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Notes and Overview for Week 2

ENGL 5362, Fall 2023

Important: No assignments or course documents, including the syllabus, should be considered to be in their final form until the first week of class begins.

Agenda

  1. Introduce each other and compose ourselves
  2. Talk about this week’s readings and probably what we already know about interfaces and ideology
  3. Followup Qs and As Online presence project
  4. Talk about Annotated bibliography project
  5. Talk about what it means to “Read/Take Notes like a grad student”
    • talk about Zotero
  6. Using library multisearch and Google Scholar together to chase those rabbits

Interface and Ideology

Assigned readings can always be found on Blackboard. Addional resources should be there, and if not are accessible through our Library)

Required:

Any two of:

Possibly:

Notes and Questions towards a critical theory of technology / interfaces

Table 1: Andrew Feenberg’s Taxonomy for philosophies of technology (Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited, 2002)

Technology is… Autonomus Human-Controlled
Value-neutral Determinism Instrumentalism
Value-laden Substantivism Critical Theory of Technology

What is an interface

  1. What is an interface and how has writing studies theorized interfaces? How do interfaces inscribe ideology? interface: a primary representation of a computer system or program; a “cultural map” of a computer system (Selfe & Selfe p. 485)

    • Colin Brooke, in Lingua Fracta (2009, the almost textbook of this course) locates the interface as the most important site for us to look at in rhet tech/newmedia–we must look at the interface and not the individual text
    • the point of contact between two elements that interact (Jones, 2021), may be computational (as in GUIs) or printed texts and physical or digital objects
    • a means or place of interaction (Carnegie p. 165), but a complex/contested concept–facilitates and (pre)defines interaction both concrete and abstract
      • page as interface
      • computer as interface
      • screen as interface
      • specific sites/apps/softwares as interfaces
      • physical objects we interact with; symbolic components of GUIs, cognitive and emotional aspects
    • just as we learn to read geographical information in maps through certain koinoi topoi and stereotyped images/styles,
    • just as goegraphical maps purport to represent fact, they naturalize political and ideological interests of the authors
      • as they naturalize, maps include and omit
    • affordances: properties that enable users to do something and reflect possible relationships; suggest appropriate usage
      • physical, what you can do;
      • percieved, what you undersand you can do
      • sensory, functional, cognitive

  2. What does it mean to look AT the interface rather than THROUGH? (back to Lanham, bistable oscillation); popular approaches to UI talk about interface invisibility (think back to Warde, also Krug, Don’t Make Me Think). That is, how can we learn to be critical users of interfaces, and what questions do we need to ask to interrogate an interface?

    • (See also Monea, Screen Reading: A Gallery of (Re)imagined Interfaces; Monea de-familiarizes interfaces in order to sponsor critical interface literay (calling attention to “material, infrastructural, tangible, and aesthetic components of web design”) that is, making the “transparency of the interface” opaque.)

Interface activity: We’ll break into small groups for this one: Explore a popular LLM-based writing tool such as ChatGPT or Google Bard or another AI-powered service such as Microsoft Word’s Editor or Grammarly; create an account and fiddle around. Use one of the sets of questions below as a heuristic to investigate and think about the rhetorical implications and ideologies of the interface. What does the interface for primarily represent? What actions are encouraged and possible? What metaphors are bundled into the interface? What is the “cultural map” here? What is shown? What are the modes of interactivity in the interface? What would a critical interface analysis show?

(For example, with anything that generates text–What is obscured through the “generating text in order” component of the interface? What do LLMs do? (it seems from the interface that ‘next word prediction’ is a main one–but LLMS do more than that))

How can we talk about interfaces so we can see rhetorical implications of interfaces? (Carnegie, p. 166 and see questions on 172) How to exaxmine an interface 101, from Carnegie:

What questions can we ask in a critical interface analysis? (Sano-Francini, 2018); questions about the meaning making function of an interface/site:

What questions can we ask to explore how power is embedded in circulatory interfaces? How can we create more equitable ones? (from Jones, 2021)

Transduction and new media / rhetoric

  1. WTH is “transduction”?

Bolter & Grusin (2000), Remediation (all definitions are from this book review)

Questions from you-all

  1. How are wampum belts like hypertexts? multimedia?
  2. If language is a series of codes that allow for the connection of meanings, as in, the color red means stop because we were told it did, then would this quote from Sano-Franchini’s work, “human beings make knowledge and meaning from the interpretation—whether conscious or subconscious—of signs, including alphabetic textual and visual design,” mean that our interpretations of the visual is heavily guided by what we are told things are to mean? If this is the case, is it any different from propaganda?
  3. Selfe and Selfe: Standard English in a computer interface is criticized for pressuring students of marginalized groups to “[dissociate] themselves from the colonial values of [those] groups” (494). Since other countries have already more or less accepted “Standard English” as the default norm, is that truly problematic?
  4. How do we develop the critical awareness that Selfe and Selfe are talking about when looking at our location in relation to the privilege we have? Is this something that comes from reflection and time or are there ways to speed up the process or to help others develop their awareness? While keeping in mind the desire to not burden others with the responsibility of educating.
  5. Could we unpack the definition of “transductive”? I feel like I understand some of it but not all of it.
  6. The idea of a Lingua Fracta between the digital and rhetorical or a “mutually transformative encounter” (255). Is this similar to the linguistic idea of Lingua Franca (having a common language between two speakers of different languages, for example non-native english speakers using english as a common language).
  7. Can we talk more about the Warpum beads as hypertext?
  8. Can you speak more on how English teachers are affected by borders then and now? How systematic and domination margins affect students today?
  9. Discuss interfaces of maps of Capitalism and Class Privilege. Discuss how the government perpetuated power through practices and content during COVID
  10. I never thought of texts as an interface. I only thought of it as being digital. Anyone else?
  11. After reading the article by Selfe and Selfe, I’m wondering what teachers who can’t do those things suggested (work with programmers, discuss colonialism with students, ect) should do to mitigate the power of interfaces to make them more accessible and inclusive? This article kind of blew my mind because I never thought of the computer interface as being harmful in that way.
  12. Did anyone else understand a thing from the Jones piece? I felt like they were speaking another language the whole time. It seems as if he’s talking about circulation in interfaces as creating worlds within worlds and how they mitigate power and parcel it out on their own whim. He seems to point to the dangers in those because of the seemingly availability of access to the user but in fact are incredibly limited. I’m serious when I say I really struggled with this piece for some reason.

Selfe & Selfe (1994), The Politics of the Interface

the “political and ideological boundary lands associated with computer interfaces” (p. 481)

computer interfaces as “linguisitc contact zones”: social spaces where cultures meet/clas/grapple, contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power as they are lived out in “interested version(s) of reality”

computer interfaces as maps that enact colonialism

How does the basic Windows/Mac interface present reality as framed in the perspective of

bricolage and the computer? (p. 493)

the greatest difficulty “we must locate ourselves in relation to the map” (p. 495ff)

Boyle, Brown & Ceraso (2018), The Digital: Rhetoric Behind and Beyond the Screen

the digital as immersive, proliferating condition–it is never one thing

  1. conflation (dependency) of early digital rhetoric and visual modes of practice
  2. multisensory rhetorical engagements
  3. digital realized less visibly, through code, algorithm, infrastructure
    • transduction and engaging digital rhetorically as an “ambient condition” (p. 252)

screen (“the screenic surface” or screen-based conventions) as the ur-interface for digital/nondigital theorizing of digital rhetoric–that is, the visual has been the primary logic or starting point of digital rhetoric? note how Welch poshed beyond screens into oral/aural features of electric rhetoric

“the digital is always multisensory (p. 254) (visual but also haptic and sonic and environmental)

Boyle, Brown, and Ceraso provide a useful review of scholarship that pushes beyond the screen–any of these pieces would be useful starting points for further study in particular areas:

transduction: how a signal moves across disparate registers of relations (p. 257), neither deductive nor inductive; converting energy or message into another form, each relay in a pathway changing the next molecule in the pathway

A response to Boyle, Brown, and Ceraso that interjects transduction with availability

rhetoric as a transductive process

Carnegie (2009), Interface as exordium

the interface is the intro, not the intro.

rhetoric of the interface–that is, the rhetorical modes of the interface

Jones (2021), Circulatory interfaces: Perpetuating power through practices, content, and positionality

interfaces create normative circulatory practices, content, and positions; produce norms about who circulates what infromation and how

interfaces are productive because they interpellate subjects interprellation–understanding one’s self to be part of a particular subject position by being “hailed” into that position. (we are invited/hailed into particular subject positions)

circulation is texts moving through time and space

circulation is world-making–publics are called into existency by discourse, people imagine themselves as part of a group by being interpollated/hailed by texts; happens through circulation

Sano-Francini (2018), Designing Outrage, Programming Discord: A Critical Interface Analysis of Facebook as a Campaign Technology

Focus on microinteractions as a way to look at the ethic or priorities in interfaces. Facebook’s UI prioritizes concicion, speed, curation practices that limit divergent perspectives, and the flattening of complex identities and political commitments such that they are indexable, processable, and thus, monetizable. Browsing, reacting, commenting, posting play a significant role in how design creates mediated intimacies.

Haas (2007), Wampum as Hypertext

Wampum belts as interfaces

Wampum belts as hypertexts (creation of a structure of elements and their presentation in interaction with the reader)

Wampum belts as shared responsiblity

“In order to retrieve the encoded communication, an individual must be a part of the community with the cultural context for accurate retrieval of that information.”

Wampum belts as indigenous revision of visual rhetorical/hypertextual sovereignty.

Both wampum and Western hypertexts supplement memory–communal, cultural, civic

For Next Time

Journal entry for week 3

Write a short (300ish+ words) critical interface analysis for your next journal entry. (Also, include a handful of questions based on/out of our readings, which are all about audience.)

Select a composing interface you use every day but perhaps haven’t spent much time thinking about–anything from Mirosoft Word to Reddit to Blackboard to the messenger app on your phone. Using some combination of the heuristics discussed in class September 7, interrogate that interface and reflect on its meaning-making interactions.

To Read for Sept 14 (Digiality, Interfaces, Ideologies)

Required:

Optional if you really want to go deep:

We will also brainstorm and write about the Annotated Bib project during class time.