roundtable.mov

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Author’s Biographies

Anne Bartlett-Bragg (ABB)-Cert IV AWT, Dip HRM, Dip e-Learning, BEd (Adult Education), MEd (Adult Education), PhD candidate. Currently she is working as a part-time academic in the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She developed and delivers e-Learning content – in the organisational context.

Anne also has a consultancy business, Digital Dialogues, and is the Executive Director of the Learning Technologies User Group (LTUG), and a member of the advisory board for the Australian Businesswomen’s Network.
http://digitaldialogues.blogs.com/

Professor Chris Bigum BSc, Dip.Ed, PhD, is Dean of the Faculty of Education at Deakin University. I have always been broadly interested in the world as it has been remade via the deployment of computing and communication technologies of various kinds and have made use of these technologies to keep an eye on key thinkers, key writers, key centres around the globe. Thank goodness for RSS feeds now and before them email filters to manage the large number of discussion lists I kept an eye on.
http://www.deakin.edu.au/alt/ed2wiki/index.php/Chris_Bigum

James Farmer is the founder and CEO of Edublogs and provide consultancy, design and development for a variety of different online community projects.

In past incarnations I’ve been involved in new media as the Online Community Editor of The Age and worked as a Lecturer in Education Design at Deakin University.
http://incsub.org/

June 13, 1993 – Can you read that?

in St Kilda, a somewhat run-down, turn of the century beach suburb in Melbourne – glorious architecture, too many cafes now that the intelligentsia have rediscovered its charm – and my friend is in Northcote, across town, only about 15 kilometres away but worlds apart. Northcote is north of the city and while it’s still considered to be inner-city by the real estate agents, it is only just beginning its upward spiral towards gentrification. We’re playing a networked game of Doom on our newly acquired 14400 modems and talking on the telephone. “Yes, yes, I can see you”. We’re yet to discover the inbuilt text function in the game that would allow us to dispense with the phones and chat via the screens. I’m blown away, metaphorically. And then, literally, as my friend seizes the opportunity to waste me.

As we progressed to modem chats and MUDs, I became acutely aware of the ways in which the concept of presence was reshaping my media world. No longer here or there, we were now here and there simultaneously. Of course, synchronous internet transactions did not constitute my first encounters with virtual presence or telepresence. I’d watched live television; I’d spoken on the telephone. This was something different.

As my Northcote friend would later put it:

Apart from the dramatic reconfiguration of spatio-temporal relations implicit in telepresence, the social and metaphysical fallout of remote sensing is considerable. Discussion of what it means to engage remotely with others constitutes a major focus of debate within the thriving academic discourse of cyberculture. (Tofts, 1998: 16)

Obviously, all media allow us to engage with others remotely. All media operate by virtue of presence – bringing one interlocutor into contact with another or many other interlocutors in a way that allows the participants to feel as though they are sharing the same space or time or both. However, traditional mediums such as radio, television and film, which at the time were the focus of most courses devoted to media studies, had not been thought about in quite these terms before. At the time of my initial immersion into the world of the virtual, I was teaching radio production and criticism. It was my first academic appointment. Most of my teaching took place in studios equipped with reel-to-reel tape machines, mixing desks and microphones. My aims were pretty much in line with most people teaching media production at the time – teach the students the basics of recording, editing, writing and announcing. Introduce them to the world of professional and community radio, place radio in some sort of historical context. Inevitably, students would graduate to take their place somewhere in ‘the media’. The emphasis on the media as something outside of our selves was prevalent in media studies at the time. The media was something we did things with – communicated an idea, told a story, exchanged information. Rethinking radio as a medium of telepresence suddenly turned all of this on its head because it shifted my focus away from ‘the media’ to the act of mediation itself.

I realize of course that I was only catching up to others who had already understood that the boundaries between such things as the media and the audience, writing and speech, inside and outside could not be sustained. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. In fact, as I was awakening to the importance of mediation, others had already moved on. As individual mediums converged into the polysemic digital space of the computer in the mid to late 1990’s, and as I put away my cutting block and learned to adjust levels in Cool Edit, writers such as Tofts were already pointing out that convergence was leading us towards a ‘dramatic shift from mediation to immediation, from transitive exchange to intransitive differal’ (Tofts, 1998: 116).

August 12, 1994 – Beyond the <centre> <center> tag

Buoyed by the thrill of updating my computer from 2MB to 4MB of RAM and encouraged by the release of Netscape Navigator 1.0, I pestered our Information Resources librarian to teach me the basics of hypertext markup language. Without the advantage of WSIWYG software, my earliest forays into web publishing were made possible by Windows Notepad, a sympathetic University webmaster and an earnest enthusiasm for the transformative potentialities of the web.

Although I was mildly enamored with surfing the web (and hey, it sure as hell beat Gopher), all that waiting around for cheesy graphics to download was still less fun than reading a book. What really attracted me to the medium were its publishing possibilities. This interest was twofold. Firstly, I could immediately see the potential for an online subject website that housed all of the material that my radio production students might need to complete their assignments. This has led to an ongoing interest in how we can use the web for not only the delivery of course materials but as part of the very fabric of pedagogy itself.[1]

Secondly, the web seemed to me to be an extension of the ‘make your own media’ ethic that had driven me into radio in the first place. Of all the mass media, radio is undoubtedly one of the more accessible in terms of participation. Since the 1970’s in Australia, the community radio sector has flourished, driven by a growing mistrust of the narrow focus and concentrated ownership of the commercial media networks and a desire for a greater diversity of voices on the airwaves. While pundits wax lyrical about “grassroots journalism” and “participatory media” in relation to blogs and wikis, they seem to forget the incredible contribution radio has made to this bottom up mode of working. I’d always felt that radio provided students with an opportunity to be able to become the media, rather than merely the consumers of media. The web in its infancy seemed to me like a natural place to extend this ethic of making rather than consuming.

My early experiences of teaching hypertext markup language (html) to predominantly Humanities students were exhilarating and exasperating. While many were excited at the prospect of learning a set of technical skills that would help them to participate in the emergent telematic noosphere, an equal number were intimidated by the technology.[2] Apart from the obvious conceptual difficulties that html presents to novices, Australian students had to also learn to spell like Americans (we spell center as centre and color as colour, for example). These difficulties were further compounded by the fact that, as a markup language, html required students to be thinking explicitly about visual rhetoric in ways that they had not done before. What are the semantics of colour or of font styles? What makes blinking text so annoying?

I still teach code when I teach HTML. Students are required to mark up their first html document ‘by hand’ using a simple text editor. This is only partly a kind of nostalgia for the craft of media making. Learning to write code without the aid of proprietary software releases students (albeit temporarily) from the stranglehold that such software places on the process of creation. The old resistances to mainstream media die hard. More importantly, from a pragmatic perspective, knowing a little code can help them to get themselves out of the tangle of autocode functions that seem to come bundled with programs like Dreamweaver.

The increasing emphasis on proprietary software in digital media studies is creating a generation of students who work on the surface of technology without understanding the processes behind that creation. It is not uncommon to hear students talk about their proficiencies in Flash but not animation or Photoshop but not image manipulation. Rather than seeing these programs as tools they are seeing them as ends in themselves. Whack a filter on an image and whammo – instant art! They even talk about wanting to learn ‘computer’. I usually point out that this is akin to wanting to learn ‘pencil’.

It is important to teach students that acquiring proficiencies is not an end in itself. In any case, more and more students are arriving at university with established digital media proficiencies and can probably teach their teachers more things about Flash than they thought it was possible to know.[3] Finding a reason to use these technologies in interesting and creative ways seems to be a far more urgent project.

April 1, 1995 – A Chance Meeting With a Lemur

In the same way that the practice of reading privately and silently contributed to the formation of “self”, so too will performing hyperrhetoric contribute to a new subjectivication in the electronic apparatus (in which one will have to find a new term of self-reference, neither “parrot” [to use Lacan’s example] as in the clan identity of the oral apparatus nor “me” in the individualism of literacy. (Ulmer, 1994: 38)

At the point at which I began to question the value of teaching digital media for its own sake, I came across the writings of Gregory Ulmer, Professor of English at the University of Florida. After reading Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994), I backtracked to Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (1989) and Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (1985) and in doing so found an approach that positioned electronic culture within a framework that made action possible. Ulmer’s applied approach to digital media turned everything on its head. Rather than seeing digital media as something that you could apply a theory to, Ulmer’s concept of electracy allowed me to see that digital media could be used to invent new theories, new modes of seeing and being in the world.

Digital media is more than just a set of tools –it is part of an apparatus that refers not only to the technologies of computing but also to the ideologies and institutional practices assigned to or produced by those technologies. If the print apparatus produces the currently dominant critical and interpretative modes of inquiry in learning (critique and hermeneutics), then how might the apparatus of electracy produce a logic of invention?

While many of the hypertext theorists I had been reading at the time had been prepared to argue that hypertext, as a technology of electronic writing, was by its very nature revolutionary – embodying a poststructuralist view of language – Ulmer was arguing that we need an electronic theoria.[4] That is, writing electonically does not automatically take us outside literate practices or involve the development of new rhetorical strategies. Any cursory glance at the metaphors used in computing – the desktop, folders and files, webpages, and so on – signal the ways in which electronic writing is tied up with the practices of print literacy. What was (and arguably still is) needed to achieve the transition was the invention of new modes of writing specific to the electronic environment itself, taking into account the full potential of literacy as it converged with a new apparatus, and remembering that the technology of electronic writing is only one aspect of the apparatus. This was heady stuff!

I continue to try and teach mystory as a new electronic genre in a subject that I teach called ‘Electronic Writing’.[5] Because it is not caught up in the hype of ‘new media’, it remains relevant. The invention of a mode of discourse for the electronic apparatus is most definitely a work in progress.

February 29, 2001 – Like Minds Think Alike

My mother has recently acquired an email account. She insists on writing letters to me that are in no way different from the ones she would have written by hand. They’re long and full of family gossip and trivia. They’re also strangely formal – she signs off “Yours sincerely”. She’s extremely intolerant of my tardy and epigrammatic responses. Pointing out that I get about 100 emails a day does nothing to assuage this intolerance.

The acceleration in communications made possible by email in the past decade has wrought significant changes in the ways in which all academics work. Aside from the incessant chirping of “You’ve got mail” brought on by student requests for assignment extensions and appointment requests, the ability to have regular and ongoing contact with colleagues at a distance has transformed the way we undertake both scholarship and pedagogy. Collaborations that were once drawn out and difficult are now able to happen with ease. The evolution of email list culture has reconfigured my approach to digital media studies considerably. I not only teach students about lists in relation to questions of telepresence and textuality but we now also actively use lists for the purposes of teaching.[6]

As well as the direct impact list culture has had on the classroom, my engagement with lists has brought me into contact with like minded colleagues from around the world. The network of scholars engaged with digital media studies is not vast. As a nascent area of study, we often find ourselves ghettoed off at more mainstream academic events on the ‘tech’ panels. Academics studying digital media come from a broad palette of more established disciplines – critical theory, media studies, literary studies, art, political economy, information technology, philosophy and so on. What binds us is our interest in the ways in which digital media are reshaping our media landscape.

This was the impetus in 2001 for the establishment of the Fibreculture discussion list. Initially set up by Geert Lovink and David Teh, Fibreculture was established to provide a forum for the exchange of articles, ideas and arguments on Australian IT policy in a broad, cultural context. In particular, Fibreculture was and remains interested in the philosophy and politics of new media arts, information and creative industries, national strategies for innovation, research and development, education, and media and culture.

Fibreculture now has over 1000 subscribers.[7] I have acted as a ‘facilitator’ for the list for the past four years. As well as moderating list discussion, this has involved organizing face to face events, publications and perhaps most successfully playing a role in the establishment of the Fibreculture Journal. As a result of my involvement in Fibreculture, I have developed a keener understanding of the role of networks in a globalised, distributed environment. It also gives me a chance to practice what I teach.

The kind of engagement with networked digital technologies that Fibreculture facilitates highlights the ways in which the object and subject of study in digital media studies have increasingly merged. I use distributed networks to talk and think about distributed networks in the same way that I now use wikis and blogs in the classroom in order to engage the students in discussions of wikis and blogs. This kind of self reflexivity is quite unique to digital media studies. Students of literature, for example, were never expected to produce canonical texts for future students of literature. Similarly, students studying film criticism were not always expected to go on and make films. No doubt some did but the object of study in most traditional academic contexts was neatly severed from what was produced. These kinds of divisions are now not so neatly contained. Critics of this kind of approach may want to accuse us of sticking our heads up our own asses, to use a famous Australian expression. However, I’d prefer to think of it as an engaged criticism that refuses to leave the outside world out of the classroom.

September 4, 2004 – I Thought it Was a Phone

I’m on a conference panel (predictably with the word ‘technology’ in its title) at a youth media conference in Newcastle, regional Australia. Sharing the panel with me are two young people from Manchester, England, Fee Plumley and Ben Jones, collectively known as the Phone Book Ltd. The Phone Book Ltd, they tell me, is a creative media agency and they have been exploring mobile phone content since 2000. In the lead up to the presentations, they offer to Bluetooth some content to my phone to show me what they are going to talk about. I have to sheepishly admit to not owning a mobile phone. They look aghast but given that I am at a youth media conference I’m becoming somewhat accustomed to this.

Fee and Ben’s presentation has me transfixed. They talk about their projects; phonebook, arttones.net and the-sketch-book.[8] I’m simultaneously alert to the creative possibilities of this new medium and to my own nagging dislike of the mobile as the latest technology of privatization and customization. My interest in the creative possibilities of this new medium temporarily wins out.

In particular I am drawn to thinking about how mobiles might escape from the predominantly corporate matrix in which they appear to be embedded. And this escape, in the ideal scenario, would be facilitated by users rather than manufacturers. Innovation with new media very often only begins in earnest once a new invention leaves the production line and falls into the hands of consumers. History is littered with examples of users whose ingenuity has reshaped technologies away from their intended purpose. The telephone was originally conceived as means to disseminate culture to the masses and was developed as a broadcast device, not as a communications device. In line with inventor Alexander Graham Bell’s intentions, operatic concerts in Boston and Cambridge were transmitted over phone lines in the late nineteenth century. Phonographs, on the other hand, were conceived as a recording apparatus for dictation rather than as a mass distribution device for music. According to Carolyn Marvin, the appearance of a new medium becomes an occasion for a ‘drama’ played out between different groups and hierarchies within a society as each attempts to assimilate the new media into their existing rituals and habits (Marvin, 1988: 6). This then leads to experimentation as users work through their particular visions and imaginaries in regards to the new medium. Could the mobile be taking this well worn path?

I’m yet to be convinced. Perhaps it’s a sign that my engagement with digital media over the last decade has led me to develop a degree of cynicism towards the hype that accompanies new technologies and their promises of a better world for everyone. Perhaps it is also an increasing concern I share with others over the turn that digital media seems to be taking away from the collaborative and the networked towards an increasing emphasis on the personalized and the individualized. Australian critic, Daniel Palmer, notes that mobiles are part of a broader phenomenon that he calls ‘participatory media’. However, this is not the participatory media of grassroots journalism and DIY media. It is participatory ‘in the sense that its “modes of address” function to blur the line between the production and consumption of imagery’ (Palmer, 2005: npn). This produces ‘the key forms of mediated visualising practices that make up our shared visual culture’ and that ‘all forms of media participation need to be considered in relation to defining characteristics of contemporary capitalism – namely its user-focused, customised and individuated orientation’ (Palmer, 2005: npn).

The repercussions of an increasingly individuated, personalized and customized media culture are profound not only in terms how we approach these developments critically, as scholars and as practitioners but in terms of their effect on the whole project of teaching digital media studies and teaching generally, for that matter. The changes that are taking place in the mediasphere generally and digital media in particular can be seen to be mirrored in the academy. Increasingly, at least in Australia and as a direct result of fee for service education models, students are able to pick and choose subjects on the basis of what they are interested in rather than as a coherent program of study. As Darren Tofts has noted:

There is an increasingly aggressive attitude of individual discretion with which students will determine whether or not it is worth coming to a particular tute or enrol in a particular subject on the grounds that, in advance of any study, it is already irrelevant to their particular needs. This attitude is commonly articulated in the perception that learning is expendable and selective, a perception disclosed in the repertory statement, “I couldn’t come to class last week. Did I miss anything important?” (Tofts, 2004: npn)

The key words here are of course “in advance of any study”. The presumption that students are already in a position to make assessments about their education without the benefit of being educated leads to the institution of a kind of Academic Idol in universities. Courses that are relatively undemanding, fun and focused on student interests are popular; courses that require a degree of hard work and commitment are only chosen by those that don’t have better things to do. Now I’m not saying that learning should not be student centered but customizing your program of study so that you are never forced to confront difficult questions, never challenged in your beliefs, as though you were choosing a cable channel rather than a life path, is a little worrying. As Tofts explains:

The emphasis on interactivity and user choice in digital media (whether on or offline computer-based media, digital television, mobile phone content) is a sign of what Richard Sennett has called the “tyranny of intimacy”. Participation, once the province of community, of social interaction, is the new currency of individual engagement with real time media. (Tofts, 2004: npn)

Inevitably, we will see greater personalization and greater customisation in our engagement with media of all kinds as media converge into the digital. And as a natural consequence of this we will be forced to attend to the social ills that result from this further individualization of media culture. At the risk of sounding hypocritical, I’m able ponder these concerns while accessing Gracenotes as I upload my CD collection to my iPod or downloading a recipe on the networked laptop in our kitchen. But that really is the point. Digital media are now so embedded into the fabrics of our everyday lives it is getting harder and more urgently necessary that we continue to reflect on how we are changing as a result – as individuals, as cultures, as societies and as another species sharing the planet.

I am not sure how these forces will play themselves out into the future. I could never have predicted, sitting in my room all those years ago watching my avatar in DOOM bite the dust and be reborn again and again, that digital media may have led me circuitously to where I am now – wherever that is. Perhaps as James Joyce, himself a prescient theorist of new media, would have had it, we can only watch the riverrun … ‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the’ (Joyce, 1975: 628)

Author’s Biography

Lisa Gye lectures in Media and Communications at Swinburne University and is interested in the ways in new media technologies impact on creative and academic modes of expression.
http://www.swinmc.net/lisa/contact.html

Notes

[1] I’ve written about this extensively elsewhere so I won’t elaborate here. See, for example, Gye, L., ‘Halflives, A Mystory: Writing Hypertext to Learn’, Fibreculture Journal, Issue 2, 2003 http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue2/issue2_gye.html
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[2] I remember one student who, upon seeing a mouse for the first time, picked it up and pointed it at the screen like a remote control, perplexed as to why nothing seemed to be happening
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[3] I remember my astonishment when my then 11 year old son showed me an animation he had painstakingly created in Powerpoint. It hadn’t even occurred to me that you could use that program for anything more interesting than boring corporate presentations.
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[4] The earlier work on hypertext of scholars such as George Landow and Jay David Bolter were good examples of the kind of euphoric optimism to which I’m referring here. See, for example, Bolter, Jay David, 2001. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (Boston: Lawrence Erlbaum, Assocs). Interestingly, both Bolter and Landow and many others like them toned down their initial enthusiasm for the revolutionary powers of both postructuralist theory and hypertext in their later writings on the subject.
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[5] According to Ulmer, “As a conceptual neologism, “mystory” is the title for a collection or set of elements gathered together temporarily in order to represent my comprehension of the scene of academic discourse. It is an idea of sorts, if nothing like a platonic eidos, whose name alludes to several constituent features (generated by the puncept of “mystory”)”. (Ulmer, 1989: 83)
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[6] My colleague Esther Milne, with whom I teach Issues in Electronic Media, has written extensively about the relations between letter writing, email discussion lists and SMS. Examples of her research can be read in M/C Journal, “‘Magic Bits of Paste-board’ Texting in the Nineteenth Century” http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0401/02-milne.php and Fibreculture Journal “Email and Epistolary technologies: Presence, Intimacy, Disembodiment” http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue2/issue2_milne.html.
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[7] More information about Fibreculture can be found at http://www.fibreculture.org
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[8] For more information on the phonebook ltd projects, see http://www.the-phone-book.com
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References

Cole, Robert. (ed.) Issues in Web-based pedagogy: A Critical Primer (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000).

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1975): 628.

McLuhan, Marshall and Quintin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (Simon and Schuster, 1967).

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).

Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Palmer, Daniel. ‘Mobile Exchanges’, Paper presented at the Vital Signs Conference, ACMI, Melbourne, September 8, 2005.

____. ‘The Paradox of User Control’ in Digital Art and Culture Melbourne 2003 Conference Proceedings, Melbourne: RMIT, 2003: 167–172

Tofts, Darren and Murray Mc Keich. Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (21C Books, Interface, 1998).

Tofts, Darren. ‘f2f 2 url & b ond: space/time and the dissemination of community’ Keynote address at Concepts for Change: representation, community and the transformative power of technology, Central Queensland University, Bundaberg, 5th November, 2004.

Ulmer, Gregory. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Baltimore: John Hopkins U.P., 1994).

____. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (New York: Routledge, 1989).

____. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1985).

____. ‘Textshop for (Post) Pedagogy’ in G. Atkins and M. Johnson (eds), Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition ( Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1985).

________. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (New York: Longman, 2003)

Amidst shifting modalities of culture, inflected with new technologies and changing social desires, university disciplines have experienced seismic shifts in focus. Literature and Cultural Studies are being superseded by Communication Studies, Creative Enterprise, Creative Industries, Converged Media and other such nominalisms. In my workplace, the structure that was inaugurated only a few years before is already looking clunky, an outdated batch of titles and course content. Is it still appropriate to be talking about ‘Multimedia’? Are ‘New Media’, ‘Digital Media’ and ‘Converged Media’ sufficiently different substitutes? Are animation and gaming the province of Multimedia, Design, Art or Film and Television studies? From the growing number of enquiries from students about crossing areas we have been forced to look at the relations between them, and yet it seems that no amount of synergy could adequately capture the multifarious interests of a wired generation. We are playing catch-up with a world that has careened out of the control of what Louis Althusser once called Institutional State Apparatuses, state sponsored structures for the induction of workers into the ideologies of twentieth century capitalism. In an increasingly neo-liberal environment, the university looks like a necessary but necessarily inadequate training ground for corporate employees. Companies and institutions want their workers to have degrees but not necessarily to have those critical practices that bring about social change. The responsibility for imbuing technical skills has shifted from the workplace to the publicly funded universities, who now train professions by market demand. When debates around education in the public sphere do take place, they are often on the terrain of industry and its needs. In Australia the situation is arguably worse, since the sheer smallness of the higher education sector makes it more vulnerable to industry pressure groups and the market forces that drive students into different degrees.

I want to turn here to the disciplinary troubles brought about by the increasing multiplicity of student needs on the one hand, and the singularity of economics on the other. As a measure of this contradiction I want to examine one term, the “digital”, that names the degrees many students US students will now carry with them throughout their lives. Here I will argue that such nominalisms are of seminal significance for the humanities, as they constitute the relationship that knowledge has with the world. To frame this knowledge in terms of the digital is to yoke it to a misrecognition that knowledge is constituted by technology. Certainly the digital is symptomatic of wider changes to economic, social and cultural orders that overreach its theoretical idea. Yet novelties such as the connectivity of computing and mobile devices also obscure the historical continuity of these same orders. The job of educators is to defamiliarise technology rather than to explicate it, to make radical those concepts driving the commercial sphere. So it is that I want to stage an argument against naming knowledge after the digital, and instead argue for the most radical theoretical interventions on the level of this name. In the second part of this paper I make a counter-argument for the use of the term “virtual” as a more effective means for structuring knowledge. This is in order to place a sufficient degree of abstraction between technology and knowledge, and to recapture the university’s place as a site of radical interventions.

The digital has been used as a way of distinguishing the transmission of information from analogue technologies, the latter transmitting a continuous and variable signal, rather than the absolute and numerical values of the digital. It also refers to the digits that operate interfaces, in an allusion to the labour saved by machines of the hand rather than of the arm and back. By definition the digital is more quantitative than qualitative, though apologists for the digital claim that there is a limit to the amount of information that the human sensorium can absorb, so that the detail of the digital is always bigger and better than the human senses. The shift here is of interest, as the foundations of digital technology in numerical logics coincide historically with the processes of late capitalism that are also grounded in sophisticated techniques for modelling markets. The immediacy of this technology has assisted finance capitalism to reach its current global and virtual extents, high end economic flows determined by pre-programmed purchase and sales levels. This is not to say that the digital is inherently capitalistic. Yet the term does not put sufficient distance between itself and a visible set of technologies at the point of sale, such as computing and mobile devices. Such technologies are themselves called digital, such that commercial products appear as that which precedes and enables the university’s knowledge. There has always been a circularity between disciplines and the world, as education constitutes itself with regard to change. Critical thought has always taken place at the interface between oral and print technologies, between teaching and writing. The university converts this relationship with historical change into this interface, determining the knowledge that reproduces its institutional form. Yet the digital is not driving history, it is not producing a different mode of economic or even socio-cultural production. Digital technologies are instead reproducing social, cultural and economic forms that preceded it. The digital is a metaphor for change rather than the change itself, and it is on this metaphoric level that universities must mount a critical intervention. The digital is part of a continuum of change within a longer duration. These changes are better framed by the virtual.

Let’s take the example of architecture. In this discipline, the development of Computer Aided Design (CAD) is taken to have generated a new set of forms for designing buildings. Yet such forms also preceded the technology that appears to have brought them into being. The intricate dimensionality of architect Zaha Hadid’s work dates from the late 1970s and was first drawn without computers, yet they have every appearance of a CAD design. Complex and organic shapes weave and cross each other in diagonal rather than vertical structures of load bearing. If “computers only make Hadid’s work more biomorphic, topological, and sexy”, they remain unnecessary to its innovation, a tool rather than a result of their invention (Ryan, 1996: 88). Such innovations, in which the pillar is no longer fundamental to both the construction and design features of architecture, have not been seen in the European tradition since the Gothic cathedral. Yet Hadid’s work demonstrates that this shift away from the more contemporary Romaneque is due to more than CAD. It is indeed possible to reverse the reasoning at work here in order to argue that CAD was instead a development of socio-cultural changes, within which Hadid figures as a representative. Why not call this new era of design Hadidesque? The argument has the quality of defamiliarising the intuitive notion that technology is itself a producer, that CAD is itself responsible for building design. A more radical example of such a reversal can be found in the field of media studies, in Raymond Williams’ Television (1974). He argues that this medium became so popular in the 1950s because nations needed ways to bind themselves together after the war. The dispersal of people from their traditional neighbourhoods and into the isolation of the suburbs, the lack of faith in the nation-state that had led working people into senseless battle, all required a remedy that would manage the continuity and identity of post-war society. Its adoption was determined by a complex of historical and social factors. Such radicalisations of the place of technology in history remain relevant.

Visual studies is another discipline in which the digital is contested as a site of knowledge. William Mitchell’s The Re-Configured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1992) reproduces a McLuhan style history of technology. Mitchell returns to the pre-photographic only to make the point that the visual developments of the Renaissance and the camera obscura were leading up to the seminal invention of photography. History becomes a series of technological interventions that have culminated in the instantaneous, illusionist post-photographic era in which we live. Mitchell’s argument is against the realism that has been associated with these previous inventions, against the pretence of perspectival and photographic representations to truth. Instead, the digital reveals the fakery that is already written into the photographic, in a history of history of making rather than taking pictures. It is a clever ploy, but one that remains technologically deterministic, solving rather than problematising the place of new media. For the making of images remains dependent on this continuity of technology, rather than being inculcated into differential sites of historical meaning. The one mode of visualisation folds all too easily into the next, its specificity lost to this march of artifice.

The significance of digital technologies and the way in which they determine contemporary thought may well be compared to the way photography has been historicised as a seminal event in the history of vision and culture. Photography is often taken to have changed human life in Europe, if not the world. It brought about, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, conditions for the infinite reproduction of images and the democratisation of image production. The influence of Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1968) can be taken as symptomatic of a trend toward technological determinism in the twentieth century. The argument of this essay, that art objects will no longer be precious in an era of many images, attributes to photography the power to change a modern tradition. Susan Buck-Morss points out that it is in fact possible to argue the very reverse, that in fact the tradition of modern art has only been strengthened by photography, which in reproducing its images tends to increase the value of the original object. Technology then services the structures of power that precede it. Perhaps the most effective revision of the photographic rupture is Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (1990). Wanting to dispute the notion that photography was the latest in a series of perspectival technologies, he turns to the distinctiveness of the camera obscura in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The camera obscura is usually inscribed into the development of better and better techniques for realistic visualisation, and is thought of as a consequence of perspective itself. David Hockney goes so far as to argue that the camera obscura actually determined the course of perspectival image making. Crary instead gives the camera obscura its own distinct place in the history of visual ontology, as analogous to the Cartesian split. From their dark place in the isolation box of the camera obscura, observers configured the separation of their thought from vision. While photography was shared in public space, the camera obscura was the symptom of an era of growing literacy and the interiority of mind, in which knowledge was absolute and contained by a sensibility of stable observation. Sitting in a darkened space offered a model of this mind, from where the subject was able to view the external world as if through a glass, darkly. In Crary’s revised history of the camera obscura, technologies are the metaphor for a differential picture of a period of history.

Williams and Crary both bring historical constellations of meaning to bear on their respective technologies. Television and the camera obscura are lifted from comparisons to other technologies and are instead cognitively mapped within their times. They are but the vanishing mediators that will give way to questions of a historical and ontological nature. After Williams, we might ask what historical contradictions the digital resolves? If television solved the problems of maintaining post-war nationalism for the state, what problems does the digital address or disguise? What shift in the socio-cultural domain might the digital be indicative of? It would be simple to argue that the digital is symptomatic of developments in capitalism. The internet is then consequent upon its need to link global markets and anti-market structures. Mobile technologies open new, pedestrian and commuting markets. Time is no longer lost in a decentered world that requires connection between disparate geographies. As Rex Butler has argued, the global economy operates in the gap between the world and an imaginary and infinite world of capitalist expansion. For capitalism, the geographical world is not enough. The gap between an imaginary and actual world is transcoded by communication studies into a “digital divide” between the technologically advantaged and disadvantaged. In Marxist terms, the digital divide is itself a false problem, because capitalism is itself uneven, and structurally produces advantage and disadvantage. The digital divide disguises a larger and more fundamental divide at work in the global economy. The lack of technologies amongst the poor is but one of many indicators of disempowerment in global capital. Discourses around the digital divide offer the appearance of Marxism without being Marxism, addressing technology as a cause of inequity rather than its symptom.

It is also possible to use Crary’s methodology to begin to think about digital technologies within other modes of historical duration. Art history is largely interested in deciphering images to reconstruct the self-perception of the period in which these images were made. Crary attempts to think through the camera obscura in order to establish the qualities of the minds that used it. Is it possible to look back on digital technology as if from some unimaginable future? From a place in which the artefacts of computing bear clues to how this period imagines itself? Here we confront the paradoxical rhetoric of the digital as a state of becoming, as that which we will be. Scholars of the internet often employ such rhetoric. Take, for example, Sherry Turkle’s book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), in which the medium “links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities” (Turkle, 1995: 9). The technology is here a way of self-imagining, the internet a transcendental or quasi-cause of this imagination, that which enables ourselves to become transparent to ourselves, in an equivalence of technology and identity. It is the point here to turn this logic around, so that the internet is both more and less than the way in which we imagine ourselves, subjectivity less a state of equivalence than one of fracture and complexity. Turkle’s subject is historical as it becomes this equivalence. Yet in becoming its vision of itself, it aspires to leave history. How to perceive the present from an imagined future when this future has already been colonised by the present? The answer to the contradiction lies in Crary’s methodology, which ranges over all kinds of materials, from philosophy to maps, poetry and scientific experiments. The transcendental signifier here is a consciousness that is itself transcendental, that peers as if from the darkness in the camera obscura into the outside world. The schism that this thought has with itself is the subject of this technology, as it is the subject of the period in all its numerous expressions. The question asked here is just how a technology is located in the more general schemas of understanding that specify a period. Crary sets out to argue with the camera obscura as one example of visual history, as a moment in the ongoing development of technologies of visualisation. So too we must begin to locate the digital in histories that are not technological, to construct a non-technological version of the digital.

I want to turn to three cultural histories whose interests construct another possibility for framing the digital, and in the process erase the digital as a site for knowledge. Pierre Lévy’s Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (1998), N. Katherine Hayles’ How we Became Posthuman (1999) and David Summers’ Real Spaces (2003) all converge on the term virtual as a way of framing the present state of technological instantiation. Their methodologies are philosophical, literary and art historical in turn, such that the virtual is defined differently by each. Yet it is to the point that the phenomena to which the term points is not dissimilar, providing a useful series of variations and contestations. Could a University, seeking new ways of promoting its cross-disciplinary identities, harbour a Faculty, School or Department of the Virtual? At present the term would appear too abstract, too esoteric. Yet this is precisely the kind of radical intervention that the Humanities needs so as to claim ownership over the knowledge it teaches. Indeed, when my own University can set “Frontier Technologies for Digital Ecosystems” as a research priority, evoking some hybrid of the Wild West and ecological consciousness, it would appear that anything is possible. The flexibility of nominalism may well be exploited by scholars looking to set research and teaching agendas.

It is, then, to the virtual that I want to turn here, as a site of meaning constructed by philosophy, literature and art history. Pierre Lévy’s method is philosophical. His Becoming Virtual (1998) defines the term in deference to a tradition in philosophy that has used it as a measure of potential, carried on most recently by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Michel Serres among others, but dating back to medieval scholarship. The virtual is the series of possibilities that tend toward actualisation, yet this virtual is also distinct from the possible as something that is already fully constituted. The example Lévy uses here is the seed’s relationship to the tree. Within the seed lies the possibility of the tree, a virtual tree that has not yet been actualised. From this definition it is possible to arrive at a series of terms by which to navigate the artefacts of digital culture. Corporations, for instance, are virtual without always being actual. Virtualisation is the process by which the functions of a business may become steadily more abstract, an abstraction that is likely to include the use of digital technologies. So that a company may shift from mining to finance capital and back again, from manufacturing to carbon trading and onto something else. Virtualisation also describes a wide array of art and heritage practices, from making a record of buildings scheduled to be destroyed to visualising imaginary buildings. Actualisation offers a more troubling set of examples, in which war is carried out after battle plans have been simulated, or buildings are constructed after CAD has visualised them. Its accompanying term is devirtualisation, which realises in the actual world artefacts or events that are otherwise only virtual. So that, for instance, Peter Hennessey’s life-size, plywood models of the Sputnik and Voyager spacecraft devirtualise, without actualising, objects that cannot be directly experienced. Skirmish and paintball are other examples of devirtualisation, actualising in the world that which is otherwise experienced only through television, computer games and other modes of mediation. The digital is a subset of the virtual here. It offers one relation among and within other modalities. Here the constellation of terms around the virtual reverses the Baudrillardian logic of simulation in which the virtual brings the real into being. Instead, movements of virtualisation, devirtualisation and actualisation shift between financial, institutional and creative strata. Significantly, Lévy’s definition of the virtual shifts visual technologies and cultures away from a relation with the real and its association with truth. The real belongs instead to a photographic order of meaning that proposes there is some paradigm by which representation models itself. Lévy’s virtual, on the other hand, bears no relation to the real, instead creating modalities of meaning that are not indexed to technological modes of enframing.

Another historical order is proposed by N. Katherine Hayle’s definition of the virtual, this being ‘the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns’ (Hayles, 1999: 13-14). This is perhaps the clearest general and cultural definition of the virtual, and one that can be applied to many features of contemporary life. Television today, for example, is full of imagery showing the detailed interiors of human bodies. Two examples illustrate the point. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000-) specialises in digital simulations of the paths of bullets through the body, of surgery, hairs and bodily fluids that have been deposited in orifices. Gunther von Hagens, famous for his touring Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies exhibition (1995-), also shows the insides of bodies, but this time they are actual corpses. His television program Anatomy for Beginners (2006) is also symptomatic of an era in which digital visualisation techniques have become significant tools in the medical repertoire, in which the ability to travel through the insides of the body is enabled by computer generated techniques for three dimensional modelling. Yet here digital techniques for rendering the body are not present. CSI is a case of medical virtualisation, while Anatomy for Beginners is an actualisation of this virtual, as information that is familiar to patients and their relatives, if not to viewers of CSI, are inscribed onto dead bodies. That this is a cultural shift rather than a technological breakthrough is my point here. While CSI glamorises new techniques for identifying criminal behaviour and carrying out surgery, it remains a detective drama, its pleasure lain as much in the operation of the detective’s mind as in new technologies for visualisation. The digital generation of bodily interiors takes place in a narrative of cognitive revelation, in the operation of thought over and about a corpse. Information conjoins the cognitive with the visual here, Haraway’s definition of the virtual being the cultural logic by which CSI is understood as a successful television series. The virtual, that transparency of everything to its own informational structure, informs Hagens’ Anatomy for Beginners too. Yet this information is not revealed through the digital. It comes to vision through the brutal operation of hacksaws and hammers on the bodies themselves. The pleasure here lies in the actualisation of violence upon the body, in the manner of a war staged through television screens and sensors, and yet whose destruction is clearly actualised, its effect taking place within flesh.

Hayles’ book is also useful in its deconstruction of some of the assumptions technologists have made about the way in which computers will transform human nature. Its target is the quantification of consciousness by cyberneticists who wanted to transcend the body with intelligence. The conditions for consciousness are more complex for Hayles, and her argument comes to centre itself on the body as the site by which the mind comes to its own awareness. Her history of the ideas and personalities behind cybernetics demonstrates the way in which technology is constituted through social and cultural relations. The technology at stake here is computing, and is a part of a constellation of interactions and relations, interfaces and exchanges. These are between bodies of scientific knowledge and ideologies, personalities and acculturations. Attempting to think the totality of these relations, Hayles comes to question the idea that technology possesses some autonomous logic all of its own, as well as its causal relation with the world. Her thesis about the posthuman proposes methodologies for analysis that bypass the assumptions that, first, science is a quantifiable operation and second, that science has reasonable and scientific consequences. Computation and subjectivity are the two historical worlds that Hayles is working with here, the passages between them revealing the enterprise of computing with all of its humanist promise of liberation, and a subjectivity that is, once again, fractured by the divide between science and the human arts. Here Hayles begins to resemble Crary in her return to a human subject situated at the the disjuncture between consciousness and the sensory world. In both cases, technologies play the role of metaphors for the self-alienation of an era.

There is a final definition of the virtual that we can include here, this from an art historian attempting to create a global art history. The project, Real Spaces (2003) by David Summers, proposes the virtual as a category of visual history. Summers is interested in how virtual space is represented on a surface, how two and three dimensions are mediated by this surface. This history begins in Mesolithic rock paintings and continues through to the perspectival techniques of the Italian Renaissance. Virtual spaces ‘demand completion on the part of an observer. Whatever illusionistic force they may have, virtual spaces show what is always at an unbridgeable remove, at a distance in space or time, another present, a past or future’ (Summers, 2003: 44). For Summers the order of the virtual is distinguishable from the order of the real because it is that space we do not share with other people. Thus the virtual becomes individualising, and the site of unreal human relations. This is the most conservative definition of the virtual thus far, and perhaps not coincidentally coincides most closely with the history of the visual as the history of visual technologies. From the beginning of his engagement with the virtual, Summers separates his project from the digital. His use of the term, he tells us, was ‘chosen well before “virtual reality” became current’ (Summers, 2003: 431). His reflexivity here is part of a much larger reflexivity with regard to a history of virtual imaging that largely reduces it to the mechanics of illusion. This illusionism is, however, a component of a more essential structure of human relations. The virtuality of these relations is constituted by doubt, the incompletion of the image that of the incompletion of the other to the self.

The examples used by Lévy, Haraway and Summers used to illustrate the virtual are both digital and not digital. They are drawn from different times, places and spaces. These examples make up a continuum of meaning that includes, but is not limited by, the digital, which becomes one of the virtual’s many variations. For Lévy, the virtual is synonymous with capitalism, and more particularly the place of labour today. Corporations work toward deterritorialising labour in a virtualisation of its value, and in actualising this value in other territories. A history of the virtual after Lévy would include the humanisation and inhumanity of corporations. It would include the recognition of corporations as legal entities, and a history of their involvement in various types of warfare. For while the abolition of slavery in the US led to the recognition of corporations as human beings with all the rights and obligations of such, the production and sale of weapons by corporations is a sign of their inhumanity, of the consequences of their subjective virtualisation. Here Lévy’s definitions of the virtual coincide with Summers’ criticisms of its inauthenticity and illusionism. Virtualisation creates a troubling situation for the Humanities here, as the human subject and its labour is no longer a site of meaning. Yet Lévy and Summers turn to other strata of meaning in which life asserts its immanent force. For Lévy the flight of birds is deterritorialising and offers a parallel movement to the virtualisation of capital. In his global art history, Summers describes “real space” or place as a site of distinctive social and cultural relations.

The other text being reviewed here, Katherine Hayles’ history of cybernetics and information machines, offers another way of historicising the virtual. Hers is an account of the production of technologies of the body and the production of virtual bodies in the twentieth century. It is a cultural history of computing, of an intellectual milieu that anticipated the era of digital technologies. Hayles traces the origins of motifs that are now repeated in digital theory, including interactivity, autopoesis and the self-organising system. The ideas that these scientists were throwing around in the 1950s and 1960s about building intelligent machines were consequent on a cultural environment that would bloom in the late 1960s and 1970s, an era whose youth were more receptive to utopian and libertarian ideas. Hence to this prospective history of the virtual we can add this cultural material, which coincides in the 1970s with the beginnings of Apple and Microsoft from the bedrooms and garages of the young student population (Friedberger and Swaine).

Finally we can turn to a prospective project on the relation of the digital and virtual to each other, a project that empties the digital out into a series of sites of knowledge that are not technological. These are philosophical (Lévy), visual (Summers) and socio-cultural (Haraway). These modes of constituting knowledge have the advantage of long durations of historical life, and of relating to sensibilities that are not necessarily implicated in commercial interests. Grouping these knowledges together, the virtual becomes a transcendent site of knowledge, productive of difference. The digital is, on the other hand, immanent to the function of technologies, making its meaning all too easily contained. It is continuous with aspects of the virtual history proposed here, as different disciplinary knowledges converge within digital knowledge systems, cultures and art practices. This history lifts the digital out of its immanence, reconstituting it with regard to traditional disciplines. This is no conservative return to previous regimes of knowledge, but a recognition of the historicity of the digital, its reproduction of existing social, cultural, economic and vital forms. The digital makes visible that which was already taking place within the virtual, from corporate deterritorialisation to social networking. It puts a technological face on the virtual continuity of regimes of knowledge and power. The humanities has always been interested in complimenting, extending and interrogating the conditions of life in modernity. It may appear, as university’s determine new knowledge areas, that the traditional humanities is under threat, that disciplines such as Literature and Cultural Studies are being replaced by other, more technologically mobile areas as Communications, Creative Industries and Converged Media. It is the responsibility of the humanities to make these transitions between disciplines transparent and accountable. What relationship do these new disciplines have with capitalism, knowledge production and the critical role of the university? Nominating a new field of knowledge is at the coalface of the relation between the university and its world. Here I have argued for disciplinary and interdisciplinary titles to be abstract, estranging and productive of differential meanings.

Author’s Biography

Darren Jorgensen is currently co-ordinating the Internet Studies program at Curtin University. He has previously published in the fields of critical theory, art, genre and popular fiction.

References

Althusser, Louis. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’, in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127-186.

Anatomy for Beginners 2006, television program, Channel 4, Presenters Dr Gunther von Hagens and Professor John A. Lee.

Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Ardent (ed. and intro.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968): 217-251.

Buck-Morss, Susan. ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, New Formations 20 (1993): 123-143.

Butler, Rex. ‘The World is not Enough (on Globalism and Art)’, unpublished essay (2006).

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 2000-, television program, CBS Network, Performers Gary Dourdan, George Eads, William Peterson, Marg Helgenberger, Jorja Fox, Paul Guilfoyle, Eric Szmanda, Robert David Hall, David Berman.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and forw. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Friedberger, Paul and Michael Swaine. Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer (Berkeley: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984).

Hagen, Gunther von. Body Worlds, touring exhibitions (1995-).

Hayles, N. Katherine. How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Hennessey, Peter. My Voyager, documentation of artwork (2004), http://www.peterhennessey.net/

Hockney, David. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001).

Lévy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, trans. Robert Bononno (New York: Plenum, 1998).

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1964).

Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

Ryan, Raymund. ‘New York Zaha’, Architectural Review 7 ( July, 2006): 88.

Serres, Michel. Genesis, trans. Michel Serres (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

Summers, David. Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phiadon, 2003).

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1995).

Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974).

This in an interactive text—click here to open.

Abstract

This webtext demonstrates the possibilities of using new media to teach students critical literacy skills applicable to the 21st century. It is a manifesto for what we think writing scholars should be teaching in general-education “writing” classes like first-year composition. In order to answer the question of what we should teach, we have to ask what kinds of academic literacy, if any, we value. We argue here that rhetorical theory is a productive way to theorize how meaning is made among new media texts, their designers, and their readers. We use the Ancient Greek concepts of topoi and commonplace to explain how designers and readers enter into a space of negotiated meaning-making when converging upon new media texts. That negotiated space offers a new-media space for learning critical literacies by means other than research papers. As examples, we discuss two student texts and the literacies they demonstrate.

Re-inventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media

Prelude: Formal Anticipation and Origins[1]

This middle does not play the role of an average but rather serves as the means by which life enjoys ‘the absolute speed of movement‘ (Pearson, 1999: 169)

As the epigraph might be understood in the context of this essay to point to movements or to methods of composing, let us begin with the premise that Part I of this essay need not necessarily come first and that the reader might happily jump from ‘Collisions, Collusions, Compositions’ directly to Part II, ‘Composition, the Discipline, the Course and the Product.’ And of course a reversal of this premise might also possible. And yet the force to read through the form of this piece as presented and ‘from the beginning’ ‘to the end’ pulsates in the adherence to or rebellion against this modal premise. This force sustains itself despite the instantiation of the essay in a digitally distributed venue. But then this is precisely the point; the form of the essay, this essay, and most academic writing is always-already instantiated, plugged in, and transferable, without formal alteration to the rhetoric or modes of signification, to what Derrida once described as différance or ‘the formation of form,’ ‘the being-imprinted of the imprint’ (Derrida, 1976: 62-63) and in another register that which Marshall McLuhan described as ‘the medium is the message’ (McLuhan, 1999:7). What does not remain unchanged, however, is the practice by which an essay, this essay, is to be read or distributed beyond Fibreculture. And so, I offer the reader the opportunity to move, surf, click, or zap past part I, ‘Collisions, Collusions, Compositions’ to a middle ‘by which life enjoys “the absolute speed of movement”’ (Pearson, 1999:169) and without necessitating or precluding returns and without loss. Go.

Collisions, Collusions, Compositions

…before all determination of the content, [it is rather] pure movement which produces difference. (Derrida, 1976: 62)

And we begin again in another middle despite our choice to pursue a tendency to continuity and the origins of writing, the passion of the origin, which will take us from here to back there, singular and without referent or link. This is a movement, a difference, and a middle out of which escape may not be possible. And so for this lexical movement we shall have tales of origins that are not origins as they are plural. This piece might have come about as the assessment report to a new program in university integrated digital writing pedagogy, about which I shall return as a coda. But this piece also erupted as an accident and fortuitous collusion of ‘middles’ during my not so distant graduate student past. So I will offer a history of collision in part due to what is a third origin: an old feminist habit demanding location and positionality that is itself traceable in part to that which shall not be revealed as something coming later but presently resonates as a theoretical vacuole in the middle of several detours only several of which shall make the cut here. Form is a strict taskmaster and we do fail.

To return to our middle, at a certain moment my ambitions were to begin to articulate what I took to be a linking of the multiply scaled, embedded and deferred temporal and spatial aesthetics of technoscience, networked circulations and human-computer interfacing, capturing and captured by coding, programming, logic, noise and pattern, and inorganic and organic affectivity on its way through the post-structural, the interdisciplinary, and the transnational, around and through the multiply scaled, embedded and deferred ‘aesthetics’ and disciplinarily turbulent terrains of theoretical and narrative ‘posthumanism,’ ‘transhumance,’ and ‘postmodernism.’ From this exuberance came a dissertation loudly titled New Media and Technoscience Fictions: Affect, Speed, Control (2005).[2]

As the title and description of the dissertation project insist, affect, speed and control were my nodes of transit for thinking about affect and bio-aesthetics in contemporary fibre and visual cultures, new mediated objects, and postmodern film, fiction, and electronic literatures. In the brief interlude since this moment, integrated digital cultures has become significantly more academically instantiated. The theoretics of this project have fallen through a differential from a cybernetic tack, swerving back a bit more in terms of what was once coined ‘slippage’ in grammatological theory or ‘the irrational cut’ in film theory.

The writing of this essay takes off from two additional discourses, composition and rhetoric, and as I began to try to theorize the grammatological move from analogue composing to digital compositing, it became increasingly critical to ask the same questions of all academic writing but particularly student writing as regards bio-aesthetics, affects, speeds, controls, streams and linkages. The approach shifted from a less progressive arrangement of technics, rhetoric and cultural productions to something more genealogical, topographical, tropographical, ‘dilated’ or rhizomatic.[3] And in doing so, to look at the objects, practices and spatial and temporal theoretics of what we think of as postmodern fictions (cinema, electronic and print literatures, and digital prose) and new media art ‘as ‘cross media movements’ streaming through cross circulated bodies rather than as distinct genres.[4]

In the meantime, I have become a tenure-track assistant professor charged with establishing the ethos and practices, pedagogy and instructor development of composition writing policy and the integration of digital writing technologies and pedagogies for first-year students at a large urban university. For this, experimentation with practices of cross media movements, distinct in their material medial specificity and distributed in their capacities and values, summoned this work to the future of integrated digital thought and pedagogy in so many intended and unintended middles.

Composition, the Discipline, the Course and the Product

Never before has the proliferation of writings outside of the academy so counterpointed the compositions inside. Never before have the technologies of writing contributed so quickly to the creation of new genres. The consequence of these two factors is the creation of a writing public that, in development and in linkage to technology, parallels the development of a reading public in the 19th century. And these parallels, they raise good questions, suggest ways that literacy is created across spaces, across time. (Yancey, 2004: 297)

If, as Yancey asserts, ‘writings outside of the academy’ have generated a ‘writing public that in development and in linkage to technology parallels the development of a reading public in the 19th century,’ then those of us who teach in the academy would do well to consider the following questions: what does it mean to ask a student who is well-acculturated to interactions with new media, with digital integrated communications, and with compositing multimedia and hypermedia for social pleasure, to write a formal academic ‘composition?’ What literacies have been ‘created across spaces, across time’ that might well serve as a facet in an integrated pedagogical approach to writing in new modes and genres and producing new distributions knowledge across the academy? If the material and temporal substrates of writing traverse, bypass and exceed the academy in the creation of a writing public and correspondent generative literacies, toward what is the education of writing styles, forms and genres tending in university settings?

Before working toward a pedagogical anticipation in response to and beyond these questions, it is critical to locate the node of institutional positioning from which I work as it informs a history of formalized training in writing underwritten by a philosophy of writing and writing pedagogies that I will privilege in the departure points of my argument. In higher education in the United States, the term ‘composition’ assumes three possible and interrelated meanings. ‘Composition’ refers to the academic field concerned with first-year university writing. In part and as a result of the labours of this field, ‘composition’ is then employed to designate the required semester or two semester courses that first-year university students are nearly universally required to take and pass to meet graduation requirements and in many cases as prerequisites to advanced courses in individual degree programs. Finally, ‘composition’ refers to the verbal and rhetorical products made by students in said courses.[5] This compositional writing of ‘papers,’ the third use of the term ‘composition’ in the U.S., refers to academic genres of writing en masse, and in the Composition or ‘Comp’ classroom. It refers to the ‘basics’ or perhaps the generalization of the particularities of linear and synthetic styles and genres of writing that I will discuss momentarily: description, analysis, comparison, persuasion, and integrated research. Compositions, then, are academic papers of a single form but differentiated disciplinarily in conventionally designated academic genres and formats.

Composition is a serious business in the U.S. academy. And despite the requisite investments made in these courses by universities and colleges, writing or ‘Comp’ courses are perhaps also the most profoundly maligned and their labours and purposes have been the most severely feminised. Most pointedly, Comp is the course in which ‘students are supposed to learn how to write’ — phrase that is cross- and trans-disciplinary and can rapidly germinate numerous variants that allude to illiteracy, comma-use, and the eradication of secondary education’s and particularly public education’s genetic and teratological deficiencies and the fundamental tenor that liberal arts education should become far more instrumental. This phrase premises a basic assumption that students are illiterate prior to university training and not simply underexposed to and under-practiced in the traditions and conventionalised practices of academic writing. In this sociological diagnostic mode emanating from a mechanization of liberal morality and economics, students are not yet worthy of higher education on their first day’s crossing of the university threshold, but they may demonstrate their potential good in the mastery of a three month writing workshop in which the whole of the English language, academic, and critical reading and writing literacies might easily be offered up in their entirety for the earning potentials of the worthy among the masses.

For the sake of argument, we shall assume for a moment the validity of both premises, universal illiteracy and the efficacies of the Comp course as corrective. In practice, the course bears not only the weight of the tower of English language literacies (for English is not one thing) and the burden of forestalling the second movement of Robert Scholes’ Rise and Fall of English but also an enormous workload for students and instructors alike.[6] Students are expected to write compositions in a variety of analogue rhetorical styles: personal, persuasive, analytical, comparative, descriptive, research, etc. In addition, it is assumed that they will also intuit by example in a writing ‘handbook’ and perhaps a day of classroom instruction that models a variety of (from the point of the student) arbitrarily structured academic formatting modes: the Modern Language Association (MLA), American Psychology Association (APA), the Chicago Style, etc. The intellectual or ‘content’ basis of these compositions is borne forth from another highly profitable publishing gem, the composition ‘reader’ that includes bits of canonical English and American and in some cases ‘Global’ or ‘World’ written works from a variety of disciplines (though heavily reliant upon ‘lite’ humanities texts), short popular essays that offer up digestible ‘issues’ or ‘themes’, and in particularly inspired readers, stand alone images or integrated text and images are presented in either print publication or digital appendices. At what point might we assume that the student will face this sort of material in their undergraduate careers that it should play the meat to the meal of formal academic writing?

Given these expectations and classroom materials, critical comprehension and properly formatted written interpretation constitute the explicit goals of a Comp course. Classroom modelling of the reading process by instructors leads to the production of textual and on occasion contextual revelations, ‘depths’ or meanings. Classroom modelling (if any occurs) of the interpretive writing process leads to the production of what I term endgame or assessment writing pedagogy. The instructor models or speaks not through the rhetorical modes and valences that she would have her students learn but rather models and speaks through the qualities of the evaluative experience of grading such work. In other words, students are to write compositions in order to produce a quality of reading as positioned by an evaluating instructor rather than write to produce a quality of writing that assembles and expresses the thought of the writer in dialogue with an intended reader.

Though there are a host of terms and issues that might describe the endgame instructor, perhaps the most symptomatic of this assessment writing pedagogy is the demand that students write with what is often termed ‘clarity’. Clarity for all its denotative ambiguity is a style and not a measure of intelligence or a moral value. In fact the particular form of clarity most advocated in my experience might be described as a form of rhetoric lacking complexity, produced in linear expositions and descriptions retracing already established schematic accounts of knowledge ‘buried’ in a primary text. Furthermore, the excellent student will have learned to make the move from clarity to translucence as s/he retraces both form and content that the compositional rhetoric becomes fully un-writerly, author-less or de-subjectivised prose (even in the personal essay). In an inflected take on patriarchal, colonial, and racist strains of language policing in a chapter entitled, ‘Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box,’ Trinh T. Minh-ha shatters the fantasy of clarity and because it provides a crystallized articulation of a basic assumption from which I am writing, I will indulge in a lengthy quotation of her critique:

Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save—at any rate to mean and to send out an unambiguous message. …To use language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. …Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order. Let us not forget that writers who advocate the instrumentality of language are often those who cannot or choose not to see the suchness of things—a language as language—and therefore, continue to preach conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing: principles of composition, style, genre, correction, and improvement. To write ‘clearly’, one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify; in other words, practice what may be called an ‘ablution of language’ (Roland Barthes). (Minh-ha, 1989:16-17)

And after classroom modelling of the expected quality of purified readerly-ness, the work assigned to the student receives the corrective treatment by instructors (with greater and lesser evangelical and missionary zeal and cultural bleaching) in the forms of annotation, copy-editing, endnote mini-treatises, and the reduction of all student signs and rhetoric into a single, alphabetic letter or a quantified percentage-based grade — an absolute ‘ablution of language’ indeed. This verticality of power rests at bottom upon an instrumental literacy that proffers only the most legible and deburred meanings and adherence to the conventions established to render messaging unambiguous (contrary to the valued ‘deep’ texts presented in the published readers), available only in the strictest reduction of noise and excess in the formal re-presentation of the patterning of language.

These treatments demand intensive instructor engagement with an enormous amount of student writing, and can become a labour of harsh ‘benevolence’ that at times resounds with the tenor of a colonial ‘uplift’ mission, i.e. ‘”giving” a way out of poverty’ or ‘“giving” students what they need but cannot see or get for themselves’ (implied but never said: ‘because they are illiterate and uneducated and I am their salvation’). To complicate the socio-economics and politics of these relations, Comp courses are more often than not staffed by ‘flexible’, significantly underpaid, and institutionally degraded labour — graduate students, ‘long-term’ adjunct instructors who are not employed on tenured faculty lines, and in the best of circumstances, junior faculty who have only recently been appointed. However, for both graduate students and junior faculty who teach ‘Comp’ for many years, it is also commonly held to be something of either an apprenticeship and faculty development process or a series of toll-gates at which the doctoral candidate or junior colleague must pay steep dues in order to advance up the rungs of the tower. The undervalued assist the devalued such that we might all move up a notch.

Because of these labour and psycho-dynamically intensive circumstances, the precarious and the debased positioning of instructors within U.S. university structures, and the hermeneutics of critical thought that undergird the task of promoting academic literacies, in the United States we have folk such as myself with sometimes clerical and sometimes rather Orwellian titles, such as ‘Co-Director of Composition,’ who are presumed to specialize in the field of Composition and Rhetoric (Comp/Rhet) in order to nurture the illiterate, the overworked and the underpaid, to ‘teach pedagogy’ to novitiates and to determine a philosophy or at very least a set of norms and policies regarding the practices engaged in the ‘Comp’ classroom that produce the most ‘clear’ and ‘correct’ academic writing or instrumental compositions possible for the sake of our content-based colleagues, and wherein the rhetoric is almost always lost to the particularities of compositional genres from the instrumental tendencies aforementioned.

I do not have the opportunity to reproduce the history of the field of Comp/Rhet here, but I will offer a brief sketch and an observation. The field of Composition has written most primarily to the subject of first-year student writing both in and against the tide of the biased assumption that this writer is remedial (a term I l obviously take issue with given the previous paragraphs and look forward to spinning a bit later as cross mediated). Or as my inflection against the charge of student illiteracy suggested earlier in this essay, students somehow arrived at university without something that should have been gotten somewhere else by someone else and much earlier in their education. This something, often couched as basic literacy, correct sentence, paragraph, rhetorical structures, conventional usage of punctuation, and of course, clarity, assumes an ontological similitude to a take-out meal. Students should have picked it up and carried it with them on the way to university where it might be properly laid out and consumed. The somewhere and someone else and earlier refer to anywhere and anyone but this classroom and this professor for non-composition instructors and a marked increase in workload for Comp instructors and remediation for the students. Composition, in response to this cycle and in the advance of critical reading and writing, produced many schools of thought through which all of the noted deficiencies (for students and instructors alike) might be addressed, including a redress of the notion of deficiency itself and a critique of the regimented primacies of academic genres, particularly when deployed to gauge literacy in sum. And these discussions, studies, ethnographies and practices have indeed produced a revolution in philosophies of university writing and a plethora of pedagogical interventions in the teaching and learning or practices of writing. I would observe, however, that despite a much longer genealogy of Rhetoric exists, that the split between Composition and Rhetoric is overly profound and somewhat baffling.

But more important to the issues of this essay, there has also been a correspondent thirty-five to seventy year revolution in cybernetics, information technologies, and the habitus of integrated digital environments, and yet in terms of questions of digital rhetoric, the surface of the written ‘composition’ has barely been scratched. We have yet to fully engage with Kathleen Blake Yancey’s call for an address to the disjoint of writing inside and outside of the academy, to which she assigns particular responsibility to ‘technology.’ And this discrepancy has provided a tremendous opportunity to reconsider compositional pedagogies, the practices of writing, the techne, technics, techniques, and technologies of writing, the affective materiality of composing and what I am primarily urging us to consider, digital compositing, as writing that traverses the insides and outsides of the academy and academic writing.

Compositing

Thinking is what we already know we have not yet begun; measured against the shape of writing, it is broached only in the epistémè. (Derrida, 1976: 93)

Composition, or composing when in practice for the academic classroom, is the authoring of processes of thought in a particular form — the academic paper — expository, linear and interpretive ‘writing’ within given parameters of discipline and format. Digital composites, or compositing, when in practice, are the objects and practices of writing in genealogical affinity with hypertext, the sampled remix, mash-up, mod, crash-up, hybrid, bricolage, Deleuzian diagrams, and perhaps Haraway’s cyborg and Vertov’s montage. At its most reified, compositing is the digital design and authoring of cut and paste visual, aural, tactile and textual objects, capable of circulations of informatic exchange and reintegration through a potential network of like objects, produced, moving and existing, as Yancey urges, ‘across spaces, across time, and most provocatively, capable of cross media movement. Derrida’s concerns with the constitutive ‘outside’ of meaning, like Deleuze’s concerns with the folds of surfaces (when language is at issue), are both preoccupations with the materiality and modalities of signification and signs or the languaging of language and the mediality of mediation. In this context, we shall take these concerns and tack in a direction that leads to a consideration of inscription and pedagogical practices, not as instrumental instantiations but rather as affectively constitutive.[7] And as compositions have generatively differed across scrolls, quilled parchment, manual typewritings, and word-processed papers, in their ends, paper productions complete the inscription process. Unlike compositions, paper or hardcopy is not a possible end for composited objects.

This trajectory of distinction cannot be overstated, even in terms of the status of compositions. The papered composition, publication, book, or student draft is founded, as are digital texts, in its stilled or accelerated movements, material substrates, temporalities, and constraining or ‘formal’ properties—the indivisible manuscript. A paper is handed in and books are signed. As a material object, the authorial script is whole and stands in a correspondent holistic metonymy with the authorial body, the propertied production of a person, and the properly personal. In itself, the manuscript is a uni-directional, horizontal missive. Of course, in terms of rhetoric, thought, and the movement of thinking, the script reads in multiplicities. But nevertheless, the material practices of writerly production differ from the reception in that the manuscript is bound to the form, a specific design on paper. For the writer, this suggests a spatialising set of design tasks to be learned in composition class as well: margins, headers, title pages, and paragraph typography to name a few issues. These spatialized constraints are also enforced rhetorically: reductive synthesis (the arms of the hydra resolved unto a trunk), argumentative interpretation (the ground, the base, the core, the bark, the future of limbs), and citational formatting (the ground came from X, the base from Y, the bark from Z).

Composition requires cognitive re-presentation within a given topography and a set temporal span regardless of the shapes and speeds that might arise in processes of cognition, interpretation and composing, regardless of any actual thinking. The various generic qualities of academic writing in specific fields provides strict design parameters through a shared and discreet legend against which the future of manuscripted thought must tabulate itself to be recognized as accountable literate writing. The medium is the message only insofar as its formal excesses cannot transmit as anything but noise and chaos. Intertextuality resides only at the level of readership and writerly citation thresholding the full force of writerly signification in the manuscript to remain expository, always-already exposed, and above all, transparent and clear. Excess tensions and force are aporetic (provocatively in ‘good’ writers and painfully in less experienced writers), thus enabling a new cycle of hermeneutical intertextuality and reception that posit no surprises for any reader (and at the same time positing the reader as the ‘explorer of hidden meanings’—this is our most muddled contradiction for students in terms of the critical turns we demand as teachers).

A composite or composited text is not bound for paper, and while it might be possible to download hardcopy of all possible sub-surface texts (hyperlinks, blog commentary, frame-by-frame streaming media), it is not possible to download the resonant dynamics or ‘radiant textuality’ (McGann, 2001) of a live hyperlink [16], the interactive movement of digital commentary, the stream in streaming media, or sound of any kind. Integrated digital texts are on the most part small-screened, and produced by composing textualities and by means of constructivist software control codes and their distillation in user functions, in distinction to composition, which is a scripted production of hermeneutical, synthetic, dialectical or analytical inscriptions of the depths and meanings found in ‘primary texts.’ And what is key for the academic purist to understand is that manuscripted compositional practices comprise one of many modes already in the integrated digital mix, as it were. Digital objects are produced such that compositional intertextuality folds into and/or unfolds across composited cross mediation, resonant through particularized and distributed fields and domains. The spaces and temporalities of critical engagement, interpretation and composition remain rhetorically and textually present simultaneous to their opening onto actualizing multiple spaces and temporalities, movements and speeds. This is a theoretical description of intertextual ‘writing’ across integrated digital platforms such as MySpace or Facebook, blogs, wikis, webpages, or digital archives. This is a theoretical description of communicating in ‘mixed reality.’

Mixed Reality and Cross Media Movements

Recall that even before we began creating formal systems of visual signs—systems that generate this very sentence-object you are now reading—the language we use is woven from audible and visible elements. And as the syntax of the last sentence is designed to suggest, this textual condition of ours is constructed as a play of incommensurable elements, of which temporality is one. …Textual space and textual time are n-dimensional simply because they locate embodied actions and events. (McGann, 2001: xiii-xiv)

Compositing is a production of interactive and dynamic digital surfaces and topographies, mobile and translatable across space and time, platform, field and domain. They are capable of cross media movements in what might be thought of as uneven terrains of mixed reality. Cross media movements are a way to rethink theoretical and critical approaches to studies of contemporary digital and analogue cultural production and sociality that presume a developmental or familial ‘newness’ or technological distinction as departure points for critique and/or analysis. That certain media platforms impose strict thresholds or operate in constrained coded or material substrates demands that we are particular while at the same time working with the capacities of digitised transit and transposition of partial and complete objects, code, and even the embedding of platforms (i.e. a QuickTime clip in a blog that is providing RSS feed to a website housed in an archive). Material considerations of quality, movement, symbiotic exchange, feedback streams, relations of motion and rest, speed, control and affect, and expressive tendencies in dialogue between what is divided into analogue and digital media might offer a far more provocative approach to our proliferating mixed reality and its corresponding popular compositional condition: from diaries and yearbooks to MySpace, Facebook and Xanga; cut-ups to mash-ups; adaptations to mods; bricolage to HTML and CSS; home video and television to YouTube. Each is particular but all are in a circuit of movement and speed relative to the constellation of objects and streams in the field. Thus, cross media movements as a critical tack offers an excellent departure point from which to consider the sociality and knowledge-based capacities of mixed reality. This allows and in fact necessitates a reconsideration of pedagogies — rhetorical, compositional and otherwise—across disciplines and fields.[8]

Mixed reality is an epistemological and ontological understanding of the analogue world as riddled—albeit unevenly but also ubiquitously—with portals and interfaces for digitisation, networked computing, and human computer interfacing. However, what then needs explicit attention is the discursive status of the ‘analogue.’ While the analogue is always-already considered a supplement to digitality or electronics (and these are not synonymous), the analogue also occupied a mode in which it might be used synonymously with ‘nature’ or the ‘natural’ world. The pre-electronic equation of analogue/nature assumes its supplement to be industrial mechanics/technology (and in advanced math, this becomes nature/culture/the human). But strangely, in the onto-epistemic discourses of digital/electronic technicities, the natural and the industrial/mechanical (not to mention culture and the human) have slipped into the same onto-genetic status relative to digital and electronic media. In other words, the supplementary discourse, an as yet unchanged logic despite the ontogenetic shift, posits nature-mechanics/analogue over and against integrated electronics/digitality. What is needed to resolve the problematic of these old equations is a consideration of materiality that does not presume the completion of form, or rather the freezing of form — analogue, natural, mechanical or electronic — is: a) possible or revelatory or b) equivalent to ontology or epistemology.

In addition, the discursive tension that worked to critically sediment the mechanical/natural divide and generated both revelatory schema for political movement in the form of the critical powers of revelation (Darwin, Freud, Marx, natural history, national history, critical theory and the Frankfurt School, etc.) and vertical/spatial modes of technical territorialization (high rises, corporations, organized labour, institutionalisation, nation-state formations, democratic governmentality, fascism, from punish to discipline) ultimately hinged on the same capacity to navigate efficiently and deeply from one medial position on a two-dimensional real-time grid to a second position on a two-dimensional real-time grid, to freeze or capture the form of this movement, and to trace the purity of these lines as form such that the trace is confused passionately with the pregiven or the origin. Thus what emerges out of the mechanical/natural tension is an ‘anxiety of influence’ of capture, of form, of consistency, and of efficiency … a dialectical model for history, temporality and matter that takes its epistemological effects (but not its affects!) for its ontology.

What shifts in the analogue/digital tension is that this ‘anxiety of influence’ works in both directions between analogue (nature + human + industrial mechanics) and digital productions and need not be limited to a single synthetic interface between two well defined players operating on a real-time grid. This opening of temporal and spatial fields does not so much produce an anxiety of inheritance as it exponentially grows modes of productive and compositional creativity and expression … an anxiety of excess perhaps. Furthermore, this speedy dilation of productive, compositional and of course receptive modes (a schema of power predicated on constellated surface motion (nodes, networks, demographics, populations), command, control, communications (cybernetics) rather than folded depths) have been quick enough to bypass certain conserving and longer lived, spatialized and verticalise cultural forces, not limited to but certainly including corporate and academic controls, affectively flattening prior powers of movement and intensity.

In digital practices the capacity to diffract, bypass or go faster than the conventional restrictions on sociality, knowledge production, broadcast, publication, selection, review, and distribution are engendering a popularist DIY (do-it-yourself), BY (broadcast yourself) and DIWO (do-it-with-others) ethos that fuels the extraordinary compositional productivity of user-generated content across Web 2.0 platforms and accelerates the morphologies of mixed reality and cross media movements and interfacing. But from the vantage of digital cultures, these material and epistemic tensions of the supposed analogue/digital divide are not oppositional. In fact, verticality generates movement when thought with temporality and curvilinear dimensionality (surfing, ‘levels’ of access, embedded coding practices); horizontality generates field resonances when thought with temporality, surface thicknesses across a composite topography (wi-fi hotspots, hyperlinks, subway entrances, access codes). It is only when compositional movement and temporalities are frozen or a composition is laboured to remain at ‘zero-speed temporality’ does an unforgiving and unyielding articulation of form and structure become theoretically an abstract possibility (Bianco, 2005:95). Repetition of this labour produces convention; the repetition of convention produces form and structures. The forms and structures are read critically to have been dormant and awaiting release such that the epistemological effects of these labours are mistaken for ontology. This is not an argument against the work performed to execute forms and structures but one that argues against the sacralization of formalist tendencies at the threshold of the ideal. For the rest and the real, mixed reality and cross mediated movement offer modes of thinking the material plane of consistency, force and its expressive capacities, including academic writing and pedagogy. What digital compositing offers is a method by which to make the correspondence between living mixed reality through cross media currents and making academic knowledge at university glaringly obvious and affectively resonant for our students and ourselves.

Social Compositing (Writing Inside/Outside the Academy): 2 Classroom Detours

Connectivity is more a status than a state or a thing. Connectivity is a ‘status’ in both the technical and political sense of the term. Connectivity can be high or low, it can be wide or narrow, and it can be centralized or decentralized. (Thacker, 2004: 167)

A necessary disruption — for my call to digital connectivity, circulations and compositings will occur in what I have described as an ‘unevenly’ distributed mixed reality. There will be hot spots and dead spots. There will be bodies not in transit and unable to access. And thus before continuing a critical elaboration of compositing, it is important to take up the primary critical pedagogical refrain decried when the subjects of digital technology and higher education are raised together: the digital divide.

In the U.S., the digital divide primarily referred to unequal access to networked digital technologies at large, particularly in terms of race and class barriers to private access (Who can afford a PC or Mac? Who can afford dial-up, DSL, or cable connection? Whose communities are more likely to experience thick exposures to digital technologies and mixed reality as a result?) These questions did not end with the individual user but have in fact also been addressed in the obscene discrepancies of funding in public primary and secondary education. What (usually suburban and small town) public schools receive sufficient funding for computer labs and training? What (usually inner city) public schools do not receive sufficient funding for books much the less networked communications? Why do some (‘city’) public schools receive two to three times the funding, including earmarked monies for instructional technologies, while other (‘inner city’) public schools do not? These issues have found their way into the courts in New York State, as New York City sues the state for billions of dollars not released to the City public schools. These make for an interesting backdrop against which an argument might be made for the sluicing of social compositing into the classroom. With such discrepancies and structural inequities of access, who, where and how are there students compositing for social pleasure?

In response, I would like to suggest two illustrative detours from my classroom experience at two different universities, Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and Polytechnic University, taken from the recent past. These not only model the disparate span of the digital divide in New York City, but also model the multiplicities and adaptabilities of social compositing across social stratifications. Both universities are located in New York City in the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn respectively. The students from each university can be characterized generally as working-class, the exceptions tending more toward poverty than toward middle-class privilege. The student bodies are comprised of a majority of first and second generation immigrants from every part of the globe and constitutive of radical national, racial, ethnic, religious, social and linguistic diversity, and most students are multi-lingual as a result. Many are drawn from New York City Public High Schools, Catholic and Protestant parochial schools, and yeshiva. However, there are significant differences as well.

Polytechnic University is primarily an institution invested in technical baccalaureate education, and most students pursue computer programming or various engineering programs. Males make up the overwhelming majority of students and if a Poly student attended a New York City high school, most likely he graduated from the ‘specialized’ science and math campuses, one of which is only blocks away. Many Poly students must work part-time to support their university studies, but many are also likely to find technical or financial employment in relatively well-paid part-time work.

On the other hand, CUNY is a significantly under-funded 19-campus public university system made up of two-year community colleges, four-year senior (baccalaureate) colleges, and a centralized graduate campus. CUNY students in general, but in the case at Queens College in particular, attend ‘normal’ New York City high schools or religious education. Women make up the overwhelming majority of students and few attend ‘specialized’ public schools. Most students work half- to full-time jobs, varying from low-paying service wage labour to salaried service sector careers. Many have serious community and family responsibilities as well.

All of these circumstantial factors undergird, exacerbate or enhance what is the most significant difference in terms of a discussion of composition, compositing and the status of writing and pedagogy, inside and/or outside of the academy: Poly students, to the last, have laptop computers, a wireless network, and explicit hardware, firmware and software training, if not in software and hardware design and engineering, then certainly in advanced software use and language acquisition. In fact, this ubiquitous computing program began the year I arrived at Poly (1997) and was handed an IBM-sponsored laptop. At the time of my arrival at Queens College in the fall of 2002, students were still sharing a small, unreliable, and rather contagious ‘lab.’ Since then, students are able to access a wireless network and borrow laptops for limited use from the library. There are now several well-staffed computer labs across campus. However, there is no training in software use and language acquisition outside of basic workshops and pursuing a major in the Computer Science Department. Given these two remarkably disparate academic worlds, I will offer two examples to demonstrate that neither ‘access’ nor exposure to that which has become the conventional model for ‘having technology’ mitigates the engagement of social compositing. That it occurs is not at issue in terms of my argument that academic writing might do well to draw from a variety of modes of ‘social compositing.’ Rather, how it occurs is.

Classroom detour #1: Queens College. On the due date of a difficult paper assignment for a major’s elective course on theory, writing and fiction, I watched a student drop a pile of stapled hardcopy on my ‘professor’s desk,’ which I did not use except to collect homework. The student then returned to her seat, reached immediately into her bag, took out her cellular telephone, and digitally photographed me standing behind her paper at the moment in which she was released from its trials. She then text-messaged the photo and accompanying commentary regarding the completion of said professor’s ‘vicious’ assignment to four other friends (including two sitting in this very classroom). Though I did notice the photographic moment, her text-messaging motions, and the buzzing vibration of her two colleagues’ cell phones, it was not until I asked her later about her actions (and to turn off the telephone) that their fullness came to meaning. She explained to me that the significance of the assignment was in capturing the movement of the transmission of the paper and all of its processes, complete and fixed, from her body to mine, and cross mediating (my phrase, not hers) this moment and place, its force of signification through a collective network (the 2 colleagues in the classroom and two outside of the classroom) through a composite/composited (text + image + times + movements) expression. Given that we had worked on collage, bricolage and theories of imbrication for the paper assignment, the force of this moment struck me. This instant message ‘composition’ did not circuit through anything akin to the affective conduits of the paper-writing frenzy or paralysis that had probably occurred across the body of the student the previous night. And if the student were asked, it would have been highly unlikely that there might be any report of sensate, affective, much the less cognitive correlation between these two communicative compositions—despite their congress with one another theoretically.

Classroom detour #1: Polytechnic University. As is my ritual, I stood behind the professor’s desk, which I do not use except for collecting student work. On this due date, students, who were first year Master’s degree candidates (MFA) in a combined theoretical/historical/studio program in new media, were given the option of providing hard copy or ‘dropping’ their papers in the digital drop box for our class. The assignment, difficult in its own terms, comprised a long-term comparative and theoretical analysis of three films that took as their rhetorical and formal subjects simultaneous and multiple temporalities (this assignment abides in a non-digital visual studies component of a longer course that had not yet arrived at integrated digital technologies). I watched a student who felt as invested in his critical studies as his lab work hit the return key to post what I was later to discover was his undercooked paper in the digital drop-box. He then immediately returned to uploading a hacked, or let’s say, borrowed and adapted, mod file (his sound was up and blared in the room) to his one and a half minute game sequence that he and four friends design and code outside of the curriculum of the program for fun and social competition. I asked about the sound and the project, assuming it belonged to one of his studio courses and discovered that not only did the critical studies constitute a vacuole in his regular practices of compositing, but so did his studio assignments. When asked about the assigned work, he said that he felt that the assigned compositions (critical and studio) were little other than a pause in his ‘real stuff,’ which I took to mean his thinking, creative capacities, and the composited objects that were produced from them. When asked if he saw the gleaning of theoretical texts, visual objects and films into our assigned textual composition as something like the tweaking of a deterritorialized sound file for reintegration in his own game, his response was politely neutral in its reference to the materiality of sound versus the vacuole of ‘paper-writing.’

On the surfaces, many correlations might have been made these two inter-textual and cross mediated authoring actions yet the compositional processes did not connect much the less provide any affective sense of kinship between the objects. Both of these examples occurred in the same semester and perhaps more provocatively in the extrapolation and hyper-mediation of these concurrent moments, we might ask ourselves to envision ‘writing’ under these circumstances, in the future-present of our students and ourselves, and most certainly grammatologically and in terms of different relations of movement, embodiment, perception, sensation, affect and production.

Transitions, Transformations, Transversals: Taking Issue with Translations

Whenever you look at an image, there’s a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply create a sense of order. The end product of this palimpsest of perception is a composite of all the thoughts and actions you sift through over the last several microseconds—a sound-bite reflection of a process that’s a new update of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the German proto Expressionist 1920 film Der Golem, but this time it’s the imaginary creature made of the interplay of fragments of time, code, and (all puns intended) memory and flesh. Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky)

So what are we to make of the materiality of digital images and sound versus the vacuole of ‘papers,’ as my Poly student points out? Or perhaps more pointedly, how are digital text, images, and sound to be considered formal elements of ‘real paper,’ as a senior colleague queried at a recent faculty development workshop? Certainly in the humanities the narrative has offered a shared strain through which prose and film might be housed in the same prison house of language, and Barthes has offered similar accommodation to photography and to an extent certain forms of music. This skeumorphic tendency also appears at moments in Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) . In this now Ur-text of digital studies and at a key moment in his description of analogue to digital shifts, Manovich offers a techno-progressivist argument suggesting that the cinematic imaginary is being over-taken and radicalized by archival, user-screened interaction in which ‘new media embeds cinema-style illusions within the larger framework of an interactive control surface’ (Manovich, 2001: 210-211).

Though this may seem a mere theoretical quibble, I’d like to consider this recall of cinema to ground new media as a critical misstep in our cross media movements between composing and compositing. It is a misstep precisely because of its tendency toward the developmental reification of forms and genres—an impulse that marks Manovich’s text as quality academic writing but also seems rather akin to Kathleen Blake Yancey’s diagnosis of technological progress as the primary correlate to a reading and writing public. In both cases, technology is a black box that hides within itself earlier black boxes in chronological accumulation and generational influence. ‘Interactive control surfaces’ contain cinema (but not broadcast television, radio, short-wave or animation?) in Manovich’s example; in Yancey’s comments, she explicitly cites ‘development’ of technologies that ‘parallels’ the industrial context in which ‘the development [and the second use of this word in one line] of a reading public in the 19th century.’ Mass printing in the reading public of the 19th century is analogous to an unnamed ‘development’ ‘in linkage to technology’ that is now creating a 21st century mass ‘writing public.’ Aside from theoretical problems such as the division of reading and writing as well as the functionalist tenor of the analogy, the descriptive and comparative impulse is provocative but also marks Yancey’s comments as an articulation of legible academic rhetoric. Indeed, for both, the medial translation is contained by an already laboured and distributed genre or form. New media is new cinema; the printing press is to reading as (the digital writing platform left unspecified) is to writing. While the urge to translation and movement is critical, there is a scripting here of historical practice that can become rather conscripting in terms of expression. If composited media must adhere to the aesthetic or critical practices of composed analogue media in order to circulate as legible and valued knowledge objects then we find ourselves once again in what I described earlier as endgame or assessment producers and composers—producing only to the established limitations of value of a previous mode of production. For academic writing, this curtails the very call at which Manovich’s translation and Yancey’s pedagogical rallying cry aim. For progressive pedagogy, the curtailment disavows the materiality of lived practice.

Rhetoric, as mentioned earlier is the forgotten partner of composition and classically alludes to the styles of persuasion in oration and ultimately argument. Style manuals, predating the composition reader, are still a staple of the composition classroom. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style offered the backbone of the beast of writing instruction in my own undergraduate experience. However, due to profound differences in the material substrates, syntax, grammars, codes and tacit practices, integrated digital texts and composited objects may produce styles and even forms that are not re-presentations of longer lived analogue media. Given this, why should we continue to follow faithfully along the generational modus to which we have become accustomed, 1.2 consumes 1.1 but 1.1 always already contained 1.2 inside itself, like Aristotle’s homunculus, ready to emerge. Thus, new media ate up cinema (and television?), cinema rocked the essayists and orators from their chairs and podiums and classical oration always held a little YouTube clip in its belly. This fury of McLuhan-esque medial cannibalism and Kittler-esque medial borgism suggests that digital media has embedded cinematic, photographic, novelistic, and newsprint style illusions accounting for a genealogy that leads to a moving series of pictographs, narrativized, composites cut from real life—storytelling in scissor cut and taped bits of pictures and text (and later sound and dialogue after swallowing radio).

Montage is of course a composite but generally theorized as one labouring to narrative or ideological continuities (which may have something to do with the force of signification of the realist novel and the labour spent to correlate the two). However, montage is not the same practice or method of compositing nor of embedding by which digital styles much the less that by which photographic, novelistic, or news styles are produced. There are differences in the material production of these forms and material continuities: silicone, celluloid, iodine vapours, silver salts, typesetting, etc. Nor can these media and their ‘styles’ be reduced to their instantiations as devices. A camera is not photography, a photograph or photographic style. Likewise, mass printing presses do not produce the bodies of readers nor do integrated communications devices transmit the fingering bodies of text messengers. While we might easily list the material that constitutes the object-hood of a camera or a photograph, what might we list as the materiality of photography or worse photographic style? Novelistic style? Newsprint style? Visuality, temporality, (bin)ocularity, language, text, spectacularity, the interval, the grapheme and so on? From whence is produced the material movement of style and of a style of thought?

So the question becomes by what modalities of distinction and presence can we address and perhaps respond to the question of the materiality of integrated digital media that produce mass writing in genres outside of the academy. Are not these linkages and embedded materialities interfaced with dynamic and interactive bodies? Are not bodies the cross mediated objects under grammatological construction? Mark Hansen, in New Philosophy for New Media, has been at this question for sometime, albeit not in terms of writing but in terms of new media art.[9] He writes:

…to put it in simple terms, it is the body—the body’s scope of perceptual and affective possibilities—that informs the medial interfaces. This means that with the flexibility brought by digitalisation, there occurs a displacement of the framing function of medial interfaces back onto the body from which they themselves originally sprang (Hansen, 2004: 22).

In Hansen’s phenomenology, the question of the body is an affective and receptive one rather than an expressive one. In this way and despite significant differences, Hansen’s work shares a focus on reception and consumption with theorists such as Rei Terada, Sianne Ngai, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Theresa Brennan whose work on affect takes affection to be primarily an emotive or psychoanalytic register of events and powers that have come to pass.[10] But in the process of production, composing or articulation, how does a body materially and affectively engage the cross medial interfaces and movements of writing as an assemblage or composite? Of composition? These questions are critical to any analysis of thought and cognition and by extension here—composing in academic genres. What is the mediated embodiment of formal academic writing? First, it is exterior to the given forms that make academic writing formal. It must be taught. It demands a synthetic heterogeneity rendered linear by means of interpretive ‘transitions’ or integration. From this particularity let me point to a digital analogy in terms of the embodiment of interactive textuality.

While transitions, in the traditional sense of academic composition, are possible in the composited piece, the digital text hovers in time with the capacities for transformation and transpositional shifts energetically spatialized in the user’s body as a pause or link. The hyper-mediated text hovers in the compassability of not just transitional rhetorical movement but a transversal rhetoric of enfleshed resonance and cognition. Seamlessness or epistemological suturing does not govern the movements. Digital compositing allows the heterogeneity of text a corresponding heterotropic materiality, temporality and spatiality that is not simply a function of the psychoanalytic imaginary but also a function of the integrated microphysics of the matters of the digital platform and the bodies at play. Saturations, rhythms, pixilation rates, reaction/navigation cycles all perform at scales below the register of cognition as bio-aesthetics, as material vibe, groove and affect circuiting the body.

Furthermore, this composited dimensionality demands an embodied reception and interactivity in its legibility, or as Hansen suggests, ‘the digital calls on us to invest the body as that “place” where the self-differing of media gets concretised’ (Hansen, 2004: 31).] Academic composing, on the other hand, concretises ‘the’ paper, which flees the authorial body, as my classroom detours were wont to describe. The composition must close down its space and temporality to edify the argument contained by its form. The reader then enters this edifice as a structurally fixed space in which she seeks the fissures in the stanchions or the rooms that boast far too many doors and windows to remain structurally sound. If, as Hansen suggests, the digital invests the space of the body with the ‘place where the self-differing of media gets concretised’ then we might suggest that the academic composition invests the space of the academy with the place where the self-same-ing of writing and thought ‘gets concretised.’ The body’s encounter with media cannot contain in its epistemological effects the ontology of media. Instead, one must consider the powers of formal closure and the constraints to the force of signification at play in a theory that must do enormous work to produce digital concrete. If we consider Hansen’s claims for digital writing alongside the claims for academic writing, then there is no unsolved mystery behind Yancey’s observation that ‘never before has the proliferation of writings outside of the academy so counter-pointed the compositions inside’ or that ‘never before have the technologies of writing contributed so quickly to the creation of new genres.’ It is precisely the foreclosure of academic space and compositional places to the digitally mediated body that produces the counter-positioning of an inside and outside of the academy as well as the proliferation of non-academic genres.

And certainly this reterritorialization of the grapheme must also visit the graphic. To return to Manovich’s claim regarding new media’s successive relation to the cinematic versus the grammatological—the concept of ‘illusions’ takes us away from the Bergsonian mattering of perception and images that underlay much of the materialist thought of contemporary visual theories. ‘Illusions’ are of course suggestive of the psychoanalytic discourses expressing phantasmatic and libidinal qualities in cinematic spectatorship. And here Walter Benjamin must also lay yet another concretising claim on the states of the body in compositional action; we must add mass reproducibility—more an assertion of temporal qualities of the apparatus (how fast? How many how fast? How many how fast simultaneously?) than a comment on the particular material components of cinema. Style is no less stingy and effusive with its matterings in compositional discourse, sometimes grounded in the romantic mist of biological genius, style in the flesh or the DNA of the auteur, depending on the romance at hand, and at others grounded in the economy of simple sentence-mapping exercises learned at age 11 in Mrs. Plumleigh’s English class (Hemingway {Proper noun} writes {Verb/Predicate-third person singular} {period}). Matter matters. Human matters are a modification and subset of matters {period}.

Embedding is a sturdy enough verb and instantiation an even sturdier noun (as should be in the logic of substance and presence in grammar). And we are global witnesses to embedded journalists working in the circuits of global, networked and digital communications media across a variety of platforms (newsprint, internet, cable television) and they do indeed yield an enormous sense of the embedding of journalistic-style illusions. And sense here must assume a complicated and perhaps ambivalent tension in its vocabulary. In a proper Marxist critique, we might simply unveil these illusory machinations or rather take the machine from behind to locate this labour of sense and style. But Manovich points to a passivity of consumption that complicates the labour power at work in sense and style and continues ‘Illusion is subordinated to action, depth to surface, window to imaginary universe to control panel’ (Manovich, 2001: 211). If we read the first clause thickly chocked with libidinal and phantasmatic spectatorship, then this passivity of cinema-style illusions becomes quite troublesome particularly when plotted supplementarily against his inviting call to ‘action’ and movement. The discourse of psychoanalytic desire is not consistent with such a mass and intentional action nor with its correspondent partner paralytic passivity, but rather moves through domains of processual receptivity, which means that we’ve shifted bodily registers from the sub-individual in which the Wunderblock of ‘illusions’ in psycho-dynamics traces to the brute meat of a stilled body in a domineering agential darkness of a movie theatre, corpse-like and propped in the seat by the mere forces of gravity and quantum antagonisms. Furthermore, screened desire is no less desire but only differently screened at the multiplex and in front of a Mac. Size (and lighting) may matter, but the ‘depth’ of screened surfaces and the superficiality of screened depths require differential material thresholds and vantage points that do not depend upon projection and backlighting nor do they fall upon the corpses of pre-given disciplining forms or genres. The power of screened verticality may offer as phantasmatic a narrative, but the materiality of five-meter tall bodies is another story.

And the final quibble, how is the digital display not also a ‘window to [an] imaginary universe?’ How are rather notorious and other less offensive operating systems somehow inconsistent with a window from the vantage point of the user/producer? What of televisual control panels, remotes, zapping, clicking, and surfing? What of the sized-to-fit verticality of screened interactions or tactility of the interface? Of the grammatological interactivity? What might be embedded in Manovich’s passage is the style of a material language used by a rather brilliant new media producer of soft cinema who is fluent in particular codes and for whom embedding objects is an organizing and tacit affective practice and syntax, but in this case, one that jumps scales in this analysis. In fact, this entire quotation reads:

Just as any particular software application is embedded, both metaphorically and literally, within the larger framework of the operating system, new media embeds cinema-style illusions within the larger framework of an interactive control surface. Illusion is subordinated to action, depth to surface, window to imaginary universe to control panel. From commanding a dark movie theater, the cinema image, this twentieth-century illusion and therapy machine par excellence, becomes just a small window on a computer screen, one stream among many others coming to us through the network, one file among numerous others on our hard drives. (Manovich, 2001: 210-211)

What does the rhetoric of ‘metaphorically and literally’ mean here in terms of materiality? ‘Literally’ literally means readably. Literary, social and political critics certainly understand the contestation of readability, legibility, intent and reception, discourse communities, and such, and to a echo a refrain from an moment above, there is no more noble goal projected onto a composition specialist by her colleagues across the disciplines than that she teach clear ‘readability.’ If that fails, she might make ‘basic English’ our students’ number one priority in the composition class, as if academic fluencies, professorial legibility, and rhetorical context and genre were one. And of course a metaphor asks us to imagine difference as similarity by means of a transversal or diagrammatic relationship. How is the ‘cinema image’—not cinematic image or style—both an ‘illusion and therapy machine’ passively condensed into embedded code? These are material and rhetorical inconsistencies or, perhaps closer to the quick, the failings of my own preferred academic style. For still, like reading Freud, I find myself more convinced by Manovich’s writing style than by his theory of the family tree of new media. Indeed, the mechanisms of digital media can swallow filmic objects such that they become ‘one file among numerous others on our hard drive’ and indeed photographic depth and classical perspective so prescriptive in much analogue, anthropomorphic, binocular-centric visual regime but seemingly lapsed in digital visuality. But in these examples, analysis is occurring on two levels, both of which are captured in a black box of media in progression from lesser to better-abled and describe-able black boxes.

However, if there is something of an onto-epistemological claim in the assertion that new media invaginates cinema-style and its [passive] receptivity as ‘one stream among many others coming t[hr]o[ugh] us,’ then indeed constitutive modalities of thought, knowledge, matter, writing and composition must have shifted transversally. And it is here that these three suggestive modes style (illusions to action), materialization (depths and surfaces), and affect (windows to controls) must be released from their instantiation in narrative logic and compositional closures. And it is here that the power of Manovich’s work in becomes so resonant.

Sightlines and Vantage Points: Pedagogy

…multiplicities give form to processes not to the final product… (DeLanda, 2002: 22)

Solidity, perspectival fixity, objectivity, and absolute learning—my students crave nothing less in the classroom and yet they would not abide a bit of it outside. The sightlines of composites produce a need for composite vision, hearing, and action, a germinating body that can holistically consume and become multiplicity at once. This and getting the assignment ‘right.’ This desire to be all and become more through consumption of goods, time, space, attention requires distribution and selection of a palimpsest as D.J. Spooky/Paul Miller wrote in the passage cited earlier. It also allows for writing in lexia, composites of motion and process rather than writing in redacted wholes, compositions of contraction.

In the spring of 2001, I began to require my Poly students to maintain their own webpages, which were linked through a common course page that I constructed. Students could produce the pages in whatever software formats they were already literate, including word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word. We engaged a variety of texts, including theory, pop culture, film, e-fiction, film and more traditional literary objects. For their final assignment, which consisted of a dialogue between theoretical and cultural productions, they needed to formally enact this synthetic work in a digital and an analogue object. Many students wrote ‘good’ or proper compositions with some hyperlinking and handed in hardcopy of the paper as the analogue to the digital. This occurred despite my invocation that the formal processes of both pieces needed to speak to the rhetorical movement. For these students, no consideration was given to the potential for temporal-spatial dynamism or design primarily because students ‘didn’t think an English teacher would allow’ that or consider it ‘writing.’

One student did take up my offer and produced an extraordinary and sensate website that shifted if the user hovered too long in one spot. The experience constantly enacted an anxiety of slippage, departure, competing speeds and a keenly spatialized affect of sliding backward away from something important. The films that the student analysed were Fight Club (1999), Requiem for a Dream (2000), and Memento (2000). And as his analogue process, he constructed a perforated Moebius strip, a construct that we had discussed in class, on which textual hardcopy and images were spliced. As the reader attempted to read properly, the perforations would split the page and the text would become illegible, forcing the reader to unravel the next sheet. The process continued, leaving the reader with bits of images and argument and loose sheets of paper. This student’s webpage and Moebius paper were simple cut and paste jobs, but in terms of the endgame of his own critical thought, they were also functions of creative criticism that affectively gave body to rhetoric and gave rhetoric to bodies.

Qualities and Types

But Echo is an insurgent. Despite the divine constraints imposed upon her, she still manages to subvert the gods’ ruling. After all, her repetitions are far from digital, much closer to analog. Echo colours the words with faint traces of sorrow (The Narcissus Myth) or accusation (The Pan Myth) never present in the original. … Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate. (Danielewski, 2000: 41 & 50)

If we are to grab hold of the monstrously quick and proliferating productions, modes and practices that sit stuffed together in the terms new media and digital media, is it from these generic postures, departures, or perhaps, just simply, models that theory is to attend the digitalisation of cultural production? The modifiers of these descriptors, ‘new’ and ‘digital’, offer two paths: evolution and technicity. Post-structural theorization of the last forty (to perhaps four thousand in Western philosophy) years has laboured excessively to produce the explanatory limit conditions of developmental narratives, realism and/or functional pragmatism, and I am convinced.

While a good deal of media critique engages the familiar work of description, definition, typing and pedagogy, the question of ‘new’ media versus ‘old’ media seems an unyielding touchstone or point of departure for much of the scholarly work that would theorize contemporary technological and media cultures. Whether our work locates its methodology in a serial repetition of developmental narratives of chronologized and sequentialized progress that registers the ruptures, breaks or bifurcations of particular strains of practice, sociality, hardware and software, or even epistemology and ontology, the nearly ubiquitous scholarly investment in keeping track of our histories and even genealogies rarely privileges movement as the trope of choice. This does not imply that movement is not also subject to narratization nor does it imply that descriptions of necessary motions of interactivity have not been produced and analysed. Perhaps, given the seductive schematisation of ‘mapping’ technological trajectories, the quality of the trajectory itself resonates less loudly, less securely, and less determinately. For qualities, like proliferations, confront an epistemology of the mastery of content, the nostalgia for lost powers and the discomfiting distance of tempus fugit, with a decidedly irresolvable challenge and a well-worn theoretical question; how does the flight of butterfly translate when pinned dead to an insect display board? If the capture of the thing also constitutes its death and produces by this transformation a new entity, how might we ‘scholarize’ this flight but through the capture of movement transformed into a deadened and mastered object archived in and among other similar objects? The loss of motion bottles up and cuts out the spatio-temporal dynamic of powdery wings, bouncing and bobbing ‘in mid-air’ across an incessant and living diegesis—flight. The lineage or anatomisation of butterflies as insects cannot recover this quality nor can a comparative analysis of butterflies versus beetles. Is it significant or provocative to assert that one flies and the other flies less? Perhaps, in some ways, the answer is ‘yes.’ But this comparative typology cannot express the quality of the flight of butterflies or beetles, for that matter, except through a negating cut, a formal containment. Is it not possible to take flight over stillness?

It is this negating cut, a mode of scholarly production in its own right, that is operating as a privileged ‘approach’ to the relationship between digital media and analogue media today. And it is the point of my call to holistic integrated digital writing pedagogies in order to tease out not just the qualities of digital media-in-themselves and analogue media-in-themselves but also to consider the transversal movements of media that might make these generic distinctions less distinct and the making of kinded-ness a less readily available practice of production and power.

How might we think ‘cross media blow-back’ between digital and analogue media without thinking in family trees. By cross media blow-back, I am referring to aesthetic, political and social skeuomorphs, anticipations, feeds, circulations, structurations, codifications, movement and most importantly, material affects, and temporal circuits that work in both directions—from the analogue to the digital and from the digital to the analogue. The particular concerns at hand locate us in a once familiar and yet estranged domain. Much theoretical, critical and practical articulations have been written suggesting many ways in which we might begin to think of digital video, Web 2.0, electronic literatures, ‘instructional technology’ based pedagogies, and the immersion and interactivity of digital production as constituting a generic break with cinema, television, print literary culture, and the ‘traditional’ classroom. And most often this is delivered in terms of genre, material and processual instantiations, or absolute medial difference. What might it do, then to suggest that we slow down our classificatory fervour in order to consider how so-called analogue and digital productions traverse each other as the cross media movements of a mixed reality terrain in ways that do not first necessitate a review of the totalising effects medial difference, identity or chronological usurpation?

What Katherine Hayles terms in Writing Machines ‘Media Specific Analysis’ is a critically important approach to genre-based, interpretive textual, visual and cultural studies, but what I strongly assert is that the extension of critical approaches emerging with certain analogue cultural production (including for example, apparatus, subjectivity and representational theories) and ‘applying’ these approaches wholesale to digital production may not be fully sufficient to provide descriptive analyses, critical responses or pedagogies to the qualities, the spatio-temporal materialities and movements of either our new, digital, or our old, analogue, media much the less our old, digital, and new, analogue, media. In addition, if the apparatus, the subjective, and the representational must be taken up first and foremost, then we may find that after a bit, our ‘new’ media won’t, perhaps already doesn’t, have quite the ruptured quality that the doomed-to-age moniker of newness suggests. We find ourselves retracing already overcooked and well-worn moves that define genre in terms of politically and aesthetically challenged terms of difference and kind, new, old and older, inclusion and exclusion, and ultimately valuable and de-valued. An approach to media of various kinds that does indeed sequester time to its purposes need not presume the developmental narrative drawn at the feet of Chronos such that, ‘in the beginning’ was the cave drawing, which gave way to the illuminated manuscript. Then as if birthing the modern, the novel emerged with no greater calling than to recede at its zenith under the sign of visual and literary cultural practice to the ascension of digital art. This narrative is an academic cliché, and both comforting and appealing in its familiarity and even moments of demonstrability. But we have little time to rehearse post-structural interventions that have already allowed us to see the Emperor’s new clothes and at times to witness his navel-gazing. To drag slow and linear developmental narratives already problematised in analogue production onto the speedy transversal movements of digitised cultural production and globalized economies seems akin to retrofitting airplanes with wooden wheels or to retrofitting one’s RL closet with a Second Life inventory of clothing … neither work.

Social Compositing (Writing Inside/Outside the Academy): 3rd Classroom Detour: Cyber-Comp@QC.CUNY.edu

As a postscript that does not come at the end, a final trip into the classroom. I have worked with my department and the administration to rethink Queens College’s two required composition classes and designed two new models that move composition pedagogy toward an engagement with that flood of writing that students participate in daily as Yancey asserts. In addition, there now exists a Digital Writing Requirement for both semesters of the first year writing courses. In the first, students practice digital and avatar-based personal, analytical and research writing across digital platforms such as MySpace, instant and text messaging, blogs, Wikis, HTML and other composite text, sound and image or text-messaging platforms. The administration has supported our efforts by offering rare resources in the form of smaller class sizes (16 and 22 respectively) and technology in the classrooms, such as display boards, laptops, Mac Minis, projectors, digital cameras and scanners.

As importantly, I created a special pilot program, Cyber-Comp, which functions as an introduction to college writing authored entirely in digital mediated platforms. Cyber-Comp is a program that, with the enormous efforts of several colleagues, almost all of whom are part-time flexible labour at the College, brings to practice many of the concerns that have been stressed in this piece, and perhaps more provocatively has allowed us to think of these courses as a place for experimentation, thought and massive productivity. For the section I taught in the Spring 2007 semester, the students maintained a nearly 100% attendance and homework completion rate, and the quality and cogency of verbal expression from my students surpassed all my projections for success. My students are invested, excited, competitive, rhetorically savvy and proud. In total, students wrote what would have been the equivalent of seventy-five fully revised critical pages of academic discourse, a figure that represents three times the required amount. Furthermore, this quantified accounting cannot describe the non-verbal forms of rhetoric or digital styles that were used in the various assignments. I currently supervise nine sections of our specialized Cyber-Comp, and my colleagues’ experiences and assessment of student work unanimously echo my own. Our students are collaborative and capable of collective knowledge making practices. They have yet to write a ‘paper’ and yet they have written well and written more than any other writing class. Finally, I will share my mantras, delivered at nearly all pedagogy development workshops: 1) if students write prolifically for fun or competition outside class then we can find a way to hack that sense of social pleasure for academic writing, and 2) if students know how to operate the hardware or navigate the software better than the teacher, take notes and let the student teach the class.

The Middle

From Spinoza, we might define affect as the power of bodies to impinge upon bodies and it seems to me that digital compositing offers the movement and affections of critical engagement that empower the student of writing rather than capture her in a form of thought that not only precedes and excludes her, but does not require nor engage her, remediates her body, affections and powers to in-form thought in deadened material inscription. Compositing carries with it many compositional practices but opens onto the body of knowledge as a cross medial affective body with and constituted through a heterotropic and heteroglossia of affective and affected bodies in productive motion, our integrated digital media, our students and our own. Time to write.

Author’s Biography

Jamie Skye Bianco is Assistant Professor of English and Co-Director of Composition at Queens College of the City University of New York. She works in contemporary rhetoric, theory, visual and fibre cultures, film, electronic literature and print fiction. She is currently working on two book projects, tentatively titled Mixed Reality: Cross Media Movements and Reading Affect/ Affective Reading.

Notes

[1] Earlier versions and bits of this essay were presented respectively at the American Comparative Literature Conference (March 2006) at Princeton University and in a series of ongoing faculty development workshops produced in the Composition Program, of which I am currently Co-Director with Prof. Duncan Faherty, and the Cyber-Composition Program (‘Cyber-Comp’), of which I am Director, in the Department of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. My gratitude goes to several colleagues for conversations and presentations in the workshops, particularly Devin Zuber and Hugh English. Perhaps most intensely, I owe a debt of happy gratitude to the ‘Cyber-Comp’ instructors for following my unfinished theoretical tracks to create a Program that was invented out of our collective labors. To instructors Rebekah Rutkoff, Jesse Schwartz and Justin Rogers-Cooper — thank you for being first and being willing to fail, and to instructors Karen Weingarten, Fiona Lee, Brooks Hefner, Jenny Kijowski and Steve Alvarez — thank you for joining in and elaborating our project. We are still unsure for we have learned that this is the best affect from which to composite our classroom practices. My thanks also for editorial feedback and support from my working group: Karen Weingarten, Rebekah Sheldon, Justin Rogers-Cooper and Jesse Schwartz.
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[2] Bianco, Jamie ‘Skye’, New Media and Technoscience Fictions: Affect, Speed, Control (New York: Dissertation submitted to the Ph.D. Program in English, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2005).
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[3] A debt of terminological gratitude must go to Rebekah Rutkoff, my colleague at Queens College, who introduced me to her concept of ‘dilated writing,’ similar to both an expanding iris in film theory and a ripple effect in liquid.
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[4]‘Cross media movements’ is the proposed title of my current book project and will be discussed at length further along in the essay. Briefly, the term refers to the translatability and transversal quality of coded affect, cultural production, discursive nodes and many other streams and modes of experimentation and expression to circulate, transit and resonate simultaneously in multiple locations. Two brief examples taken from analogue and digital cultures: the adaptation, which functions to move narrative codes across media; and ARG’s or alternate reality games, which are basically hunt and discover games requiring facility, fluency and literacy across various digital and analogue code systems and media to follow the hunt and to play.
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[5] For my purposes here, I’d like to consider composition primarily in the latter sense, but for what I hope will become apparent as the composition of my argument here unfurls, is informed by and pushing the field of Composition and Rhetoric and more importantly academic writing at large.
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[6] ‘Guarding the tower’ is a reference to Mina Shaughnessy, ‘Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing’, College Composition and Communication 27.3 (October 1976) 234-239. The second reference is of course to Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall of English (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
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[7] There is much to be written about the spacing and intervals cross-currenting the works of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. This issue is taken up in a book project on which I am currently working. It considers approaches to materialist (rather than emotive) affective critique in the humanities. A preview of this work will appear in the electronic book review (ebr) in an essay forthcoming and tentatively titled ‘Reading Affect/Affective Reading.’
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[8] A process that is already well in progress and is re-arranging several disciplines and fields in the U.S. academy. The recent upsurge of interest in ‘Literature and Science’ is a recent symptom of this exciting tendency in English Studies and Literary Studies. In fact, in the last five years the appearance of STS—Science and Technology Studies—programs and departments across the country alludes to a further step in this reterritorialization of knowledge claims.
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[9] Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2004) is the second of his monographs addressing the issue of new media and human embodiment. Moreover, as the title to Hansen’s first book alludes, Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), Hansen’s work argues against an outside to the phenomenology of the human body. In the quotation, Hansen strongly asserts that technology operates in a feedback loop with the human body cultivated by the human body itself and that technology is itself the offspring of the human body.
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[10] For an extended discussion of the differentiations between and among theories of materialist and emotive affect, please see my forthcoming ‘Reading Affect/Affective Reading’ at the electronic book review (ebr).
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References

Aronofsky, Darren. Requiem for a Dream (Artisan, 2000).

Bianco, Jamie ‘Skye’, “New Media and Technoscience Fictions: Affect, Speed, Control” PhD Thesis (City University of New York, 2005).

Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, 2000).

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

Fincher, David. dir. Fight Club (Fox, 1999).

Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2004).

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2002).

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2001).

McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave Press, 2001).

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1999).

Miller, Paul D. (aka D. J. Spooky). ‘Material Memories: Time and the Cinematic Image’, DJ Spooky, http://www.djspooky.com/articles/MaterialMemoriesE.html

Mina Shaughnessy, ‘Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing’, College Composition and Communication 27.3 (October 1976) 234-239.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman Native Other (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991).

Nolan, Christopher. Memento (Columbia/Tri-Star, 2000).

Pearson, Keith Ansell. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Thacker, Eugene. ‘Networks, Swarms and Multitudes,’ in Life in the Wires: the CTHEORY Reader (Victoria: New World Books, 2004), 165-178.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. ‘Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key’, College Composition and Communication 56.2 (2004): 297-328.

Colleges and universities in the United States currently face a daunting challenge: how can we transform longstanding definitions of literacy to account for not only the vast social shifts wrought by the centrality of networked, visual and aural media, but epistemological shifts as well? Calls for reconsidering literacy in light of digital tools are multiple and varied in approach and orientation, ranging from the declaration that every grade school student deserves access to a computer by then President Bill Clinton in 1996 (U.S. Dept. of Education, 1996), to the articulation of multimodal literacy outlined by Gunther Kress in his seminal book Literacy in the New Media Age to the taxonomy of skills characteristic of a new generation of students who currently inhabit a digital and participatory culture listed by Henry Jenkins in his 2006 paper for the MacArthur Foundation, ‘Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century’; here Jenkins highlights the potential benefits of forms of participatory culture, including

opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship (Jenkins, 2006: 3).

Scholarly work dedicated to expanding the definition of literacy and practices of reading and writing to include visual rhetoric and multimedia tools form a rich, longstanding tradition, generally emerging from college and university programs in composition and rhetoric. These programs advocate expanded composition practices, working toward an understanding of the elements of visual rhetoric and the use of multimedia reading and writing practices that unite text, images and design. As Mary Hocks explains in her essay ‘Understanding Visual Rhetoric,’ the key here is in avoiding an easy bifurcation between the visual and the written, acknowledging instead that ‘all writing is hybrid – it is at once verbal, spatial, and visual’ (Hocks, 2003: 630-631). The incorporation of visual elements, then, is not a radical shift; it is instead part of the always dialogic relationship among divergent aspects of communication.

Further, the resounding proclamations for redefining literacy brings with them attention to the term ‘literacy’ itself. As Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola argue in their essay ‘Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?’ literacy is a term that too easily slips off our tongues (1999: 349). Borrowing Stuart Hall’s use of the term ‘articulation’ (which in turn is borrowed from Antonio Gramsci), they argue for understanding literacy ‘not as a monolithic term but as a cloud of sometimes contradictory nexus points among different positions,’ adding that

literacy here shifts away from receiving a self to the necessary act of continual remaking, of understanding the ‘unity’ of an object (social, political, intellectual) and simultaneously seeing that that unity is contingent, supported by the efforts of the writer/reader and the cultures in which they live (1999: 367).

Many scholars have contributed significant work to this larger project of rethinking literacy alongside expanded acts of reading and writing, including Gail E. Hawisher, Nancy Kaplan, Stuart Moulthrop, Cynthia Selfe, and Scott deWitt, all of whom have made convincing arguments regarding the need to include visual rhetoric in any consideration of reading and writing practices in the 21st century, with attention to a redefinition that acknowledges this inclusion.

Many scholars have also studied the role of networks in educational settings, and while much of this work focuses on distance learning and forms of distributed teaching[1] , with the preponderance of Web 2.0 tools, especially those designed specifically for students, critical analysis of Net-based opportunities are on the rise. Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom outlines the shift from a mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere, and suggests implications for education and students. Further, the work of Trebor Scholz interrogates the ways in which people actually use online tools and collaborative environments, and his Distributed Learning Project, which is a site for sharing resources for the teaching of and learning about new media art, offers a productive and real embodiment of distributed scholarship.[2] And Cheryl Ball’s 2007 examination of Michael Wesch’s Web-based essay, ‘The Machine Is Us/ing Us’ and the potential of Web-based forms of composition points to future forms of net-based writing practices that unite text, graphics, images and sound in a kind of desktop-oriented compositional mode.[3]

Along with these redefinitions of literacy and calls for its expansion, we are also witnessing a groundswell of interest in understanding how to teach, in light not only of changes in the abilities and skills of students, but with respect to vastly different social, cultural and economic contexts that both characterize contemporary educational settings and will greet students when they leave the university. These shifts range from the decade-old critique of the increasingly corporate nature of the university and its role in sustaining a notion of the nation-state[4] to the challenges of fully understanding what Brian Goldfarb dubs a ‘visual pedagogy.’ Goldfarb writes in his introduction, ‘Subjects “come to know” in institutional settings that rely increasingly on media forms to produce knowledge,’ continuing:

As the twentieth century progressed, media became an integral part of any discussion about the ‘how’ questions in education. How do we teach? Certainly with media. How do media function? Certainly as modes of pedagogy. Throughout the intensified globalization of the second half of the twentieth century, media technology made a firm union with the science of pedagogy broadly applied, and this union has come to symbolize technological life in the industrialized nations of late capitalism (Goldfarb, 2002: 22).

Goldfarb goes on to analyze the ways in which we might expand our notion of pedagogy to include institutions beyond schools – museums and advocacy groups, for example – and in the process complicates the often simplistic thinking behind deployments of media in the classroom.

Yet another challenge in considering literacy and pedagogical practices in the 21st century comes in offering instruction to a generation of students with fundamentally different abilities and needs than generations prior. Marc Prensky responds to the claims that education in the U.S. has declined dramatically by asking critics to remember the fundamental cause of that decline. He writes, ‘Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.’ He adds,

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a ‘singularity’ – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called ‘singularity’ is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century (Prensky, 2001: 1).

Rethinking teaching practices to accommodate the skills and needs of these students often point back to the very tools students are already using. Here are just three recent instantiations of this:

• The 2007 Horizon Report, published jointly by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE, lists an array of ‘technologies to watch,’ by which the authors mean tools and applications that the anticipate will be broadly adopted by universities across the United States in the coming year; among the technologies listed this year are social networking tools, virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games.
• Some scholars are also promoting the use of games as models for learning. Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, for example, in a working paper titled ‘The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind,’ describe the ability of multiplayer online games to ‘allow players to construct vivid and meaningful “conceptual blends” by taking different worlds (such as the physical and the virtual) and combining them to create new and better ways to understand both the game world they inhabit and the physical world’ (Thomas, Brown, 2007: 149).
• The multi-user virtual environment Second Life is now home to the sites of more than 200 college and universities around the world, and educators are working hard to develop new pedagogical practices designed for the affordances of immersive, virtual environments.[5]

The demand for an expanded definition of literacy to accommodate visual and aural media, then, is not particularly new, but it now carries with it calls for rethinking not only what we teach but how we teach. It also gains urgency as college students transform, becoming producers of media in many of their everyday social activities. The response among those who grapple with these issues as instructors has been to advocate for new definitions of literacy and an emphasis on visual literacy. These efforts are exemplary, and promote a much needed rethinking of literacy and models of pedagogy. However, what I would like to argue here, in what is more akin to a manifesto than a polished argument, is the need to push farther: What if we moved beyond visual rhetoric, as well as a game-based pedagogy and the adoption of a broad range of media tools on campus, toward a pedagogy grounded fundamentally in a media ecology? Framing this investigation in terms of a media ecology allows us to take account of the multiply determining relationships wrought not just by individual media, but by the interrelationships, dependencies and symbioses that take place within the dynamic system that is today’s high-tech university. An ecological approach allows us to examine what happens when new media practices collide with computational models, providing a glimpse of possible transformations not only ways of being but ways of teaching and learning. How, then, may pedagogical practices be transformed computationally or algorithmically and to what ends?

What Is an Algorithm? What Is Computation?

To begin to answer this question, we need to consider the nature of algorithms and computation, acknowledging up front the fact that the desire for an algorithmic model is produced at the intersection of cultural, technological and social needs. Indeed, as the deployments of the term outlined below indicate, algorithm and computation here function as metaphors and bear the weight of the desire to articulate a still nascent practice within an emerging social sphere.
Algorithms are closely tied to generative art practices in that generative art sets up parameters and then allows for the unfolding that ensues. Philip Galanter defines generative art as any practice in which ‘the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art’ (Gallanter, 2006). Marius Watz adds a distinction between generative processes that are deterministic and those that are more open:

A central aspect to the generative approach is the use of an externalized system, created by the artist but rarely completely under her control. Standard software tools are deterministic systems that always produce the same results, while generative systems are dynamic processes that must be harnessed and even farmed. The artist specifies the initial boundaries and strategies of creation, and then enters into a feedback loop of adjusting parameters in a search for optimal regions in parameter space. The moment of genuine surprise is often the moment of breakthrough (Watz, 2006).

Finally, pushing a bit further, Inke Arns suggests that we not look merely at the results of a generative process, but instead at the software itself. In ‘Code as Performative Speech Act,’ Arns writes,

Software art does not regard software merely as a pragmatic, invisible tool generating certain visible results or surfaces, but on the contrary focuses on the program code itself – even if this code is not explicitly being laid open or put in the foreground. According to Florian Cramer, software art makes visible the aesthetic and political subtexts of seemingly neutral technical commands (Arns, 2002).

What we can take from the artworld’s interest in generative and software-based practices is the desire to set something into motion, to relinquish some amount of control, and to reference directly the functionality and parameters of the tools – in this case software – that produce the conditions for the experience.

Algorithms have also recently inspired designers. In her graduate thesis titled, ‘Allegorithm,’ graphic designer Juliette Cezzar, for example, defines an algorithm as a ‘pre-programmed procedure for an expected or unexpected result,’ adding that it is also an attitude, technique, perception and procedure (Cezzar, 2002). For Cezzar, algorithms are constitutive of decidedly non-computational practices, such as baseball games, the methodology of scientists and the essay structure deployed by journalists. In all of these cases, an algorithm functions by allowing its users to follow a set of predetermined rules toward expected results. However, the more interesting direction of algorithms is toward unexpected results, as conditions are set in place that generate unanticipated outcomes.

McKenzie Wark addresses the idea of the algorithm in his book, GAM3R 7H3ORY, which looks at gaming as a series of allegories for daily life.[6] In his discussion of allegories and algorithms, Wark defines an algorithm as ‘a finite set of instructions for accomplishing some task, which transforms an initial starting condition into a recognizable end condition’ (Wark, section 31). He also notes that ‘what is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm’ (Wark, section 30). He continues:

If the novel, cinema or television can reveal through their particulars an allegory of the world that makes them possible, the game reveals something else entirely. For the reader, the novel produces allegory as something textual. The world of possibility is the world of the linguistic sign. For the viewer, the screen allegory is something luminous. The world of possibility is the world of mechanical reproducibility. For the gamer, the game produces allegory as something algorithmic. The world of possibility is the world internal to the algorithm. So: a passage from the topic to the topographic, mediated by the novel; a passage from the topographic to the topological, mediated by television; a passage, mediated by the game, from the topological to as yet unknown geographies, a point where the gamer seems to be stuck (Wark, section 59).

Gaming, then, is a point on one vector of transformation, from the novel to the screen to the immersive world of the game, and from the textual sign to the world of mechanical reproducibility on to the world internal to the algorithm. Gaming takes us inside the algorithm, producing for the gamer ‘an intuitive relation’ to that unfolding that is the algorithm. Rather than an allegory, the gamer experiences the putting into play of a set of elements determined in part by code.

Finally, in the preface to his book Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway defines an algorithm simply as ‘a machine for the motion of parts’ (Galloway, 2006: xi). He goes on to describe video games as an essentially active medium, by which he means a medium ‘whose very materiality moves and restructures itself’ (Galloway, 2006: 3). Galloway’s book is an often eloquent examination of video games as a cultural form, but for my purposes, his text, alongside the others noted above, offers a useful vocabulary for a set of computer-based actions that contribute to a new model for the sort of pedagogical practice I am trying to articulate, one similarly grounded on algorithmic unfolding and machinic processes. Following this lead, we should consider relinquishing pedagogical models based on representation, narrative and discourse and move toward an information-based model, one in which cultural objects are technologies and the reader/viewer becomes a user or player.

However, we can only undertake this consideration with the following recognition: as Florian Cramer points out so well in ‘Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination,’ algorithms not only date back well before computers, but they also play a part within a cultural imaginary. He writes,

With its seeming opacity and the boundless, viral multiplication of its output in the execution, algorithmic code opens up a vast potential for cultural imagination, phantasms and phantasmagorias. The word made flesh, writing taking up a life of its own by self-execution, has been a utopia and dystopia in religion, metaphysics, art and technology alike (Cramer, 2005).

Algorithms promise almost magical possibilities and the fulfillment of utopian transformation, and their deployment here, as metaphor and model, is with the recognition of their function within a larger cultural imaginary.

Comparing Pedagogical Models

Models of pedagogy are complex, and include, for example, the broad articulation of pedagogy by writers such as Paolo Friere who, in his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argued for replacing a ‘banking’ model wherein an instructor makes scholarly deposits into the student with a model grounded in praxis, dialogue and attention to the contextual politics of any given pedagogical situation (Friere, 1970: 198). Henry Giroux, another theorist of pedagogy, argues for an analysis of ‘the meaning of knowledge, classroom social relationships, and the political and cultural nature of schooling’ (Giroux, 1988: 24). This essay cannot accommodate a full explication of the field of pedagogical theory; instead, I want to examine some of the much more basic components of teaching practices in colleges and universities, and ask how an almost whimsical rethinking might point us toward a computational pedagogy. Below, six small incursions into pedagogical practices and models toward the hope of creating a computational or algorithmic pedagogy:

Select and Combine: Using the Database Instead of Narrative

In many liberal arts classes, the 16-week semester (or 10-week quarter) is arranged linearly as a narrative that begins with a set of questions and concludes with a set of answers, however provisional. The class often includes an arc that resembles that of a narrative, as issues and conflicts reach a climax, then conclude with some sense of resolution. Obviously this is a sweeping description of classroom models, but it fits many courses that strive to address a theme via a series of questions. A narrative model, however, embodies an outdated epistemology and speaks to an older generation. Indeed, if, as Fredric Jameson claims, narrative is the fundamental cultural model for the 20th century, networks and participatory culture define our current moment, bringing with them a different set of themes, structures, practices and ideological constraints. In place of the narrative model, we might imagine the content of our courses as a database that is open to multiple points of entry and innumerable patterns of selection and combination that are realized most fruitfully through a kind of collaborative remixing by student and professor. In this way, the process of learning aligns with the activities of processing and play, such that the course itself becomes ‘a machine for the motion of parts.’ Within this machine, the instructor serves as both designer and player, setting initial rules and expectations in place, but recognizing the need for improvisation as an enacting of possibilities unfolds.

From Stasis to Process: Allowing for Unexpected Outcomes

The algorithmic model dares us to relinquish the vaunted ‘learning objectives’ dutifully listed on our syllabi in favor of unexpected outcomes. Once set in motion, the course opens up to unforeseen arrangements and convergences of student interest, needs and abilities. As we forego the specificity of the learning objectives, we might gain ground in the larger project of teaching students how to learn, moving beyond the acquisition of information to an enhancement of the ability to learn. As learning objectives themselves become decentered, traditional approaches to evaluating student work must be rethought. One clear implication is the emphasis of process over product in student learning and a model of pedagogy that takes account of different learning styles and a range of possible goals and priorities that may vary from student to student.

Toward Distributed Authority

Another traditional pedagogical model places the instructor in the position of expert delivering knowledge to learners in an institutional structure that frequently remains transparent to students. Known generally as ‘direct instruction,’ this model, too, is outdated in many classroom contexts, and does not align with the broader array of social practices of students, who know that the role of expert is contextual. Further, in technology-based classrooms, students often arrive with more expertise in certain areas than their instructors. An algorithmic pedagogy would examine the structure of the class itself, looking at the specific arrangement of institutional power alongside the expectations of participants. Obviously, instructors do bring fundamentally significant contributions to the classroom, as well as a degree of institutional power that, despite gestures toward divestiture, always remains in place.[7] That said, however, how might one experiment with the deployment of expertise using a network as metaphor? Going further, how might we include networked experience in conjunction with class-based experience? How might we find ways to mobilize a user-oriented, participatory pedagogy in which students cycle fluidly through the roles of teacher, learner and synthesizer?

Soft Media Objects

In a 2006 presentation at Hyperwerk in Basel, Marius Watz noted that ‘things change when they become digital. A digital video is no longer a tape. It is suddenly a soft media object…’ (Watz, 2006). Soft media objects are those that are eminently mutable; situated in a vast online database of traded media, they become the fodder for tactical reuse as they are read, used and redeployed in sometimes eloquent ways akin in spirit to the critical analyses we favor as instructors. As we incorporate this media into the classroom, the modernist emphasis on medium specificity gives way to awareness of the function and context of any media object. The result is a transformation of ‘finished’ art works, texts and media objects into raw materials that are ripe for reinterpretation and recontextualization. A student’s coursework is thus inscribed in a process of knowledge production and transformation that continues beyond an individual class and may ideally be conceived as having relevance beyond the university.

Code Literacy: Understanding Dynamic Reading and Writing

Another traditional component of university teaching relies on reading and writing as central practices for gauging student learning. However, more and more what students need is the ability to read and write dynamically. The information around us moves and changes faster than ever, with much of that information existing not in stasis but in a constant state of flux, with ever changing relationships to other data. How can we understand writing and communication when we are dealing with dynamic information? In his graduate thesis, Ben Fry, who with Casey Reas developed the open source programming language known as Processing, asks, ‘What does the world economy look like? How can the continuously changing structure of the Internet be represented? It’s nearly impossible to approach these questions because few techniques exist for visualizing dynamic information’ (Fry, 2003: 13). Processing allows designers who are non-programmers to play with code and begin to understand how to read and write dynamically, and this ability is one needed not only by designers but our culture at large. The ability to engage directly with code, even on a fundamental level, allows for new forms of reading and writing that transform conceptions and definitions of literacy.[8]

Toward Virtual Education: A Process of Invention

A computational or algorithmic pedagogy points to a form of virtual education, with ‘virtual’ in this case being understood in the sense articulated by Gilles Deleuze who defines the term across several years and texts.[9] For Deleuze, the virtual and real are not opposed, nor does the virtual correspond with the possible; rather, the virtual is that which generates a thing’s actuality. In replacing the possible-real binary with virtual-actual, Deleuze posits a form of becoming that is not algorithmic in the sense of producing expected and predetermined outcomes but instead in generating the unexpected, and a sense of the ‘impossible.’ In a review of Keith Ansell-Pearson’s Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life, Daniel W. Smith writes that for Deleuze, ‘the “rules” of virtuality are no longer resemblance and limitation, but difference and divergence. The virtual is itself entirely differentiated; and in actualizing itself, it does not proceed by limitation or exclusion but rather must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts that require “a process of invention” (72)’ (Smith, 2002). The virtual classroom, then, is a space for the actualization of emerging desires, and an algorithmic pedagogy would enact this process of invention.

Conclusion

The model of algorithmic pedagogy proposed here is admittedly provisional, but not entirely metaphoric. As with attempts to understand the functioning of complex systems, algorithmic pedagogy knits together ideas across divergent territories of disciplinary thought and practice. It is no accident that the vocabulary and epistemological framework that enables this argument derives from computers and digital culture. Indeed, the work of university faculty is rapidly coming to resemble that of systems engineers, architects and designers, as opposed to mere experts. And while this article has focused on the implications of algorithms (and algorithmic thinking) for teaching and learning, an equally profound impact may be seen on the evolution of other realms of scholarly practice, particularly research and academic publication. As the whole of academia slouches grudgingly into the digital age, it may well be time to reexamine an even broader range of conventions, standards and expectations across the academic spectrum.

Author’s Biography

Holly Willis is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts, as well as Director of Academic Programs at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where she teaches, organizes workshops and oversees academic programs designed to introduce new media literacy skills across USC’s campus and curriculum. Willis’ current research centers on the intersection of media art, graphic design and rhetoric, and the ways ideas and formal strategies from each might inform contemporary scholarly practices.

Notes

[1] See ‘Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy’ in Distributed Learning, Joyce Neff and Carl Whithaus, eds., (Mahway, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007).
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[2] See Scholz’s site, collectiate.net at www.collectivate.net. See the Distributed Learning Project here: http://sharewidely.org/
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[3] Michael Wesch, The Machine Is Us/ing Us. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
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[4] For example, see The University in Ruins, in which author Bill Readings writes, ‘The University is becoming a transnational bureaucratic corporation, either tied to transnational instances of government such as the European Union or functioning independently, by analogy with a transnational corporation.’ The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
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[5] Free accounts for Second Life are available through the Second Life Web site: http://www.secondlife.com
Information regarding the educational uses of Second Life is available through the Second Life Educators’ List: http://secondlife.com/education
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[6] Rather than chronicling the deleterious features of gaming, Wark instead considers game space as a kind of utopia, and his writing practice for the project embodies some of the ideas outlined in his text. Rather than composing the book as a linear argument in traditional academic form, for example, Wark instead wrote the book in a very modular way, with a set of rules that dictate the form, in a sense adopting an algorithm for his writing practice. Each of the book’s nine chapters contains 25 paragraphs, and each paragraph contains 250 words and is placed on what looks like a filing card. Each chapter has its own color, and the cards appear in stacks. Readers are invited to comment on each card, and the comments appear alongside the text. As a result, readers can opt to read the book as a book, moving through the stacks of cards in order, or as an evolving conversation linked to particular sections of the book.
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[7] See Integrating Hypertextual Subjects: Computers, Composition, and Academic Labor, by Robert Samuels (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2006) for an eloquent and much-needed analysis of the institutional uses of “learner-centered pedagogy” and the deployment of technology-driven classrooms as a means to casualize academic labor.
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[8] The fellowship process and close collaboration between scholars and designers in the creation of projects for the University of Southern California’s online scholarly journal, Vectors: A Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, offers evidence of this transformation. Selected contributors are invited to USC for a week-long residency during which they are introduced to the journal, the collaborative process and examples of multimedia scholarship; they are also introduced to the journal’s database infrastructure and invited to imagine their work in relationship to a database. The second half of the week includes the intensive workshopping of each project in small working groups. Part of the ongoing project for the Vectors designers has been to imagine new ways to illustrate relationships among the chunks of data entered into the database. Each project in Vectors includes a back-end, where data is entered, and the interface, where the user encounters the designed depiction of that data. More recently, however, Vectors designers have been experimenting with ways to visualize the layer between the database and the interface, a way, in short, to read the XML. The result is the use of an XML browser that dynamically generates a visualization illustrating the relationships among words, ideas, themes and so on within any given text. Seeing one’s research suddenly take shape in this way is nothing short of transformative for participating scholars.
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[9] Phillip Roe develops the notion of the virtual in relationship to new media education in an essay titled ‘That-which-new-media studies-will-become’ in Fibreculture Journal, Issue 2, 2003. http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue2/issue2_roe.html
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References

Arns, Inke. ‘Code as Performative Speech Act,’ lecture at the Read_Me Conference, Aarhus/DK, August, 2004. Download: http://www.projects.v2.nl/%7earns/Lecture/

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), or online:
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page

Cezzar, Juliette. ‘Allegorithm,’ Yale University School of Art thesis, 2002. Download: http://juliettecezzar.com/sections/about/index.html

Cramer, Florian. ‘Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination,’ Piet Zwart Institute, 2005. Download: http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/

Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970).

Fry, Ben. Organic Information Design, Master’s Thesis, MIT Media Lab, 2003. Download: http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/thesis/

Galanter, Philip. ‘Generative Art and Rules-Based Art,’ vague_terrain 03, June 2006. http://vague_terrain.net

Galloway, Alex. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Giroux, Henry. Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (Westport. Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey, 1988).

Goldfarb, Brian. Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and Beyond the Classroom (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002).

Jenkins, Henry. ‘Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,’ The MacArthur Foundation, 2006. Download: http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Hocks, Mary. ‘Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments,’ CCC, 54.4, 2003, 630-631. Download: http://inventio.us/ccc/archives/2003/06/16_mary_e_hocks.html

Kress, Gunther. Literacy in the New Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2003).

New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. 2007 Horizon Report.
Download: http://www.nmc.org/horizon

Prensky, Marc. ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,’ On the Horizon, NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001, 1.

Smith, Daniel W. ‘Review of Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life,’ Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2002.07.14. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1131

Thomas, Douglas and John Seely Brown. ‘The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind,’ Games and Culture, 2007; 2; 149. Download: http://www.johnseelybrown.com/playimagination.pdf

U.S. Department of Education. ‘Getting America’s Students Ready for the 21st Century: Meeting the Technology Literacy Challenge’, Report to the Nation on Technology and Education (Washington, D.C.: GPO. June 1996). http://www.ed.gov/Technology/Plan/NatTechPlan/

Wark, McKenzie. GAM3R 7H3ORY, Version 1.1, 2006. http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/

Watz, Marius. ‘Fragments on Generative Art,’ vague_terrain 03, June 2006. http://www.vagueterrain.net/content/archives/journal03/watz01.html

Watz, Marius. ‘It’s All About the Software, Baby,’ presentation at Hyperwerk, Basel, Switzerland, 2006. Download PowerPoint slides: http://workshop.evolutionzone.com/category/theory/

Wysocki, Anne and Johndan Johnson-Eilola. ‘Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?’ in Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe (eds) Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999).

It is easy to argue that much of the rhetoric attached to “new media” and the internet in relation to pedagogy has mistaken quantity for quality. It has been a conversation that has confused the qualitative changes that our new conceptions of media, knowledge, and networks afford with the quantitative changes beloved of those who confuse teaching and learning with instruction and consumption. These new qualities are the differences between the vector and commodity, blogs and books.

However, imagine if our universities had been invented now. What would pedagogy be? What form would teaching and learning take? What would count as knowledge? Expertise? What forms would this knowledge take?

Taking this as a departure this issue of the Fibreculture Journal invited those working in new media, internet studies, education, and cognate disciplines to discuss the strengths and celebrate the possibilities that new media and its networks affords teaching and learning. The emphasis in this issue is not on the criticism or description of existing models and paradigms but to invite the exploration and celebration of new possibilities, real or imagined. What new knowledge formations should there be? How would they be taught? How could they assessed (if at all)? What critical academic work, and in what forms, would our students be producing?

Willis, in ‘Towards an Algorithmic Pedagogy’, takes a position from within contemporary debates on multimodal literacies asking how to shift traditional and institutional definitions of literacy to acknowledging not only the changes wrought by digital networks but the epistemological changes that have followed in its wake. These epistemological changes see contemporary media from an ecological perspective where such an approach

allows us to take account of the multiply determining relationships wrought not just by individual media, but by the interrelationships, dependencies and symbioses that take place within the dynamic system that is today’s high-tech university. An ecological approach allows us to examine what happens when new media practices collide with computational models, providing a glimpse of possible transformations not only ways of being but ways of teaching and learning. (Willis, 2007)

This is where Willis sees the consequences of the digital as productive of a mode of practice, rather than in the production of objects or artefacts, and so proposes a pedagogy that is “soft”, process orientated, distributed in regards to authority and allows for the unexpected.

Whereas Willis makes an argument through the essay, Bianco’s ‘Composing and Compositing: Integrated Digital Writing and Academic Pedagogy’ moves into a reflexive mode where the writing seeks to perform as much as state its case. Here we get the brio of writing that is beginning to treat text as a material artefact with force in its own right, and not merely a semiotic sign on the way towards an idealised sense. Here a liberal use of basic typographic variation is employed to good effect. It is easy in work such as this to misjudge this as only bravado, or even perhaps writerly vanity, however the ease with which type is malleable in digital writing (a point we have perhaps too easily taken for granted after twenty years of word processing) and the resolute conservativeness of academic writing to eschew these simple possibilities is something this work returns to with some force. This is an exciting essay, crossing between classroom practice and a critique of literacy and literacy education that is grounded in that peculiarly North American phenomenon of the composition class. Bianco argues:

The various generic qualities of academic writing in specific fields provides strict design parameters through a shared and discreet legend against which the future of manuscripted thought must tabulate itself to be recognized as accountable literate writing. The medium is the message only insofar as its formal excesses cannot transmit as anything but noise and chaos. Intertextuality resides only at the level of readership and writerly citation thresholding the full force of writerly signification in the manuscript to remain expository, always-already exposed, and above all, transparent and clear. (Bianco, 2007)

These are accurate points, and in the history of critiques of the normative force of academic writing on discovery and experimentation perhaps not novel. However, from this traditional critique Bianco quickly moves to the qualities of movement and affect and their affordances for writing in digital media. While remaining preliminary, I believe this slide towards affect offers a manner of conceiving of the role of learning and literacy that offers an alternative conception to that which we have inherited.

Unlike the first two essays Ball and Moeller offer a manifesto come “webtext” that can only ever be online. It uses a very simple alphabetic architecture as one form of navigation, but also uses typographic cues to indicate writerly voice, as well as providing internal links. Hence ‘Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media’ can be read traditionally, from beginning to end by following the letters, or hypertextually by reading the internal links. They argue for the relevance of rhetorical frameworks for the study of what is best thought of as a digital writing, specifically identifying the value of “topoi” as places of ‘negotiated meaning making’ which allow for a variety of critical literacies to be experienced. The arguments here are rich, variable, and splintered, as they ought to be. It is a call to arms as much as a demonstration of other academic forms in the humanities and is what I would characertise as part of the first wave of such work.

These three essays together in their own right are of interest as they demonstrate the extent to which problems of “literacy” and new media are present in a North American context. These are not debates that one sees very much of in new media, internet, or media studies in Australia (though they are more common in technology and education communities) but for those who are interested in finding a practice that lies between the studio arts and design based model of making (with not a lot of critical thought), versus the Bachelor of Arts model of critical thought via essay writing (with not a lot of creative making) they provide a series of critical possibilities and modes of practice. This cultural difference is evidenced in the differences in the arguments introduced by the remaining, local, contributors to this collection.

Jorgensen makes two major claims in ‘The Digital, the Virtual and the Naming of Knowledge’. The first is that the role of educators is to defamiliarise rather than explicate, and the second is to validate the “virtual”, in particular via Lévy, as a more robust framework for research and teaching in the realm of the digital. The first claim is made in an effort to shift the larger project of digital studies (whether this be labelled new media studies, internet studies, media studies or some combination of these is largely moot) towards an engaged and critical practice and not merely an instrumental teaching which prepares labour for a post industrial labour market. This is compounded simply by the promiscuity of the digital as a useful category since its role and applicability is hardly subject to disciplinary constraint, and Jorgensen identifies an implicit determinism in what has become a reactive educational agenda within our universities. On the other hand the ‘virtual’, particularly in the sense he ascribes, has the benefit of not being grounded within the digital, but offers a methodology to consider technology in terms of actualisations. Jorgensen argues that this provides a means of investigation and critique that is neither technologically or socially determinist and allows us to view ‘a technological face on the virtual continuity of regimes of knowledge and power’ which allows the humanities to assume the critical role it ought.

Gye’s contribution, ‘Some Thoughts on the Evolution of Digital Media Studies’ is firmly located in the specificities of teaching in an applied institution and offers a historical, critical and personal reflection on Gye’s history as a digital media studies educator. Here the contexts of teaching involve as much a “doing” of digital media studies as a theoretical analysis of whatever we may take digital media studies to be. In this context Gye argues for the legitimacy and ethics of media as a “making your own media”, the sort of independent media production and distribution that community radio developed, with its attendent technical skills which are understood to be means towards an end, rather than the ends in themselves. From here Ulmer’s seminal contributions to the broader field of critical digital literacy are introduced from where Gye slides into the shift from the digital as a mode for the production of different objects into networked practice where the idea of object is problematised, which in turn becomes the space of the mobile phone, the network, and the relations between the individual, corporate culture, communication as social and commercial imperative, and the role of education as a critical practice. Gye’s contribution provides a timely overview of the very rapid change in both the object of study, and the same socio-technical changes that students and institutions have bought to education in general. While Gye does not offer specific answers, the questions are significant.

Finally, a mp3 roundtable conversation, moderated by James Farmer, discusses the key questions posed in the original call for papers for this issue. Farmer’s respondents, Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Chris Bigum, provide an intriguing and timely discussion around the possibilities and problems posed by digital literacies. While arguing for a revolution, and criticising existing practice as merely applying “band aids” to existing structures, Bartlett-Bragg identifies the tensions between the demands of digital learning systems as apparatuses of compliance, versus the affordances of the digitally native student. Bigum, on the other hand, identifies the resilience of the university, and education, as systems that in themselves have much to offer and provides an intriguing, and very well argued counter view that seeks a middle road between existing industrial modes of education and the more utopian versions of digital liberation. That this was recorded using Skype I think is of more than passing interest as it is a simple example of the ways in which simple tools might shift and complement traditional practices.

The essays and ideas collected here are diverse, at times disjunctive, but each provides a point of view on the digital, broadly conceived, and education. At this point, with digital media now ubiquitous in our institutions, but also with the rise of highly centralised learning management systems, it is perhaps timely to have a survey of this sort. This lets us recognise where we have come from, where we have gotten to, and then perhaps allows for debate on where we might go.