Alex Reid’s blog

When is something not a political issue? I find it a little odd all this protestation about protests, all these proclamations by politicians, sports pundits, and athletes that the Olympics are about "amateur" competition. Well, of course, the Olympics are about sports, but they've also always been about more than sports. They were intended as means for promoting international peace and understanding. So they've always been political.

At the same time, the Olympics have also become economically valuable and an opportunity for promoting national pride. You can't just divide the political from the rest of life. If you want to disagree with the political statements protesters make that's one thing, but pretending that the Olympics isn't making its own strident political statement, that events like the Torch run are not in themselves political is just pure fantasy.

I've been working on our department's strategic plan. It's really difficult to be "strategic" in a department as divided as ours. It's not that we are hostile to one another. Nothing like that. It's more like the amicable divorce where exes get along for the kids' sake.

But you can't really plan a future together.

Being divided hasn't been great for professional writing, but it hasn't been terrible either. We've been free to pursue our interests, but with only three of us, we're ultimately limited in the scope of our activities. There are advantages to being small, but there are also obvious disadvantages. On the other hand, I think it has been hardest for our teacher education faculty who have to run the largest program in our department and deal with all the state bureaucracy.

If you took away all the personalities and the history and examined the situation with a cold eye, it wouldn't be hard to determine that we are inefficient. We are inefficient because are department runs according to conflicting sets of external disciplinary values (literary studies, rhetoric, teacher education) rather than through some internal logic that would seek to maximize the department's human resources.

Obviously the premise is that departments follow a shared disciplinary logic. While we all know the long-standing conflicted history of English a la Graff, I believe that in the past those shifts still worked within a disciplinary logic. We have something different. In the 16 years I've been a grad student and professor, I haven't seen anything that resembles a coherent discipline, and I don't see anything to suggest such a thing will ever come to pass. I don't even see it in rhet/comp, let alone in English Studies.

I mean are there any Phds in English under the age of 50 that believe rhet/comp and literary studies are part of the same discipline? what common objective would they share that would differentiate them from other disciplines (i.e. what do both r/c and lit. stud. do that philosophy or communications or history don't do)? what are their common methods or activities?

The upshot is that English departments can't be founded on a disciplinary logic unless they subdivide, which means they are no longer really departments. Instead they require a post-disciplinary arrangement. That means a local arrangement that is not based on what "should be" according to some external disciplinary vision but rather on whatever is.

Creating a strategic future based on whatever is not easy, as one is always tempted, attracted to the desires of disciplinary machines. It is especially difficult in terms of the most treacherous of departmental grounds: new hires. It is a strange battlefield in a way. We tend to fight for someone "like us," and yet hires are always risky. In some respects it's easier to let others take the risk.

The deepest challenge though is to create a future where the curricular/disciplinary goal is NOT to hire or educate people like us or to become like us. What happens when we give up that desire to reproduce our ideological, aesthetic, and disciplinary values? How do we even teach outside of that cybernetic, interpolative desire?

I'm not making recommendations mind you. Really I'm not. I don't believe such post-disciplinary spaces are reachable given where we are. Or, alternately, we will come upon them inevitably through ongoing fragmentation.

I'm in the midst of writing an article on this subject. It's been one of the main focuses of my work this sabbatical. I presented at NEMLA on it and will do a related, more academic presentation at Computers and Writing next month. But I'm at the point where I am so hip deep in it--about 3500 words in with at least that much written and discarded--that I'm losing what I was trying to say.

So I'm here trying to figure that out real quick.

1. Despite our widespread belief in the socio-cultural function of discourse, we still treat composition as a fundamentally internal, private activity.
2. Similarly, we tend to view and value teaching as an intimate activity: smaller classes, faculty-student relations, etc. In part we view this as a kind of relative privacy, akin to the way college in general is sequestered from the rest of culture.
3. Both writing and teaching have always been networked activities but we tend to devalue and/or occlude those aspects. That occlusion has long been facilitated by the fact that the network in which we worked had been so stable that it was easily naturalized and/or forgotten.
4. The continuing emergence of social media networks has not only altered and made visible the networked relations of pedagogy and composition, but it has also created a more public network.
5. The expansion of social media networks into mobile networks now makes every first world, college classroom (and many beyond that) into a public, online, networked space.
6. These same technologies likewise make every composition for such courses into a public, networked composition. Like it or not, we are inextricably linked to this network, just as we were once linked to networks of library books, microfiche, typewriter ribbon, etc. In a sense, it is the same network, just simply an evolving one.
7. That said, a particular courses situation in that network can shift depending on a variety of factors, not the least of which being the faculty's approach. For example, faculty might attempt to control or silence social media networks by having students turn off mobile phones or forbidding "internet sources." Others might use the web in a regulatory way as with a cms or Turnitin.
8. So when I look at "public online pedagogy" I'm really looking at one way that faculty might respond to the context of teaching and writing in a social-mediated network.
9. I don't want to be an apologist for such practices. Nor do I want to present a heroic teaching narrative about it.
10. That said, I do want to analyze what public social media networks might facilitate. For example, they ease group-formation among students in a course. They also encourage group-formation with other students on campus, as well as off-campus. These activities can happen on-the-fly and more organically, without so much coordination by instructors or institutions.
11. Fundamentally though the point is to be able to share compositions with a public that has a real investment beyond the auspices of a course in what you are doing. It may be pie-in-the-sky to imagine some significant thing to happen through this public communication, but that's not necessarily what it is about. After all, I've written many things without moving the planet and I don't cry myself to sleep at night about it. The point is to have an opportunity as student writers to experience and analyze the rhetorical operation of such networks rather than occluding them.

OK, back to "real work."

Reading Richard Florida's Who's your city? it's only natural to think about one's own situation: should I move? where to?

For me moving begins with a few caveats. First, in academia the job search is a little unique. I'd need to create a list of locations and/or institutions then wait to see when good jobs open at those sites. Second, before even thinking of moving, there are the considerations of my wife's career and the kids' lives. Whether or not Syracuse is a good place for them, they are happy and have friends and so on. I know from my own childhood how difficult it can be to move.

So that said, if I were to move, what would I be looking for?

1. A vibrant intellectual and cultural community--interesting people to work with, cool things to do with friends and family, diversity, good schools
2. A green, sustainable place--where we can walk or take decent public transportation, fresh air, parks, places to exercise, and so on
3. Fitting in a little--not that everyone should be like me, but I don't want to be surrounded by the dominant Christian-American monoculture or by acquisitive, materialist competitive types. I crave people who are more open/experimental, creative/intellectual in their pursuits, who are less acquisitive and so on. But I also don't want to be drowned on counter-cultural lifestyle politics, which is how I sometimes felt living in Ithaca.
4. Long-term affordability--we don't desire a huge house, but we have two kids and a dog. We work from home a fair amount (though maybe that could change). I don't want to be in a situation with kids where we have to hop from rental to rental in a city.
5. Proximity to family?--that's the tough one. My family is in the Northeast. My in-laws live in the Southwest. Opposite sides of the map. Living in Syracuse we can make weekend trips for family get togethers, which happens a couple times a year. We fly to the in-laws once a year for two weeks. But the cost is high (four plane tickets out of Syracuse + boarding the dog). I'm not sure we can resolve that one, but it might be nice at least to live near a more major airport hub.

In the end I don't really have a list of cities, at least not yet. I've lived in New Brunswick NJ, Las Cruces NM, Albany NY, Atlanta GA, Ithaca NY, and Syracuse NY. Each has had it's positive attributes. I've also lived in rural NJ, rural PA, and rural NY and I can tell you I can pretty much rule out the "rural" living thing.

So we'll see. Right now though the thought of any move is purely hypothetical. I've got no plans on going anywhere. Still Florida's book does make you think about your choices.

I was very happy to hear Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I had the good fortune of meeting and befriending Junot when we were both undergrads at Rutgers. I've watched his career and enjoyed his first book, a short story collection called Drown.

Check it out if you haven't already.

It's understandable that people mistake me for a technophile. After all, I teach with technology, have a blog, make videos, etc. I research new media. However, to me, the idea of being a technology-lover would go far broader. I think that few people recognize how their desires are shaped by technologies, how they have come to love technology in a very unhealthy, addictive way.

Take meat as an example. If you buy meat from a supermarket and eat it, then you're certainly more of a technophile than I am. Meat is a constellation of technologies: antibiotics, hormones, genetically-modified corn (which the animals are fed), fertilizers and pesticides (for the corn), fossil fuels, refrigeration, etc. It's nasty business, but if you love meat, then you love technology.

There are few things more technological on this planet than a fast food burger.

In fact most processed foods with or without meat are heavily mediated.

The whole idea of technophile and technophobe focuses on only the most visible and recent of technologies: things that you might purchase in a store personally as a consumer and thus choose to use. But the technologies that really shape culture are more pervasive than that; we're soaking in them. In my view, it's foolish to love any object, doubly foolish to love objects uncritically. But it is truly inane to limit one's scope of technology to what is right in front of one's face!

We are all immersed in our technoculture. But the shape of our future has less to do with mobile phones or blogs than it does with energy (food and fuel) and sustainability. Living in an oversized house? Driving an SUV? Eating food flown in from all over the planet? Packing your house with plastic crap? Don't tell me about being a technophile.

It's sad to say, but she died on Thursday, though I only found out this morning. She was in her nineties and had suffered from senile dementia for at least a decade. She was able to recognize me at my wedding, twelve years ago, which is about the last time I saw her.

She lived in England, where I was born. I've lived in the US for 30+ years, since I was a kid. My parents divorced back then. My mom, an American, stayed here. My dad, a Brit, bounced back and forth. He's actually in Malaysia right now, so I don't think there was anyone there when she died (not that she would have recognized any of her family anyway). Her siblings, if any are still alive, and their children live in Australia. I've never met them, at least not that I can remember. My dad's an only child. My grandfather died 30 years ago.

So there you have it. It's sad. I find it hard to grieve for someone I didn't really know, but I can feel some sadness over the way a family falls apart, over the way karma spreads out from something like a divorce, shaping the future.

New post on my other blog on "product orientation in the age of networked composition."

Some of my colleagues are putting together an application for the Learn and Serve America Higher Education College Student Social Media Initiative. Basically the idea as I understand it is to use social media to facilitate and increase student participation in service. It's a challenging proposal on several levels. I also wonder if social media challenge our conventional notions of service.

Thinking conventionally first, for me the first question is NOT what brings students to volunteer but rather what dissuades them from volunteering. That is, whatever we do, the messages we send, only attract a certain % of students. If the idea is to get more involved then more of the same message won't work. I imagine my service learning colleagues might have some ideas about that. Maybe it's just a matter of getting the message out in more compelling ways.

Part of the grant is partnering with a non-profit organization, so a lot of the direction we might go depends on that partnership. I would think that working with a group whose activities are focused on communication might make sense, but who knows.

Though I doubt we'll go in this direction, one thing I'm thinking is that social media can change the way we do work. As such they can change the way we do service. For example, if we crowdsourced service projects then students could pick and choose, doing just a little part. It might be an attractive experience to be smart-mobbed into some collective action.

So there are some very general ideas there, but something to think about.

A few weeks back at the C's, Collin's presentation mentioned the "invisible college," a reference to the precursor to the Royal Society as a predisciplinary network of academics. As Collin suggested, such invisible colleges continue to exist, particularly in loosely organized disciplines like rhet/comp. We don't really have a paradigm a la Kuhn; no normal science for us. Blogging networks and other social media relations are probably good examples of modern-day invisible colleges. That said, perhaps we are not necessarily moving toward more disciplinary-institutional identities as we no longer require the material capital of formal organization as group-forming and maintenance have relatively low costs. Then again, there are reputation issues to consider. In any case I don't want to go down that path today.

Instead I want to think about this in relation to the idea of emergent cities. Robert Axtell and Richard Florida have an article modeling the emergence of cities. They write:

cities emerge from the interactions of agents and firms. When many such firms have the same location, in our model, we call the resulting agglomeration a 'city.' Cities, in the model, have no agency, but are able to attract people from other cities to work within their population of firms. Cities are also able to house new firms, as when an agent decides to start up a new firm and stay in its present location. A finite set of locations is assumed, and the initial actors locations are random. People can join firms, adopt firms locations, or create new firms either in their current or a new random location. Thus, cities emerge through the interactions of purposive agents through the institution of the firm.

I'm not qualified to speak to the validity of their methods. I'd be interested in hearing what anyone else thinks. However I am interested in this conceptually and what it means for discourse networks. Basically the premise of Florida's creative class argument is that innovative and creative professionals (who drive our economy) prefer (perhaps even need) to group together to share ideas, conversation, and creativity--even across professional boundaries. As such, they head for these mega-regions where a critical mass of diverse, creative people may be found.

This brings me back to the invisible college. If one were to employ distant reading methods (as Derek is working with), you might be able to track the relationship within and among invisible college networks in trackbacks, comments, citations, keywords--things like that. (I'm speaking hypothetically here; I don't know if one could actually pull this off in technical terms.) Anyway, I think that you might find similar emergent properties here. That is, I think you would find that discursive practices begin to intermingle in heterogeneous mega-regions.

Now I could turn to more familiar territory (at least for me) and speak about this kind of attraction in terms of Deleuze and Guattari. Don't worry, that's just an empty threat tonite. But basically it has to do with how singularities and multiplicities function in non-deterministic ways to unfold materiality. Of course it is a little disconcerting because it takes agency out of our hands. Florida's model does the same, even though he glosses over that fact. He speak of "agents" with rational decision-making processes, but the results are always the same in his modeling: so where is the agency, eh? Not in the big picture, that's for sure.

Anyway, I'm edging in this direction. If Two Virtuals focused on subjectivity in the network, now I think I want to move into larger scales of composition.