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Notes and Overview for Week 7

ENGL 5362, Fall 2023

Agenda

  1. Compose ourselves
  2. Discuss the Digital project
  3. Part II of Update Culture: Timing, Attention, Management

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

Required for today:

Notes and Questions for Update Culture:

Your questions from Part Two

  1. Since “unethical” content does not automatically make a digital writer an unethical person, could unethical methods be used to achieve an ethical means? (E.g. “Whitehat” trolling, in an attempt to stop the circulation of blatantly false information)
  2. Nearly every case mentioned within the text suggests that all the subjects interviewed contribute so heavily to update culture due to the “rush” or sense of validation that they receive from the interaction. Could it be argued that update culture thrives on exploitation?

understanding Kairos, Chronos, and Digital Writing; What are writers doing as their writing is in circulation?

How have roles for writers changed in 21st century writing contexts? How have the technologies with which we write, deliver, and circulate writing affected writing/writers? How, as Gallagher claims in his final chapters, does our developing understanding of the afterlife of digital texts inform the ways we think about writing more broadly? - as digital writing circulates, it does not do so statically or without making a claim on those who initially write it (4) - fundamental shift in the analytic and inventive focus from an end product of writing to the emergent responses to online commenters (4)

How does Gallagher’s book change our understanding of (any of) the five main “threshold concepts of writing”? (Alternatively, how do IPI templates and other digital/social tools we use erry day enact these concepts?)

  1. writing is a social and rhetorical activity,
  2. writing speaks to situations through recognizable forms
  3. writing enacts and creates identities and ideologies
  4. all writers have more to learn
  5. and writing is (also always) a cognitive activity

How do the kinds of everyday writing and everyday writers Gallagher is writing about intersect with our lives? Do we engage in this kind of behavior? Which of our day-to-day pursuits depend on these types of writers/writing?

What, according to Gallagher, is wrong with the adage “Don’t Read the Comments”?

we should examine not just the end product, but how processes and stratgies change over the course of time as they experience their audience’s reactions and responses (after composed, during delivery) – writing during circulation (which is different from print economies of writing)

writers attend to afterlife in “update culture” through stratiegies:

Update culture is NOT radically new, just faster and more intense version of historical antecendents and precedents

What do we do with the expectation of textual mutability?

Mutability [“We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon”]

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I.
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:-—
II.
Or like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
III.
We rest-—a dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise—-one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:-—
IV.
It is the same!—-For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free;
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

Interactive and Participatory Internet Templates (IPI)

IPI Templates defined: interactive interfaces of ongoing prefabricated designs and cultural forms; contain empty spaces designated for writing or filling in; surrounded by a variety of interactive fields (p 34)

template rhetoric has four characteristics: users communicate on the internet through interactive templates that structure the available means of persuasion; they can get creative with the interface and invent new ways of using the available means, but interactions are still structured (in interfaces) and behind it all is a lack of coding access

  1. repetition (continuous filling in/out, continuous prodding, creation of habit)
  2. time-space compression (tech increases speed of production, distribution, circulation; discourse quickly moves around; conflation of when with what/how)
  3. ambient affordances (users & templates coalesce to form persuasive digital rhetoric beyond TD or SC; templates/techs have an active/primary role in situation/event of digital writing; habituated ways to respond and a common lnaguage for understanding response)
  4. standardization (imposition of hegemonic communication practices; templates inform us about what kind of infor goes where; filters to expectation and decorum)

textual timing: kairos and chronos

textual attention: responding to audiences

textual management: writing and agency/control

ethics in the age of update culture

For Next Time (for Oct 19 )

For the next three weeks we’re working together through Gries & Brooke (Eds.) (2018). Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt21668mb You will read selectively, rather than the entire book, and between all of us, we will be able to have multiple readings of the core issues in the text. I will invite three volunteers to help lead discussion on each of those days by working through their talking points with the class.

Everyone will prepare talking points and post them for your reading journal entry that week, either as a Word doc or pdf file attached to your journal entry. This handout discusses tips for preparing your talking points.