digital digs

Virtual/Academic: The Campus as Informational Space

I've moved my video off the front page so it isn't constantly loading everytime you visit the page, but you can still check it out.

Ethos in the Marketplace

Clearly Friedman is enthusiastic about the global marketplace. I've been writing a bit about the marketplace here as well, in my discussion of Lanham's Economics of Attention and even further back here in a post on professing. I'm not in the habit of linking to myself, but I'll make this exception as I'm trying to develop a thread of thought here.

Both Friedman and Lanham oppose top-down, centrally-controlled (i.e. socialist) economies. Instead they support the notion of bottom-up marketplace economies. I don't really want to get into this here, but there are three obvious things to remember:

• Bottom-up and top-down are clearly interwoven. Friedman has no problem with top-down corporate structures. I.e., it doesn't bother him that a Bill Gates or Michael Dell controls his company as thoroughly as the leader of any socialist nation controls his/her country.
• Corporations seek to dominante the global market (or at least their area of it) as thoroughly as any socialist government dominates it's geographically-bounded market. There's no real difference here except corporations don't even pretend to act in the interest of citizens.
• The traditional argument for laissez-faire economics predicates essentially separate national economies and markets which had the potential to be thoroughly controlled by a government. In a flat world those markets are global. No single government really has the power to control the market. Governments are just players in the economy along with the corporations, and many corporations are bigger than many governments.

But anyway, my point here is that within this context I get a better understanding the argument Lanham was trying to make about the value of rhetoric. Yes, learning to communicate globally and developing an global market ethos might go a long way toward saying things like, "yes we can make trillions selling oil but maybe it would be better to make a real emphasis on developing alternate energy sources and more fuel-efficient machines." The market doesn't seem to have a way to really say this; corporations discourses are too limited in their conception to take this action. Ethics is ultimately the ability to say it is better to die than to pursue a course of action. If Friedman and Lanham are to get their way and we are to pursue a more open, market-driven culture, then corporations will need to learn a more ethical discourse.

On the flip side, I'm not sure what is gained by simply opposing ethical behavior to corporate behavior. If we cannot imagine a way corporations can act ethically in a marketplace then we are in trouble. Ethics isn't about eliminating the market; ethics is a way of understanding how we want markets and participants in a market to behave.

While rhetoric and ethics are marketplace practices, writing both within and without the market. As Derrida teaches us about writing's relationship to philosophy, we may make a similar observation about writing and the marketplace. Writing may be conceived as labor and property; writing may be commodified and used for transactional purposes. However, I would argue that the production of writing, the emergence of thought through a compositional event, exists beyond the ken of the market. The market becomes a way of exchanging the products of such composition, as well as the material contexts that make them possible.

So perhaps the ethos of the market relies on creating a market discourse that sees the market as more than an end in itself, as something that is part of a larger whole.

Of course it does. What else would ethics be except a recognition of interdependence?

When did you realize the world was flat?

It's a question Friedman asks regularly in his book, and it's fun to answer, so I'll give it a whirl.

First a few a pre-flat inklings.

1990: I was an undergrad and working as a consultant and database designer for a small PC company.
Windows 3.0 had just come out. I'd been working there for two years, and I realized (as I started to use a mouse in earnest) that this PC thing was a whole lot easier than it used to be. I suggested that we should really think about a home user market (at that point we were mostly focusing on retail--point of sale and inventory control). There was this home security software and hardware and I had this idea of the PC as a "Fortress," securing the home and personal information. Anyway, for various reasons it wasn't to be, but I struck me then that something was going to change. Of course the Internet wasn't around, just a few lonely online communities. Two years later I'd be teaching writing in a computer lab. Five years later I'd be building my first web page. Had no idea then.

But it really hit home much later in

2003: My wife, Rhonda, and I had started a freelance writing business. OK, it was mostly her. She was working out of the home with our two kids, aged two and three at the time (sound fun?). We were on this website bidding for jobs doing editing and copywriting. The problem was that there were all these folks from Asia who would beat us to the bottom every time, and most of the customers on the site were looking for price. In the end, we did pick up a few clients who appreciated our level of expertise (though eventually the kids got older and Rhonda went back to work full-time as a community college professor).

Still it was an important lesson for me as a professional writing teacher. You can make a living as a freelance writer and/or editor. My sister-in-law does it. Obviously you need impeccable writing skills and the ability to produce clean copy. You need to work quickly and in a timely fashion. But your potential employers can get those qualities from someone on the other side of the world for a price way below anything you could do in America. Plus, if your in India making a couple hundred bucks a month as a writer, you're doing well and happy to work at that pay scale. Here you'd be disgruntled and cursing out your clients. Hard to produce your best work in those conditions.

And this is true not only for strictly freelance writers, but ultimately the case for any writers, as Friedman details in his example of Reuters (or is it AP, I forget) employees in India. Writing is easily flattened (in fact one might argue it is the first flattening technology). You have to have more, which, of course,is what Professional Writing seeks to provide--not just the ability to write but the rhetorical ability to make writing powerful.

More than ever developing that rhetorical ability will be crucial to our students' professional success. But then I think I've been saying that in a dozen different ways for the last few months.

imagine/nation

I was passed along an article from the Chronicle by one of those annoying pseudonyms, curious in this case as "his" argument was hardly the type of thing that would require anonymity. Dredging up that old example of Dead Poets Society, he discussed the disconnection between the undergraduate who majors in English out of a "love of literature" or some equally romantic notion and the faculty whose graduate school and teaching experiences have brought them to a very different place. "Benton" writes

The problem is you can't get to where I am now without going through a decade or more of immersion in a highly politicized and anti-literary academic culture. You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional.

It is not that I want to privilege some form of literary dilettantism as a substitute for professionalism. I simply want to demonstrate that the reasons most people get into English are different from the motives that will make them successful in graduate school and in professional life beyond that. They must, ultimately, purge themselves of the romantic motives that drew them to English in the first place -- or pretend to do so. If you want to be a literary professional

I suppose this is a somewhat fuzzy and undirected complaint about cultural studies and theory (there is mention elsewhere about the pressure in graduate school to be "political"). In its place, the author hopes to hold onto professionalism while recapturing some of the romantic appreciation for literature s/he had as an undergrad.

Now let me suggest why this whole business is misdirected, particularly in terms of English Studies as a discipline.

1. The author says his/her students are all headed to graduate school. I hope they aren't all off to try to be PhD's in literary studies, for their own sake! If a romantic appreciation for literature won't serve you well in a literary studies graduate program, it certainly isn't going to get you any further anywhere else in the world. While it is perfectly fine for them to love literature, just as they might love jazz or Asian fusion cuisine, they need to understand their education in some other terms.

2. While it is necessary for a graduate education--and I would say even an undergraduate education--to bring into question bourgeois notions of literary appreciation and romanticism, I would agree that there is some failure to the curriculum if it does so at the cost of crushing the students' capacity for imagination (which graduate school certainly can do). The ideology of romanticism may dominate our discourse on imagination culturally, but it does not own a patent on creativity. If students major in English b/c literature stimulates their imagination, then provide them with a more critical understanding of that process that proliferates creativity. Ulmer comes to mind here, among others. Hell, the entire experimental literary tradition of the past century comes to mind for that matter.

3. This ties into my ongoing reading of Friedman's World is Flat. In the end, he advocates the importance of cultivating our national imagination. of imagining a new role for ourselves in the flattening world. He also calls on Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind and his advocacy of "right brain" creativity. Perhaps there is something of value here in recognizing the important role English Studies can play in developing creativity. Unfortunately, I do not see that role as a priority in literary studies. And btw, I don't think of this as a cultural studies v. traditional literary studies issue. Yes, CS folks may critique the idea of "creativity," but they need to see how creativity  might continue to function following the critique of subjectivity (I assure you it does). On the other hand, traditional literary studies folks often seem more focused on literary content than on skills/practices. So neither side pays much attention to creativity. For their own part, rhet/comp people tend to see creativity as the province of "creative writing" types, who in turn, for the most part, are still caught up in romantic notions of creativity.

In short, it's a mess, but there's some potential there.

4. Finally, in the name of right speech, let me say one purely positive thing about this essay. I applaud "Benton's" recognition and valuing of his students' motivations for entering the major. We may ultimately have to teach our students that their major is quite different from what they imagined it to be. That's ok; I'd guess that's true of many majors. But we still need to start with recognizing where they are, why they've come to us, and where they think they are going.

planks of technology

I’ve been following the discussion of the proposal for a technology plank on the WPA Outcomes Statement on the WPA-L and on Jeff’s and Collin’s blogs. As has been mentioned around, there is a sense of insiders and outsiders to this conversation. I’m an undoubtedly an outsider with little interest in being on the inside. As director of a professional writing program, I have little to do with first-year composition. Though my colleagues and I are committed to getting back to teaching FYC, a good part of our interest lies in preparing students entering our degree program.

The proposal and the discussion surrounding it identify some of the common goals associated with information literacy: conducting research online, evaluating sources, working with visual elements, using computers to compose writing, and so on. There’s also discussion of issues like information management (e.g. saving/organizing files) and basic computer knowledge (e.g., a basic understanding of computers and networks). Clearly some of this business is a matter for an Introduction to Computers type of course. Students do need to understand the technical matters of sending an e-mail, saving their files, and so on. I suppose it’s a local decision, depending on one’s students, to what is necessary.

However, I don’t see these technical matters as part of FYC. Instead it is an indication of the necessity of expanding the general education curriculum to address such matters.

Moreover, I think it will be very difficult for FYC to handle “technology” as long as it continues to conceive of it as an add-on to writing instruction.

As was noted elsewhere, it is somewhat of a cliché to remark that writing is a technology. And yet, here we have technology as separable in some regard from writing. Well, that’s ok. There are many technologies; they aren’t all writing technologies. The question here is how will we understand writing as a technological practice? Here the strategy would seem to suggest writing + some other technologies, where writing remains locked in a print-era mode. I think that will prove insufficient and ultimately unwieldy as technologies develop.

I imagine that the impulse of some in the WPA to propose a technology plank comes out of a concern that without it, FYC will continue along in a print mode and find itself in a crisis. If the majority of FYC wants to treat computer technologies as overgrown word processors and the Internet as a questionable research source for a print paper a student will write, then the discipline probably will end up in some crisis in the next decade. I don’t share that concern b/c I’m not entirely convinced that having the entire national bureaucracy of FYC crash and burn might not be the best route to some future mode of writing pedagogy. On the other hand, if the discipline manages to reform itself, that’s fine too.

So I can see the rhetorical strategy of adding a plank, as an easy way for others to conceptualize it, from deans and WPA’s to FYC instructors. However, I don’t think it is a practical way to address the challenge of emerging technologies.

The question then becomes, in my view, how do we detach writing, conceptually, from any specific technological-material context so that we may continue to teach and study “writing” even as those contexts change? Now, let me anticipate an objection and say first that I agree that writing practices must be understood within technological-material contexts, so at any one point one would always be studying writing within a those contexts, as well as cultural contexts.

However, I don’t think that problem needs to be addressed here. Instead I think you would want to write something like the following (and let me note that this is something for college administrators and not the way I would articulate for others in our field who should be more in the know). I would put this somewhere at the top of the outcomes statement rather than as a separate plank.

Computers, networks and other emerging technologies continue to reshape the role of writing in education, in the workplace, and generally across cultures. Much like any academic discipline shifts and develops as new knowledge and technologies are created, so FYC must respond to changes in writing practices. As technologies develop quickly, it is impractical to establish specific technology-related outcomes for FYC. Furthermore, the availability and implementation of technologies for an FYC program is generally defined by its institutional context and will often depend on the institution’s particular educational mission. In addition, the challenges of technology extend far beyond the purview of writing instruction, so the role of FYC must be shaped in collaboration with an institution’s other departments and programs.

That said, FYC programs must incorporate emerging technologies into the achievement of their learning outcomes and study the ways in which they call upon us to understand and practice writing in new ways. This knowledge must then be integrated into the FYC program as part of the ongoing development of writing instruction.

Link: Yellow Dog � Blog Archive � The Unbearable Confusion Over Technology.

some criticisms of The World is Flat

1. Friedman criticizes people my age and younger for not keeping up globally. As he tells his own kids, "Keep working. The kids in China and India are hungry for your jobs." In a way it's a good rhetorical strategy, for as much as it lays blame on his audience for the problem, it also offers them an obvious way to participate in solving it. While there may be some truth to this, I think there are a couple of key things Friedman ignores.
   
   If we have become a "lazy" society of fun-loving consumers, it is largely because our economy has demanded this of us. This is especially true of the generations to which Friedman points, who have been the targets of ungodly amounts of advertising. Here's the thing I don't get, if Joe and Jane America lose their jobs, they won't be buying the latest cell phone or the designer toilet brush or whatever. They certainly won't be calling help lines in Bangalore. This flat world relies upon consumers in America and Europe, and in order to be consumers, we need leisure time. Even if I keep my job, but I work 12-18 hours a day, like these folks Friedman discusses, I'm not going to have time to watch TV, even if I have TiVo. Of course the Indians and Chinese realize this. They don't see a future of serving American callers. They want their own TiVo. But if they are going to buy their own TiVo's and X-Box's and so on, then they are going to have to make more money and they are going to have to have the leisure time to use them.
   
   In short, they will have to become more like us.
   
2. There is a kind of contradictory rhetoric in Friedman's book. On the one hand, his framing argument about "Globalization 3.0" identifies the "individual" as the site of globalization. This runs through the book as he talks about opportunities for individuals to globalize and also how the individual must now be responsible for ensuring his/her own employablity into the future. However, there is also a clear nationalism to the book. Friedman always returns to "America" and how our country must respond to this challenge. I wonder if this is not an attempt at some rhetorical savvy on his part: to appeal to the right with a discussion of individuals and to the left with talk of national responsibilities.
   
   Either way, I say this. Regardless of right or left, you'd have to be a fool to imagine the state, let alone a corporation, will just take care of you, like a parent. In the book, Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, says his company can thrive "even if we never hire another American." I think this is the logic of any corporation. Corporations are no more American than money is American. However, the state has (or should have) the well-being of the nation as a primary concern, along with a concern for the well-being of the global community of nations. I would emphasize this aspect of Friedman's argument.
   
   
   Friedman compares our current crisis with the "Missile Gap" and Space Race of the late 50s and 60s. A curious comparison since the Missile Gap turned out to be vaporware. However the reaction at that time was a serious government investment in basic scientific research and higher education. For example, the SUNY system was constructed in the sixties. There was a massive hiring of tenure-track faculty and an influx of students. However this kind of funding and priority went away in the eighties. Not coincidently, this disinvestment occurs at the same time that a decline in scientists and engineers occurs. That is, Friedman notes it takes 12-15 years to educate a good engineer or scientist (starting in elementary school). That missing generation of science folks (my generation of current thirty-somethings) was in elementary school in the early eighties. What happens instead is the science becomes applied, commerical research funded by corporations (who in turn receive the subsidies once given directly to the researchers, right?). However, where funding in basic research returns dividends directly for the education of American students and the general benefit of society, academic entrepeneurialism benefits the researcher, the funding corporation, and perhaps the particular university in question. Then the corporation turns around and says something like Craig Barrett: we don't need America; we just need brain power. But the university will never say that, especially not the public university
   
3. As much as I agree with Friedman's analysis of the importance of science and engineering, we must heed Heidegger's warning about the "will to technology." Part of the danger of the flat world is that it has virtualized human labor, as Heidegger and more recently Arthur Kroker have warned. Seeing every problem as a technical problem is ultimately dehumanizing in a dangerous way. By the same token, we must not naturalize our Enlightenment/humanistic notion of humanity, which is just as historical/cultural/technological/ideological as any other notion might be. Of course Friedman does this with all this talk about the "individual," but I don't expect him to wade into that philosophical territory here, so I don't think of that as a legitimate criticism of this book.
   
   That said, I think that if we are to address the challenges of the flat world, we will need to rethink our ideas of subjectivity. We will need an understanding of materiality, technology, and human identity (both for communities and singular bodies) that allows us to create a future that improves the lived experience of human lives in an environmentally sustainable way. While Globalization 3.0 has many dangers, contradictions, and inequities, it is where we are moving and perhaps part of the growing pains of modernization.
   
   Here I turn to a more philosophical source, Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Community:
   

   Contemporary politics is this devastating experimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities. Only those who succeed in carrying it to completion--without allowing what reveals to remain veiled in the nothingness that reveals, but bringing language itself to language--will be the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a State, where the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified.

   The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.

   I'm not going to go into Agamben today, but simply suggest that these passages offer a beginning point for imagining the role the humanities can play in building the "coming community."
   
4. OK, one last point, b/c Agamben reminds me. The second quoted passage, from the end of Agamben's book, comes from a section titled Tianamen. For Agamben, Tianamen Square represented a gathering of singular beings, individuals without a collective social identity, who had rejected the social-ideological identities offered by the state. It is interesting to me, because Friedman doesn't discuss Tianamen Square, though he makes extensive reference to the coming down of the Berlin Wall, which happened in the same year. Tianamen is a less optimistic moment certainly, but presumably more relevant for the Chinese economy that so interests him. China may have made strides toward being more competitive in the global marketplace, but in other areas not so much. While India is a more open and democratic nation; it is also a discontinuous nation where ultra-modern spaces bump against traditional ones.
   
   I'll have to think some more about this one.
   
   

teaching The World is Flat

In the fall, I'm teaching Friedman's book to graduate students in a course titled "Computers and the Study of English," which I'm co-teaching with my colleague, Karen Stearns. I'm going to go through it and discuss some of the issues I think I'll address in my class.

The first chapter does a decent job of using anecdotes to describe the conditions of globalization Friedman sees as flattening the world. The first and primary task I have in using this book is to convince these students, who are preparing to be high school teachers, of the significant changes that they and their future students will be facing. I want them to consider how their professions will change with the changing demands for education they will see.

There's one line I wanted to remark on in the first chapter. Friedman is inteviewing Xia Deren, the mayor of Dalian, a Chinese city at the heart of this flattening process. Xia remarks about the over 200,000 college students in his city (he's a former college president), saying those who choose to study history or literature "are still being directed to spend a year studying Japanese or English, plus computer science, so they will be employable."

Perhaps this is good advice for our own liberal arts students? Learn Japanese or Chinese. Study computer technology. So you'll be employable. Maybe, but the advice is also perhaps a decade late. India is graduating 2.5 million students a year; China graduates even more. Our graduates are competing with them now... Well not exactly competing. If the job can be done in India or China, it's  highly unlikely it can be done for a living wage in the U.S. So my students have to get out ahead of the curve somehow, without the benefits many students who attend elite colleges might enjoy.

Certainly a big part of their getting ahead will be getting a high school education that moves them forward. I'm hoping this book will get our future teachers thinking about how they will face this challenge.

iTunes University and Cortland in the Syracuse Post Standard

On the front page of Sunday's Syracuse Post Standard, below articles on murder and holiday fun, the local paper reported on Cortland's new agreement with iTunes University. There's actually a photo of me on page four, which should make my mom happy (my kids thought it was pretty funny.).

It's a good article overall. It reports on some of the concerns with iTunes U (potential student attendence issues, the cost for students to acquire iPods). However the main sense is that this is a progressive initiative.