items: One, “Making Blogs Produce” by Jen Almjeld, looks at blogs as spaces for both archiving and

48 creating academic work. This article is replete with illustrations, and links to examples. Again – tabs organize, and the reader chooses what to read, in what order, with the labels at the top of the screen serving as a map of the article: points of interest, things of note, sights to see about blogs and how they evolved, how blogs can be made to work as sites for professional development. Jen Almjeld in the introduction says of blogs, while potentially sites of “frivolity and egocentrism” they “also hold great academic promise.” This article is broken into links called Main/Blog Beginnings/Bloggers as Scholars/Storehouses/Factories/Conclusions and Works Cited. Again, the navigation through portions of the piece is made easy by these tabs. She references the Fall 2005 edition of Computers and Composition Online in which Bowling Green State University (Colby et al.) graduate students wrote about “specific implications of blogging for graduate school work likening them to a “digital salon where public and private spheres merge,” seeing “blog as performance space where now scholars test out knowledge.” Almjeld takes this further, to include not only the possible research or teaching interests of blogs, but how they “can also shape and organize emerging careers and entire bodies of work.” Her article posits blogs as both “factories” and “storehouses.” In Blog Beginnings she looks at the blog as a historical construct, drawing analogies to Aristotle’s topoi, or topics and examples for successful rhetoric. She also connects the blog to commonplace books, “places for capturing pearls of wisdom” used by “Erasmus and other humanist educators.” (from Lockridge 2003). The practice of gathering “the nectar of other peoples’ thoughts” (this from Havens, 2002) moved to the “journal-keeping habits of the wealthy and privileged of the 18th and 19th centuries,” (from W. Caleb McDaniel: “The Roots of Blogging” Chronicle of Higher Education, 2005). McDaniel positioned these books, “originally intended to help bolster public performances as speaker and correspondent,” as also “residing at the borders between public and private spheres,” becoming sites of identity construction for women as they increasingly used them to reflect their relationship to society through techniques of collage, commentary, and expression, “merging the public uses of rhetoric with the private practices of the home” (Lockridge). These books became “memory and storage devices” all of which attributes are seen in blogs today, says Almjeld, making the connection, between rhetorical

49 “invention” (or factory) and the “inventory” functionality of blogs as storehouses. In Bloggers as Scholars, for academic work, she argues that blogs can act as a stage for “graduate students and new instructors” to participate in disciplinary conversations occurring in these online spaces. In addition, these sites are useful not only as salons and storehouses, but as filing cabinets, showcases, and places to receive feedback on scholarly projects. Blogs as Storehouses offer portability, access from anywhere, and archive functions that allow the ordering of works. Blogs as Factories promote collaborative and cooperative development of scholarship through dialog, and lets scholars practice publishing, it also helps them to “get the big picture” of their work as it progresses. In the Conclusion, Almjeld says that blogging, if used with pedagogical aims in mind, can be a very productive site of knowledge- building, “as powerful a rhetorical tool as any graduate student might hope to discover.” The second article under Professional Development is Robin Murphy’s e- interview Johndan Johnson-Eilola. The piece is a visual feast that includes, set into the screens, plug-ins that enable a reader/ viewer to watch video of him answering the questions. The article is titled “Chaos: an einterview” and this piece enacts that state, visually, with a photo of Johnson Eilola’s own home-office wall (a white board covered with writing, scribbles, lines, diagrams) to illustrate his statement: I take massive notes about everything, constantly; I tag books with hundreds of post-its; I have a database of web pages, text fragments and ideas in Storyspace, Tinderbox, and DevonThink. I have handwritten notes in journals going back to the 1980’s; I have a small Moleskin notebook that I carry around with me constantly so that I can write ideas down; I have stacks of videotapes of interviews, and observations; I have sheets and sheets of enormous (three or four feet square) of Post-its that I cover walls with (especially if I’m not in my home office…) Shown below (Figure 1) is Johndan Johnson-Eilola in a screen-capture from the opening page of Murphy’s interview. This image of him is a still photo taken from one of the video segments embedded in this text that are accessed through plug-ins. Not only do we read the transcript of the conversation, but we become an audience for the dialog

50 taking place. Along with design features like arrangement and style that Murphy uses creatively to convey Johnson-Eilola’s teaching methods, we actually hear him describe his educational philosophy and can see his gestures and facial expressions as he responds to questions. The combination of words, design and moving image embodies the speaker.

Figure 1: Johndan Johnson-Eilola

Johndon Johnson-Eilola, pictured here, is a professor at Clarkson University and author, most recently of Datacloud:Toward a New theory of Online work published by Hampton Press in 2004. This “e-interview” says Murphy, “is primarily a response to my reading of Johndan’s newest text Datacloud, though as is evident in his answers and the videos depicted here, the culminating interview mirrors his writing process: Chaotic.” This article has such an intensely graphic presentation that it is hard to describe adequately. First, I can say the sections are called Home, Ideology, Play, Cynicism, Textuality, Teaching and Final Thoughts. It resembles one of Jen Almjeld’s blog-history examples: a commonplace book or an elaborately constructed memory-keeping journal comes to mind. Also, COLOR! Arrangement and style. This is like a curiosity cabinet, or a collage in its layered appearance. Besides color, there is sound, not only in the actual recordings of Johndan’s voice in the video clips but in the variety of fonts used

51 throughout. They can only be described as vocal; as modulating; carrying tone, inflection, and emphasis, in short as modeling the qualities of speech. Everything about the article’s manifestation reinforces Johndan’s motif: what calls the “Chaos at the heart of writing” that can find expression in the “contingent and fluid qualities of texts” that hypertext can facilitate, though many authors, he says, only employ hypertextual linking in standard ways, such as the efficient organization of footnotes and citations. Calling himself “not much of a role model” he says that he works by immersion into chaos, “in the invention stages over much longer periods than most people I know.” Saturation with data, diagrams that he draws, lots of loud music and holing up periodically are ways of inhabiting creative chaos for Johndan. He sees himself and other compositionists who work with students on projects in technical communication as “leaning forward into the future, as Bruce sterling says.” (Ideology) Ideologies: Saying that “experimentation will always have a role” in composition, Johndan believes that one “useful aspect of computers has been the increase in the amount of written communication,” and increasingly, “ that students are now willing to do,” admitting that inappropriate use of Instant Messaging techniques in rhetorical situations is not a failure of the technological communication per se, but represents a very “teachable moment” for teachers to explain strategies and requirements of various discourse modes. (“It’s a Good Thing.”) Play: Johndan incorporates play into teaching – he likes field trips with students to look at architecture, then consider and discuss the ways that people move through structures. He involves the students in considering the affordances of the physical space. He considers peer-review workshops a form of play: “the opportunity to toss ideas around and to expose everyone to varying approaches to work” he also gives students “the rhetorical tools they need to engage in good workshop discussions.” He borrows the creation of “personas” from usability studies; these are fictional characters, sort of like avatars – he has students role-play as these personas to test out the usability of a site, saying “they allow people to make concrete statements about how a person would interact with a site.” Cynicism: Murphy asks: “You’ve called yourself a happy cynic. How does your cynicism influence or affect your classroom practices? He replies: “...it’s just how I am”, saying that he never uses student examples cynically, only he challenges them at times

52 to “design something that violates the principles we’ve been talking about” making a cynical approach in this case into a constructive instructional application. Textuality: Murphy then asks Johndan to relate the concepts in Datacloud to Pedagogy. He answers: “…anything can be read as a text” and if so then “everything is fair game for a class activity” and the rhetorical moves and strategies of what he calls “surfaced interfaces” can be leveraged effectively by teaching both examples and general rhetorical principles which students learn to apply in concrete ways through exercises in collage, collaboration, and analysis. “I’ve been working more with remixing” he says, “having students combine pre-existing fragments of texts into new forms.” Teaching: Taking a “mundane example,” Johndan has students “design a useful subject line for an email message. We go into rhetorical purposes, interface elements, and usability issues driven by interface design,” getting students to see “computer-based composing as simultaneously functional and conceptual.” He does not see himself as hide-bound – nor a fan of the “ransom note” model in the “modernist sense of efficiency” that is severe and plain. He says: “it’s often useful to contest boundaries and make readers (and writers) a little confused.” Johndan works with concepts like “usability, (“especially the more recent, less deterministic forms”) the active reader, and participatory design, in order to “understand readers as users.” He thinks areas like graphic design and film theory should be more connected to and used in composition because they are “crucial to understanding complex texts,” and also, that “the production of text, then, is just one mode for working, alongside video, audio, and all the rest,” leaving the reader/ user/ viewer with one final piece of advice: “Publish early and publish often.” (Some things really never change.) The Reviews section offers four commentaries, three of which describe books: Technology and English studies: Innovative Professional Paths (Eds. James Inman and Beth L. Hewitt, 2006; reviewed by James Schirmer) is a collection of essays about the importance of technology in English studies today; The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (by Ray Kurzweil, 2005; reviewed by Adam Ellwanger) is a look forward to a post-biological world, and Radical Feminism, Writing, and critical

53 Agency: From Manifesto to Modem (by Jacqueline Rhodes, 2005; reviewed by J.A.Rice) is a look back and a re-mediation of history. These reviews, following the pattern of the rest of the journal’s articles, include many links to outside sources. Do you have a question while you are reading the commentary by Rice, about Rhodes argument? What does Rice mean when he says that “Rhodes proposes a Foucauldian model of analysis that evokes a radical textual subjectivity for modern day feminists”? Want to brush up on Foucault? Or, from inside of Ellwanger’s review of The Singularity is Near, find out about Alan Turing’s Test, or see what other things Ray Kurzweil has done? All this information is offered as hyperlinks within these commentaries. The fourth piece, by Paul Cesarini, reviews not a text, but a technology application, ProfCast. Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near: When humans Transcend Biology, reviewed by Adam Ellwanger, describes a near future (2045 is the projected date) when computer intelligence will supersede humans’. This theory is based partly on the “ of Accelerating Returns” which states that the rate of change accelerates exponentially. He theorizes that “when a computer is constructed that has the memory and computational capacities of the human brain” that machine will then invent ways to enhance its capacities, as each succeeding iteration of itself will also do. Some call him crazy, as Ellwanger points out, but Kurzweil spends 100 pages here refuting his critics and makes in some ways a compelling case for his future scenarios. Kurzweil posits that reverse engineering will be used to create a computer with language mastery and emotions, intertwined affordances of the human mind that at this time “remain unsolved by philosophy and cognitive science.” What Ellwanger finds very interesting is “the relevance of Kurzweil’s insights on the conversations regarding Distance Education.” What Kurzweil’s model suggests is that the way we learn in the near future will be more like uploading and downloading information to a computer. Ellwanger says this would mean, from Kurzweil’s predictions, the “disciplined space for educating bodies will become obsolete along with the body of the instructor because presence in a classroom will unnecessarily belabor a mastery of knowledge that could be obtained virtually anywhere in much less time.” Kurzweil goes on to predict that by mid-century we will abandon our bodies and exist in cyberspace. Also put forward is the idea of a “kind of galactic colonialism” that

54 gives Ellwanger pause. Notwithstanding Kurzweil’s blithe optimism about the role of capitalism in all of this progress, and the wackiness of some of his predictions, his book is well researched, Ellwanger says, pointing to “Kurzweil’s academic background, the numerous prestigious awards he has been granted, and his advisory role to the US government and Microsoft. “The singularity is Near will be a valuable read for anyone invested in thinking about how the unfolding computer revolution will impact our lives” says Ellwanger, “even for those of us who hope the Singularity is far.” A different note is struck by Rice with Jacqueline Rhodes’ Radical Feminism, Writing and Critical Agency: From Manifesto to Modem, for this is a book that looks back in order to re-mediating history. Rhodes makes a connection between second-wave feminist manifestos, pamphlets, and position statements to current-day feminist blogs as sites of “radical rhetorical action in the public sphere”. Rice points out however that her “Foucauldian lens” determines text to be the sole site of agency. For Rice, this means “feminism’s history and relations to power can only be articulated within a space that cannot resist its own construction” and this position cannot therefore articulate “how critical agency and textual subjectivity are formed.” When “Rhodes argues for the similarity between the textual function of the manifesto and the website” she makes the leap that, while manifestos were indeed “invocations of identity” the websites are “potential spaces for a collaborative textual identity not realized in linear print-based texts.” She gives the example of the “Canadian Women Internet Association” whose “‘official’ leadership abandoned the group because of ideological differences” but which continues to “receive posts without any formal or hierarchical identity.” For the classroom Rhodes offers “radical feminist textuality” as a site for the development of critical agency, and provides links to feminist websites that perform what she discusses. Profcast, reviewed here by Paul Cesarini, was created by D. Chmura of Humble Daisy Inc. in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and had its debut in January 2006. Similar to podcast, Profcast allows you to record audio narration onto existing presentations, or generate “PowerPoint or Keynote-based enhanced podcasts” and “requires no specific, proprietary media player to access”, nor is it tied to “specific types of hardware or digital audio players.” While it is designed for Apple’s iLife06 suite, (and a Windows version is being considered) “Students could access the enhanced podcasts on their laptops, their

55 iPods, or any digital audio player capable of displaying such content.” It is, according to its creator “a tool focusing on dynamic, asynchronous communication”. Profcast was designed to be relatively simple to use, to work with open standards, and to be platform neutral. Specifically conceived for distance learning settings, “Chmura wanted” says the author “to develop a tool that had a low learning curve for faculty and a potentially high impact on student learning”. Profcast, says Cesarini, is a very useful tool in certain contexts, for the delivery of educational material, although it is a one way stream of information, like a lecture—the “time-honored but frequently disparaged method of teaching”. However, “for entirely web-based classes, podcasted content can only be a positive” says Cesarini, and Profcast is a tool that allows faculty yet another way to connect with students, and to push content to them through the digital devices they routinely use and are comfortable with, “beyond the usual troika of chat rooms, discussion boards, and email”. And lastly, the Blog tab offers an invitation to participate in an ongoing discussion with peers.

Analysis: A Haylesian Lens for the online journal. Given this synopsis of the Spring 2006 issue of Computers and Composition Online, might these terms: materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology take on a different significance than they do when applied to the articles in the print journal? Where do we see Hayles in this? How are these journals alike? How do they differ? What difference does the medium make? First of all, describing a web-text is a challenge. How it is becomes immediately as important as what; form is function. Each article in this journal does have a dynamic graphic presentation that works within, and serves to reinforce, the creators’ organizational schemes. These tabbed pages and their various configurations work something like an external skeleton, or a map and a map key, which outlines talking points and orients the reader to the terrain that they will be traversing. Rather than a traditional table of contents at the beginning of the issue, these articles are narratively displayed and briefly described on the opening “Letter from the Editors” page which serves as greeting, map, door, and conveyance, since each section listed is also a hyperlink that takes you to an article with a click.

56 Because of their construction the articles in this journal demonstrate a Haylesian reflection of materiality which considers both incorporating and inscribing practices: “Sitting, gesturing, walking, moving,” are incorporating practices, learned and expressed in the body. “talking and writing” are inscribing practices. Both are “enculturated practices and both produce the body at the same time that the body produces culture” (PH 200). Thus, participating with/ in an online text literally incorporates inscription. And, Hayles says, because “incorporating practices are always performative and instantiated…in contrast to inscription, which can be transported from context to context once it has been performed, incorporation can never be cut entirely free from its context” (PH 200). This means that a digitally mediated networked document splices the reader/writer/text together in a circuit of mutual constitution. When we read “(Re)Wiring Ourselves” by Ascuena and Mattison, we become a circuit by flowing within the articulated pathways of the article. The document is not staic, it is a fluid construction made at the time of its viewing. This connection of parts is not activated until the user performs the linking, and in a sense the user becomes the current. By entering the scheme of this article the user is integrated into its circuitry. “Circuit” is a metaphor for connectedness within a system, and for a relationship between components that includes movement. In the same way that “incorporating and inscribing practices work together to create cultural constructs”, this text embodies a metaphor and becomes a “bodily practice that cannot be reduced to a sign” (PH 200). The journal Computers and Composition Online instantiates the things talked about in the print journal, and some of the ways of knowing that Hayles discusses, though traces of print-centric bias are represented here as well. As Hayles says, “our notions of textuality are shot through with assumptions specific to print, although they have not been generally recognized as such” (MC 89). Though Hult and Ritchins, in “The Rhetoric and Discourse of Instant Messaging”, cite Lewis and Fabos (2005) who say the crisis over a loss of print literacy “‘ is an artifact of a particular generational anxiety over new forms of adolescent and childhood identity and life pathways: fundamental ontological and teleological changes in childhood traceable to global economies, cultures and technologies’”, and the authors also note also correlations with Ko’s observation that “the physical mode of communication shapes language use”, they still end up with data about IM use that provides a linguistic

57 analysis. The hybridity identified in IM discourse by this study is seen as what Hayles calls “an emergent property created through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies”; but not yet examined are the material properties that Hayles locates at the “junction between physical reality and human intention” (MC 3). The authors explain that some educators fear that non-standard and hybrid forms of discourse will “bleed” over into real academic writing, and show some evidence to support those claims, but what else might this hybrid textuality actually mean and do? Why does the beautifully articulated (Re)Wiring article about Boise State’s writing center end up being ultimately about facilitating the making of print texts at a distance? Granted, we live and work in academia and we certainly don’t want our genres to bleed all over each other, and the purpose of a distance writing tutoring service is to make texts remotely—but—where is the self-conscious admission that this all may be changing, and how can we learn deeper lessons from the material practices of digitally mediated textuality? When we view J ohndon Johnson-Eilola’s “CHAOS an e- interview” conducted by Robin Murphy, we witness a very successful site of digital rhetoric. We inhabit his chaos – visually, textually, and auditorily; certainly multi-modally. He is speaking, in the video frame inserted within the page, and his moving image is layered over the visual representation of his thinking process as represented by the photo of his office whiteboard. The text of the article is visually energetic. It seems random; it exemplifies chaos – which Johnson-Eilola identifies as a metaphor for his intellectual process. Again, the metaphor is embodied as the text. Whatever connections are to be made must be made by the readers who choose, and act, to create meaning and to reveal whichever text they will experience. When a viewer enters “Making Blogs Produce” by Jen Almjeld, the blog as repository for academic work is a location—metaphorically and actually (virtually? What is the difference?) -that one may contemplate and also visit, tour, and navigate through, moving between various locations for textual archives. Almjeld offers the blog as a site of both work and network; it becomes a virtual salon, serving both a social and intellectual function.

58 When the user reads J.A. Rice’s review of Jacqueline Rhode’s Radical Feminism, the hyperlinks offer journeys to other spaces of knowledge – off to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to read twenty-five pages on Foucault, in order to better contemplate the meaning of a “Foulcaldian lens”. Click on links to visit the websites that Rhodes compares to the second-wave feminist manifestos and that she locates in her book as sites of feminist cyber-textual production: about “feminism for the new millennium” and a location of “una cultra mestiza” (Gloria Anzaldua). These embedded links both show and take the user to sites of rhetorical production that demonstrate the textual practices Rhodes talks about in her book. Ray Kurzweil (Rice reviews his book: The Singularity is Near) is cited by Hayles, though she sees him as holding an alternate epistemology of the posthuman; he is one of the utopian-futurists who believe we will transcend the human body through the interventions of intelligent machines. This is a view Hayles resists, seeing the human/ machine interface as an opportunity for humans to resuscitate and re-orient the body, rather than abandon it and the embodied world. She counts Kurzweil as “one of the many parties contesting to determine what will count as the (post)human (PH 26). Hayles mentions him in a discussion of emergence, and she groups him with the Digital Philosophers and complexity theorists who insist “there is now only one medium, the digital computer” (MC 31). Hayles feels this “claim has the effect of flattening into a single causal line- the convergence of all media into one- social and cultural processes that are in fact much more complex” (MC 31), and thinks he attributes too much autonomy to machines. She favors Bolter and Grusin’s picture of a “robust media ecology in which various forms of media represent and are represented in old media, the process they call remediation” (MC32). When you enter Adam Ellwanger’s review of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near you can find a link to an in-depth article explaining Alan Turing and his test, referenced in the review. Turing is located, along with Foucault, in that same Stanford University archive linked to in Rice’s article. Stanford is a reputable source, and the additional context is very helpful in understanding the authors’ arguments. Ray Kurzweil seems bizarrely far out in his thinking, but his accomplishments are equally astounding. Links in Ellwanger’s piece take the reader to Kurzweil’s own website

59 – Kurzweil Technologies, where one finds a page with his photograph and career summary, another with information about his Kurzweil 250 Music Synthesizer— “considered to be the first electronic musical instrument to successfully emulate the complex sound resonance of a grand piano and virtually all other orchestral instruments.” This page shows Kurzweil at a keyboard with Stevie Wonder, musical advisor to the project. There is also a page detailing Kurzweil’s selection as winner of “The National Medal of Technology” in 2000, for his work in innovative computer technologies, such as his voice recognition software, “which have overcome many barriers and enriched the lives of disabled persons and all Americans.” He is also shown in a photograph accepting the award from then president, Bill Clinton. This side trip to Kurzweil’s homepage changes the reader’s understanding of who he is, and what ethos he brings to his writing. By inviting the viewer to visit the sites containing examples of Kurzweil’s research and achievements, Ellwanger’s review of The Singularity offers a picture that becomes more like a hologram than a photograph. The Blog, like Almjeld’s working/ networking cites for professional development, offers a public space to discuss anything of current interest about computers and writing, again, this is a digital salon and a site for both social connection and intellectual work simultaneously. The blog offers a new constitution of subjectivity in the academic community. It is a site of the distributed cognition which is an affordance of digitally linked spaces, both discursive and conversational, it is collaborative in nature.

60 CONCLUSION

To look at materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology from a Haylesian perspective is to see these three terms as intertwined and inseparable. Why might this study of two professional journals in different mediums be a good way to examine them? While both versions of this journal examine the use of computers in writing instruction there are clear differences between them. These differences tell us something about the changing landscape of Composition in the 21st century. The print journal inscribes and while the online version incorporates inscription in self-reflexive ways: this enacts an example of Haylesian attention to materiality. The print journal represents the thinking mind, and the online journal performs an embodied reader/ writer/ text. The subjectivity of the print reader is located outside of the text, with a clear boundary between them. The online “reader” makes a Haylesian shift from receiver-of-text to that of co-creator-- since the text is never the same way twice--and it must be enacted to exist. The print version of the journal is discursive and reduces ideas to abstractions, while the online journal personifies epistemological frames of knowledge-making through metaphors made flesh. The online journal demonstrates the Haylesian flickering signifier: “a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces” (PH xiv). The signifier is necessarily reduced to abstraction in the print version because of the medium of its inscription- marks on a page- and “Abstraction”, Hayles reminds us, “thus not only affects how one describes learning but also changes the account of what is learned” (PH 202). This then, further reveals the intertwining of these three key terms in the digital realm. Simply, much of what is talked about in the print journal is performed in the online version. “Normally,” says Hayles, “readers attend to the represented world and only peripherally notice the body of the text” (PH 129). But when the “human and intelligent machine are spliced together in an integrated circuit, subjectivity is dispersed, vocalization is non-localized, bodies of print are punctuated with prostheses,

61 and boundaries of many kinds are destabilized” (PH 130). New subjectivities of the Posthuman are formed at these permeable edges. Referencing Anna Gunder’s “Forming the Text, Performing the work” Hayles engages with Gunder’s ideas about textual specificity. These uncover prevailing print- based assumptions; while a painting would never be considered as separate from its material substrate, a document has long had an invisible body “seen as merging with the sign system as an abstract representation” (MC 92). This is one complication apparent when discursively reviewing a text that exists on the web. Circuits. This is a metaphor, and in the online article (Re)Wiring Ourselves circuit becomes an enacted practice. What does circuit mean? In one sense, when we enter this article we literally become circuit. What else in our lives is a circuit, and what global problems do we face that are not such systems? How can we learn to see this flow as part of a new concept of subjectivity within a new epistemology? Not discussing how electronic textuality affects our self/ ves is -from Hayles- “like feeling slight texture differences on an elephant’s tail while ignoring the ways in which the tail differs from the rest of the elephant”; she continues by saying that there is “often little or no theoretical exploration of what it means to read an electronic text produced in this fashion” (MC 91). Theories of new subjectivities in the digital realm are needed. A self-conscious attention to materiality in a Haylesian sense can offer ways to expand our epistemologies and frame the learning process in terms of systems and relationships, rather than linear causalities privileged by print literacy (MC 32). Shifting the ideas of reader, and writer, and text to that of reader/ writer/ text results in what Hayles identifies as a property of digital texts: “intermediation”, which “denotes mediating interfaces connecting humans with intelligent machines that are our collaborators in making, storing, and transmitting informational processes and objects” (Mc 33). To examine subjectivity then becomes a way to look for junctures where intermediating processes can be seen as effects in the world. This is a key word for exploring how digitally mediated networked computing is affecting not only what, but how we know, or the epistemologies of the posthuman. Digitally mediated texts are performative and participatory. Visual representation and moving parts or auditory components are as important as words. A digital text is permeable in ways a printed text is not. Hayles quotes Shelley Jackson, maker of the

62 Patchwork Girl by Mary/ Shelley and Herself, from Shelley’s article reflecting on its creation, “Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl” (1998). She says: “Boundaries of texts are like boundaries of bodies, and both stand in for the confusing and invisible boundary of the self” (MC 152). This quote attests to the imbricated nature of the terms materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology. The digital realm performs them as such. The Haylesian notion of materiality that considers reader/ writer/ text as being together in a complex and mutually constituted relationship is enacted online, while the print journal in many ways is still addressing the digital landscape as if it can be measured, navigated, and understood using printed maps. What is clear, given these two examples of similar but very different versions of an academic journal which is focused on computers and composition, is that the medium matters. Furthermore, it is very difficult to critique and analyze the new affordances and capabilities of one medium (digitally mediated and networked communication) from the standpoint of another (in this case print, and its long tradition). The aliveness of the computer interface enacts an active reader. The text itself responds to the viewer’s body. The body of the text is not static but is dynamic, and is not the same text at any given time; it is mutable. The text is responsive to the commands of the reader/ machine and changes shape accordingly. The materiality of the viewer, using a body to move through, around, inside, and beyond the text is always present and is interacting with the text’s own materiality as reader/ text writes. The medium in these texts is part of the message in a self-conscious way. The message is partly the medium in which it exists. The epistemology, or cultural frame, in which we understand learning shifts from floating to flickering signifiers, and our relationship to language and meaning is unmoored from one of ownership to one of access. These changes brought by digitality come not without problems. There is a real problem of access for many; knowing the correct code, having the skill, use of the machine, becoming comfortable navigating through these systems are all things to consider. The online Journal embodies practices that engage with the materiality of the medium by engaging the reader inside the technological affordances of linked discourse. The subjectivity of the reader alters as he or she becomes a participant and an author of meaning by choosing which threads to follow, and to what depth. The

63 Epistemology of a connected, linked world is enacted by the format of this discourse, and as Hayles says in Writing Machines: “To change the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading… but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring the relation of word to world” (WM 23). The synthesis offered by digitally mediated and networked texts with physical bodies represents for some, and especially for those “born digital”, an embodied and natural form of learning that all children do, such as the example (from Hubert Dreyfus) of a child learning to pick up a cup. The child does not need a cognitive understanding of the processes involved- “the child need only flail around until managing to connect. Then, to learn the action to be able to perform it at will, the child only has to repeat what was done before. At no point does the child need to break the action down into analytical components or explicit instructions” (PH 201). Digital skills are learned and computational affordances are explored in experiential ways by many people, especially today’s children. Empirical methods of study that try to draw conclusions about digitally mediated and linked discourse from observations of discrete disconnected bits may yield data sets but no real answers. First of all, what were the questions? In order to analyze how learning is taking place in digital environments, questions about the materiality of practices must be included, and the mutable nature of networked subjectivities must also be taken into account, but most important to ask are questions about the epistemologies we operate under. Often (especially younger) computer users will just plunge in, learning by doing. There is a quality of immersion here not being considered, nor even acknowledged. As long as we try to make everything that is observable fit into unrecognized assumptions about the reader and writer and text we will continue to prove that the sun revolves around the earth. What is necessary is to think in terms of triangulating “between incorporation, inscription, and technological materiality to arrive at a fuller description of these feedback loops than discursive analysis alone would yield” (PH 207). This is the Copernican revolution Hayles calls for, and this shift of epistemologies makes possible further investigations of the reader/ writer/ text. One Reason Hayles’ work is so valuable for this current moment in composition studies as it moves into ever more mediated environments is that she gets to the root and exposes the assumptions, specific to print and Enlightenment subjectivity, that we

64 have long operated under as we have attempted to write the world. Her treatment of the development of cybernetics and Information theory is more than a historical lens. Hayles tries to explain the deep shifts in thinking about thinking, and ways that we understand human consciousness, which have occurred along with the development of the Regime of Computation. The scientists and anthropologists and mathematicians and all the interested parties whose work has resulted in the ubiquitous computing we now take for granted were each pioneers in their way, as Hayles recounts. These individuals struggled scientifically, philosophically, morally, politically, and intellectually to make meaning of the human/ machine interface. The materiality of a practice embodies a certain user. The subjectivity of that embodied user is expanded and changed by interfacing with technology. The epistemology of the culture shifts with the shifting subjectivity of its members. It is time we both recognize and question the assumptions we have about the learner and the learning process. Epistemologies are the result of cultural assumptions and practices; in a circular way our practices are also shaped by epistemologies, or world views. Our idea of education is centered on the book and the author of it, the reader of the book, and the framework of that exchange. The man of genius writes his ideas; the literate person reads them, and they circulate in a closed system of literacy – or they have until now. This is not to say we must abandon book culture, but that we must recognize when we are judging every form of emergent textuality as though it was a printed text. There is no such thing as a transparent medium. Ironically, the Haylesian lens of materiality for the posthuman era gives the book back its body too. We must not only expand our idea of literacy to encompass new and vital ways of seeing our relationship to an increasingly digitally mediated world, we must also take into account the ways that networked connectivity is changing our concept of self. Yet through all this discussion of the Regime of computation, Hayles’ epistemology does not abandon the human; it says that we are already, and have always been posthuman “information-processing mechanisms that run what programs are fed into us” (PH 279), but in the past we did not understand the imbricated nature of

65 consciousness and systems. Intelligent machines have modeled systems and embodied metaphors of human consciousness. The posthuman thus signals the end of a certain conception of human for “that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice” (PH 286), and she cautions “What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self” (PH 287). What Hayles offers, with her conception of posthuman are many resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines” (PH 287). Today, we have new literacies; we have multi-modal text production, we have discourse with multiple reading paths that are constructed by the reader. The development of the Regime of Computation creates a fluid space for author and reader and text. We also have texts which employ code-based schemes that allow for mutation and the emergence of completely new configurations, many of which Hayles explores in the three of her books that I have highlighted for this study. She turns her lens upon many texts- print, cyber, and artists’- in productive and revelatory ways. Hayles work can offer us terms to steer by as we venture forward into 21st century expressions of reader/writer/text. We also understand through the metaphor of computational linking how every problem we face exists on a global scale, if not even larger. Every conflict in the political arena is also a conflict about resources, and resources return us to the issue of our planet’s systems, which loops us back to the relation of the individual to the community, and the community to the human population, and to the meaning of agency within mutually constituted emergent systems. These three terms, materiality, subjectivity, and epistemology braid together as a question we must ask: How do materiality and subjectivity intersect in the context of the permeable and shifting epistemological boundaries in the 21st century; this era of the posthuman?

66

WORKS CITED

Almjeld, Jen. “Making Blogs Produce: Using Modern Academic Storehouses and Factories”. Computers and Composition Online, Spring 2006.

Anderson, Bill. “Writing Power into Online Discussion”. Computers and Com position 23 (2006): 108-124.

Ascuena, Andrea and Michael Mattison. “(Re)Wiring Ourselves: The Electrical and Pedagogical Evolution of a Writing Center”. Computers and Composition Online, Spring 2006.

Barton, Matt and Charlie Lowe. “Databases and Collaborative Spaces for Composition”. Computers and Composition Online, Spring 2006.

Blair, Kristine, and Cheryl Hoy. “Paying Attention to Adult Learners Online: The Pedagogy and Politics of Community” Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 32- 48.

Blakelock, Jane, and Tracy E. Smith. “Distance learning: From Multiple Snapshots, a Composite Portrait”. Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 139-161.

Cesarini, Paul. Rev. of Profcast , software by D. Chumra. Computers and Composition Online, Spring 2006.

DePew, Kevin Eric, and T.A. Fishman, Julia E. Romberger, Bridget Fahey Ruetenik. “Designing Efficiencies: The Parallel Narratives of Distance Education and Composition Studies”. Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 49-67.

Eames, Charles, and Ray Eames. Pow er of 10. (film, 1977.) accessed 15 October 2008.

Ellwanger, Adam. Rev. of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, by Ray Kurzweil. Computers and Composition Online, Spring 2006.

“Facebook vs. Yearbook: Memories Saved Online”. NPR Talk of the Nation

67 < http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90225972> May 6, 2008.

Faigley, Lester. “Literacy After the Revolution”. College Composition and Com m unication, 48 (1997): 30-43. Published by: NCTE. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/358769 Accessed: 14/ 10/ 2008 09:35

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman:Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999.

My Mother Was a Compute: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005.

Writing Machines. Cambridge: MIT, 2002.

Hewett, Beth L. “Synchronous Online Conference-based Instruction: A Study of Whiteboard Interactions and Student Writing”. Computers and Composition 23(2006) 4-31.

Hult, Christine and Ryan Richlin. “The Rhetoric and Discourse of Instant Messaging”. Computers and Composition Online, Spring 2006.

Gabordi. Bob. “New Media Take Hoffman Case to young Adults”. Tallahassee Dem ocrat, 30 September, 2008.

Kiefer, Kate. “Complexity, Class Dynamics, and Distance Learning” Computers and Com position 23 (2006): 125-138.

Miller-Cochran, Susan K, and Rochelle L. Rodrigo. “Determining Effective Distance Learning Designs through Usability Testing”. Computers and Com position 23 (2006): 91-107.

Murphy, Robin. “Chaos: An e-Interview with Johndan Johnson-Eilola”. Com puters and Com position Online, Spring 2006.

Reilly, Colleen A., and Joseph John Williams. “The Price of Free Software: Labor, Ethics, and Context in Distance Education”. Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 68-90.

Rice, J.A. Rev. of Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency: From Manifesto to Modem , by Jacqueline Rhodes. Computers and Composition Online, Spring 2006.

Schirmer, James. Rev. of Technology and English studies: Innovative Professional Paths, by James Inman and Beth Hewett. Computers and Composition Online, Spring 2006.

68 Webster, Phillip, Ben Hoyle and Ramita Navai. “Ayatollah revives the death fatwa on Salman Rushdie”. TimesOnline. accessed 17 October, 2008.

Zamierowski, Mark. “The Virtual Voice of Network Culture” in Voices on Voice: Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry. Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Ed.. NCTE, 1994.

69

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Rebecca Furlow Skinner was born in Norman, Oklahoma and has lived in Florida most of her life. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio for several years in the mid-1970’s (beginning at age 17) and then precipitously left school to pursue Life, including being an itinerant sign painter, a UPS driver for several years, and having her own shop, Bluedilly, selling artwork and repurposed, no-longer-mundane items. Returning to college many years later, she received a BA, Summa Cum Laude (2004) in Literature and Philosophy from Florida State University. She received a Masters in Rhetoric and Composition from Florida State in 2008, and is currently pursuing a PhD (also at Florida State University) in this growing field, with a particular interest in the ways that digitally mediated communication is changing the educational and cultural landscape. She lives on a farm in rural North Florida with a large collection of books, her husband and two youngest children, dogs, cats, birds, and lots of wild nature.

70