Digital Digs (Alex Reid)

Perhaps these seem like an odd collection of terms, but bear with me.

First off, let me say that I think my discipline (rhetoric and composition) has strong commitments to a number of somewhat contradictory impulses:

1. that everyone can "write" (and perhaps should write);
2. that there is really no such thing as natural talent or creativity;
3. that writing is a social rather than individual activity.

And my thought is that of course these things are all true, but they are also completely wrong. The discipline's commitment to democracy means understanding writing as a socio-political activity that everyone can engage in equally, at least on some abstract-potential level. However, I cannot get away from the fact that there are people who have an exceptional talent and interest for writing (some of whom also teach writing). The same rhetoricians who will refuse to see writing as a natural talent are quick to say they have no natural aptitude for math. Hmmmm. Undoubtedly, the mission of rhet/comp is well-intentioned, particularly if one has faith in the notion that literacy equals empowerment. At the same time, to be committed to writing having certain characteristics because writing instruction must serve a particular political end would ultimately be destructive.

All of that is a little preamble to my consideration of why I think many of my colleagues in rhet/comp would be troubled by the notion of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation that I discussed in my last post. In the mainstream discourses of my discipline, I fear that intrinsic motivation would sound too much like a kind of naive humanism, where many in my field would rather insist upon the role of social, cultural, and ideological forces. In short, all forces are extrinsic. Don't ask me how we get from there to empowering students through literacy, because honestly that little trick of agency has always escaped me.

From my view, this intrinsic/extrinsic talk must also be reconciled with assemblage theory and relations of exteriority, which is where my work and this blog often operates. That may also seem like a difficult rhetorical trick, but actually I think it's fairly simple.

When one discusses relations of exteriority, in my view, one must begin with the dissolution of inside and outside as absolute, essential characteristics. (Admittedly then, relations of exteriority is a somewhat misleading term, but that matter will have to wait for another day.) That doesn't meant that inside and outside cannot exist as emergent and very real characteristics of objects. E.g. my house has an inside and an outside. They exist and not just in my mind as concepts. In a related way, subjectivity/consciousness emerges through relations of exteriority, through a network of distributed cognition and symbolic action, through embodied processes, and through exposure to assemblages of objects. Subjectivity is semi-stable inasmuch as those relations and assemblages are semi-stable. Even though subjectivity emerges through relations of exteriority, it has an inside and an outside as surely as my house does. The point of assemblage theory & relations of exteriority is "simply" to argue that subjectivity (or any other object) is not defined that which emerges as an inside.

However, given all that, as subjects we experience our lives as a collection of intrinsically and extrinsically motivated activities. And I'm not going to try to account for them all. Instead I want to jump right to the one that is at issue here: writing. We are regularly given obviously extrinsic conditions where we are called upon to write. Student writing assignments are an obvious example. But we are also often obligated to write various kinds of things on the job. The point that Dan Pink is trying to make (see previous post) is that when we are asked to do creative, intellectual work that extrinsic motivations (e.g. carrots and sticks) not only don't work, they can be detrimental. Grades, extra credit, bonuses, etc: none of these things are particularly good motivators in getting people to do good creative work (and I would describe writing as creative work). Now certainly those things we experience as "intrinsic" forms of motivation emerge through assemblages, through relations of exteriority. That doesn't make them less intrinsic. Everything ultimately comes from some other place.

Take for example this post. Why am I writing it? (Why are you reading it?) There is no obvious extrinsic motivation. I don't get paid. It's not related to my job. Maybe I think it will make me famous or at least improve my reputation, but even if I did, there would certainly be no clear reward for writing this post right now. As such, I might say I am intrinsically motivated. What that means to me is that these actions are motivated (though not determined!) by assemblages/relations of exteriority that I subjectively experience as coming from inside. (As to why you're reading this, I have no idea; it probably has something to do with your relationship with your mother.) But this is where we might encounter the "autonomy of objects" (btw, Levi Bryant has some interesting posts on this subject: here is one). If all objects have autonomy to some degree, with the plane of immanence being a degree zero of pure autonomy, there's no special free will for humans. To be autonomous here means that objects have emergent characteristics and behaviors that are reducible to their relations with other objects.

When we are looking at the kind of positive psychology that informs Pink's work, we are not developing some general ontology. The point, quite simply, is that when humans act out of experience of autonomy, mastery, and purpose (to give a shorthand for the qualities of intrinsic motivation Pink explores), they are more successful at creative tasks. If you are a corporate manager or a WPA then you might think about creating work conditions that are conducive to these experiences. Similarly, as a teacher, one might facilitate these conditions to give students opportunities to draw upon intrinsic motivations for their writing.

So I will end with where I started. It's true that in some basic definition of writing, nearly every human has the cognitive ability to write. That said, everyone does not have the equal potential for writing and not everyone will find pleasure in it (anymore than the typical English professor finds pleasure in mathematics). While writing certainly is a social activity, we need to be more careful with that term "social," as Latour has pointed out. We need to recognize how inadequate conventional "social" explanations are for our own motivations as writers. Despite my understanding of things like audience, genre, and discourse, I know quite well that my best writing does not come from meeting those external demands. It is a sadly impoverished view of writing that does not recognize the necessity of intrinsic motivation. And I fear that in our desire to make writing logical and learnable, to make it something that is equal for all people, we ignore those aspects.

I picked up Pink's latest book yesterday. Essentially, the book takes up theories of intrinsic motivation and positive psychology and applies them to business management theory. Pink also has a TED talk that outlines the basic experimental evidence that underlies the argument he makes in the book (evidence that the book further expands upon, though always in a layperson's discourse). I've discussed this talk here before and the subject of motivation, pedagogy, and writing many times. But here I want to think through these issues more in terms of writing program administration.

Pink suggests that the dominant theory of motivation (that in academia we might think of as desire) has flaws that have become significant given the new types of labor we ask employees (and I would say students) to do. As he puts it, in simplistic terms, there's Motivation 1.0, which are our animalistic drives for food, safety, and procreation. Motivation 2.0 extends upon those more immediate drives with extrinsic motivators, which are basically carrots and sticks. As he explains, carrot/stick motivators work fine for simple, algorithmic tasks, where we ask students/employees to perform rote procedures. The important thing the research shows, however, is that when one asks people to perform heuristic tasks, tasks that require inventive and creative thinking, that the carrot/stick act can actually serve as a disincentive to performance.

Obviously the composition course is a place that calls for heuristic acts, though this is something that we have struggled over in various ways. Over the last century as a culture we have tried to turn education into an algorithmic procedure that can be incentivized with carrots and sticks from grades and detention to high-stakes testing for district funding. We have tried to turn composition into an algorithmic procedure as well, even if that wasn't what people originally intended in talking about the "writing process." Furthermore, the course is incorporated into a larger motivation 2.0 structure of grades and credits. But let me fold this back to a familiar composition scene, where the student asks "How can I revise this to get an 'A'?" And the koan-like answer is that your best chance of getting an A is to stop writing for the purpose of getting a good grade. The carrot of the A is actually limiting your performance. Of course it isn't that easy. Ironically, the whole system is designed to dissuade learning and creativity, and over time these motivational structures do lasting damage to students, as Ken Robinson has famously articulated. It isn't intentional, of course; it's just that the system is designed on a poor theory of mind.

According to the research that Pink cites, in order for people to be most successful at these complex heuristic tasks, they need to be intrinsically motivated, and he describes three key foundations to that motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In some ways, academia ought to be an ideal model for the kind of workforce and workplace Pink is describing. We have a very high degree of autonomy in the way we work. We generally work hard in the pursuit of mastery over our subject, while always knowing that there is more to know or discover. And we also tend to make strong connections between the narrow focus of our research and grander cultural and intellectual purposes. However, there are obviously general problems with the management of higher education and I think that infamously academics can be horrible managers of other academics (though that isn't true in every instance). In part, the problem is that sometimes academics end up in administrative positions for the wrong reasons, and they don't bring the creativity and passion they have for their research or teaching to their administrative roles. There is a long standing tradition of antagonism, generally, between faculty and administration, which I would hypothesize stems from the tradition of "motivation 2.0" with its carrots and sticks and its focus on controlled, routinized tasks. As Pink points out, these strategies are poisonous to the heuristic challenges of both research and teaching.

However, it's not all that simple. In UB's composition program, we have a long tradition of giving instructors a high degree of autonomy in constructing syllabi and assignments. While there have certainly been successes as a result, the practice has not been without problems. There are always limits and contexts for autonomy. As the director of composition, I can only loosen the restrictions that I put in place. For example, I can't alter the length of the semester or change the fact that students need to be graded at the end of the semester. A composition course isn't a course in auto repair or calculus. As Pink puts it, the autonomy here is over task, technique, time, and team. What you are going to do, how you are going to do it, when you are going to do it, and who you are going to do it with. Task is certainly related to purpose (purpose is a big picture task, I suppose). And technique might be one of the objects of mastery.

So here's how I see it. We start with the WPA Outcomes Statement. It's sweeping and fairly general, Many of the terms are open to interpretation and debate. And in my view, many of the outcomes themselves could be interrogated and others added. As Pink points out, extrinsically motivated people play within boundaries (in an effort to get carrots); intrinsically motivated people play with boundaries. So even if you view the statement as boundaries, we want to play with them. Similarly, our program has certain constraints and policies (which are themselves open to periodic review and change). We can and should play with those boundaries as long as we keep a larger sense of common purpose that hinges on professional ethics (and if you can't play in that broad space, that's fine, you just need to find a different profession). There are ultimately limits, but I think there's a wide degree of autonomy within that, particularly if you have a personal sense of professional purpose that is at all connected to the discipline.

Within those contexts, instructors ought to be able to define their own tasks (e.g. this semester I am going to focus on developing methods for teaching revision or digital composition or whatever); they can develop their own techniques or pedagogies; they can set their own time to work (beyond the constraints of course scheduling); and they might think about team as well (finding colleagues in the program to share ideas with and collaborate; this is not done enough!).

One of the things I think is underdeveloped, both generally and at UB, is the focus on the mastery of teaching. Since almost all of our composition instructors are graduate students, I look at the program as part of their education/professional development. Here Pink turns to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his concept of "flow." Fundamentally, the flow state is one where a person is engaged in a task that is ideally suited to just push his/her ability. It is not so difficult as to produce anxiety nor so easy as to be boring. It is in these flow states where our ability to grow is maximized. Of course we are not always in a flow state, but as a WPA, one challenge might be to maximize the opportunities for teaching to put instructors in these opportunities. Pink also points out that mastery is difficult (of course), and that it requires an ability to grind it out sometimes. The flow state can help us get over those difficult moments. Also, we need to recognize that mastery is developed not inherited and that it is ultimately unreachable: we can always improve. It is the journey that is intrinsically rewarding and motivating: not the extrinsic carrots one might encounter along the way.

Finally there's purpose. I don't think rhet/comp or academics in general have much trouble connecting their work to grand purposes like saving democracy or illuminating the Truth. In fact, I tend more to be skeptical of such claims. At the same time, I recognize the importance of having a larger sense of purpose (though maybe not quite that large). As Pink points out, one of the strategies here is to give employees the opportunity to connect their work to a personal sense of purpose. In a composition program, I think this works through giving instructors the opportunity to develop the content and assignments for their courses. If an instructor has a passion of the environment, then s/he can focus on that or maybe the passion is education or media or cultural difference. 

At the same time, it is important for instructors to recognize their own managerial role. Just as the program needs to create opportunities for instructor autonomy, mastery, and purpose, each course needs to do this for its students for the students are also engaged in heuristic work that requires intrinsic motivation. And furthermore, one might imagine that as writers we bear a somewhat similar relationship to our audiences where, rhetorically, we want to engage our readers, bring them into a state of flow, and interact with their own motivations. Certainly, to some degree, Pink's book did that for me. Hopefully it is a virtuous rather than vicious circle.

In the her Chronicle article (subscription required), "Hot Type: No Reviews of Digital Scholarship = No Respect," Jennifer Howard reports on the struggles in getting digital scholarship properly reviewed. Not only is it difficult to establish appropriate standards for review, there are not many people capable of doing the reviewing. And I fully understand the nature of the problem here: the review is an important form of currency in academia.

But once again this can all be filed under missing the point.

Digital scholarship will never make sense within the context of a print scholarship intellectual marketplace. Here's the fundamental difference. In the existing print world, a text "counts" because two or three reviewers read it and said it's good enough to print. It doesn't matter if no one else ever reads it. Yes, we can get into bibliometrics, but such mechanisms cannot explain the forces at work behind a citation. It's as if getting cited as an example of stupidity is better than not getting cited at all. Similarly there can be a variety of unaccounted-for mechanics behind book reviews. On the flip side, of course it is fairly easy to measure a variety of user activities in relation to online scholarship (links, visits, time spent, click throughs, etc); there's also numerous ways for users to give feedback. So even though one might have trouble getting the kinds of reviews Howard is discussing, one would think that with digital scholarship one could get a far more accurate measurement of how people actually use the work.

So we could have a kind of pitched battle over these terms, where the evidence for the value of digital scholarship would suggest that we have reason to doubt the value of any/all print scholarship since we don't have any metrics for understanding how/if users actually do anything with it.

But I still think that's missing the point.

The point as I see it begins with getting beneath the process of scholarly publication and review, which is obviously a print process. Fundamentally to publish simply means to make something public. But obviously it means something more specific in this context. I think we have to ask why we publish articles and monographs (beyond the imperatives of tenure and promotion). What is this publication meant to accomplish? To suggest the most altruistic motives, the purpose of scholarly publication would be to contribute meaningfully to an ongoing conversation of scholarly and intellectual merit. While the article or monograph represent engagements of labor and thought of a certain scope/depth that I think are still important in the humanities, we need to recognize that the process of publication and review is not necessary to our deeper purpose. Therefore, I think we go down the wrong road when we try to accomodate digital scholarship to the process of publication and review. 

We need to rethink the entire way we do intellectual work, which extends right down to what we ask our undergraduates to do in the classroom. I don't think this means abandoning the fundamental questions that drive our intellectual inquiry. Nor does it mean giving up the theoretical approaches that we use. But it does mean taking apart many of the unexamined, naturalized aspects of our disciplinary paradigms. Sure, one could ask, "But what is wrong with the scholarly essay? It still works just as well now as 20 years ago." But one could equally ask, what is wrong with public oratory? Why begin writing essays at all?

Digital scholarship clearly allows for a kind of large-scale, collaborative, iterative, scholarly activity that goes far beyond the essay with its citations, thesis statement, and facile structures that tie into a neat, conclusive bow somewhere around 6-7000 words down the road. In the context of digital scholarship, the essay and the monograph are about as useful as oral presentation. Of course we still do such presentations, and I imagine we will still write essayistic prose. But to seek to match digital scholarship to the metrics of print scholarship is simply another sad example of why one might lose hope for the long-term viability of academics. It's just sad, sloppy thinking.

DeanDad's review of Kamenetz's DIY U raises a number of good issues that brings me back to this topic again today, as does this NY Times op ed, which essentially argues for more summer teaching to compress the 4-year degree into 3 years. As the old saying goes, time=money, and so, we get this sense that college is perhaps a waste of both.

DeanDad's review echoes more general concerns I have raised about the DIY movement and the presumption that a significant percentage of potential college students could essentially educate themselves. For instance, not only do I imagine that very, VERY few college students could figure out how to improve their writing without close, ongoing support from a teacher, most would not even elect to do that kind of work, and I'm not sure how one would encourage DIY students to do difficult work of any kind. In short, any student with the discipline and motivation to make DIY education work is also the kind of student who could get their money's worth from a college environment.

This actually brings me to the waste of time/money issue. I appreciate this on a personal level. I bang my head against my kid's K-12 education on a weekly basis. Their schooling has only one gear: slow. Actually, that's not true. There's a second gear: reverse. As far as my kids are concerned, the curriculum could move 5-10 times faster than it does, no sweat. Of course, there are plenty of kids who struggle with the workload as it is right now. 

The real issue here is that the educational system (in the US anyway) is not meant to teach individual students. It's a democratizing process that is designed to try to bring everyone to some minimal standard. Anyone who thinks that completing the curriculum to get some degree (any degree I don't care how advanced) means that s/he has become "educated" obviously was not paying attention in class. The educational system certainly is at odds with our notion of college degrees as an investment in individual human capital and with our fantasy about our own specialness that results in kids getting handed medals and awards for participation.

It wouldn't be too difficult to imagine a different kind of educational system that is more meritocratic than democratic. In fact there are plenty of models of such around the world. Our educational system, in its own localized ways, tends to focus on the lower third of any student population. Not the lower-third nationally mind you, but the lower-third in each school district: getting them to pass state tests, stay in school, etc.

The DIY approach is clearly more sink or swim. Maybe some of those lower performing students would find a passion and succeed but I think many more would choose the do-not option that is implicit in DIY. Meanwhile the best-performing students would likely be able to take off. In short, you'd have a different educational system. It would be less democratic but it would be better for some. Maybe it would be better for "us" nationally in cultural or economic terms. I guess that would depend on what one meant by "better."

[Now I should point out, as an aside, that DIY on a global scale is more complicated; what I'm talking about here is restricted to an American context.]

Perhaps it is instructive to think of these things in energetic terms. In a complex, dynamic system like our society, democratic equality or equilibrium is costly to try to maintain. If socio-economic equality is not your goal then expenditures to maintain it would seem highly inefficient. Unfortunately, equality is at odds with excellence unless one includes equality as a marker of excellence (which I think it an entirely viable argument). Once upon a time, higher education was a mechanism for maximizing excellence, but for at least 40 years it has increasingly been a mechanism for equality. That is, we have come to see college educating a large percentage of citizens as a measure of equality.

The problem is that the equality higher ed is expected to provide is not a social equality but a kind of quixotic individual equality, where everyone has above-average incomes. That is, in our fantasy of specialness we want everyone to receive a higher ed degree as a mark of excellence. Well... duh. As long as we aim to get 40% of Americans 4-yr degrees (up from the low 30s% it is right now), we are going to be in a system of inefficiency. I think a university system that was more in line with a DIY philosophy could do a good job with 10-15% of the population and maybe serve them better than it does now. But then it wouldn't be an engine of equality. 

Some notes and thoughts on the recently completed Computers and Writing conference...

1. As I tweeted during the conference, the subject of gaming is a growing interest in the field. From rhetorical approaches to games studies to a pedagogical interest in serious gaming, there were many, many panels and presentations in this area. Perhaps we'll see a keynote speaker along these lines next year.
2. Computers and Writing also continues to shift and become more specialized. That's my sense anyway. That is, increasingly I think the conference audience at C&W is different from that at CCCC, even in a Technology session. A keynote speaker who imagines a typical rhet/comp audience will miss her mark at this conference. It's not just games. It's social media, video, and other forms of digital composition. It's building our own applications. There's plenty of intellectual diversity within C&W, but I would say it is now as differentiated from the mainstream as technical writing or the ATTW conference.
3. There were some good conversations about the role of digital scholarship in the field: the challenges of reviewing such material and the relation between our digital practices and the broader conversations in the humanities.

So I want to gather together these issues through a concept of "targeting," which struck me as an undercurrent in the presentations I saw. Targeting is obviously a process of selection. It's a regular feature of most video games, and I want to keep that analogy in my here as I stray from it. Targeting/selecting may appear as a fundamental display of agency, but we know it is more complicated than that. The selector and the selectee are both exposed to one another in a broader assemblage.  In many gaming situations both sides are hunter and hunted. But even in the cases where the hunted is seeking to avoid the hunter, there are some characteristics of the hunted that emerge in this moment of exposure that call the hunter's attention. Regardless, the point here is to investigate the assemblage of exposure where the event of selection emerges.

I saw this issue iterate in the following ways:

• in our discussion of Dan Anderson's I am a map/I'm a green tree, an excellent video exploring object relations. The conversation circles around "is it a poem?" "is it scholarly" "but poems can be scholarly." How do we target the discourse of our digital work? How does it target us?
• in Scott Reed's presentation on a game-based composition portfolio. He mentions Ulmer and references Heidegger's geschlecht.  We are stamped and targeted, which in turn shapes our own targeting. For Ulmer, invention lies in the investigation of and experimentation with these targeting apparatuses. 
• in Joshua Hilst, Sarah Arroyo, and Geoff Carter's panel on virtual immersion(s) where we see the role of networks, YouTube, and game mechanics on selections of video remixing and bibliography.
• when Collin Brooke, Doug Eyman, and Aimee Knight ask if we can spell new media without "me," and examine gamer networks, social media objects, and citational systems where it seems to me that we are looking at a series of bi-directional targeting systems. We search and are simultaneously searched for.
• later Dan's deliverator presentation "Watch the Bubble" asks questions targeting in on computers and writing... its history of tinkering and experimentation and says "we are the lab discipline of the core humanities."

So we come to the point where we look at our relations with the humanities, with English studies, with rhetoric and composition, with the digital humanities. How do we target them? How do they target us? Are we, as I suggested in my presentation, drawing on Alan Liu, monstrous exo-disciplinarity? In his User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Massumi describes a series of tactics that begins with cherishing "derelict spaces." That's what Dan's bubbles are, or at least were, the skunkworks of composition computer labs where few wish to venture. However, if you are successful in your tactics eventually the state will seek to molarize you, to create a box for you in the system. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand perhaps it is a case of being careful what one wishes for.

What does it mean for C&W to be targeted by the humanities or the digital humanities or rhetoric/composition? How do we or ought we target them in return? Or perhaps we should target new, less institutional assemblages. I would turn toward the heuretic, but then you likely knew that. That means breaking free of the hermeneutic questions of target that revealing meaning and instead turn toward production. Do not ask why I make these selections but rather what these selections produce. Rather than seeking selections that are meant to reify some illusory internal identity, why not experiment with the targeting assemblages themselves... maybe even turn them off. What happens then?

"Luke, you switched off your targeting computer! What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I'm all right."

danah boyd makes this argument in a recent post, suggesting

Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You’re wrong. People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago. Facebook may not be at the scale of the Internet (or the Internet at the scale of electricity), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not angling to be a utility or quickly becoming one. Don’t forget: we spent how many years being told that the Internet wasn’t a utility, wasn’t a necessity… now we’re spending what kind of money trying to get universal broadband out there without pissing off the monopolistic beasts because we like to pretend that choice and utility can sit easily together. And because we’re afraid to regulate. All of this comes out of the reaction to Fb's continuing push to make user information public. I understand boyd's point, but I suppose I wonder what it is exactly that "we" want Fb to be. I've been on Fb for a number of years, but not as long as I've been blogging here. I guess I've always thought of the web as a public space. On facebook I do post things of a more quotidian and personal nature than I tend to on Twitter. And here I don't really post personal things at all. But none of it is really personal. My Fb "friends" include something like 25% people I have never met but are in my field, 50% professional colleagues who I've met at conferences, 20% people I haven't seen in 15 years, and 5% other. Basically I wouldn't share anything on Facebook that I wouldn't share with students in a class. Indeed, I have students who have friended me. So in my Fb account there really isn't anything that isn't otherwise accessible on the web; it just offers one more way for people to find me.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that everyone needs to be like me! I can understand that some people want to use Fb to communicate in a semi-private way with a narrow group of friends.

That said, the privacy issue is really just a slice of the problem. What is more annoying here is the way that Fb wants to monetize users' immaterial labor by selling information to commercial interests. If Fb wants to use my status updates about jogging to sell me exercise gear or my age and education to target me demographically then that starts to get on my nerves. As long as it's just on my Fb page, like ads in gmail, I can live with it. But if it starts to get pervasive, following me around the web, then my inclination would be to shut up.

Personally I am skeptical of the utility metaphor. Maybe people are dependent on Fb, but that dependency reads more like an addiction or habit. If Fb is as indispensable as boyd suggests, then why can't they get users to pay for the service? People are willing to pay for electricity, cable, internet service, etc. If users aren't willing to pay for Fb then how important can it really be?

Underlying this all is the problematic concept of "private communication." To begin with, privacy is a legal fiction. Among bees, as I remember reading in Kittler, one bee can communicate via its dance the location of a flower to another bee, but that second bee is not able to pass the message along. Only that first bee can communicate the message. That's essentially private communication. It can only be shared by its author.

But human communication doesn't work that way. Anything that you communicate can be recommunicated. In fact, anything that you can know about yourself, even if you keep it in your head and never speak of it, can be known by others and recommunicated. Communication is not private, but it is not public either. Public is just the other side of the legal fictional coin here. Now when I say legal fiction I don't mean to suggest that it is unimportant but only that we shouldn't mistake the social mechanisms we create to try to manage communication with the actual mechanisms of communication.

As I often discuss here, if thought and communication fundamentally occur through exposure to others, then any methods to limit exposure, from encryption to contracts, operate only by limiting the value and potential of thought. When Zuckerberg argues that our values regarding privacy are changing, he's probably right. After all, they are always changing. That doesn't mean we want radical transparency today though. Exposure is critical to our cultural development, but at the same time over-exposure can be crippling. In some sense, this is what Fb is already facing as it deals with the exorbitant costs of maintaining all this user data.

danah boyd makes this argument in a recent post, suggesting

Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You’re wrong. People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago. Facebook may not be at the scale of the Internet (or the Internet at the scale of electricity), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not angling to be a utility or quickly becoming one. Don’t forget: we spent how many years being told that the Internet wasn’t a utility, wasn’t a necessity… now we’re spending what kind of money trying to get universal broadband out there without pissing off the monopolistic beasts because we like to pretend that choice and utility can sit easily together. And because we’re afraid to regulate. All of this comes out of the reaction to Fb's continuing push to make user information public. I understand boyd's point, but I suppose I wonder what it is exactly that "we" want Fb to be. I've been on Fb for a number of years, but not as long as I've been blogging here. I guess I've always thought of the web as a public space. On facebook I do post things of a more quotidian and personal nature than I tend to on Twitter. And here I don't really post personal things at all. But none of it is really personal. My Fb "friends" include something like 25% people I have never met but are in my field, 50% professional colleagues who I've met at conferences, 20% people I haven't seen in 15 years, and 5% other. Basically I wouldn't share anything on Facebook that I wouldn't share with students in a class. Indeed, I have students who have friended me. So in my Fb account there really isn't anything that isn't otherwise accessible on the web; it just offers one more way for people to find me.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that everyone needs to be like me! I can understand that some people want to use Fb to communicate in a semi-private way with a narrow group of friends.

That said, the privacy issue is really just a slice of the problem. What is more annoying here is the way that Fb wants to monetize users' immaterial labor by selling information to commercial interests. If Fb wants to use my status updates about jogging to sell me exercise gear or my age and education to target me demographically then that starts to get on my nerves. As long as it's just on my Fb page, like ads in gmail, I can live with it. But if it starts to get pervasive, following me around the web, then my inclination would be to shut up.

Personally I am skeptical of the utility metaphor. Maybe people are dependent on Fb, but that dependency reads more like an addiction or habit. If Fb is as indispensable as boyd suggests, then why can't they get users to pay for the service? People are willing to pay for electricity, cable, internet service, etc. If users aren't willing to pay for Fb then how important can it really be?

Underlying this all is the problematic concept of "private communication." To begin with, privacy is a legal fiction. Among bees, as I remember reading in Kittler, one bee can communicate via its dance the location of a flower to another bee, but that second bee is not able to pass the message along. Only that first bee can communicate the message. That's essentially private communication. It can only be shared by its author.

But human communication doesn't work that way. Anything that you communicate can be recommunicated. In fact, anything that you can know about yourself, even if you keep it in your head and never speak of it, can be known by others and recommunicated. Communication is not private, but it is not public either. Public is just the other side of the legal fictional coin here. Now when I say legal fiction I don't mean to suggest that it is unimportant but only that we shouldn't mistake the social mechanisms we create to try to manage communication with the actual mechanisms of communication.

As I often discuss here, if thought and communication fundamentally occur through exposure to others, then any methods to limit exposure, from encryption to contracts, operate only by limiting the value and potential of thought. When Zuckerberg argues that our values regarding privacy are changing, he's probably right. After all, they are always changing. That doesn't mean we want radical transparency today though. Exposure is critical to our cultural development, but at the same time over-exposure can be crippling. In some sense, this is what Fb is already facing as it deals with the exorbitant costs of maintaining all this user data.

There's been much talk around the web regarding Anya Kamenetz's book DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, which obviously connects with a conversation about the changing nature of higher education which is a long time topic here. Clearly I am interested in the potential of digital media to change education. I have often written about changes I see happening or think will happen. I write even more about the possibilities I see and interesting, productive ways to intervene in this situation. At the same time, I remain skeptical of the potential of a non-institutional educational system working as a substitute for higher education for the majority of students.

Put bluntly, if you were to take the average student I have taught and tell them "Here's the web; go get an education," the results would not be good. Is it hypothetically possible to create a society where such a system could operate in lieu of institutionalized education? I would say yes. Many, many things are hypothetically possible. Could this kind of approach work now for a small percentage of people? Probably, especially if they already have an extensive college education. (And it's only partly ironic that most of the people who argue for DIY education have impressive formal educations, without which they probably wouldn't be in a position to make the arguments they do.) But I digress.

The point I really want to make here is that all education is DIY. Maybe we've forgotten that, and maybe that's part of the problem we face. A student enters my composition class. I can't make her learn. The best I can do is create a context where she has a greater opportunity to learn about writing than if she wasn't in the course. The work I do with students in the classroom or in office hours and the communications I have with them online or through the assignments they do and the comments I give them are just a tiny portion of the learning process. 

Really you have to do it yourself. And ultimately college is about putting people in a situation where they can become more independent learners. But we see how hard that is. Doctoral students go through years of graduate coursework to learn about their subject and become independent researchers, but it is common for doctoral students to struggle in the transition from the supervised work of a course to the more independent work of writing a dissertation. A good number never write that dissertation. And even among those who do write the dissertation, many struggle to continue researching, writing, and developing as a professional once they leave their doctoral institutions and start academic jobs.

Honestly there are all kinds of pitfalls in DIY education. The obvious one is making everything too easy on yourself. Who's going to set and uphold the standard? But equally perilous is being too hard or demanding of yourself. This is what happens to some grad students who are unwilling to believe they are ready to write their dissertations. I joke from time to time that the problem with higher ed is its mini-me pedagogy, where professors are always trying to turn students into versions of themselves. But maybe that's exactly what we need in a strange way. If students need to be become self-directed, intrinsically-motivated learners, then that's what professors should be able to model and reproduce because that's what we are.

I suppose my point is that higher education is DIY education or at least should be. It is a community of experts and learners (expert learners really) following a path of education that has been worked out collectively but that still leaves much space for independent thought. It's been a little obscured, in my view, with this heavy apparatus of general education and a kind of infantilizing of students through all these support systems we provide, but honestly it does seem like students are less prepared. I don't mean that they know less necessarily but rather that they seem to feel like they need more structure. Maybe also the turn toward professionalization has over-structured the four-year degree.

Ultimately though I look at the ethos of a DIY education as being at the heart of what the liberal arts are about.

On Larval Subjects, Levi discusses three mereologies in a description of the relations between objects in subtractive OOO. To summarize (though you should read it yourself), when talking about a couple, there are three objects (the two individuals and the couple). As Levi lays out the basic theory:

Insofar as all objects are necessarily aggregates of other objects, it follows that objects cannot exist without their parts. However, while subtractive variants of OOO concede that objects cannot exist without their parts and that, indeed, one way of destroying an object is through the destruction of its parts, nonetheless objects are independent of the parts that compose them. In other words, objects cannot be reduced to their parts. The parts of an object are themselves objects that have their own autonomy and life. The larger object composed out of these parts is another object that has its own autonomy and life.

I understand this, but I also want to push on it somewhat and then comeback from the edge. As we think about parts and aggregates, at the limit we encounter two kinds of strange, conceptual singularities. I say they are "conceptual" because no human can or at least has experienced the universe or quantum foam directly. Quantum foam is theoretical physics. In theory (and based on my obviously non-expert understanding of such matters), a philosophy of objects doesn't really work on the quantum level unless it has a kind of Deleuzian virtuality. 

In a different way, the universe, while a more familiar concept, is equally problematic. Following the OOO line of thinking where an object is independent of its parts, the universe is something in excess of what makes up the universe. But where would that excess come from if not from the aggregate relations of the objects? Perhaps the universe is one of many. Energy and matter get sucked into black holes; maybe these are passages beyond the universe. Maybe. However, what this points to is the problem of thinking about totalities or wholes. Now this is certainly addressed in OOO where we understand "the withdrawal of objects." 

Objects in the mirror of subjectivity are other than they appear.

What quantum foam and the universe might present are virtuality and absolute exteriority. If quantum foam is real, then all objects emerge continually from an immanent, undecided sub-atomic turbulence that exists both inside and outside our conventional notions of time and space. This is the virtual as I understand it.

On the other hand, a totalizing object, like the universe, demands the recursivity that exteriority offers. That is, in a more local example that Levi uses, I am a citizen of the US, and as such I am part of the object. But at the same time, being a citizen is part of me. The US is part of me. Inasmuch as the US as a nation is an object, aggregated from other objects but also in excess of the expressed characteristics of those objects, and I am similar aggregate, we are both exposed, exteriorized, to one another. I am part of the US; the US is part of me; and the relation (the coupling of the US and me) is a third. 

There were three in the family, and that's the perfect number.

Of course, in a Deleuzian spirit, we might mount an anoedipal response to such a calculation: rather than the three points that define a plane, there are always n - 1 dimensions to relations.

It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n - 1). (ATP)

The "it" in this blockquote is the rhizome. If the universe is One, it is composed of directions in motion from which it grows and overspills. I am a part of the universe; the universe is part of me; the universe and I have a relation, which is three, but n -1 dimensions laid out on a plane of consistency, the virtual, the turbulent sub-atomic non-spacetimes of quantum foam. Given these recursive, exteriorized relations, it is not possible to say where the universe or I begin/s or end/s anymore than it is possible to count the dimensions of a fractal.

As I understand it, the issue for OOO is to say that object relations do not need to travel "all the way" down to the sub-atomic and back up. I agree. Furthermore, the realm of quantum foam might suggest a degree of randomness and mutation in the universe which, at least, is not locally observable in our light cone. As always, Newtonian physics remains good enough for predicting my experience of the world. This is what I meant earlier when I said I want to come back from the edge of reality. I see concerns like the virtual and totality as being taken up by OOO in a way that is not unlike the philosophy's address of correlationist concerns with ideology and representation. That is, to address these things as matters of degree. Yes, my coffee mug arises from the virtual, from quantum foam, I suppose. And yes, the fact that it is a "coffee mug" indicates it has some semiotic dimensions, and even ideological ones. But let's not forget that it is also a mug, with characteristics that are quite obviously different from sub-atomic particles, and that exceed capture within semiotic and ideological apparatuses.

Still "the mug" that I grasp (physically and mentally) is the one that is subtracted from the n. Perhaps this is what is meant by the "subtractive variants of OOO."

I'm catching up on my blog reading and Michael Feldstein had an interesting post a few days back, asking the question of whether there is a bubble in the higher education market. He points to a number of statistics indicating the declining rate of return for a college student investing in his or her education. As he concludes, "unlike your home, your education is a fundamentally illiquid asset. You can’t sell off your diploma, even at a loss, to pay back your bank loans. These students will be screwed six ways from Sunday, which is even more ways than they’re getting screwed now." In other words, students could end up essentially upside down in a college education that will never be worth the cost. Feldstein's alternative is to explore the idea of a DIY education.

So here are some thoughts I had on that.

1. Unlike the housing bubble, where house values were raised by speculation, college really does cost that much. I mean no one is making a living flipping BAs. Maybe college shouldn't cost that much, maybe it should be funded differently to reduce the cost to students, but that seems different from a bubble, or at least it's a different kind of bubble. That said, I agree that this whole business is encouraged by the availability of these loans, so that is something shared with housing.

2. Maybe a purely economic ROI calculation shouldn't be the rationale for going to college. If you're going to college solely to make money designing, producing, marketing, and/or servicing widgets, then maybe socially we should expect WidgetCo to train you. They're the ones making money off your labor anyhow. Of course that's a radical shift in our culture, but so is a DIY education.

3. So let's say half of our current college students decided to stop going to college... I wonder what that would do to the unemployment rate? It would also shift the burden for health insurance, which they are currently getting from their parents. When these couple million new job seekers enter the market, what will happen to pay rates? All I'm suggesting here is that there could be other externalities that would arise from moving so many people out of higher education.

So if you look at UB's costs, it's about $8000/yr for tuition, fees, and books.Yes, there are other expenses for college like food, clothing, transportation, shelter: but I'm guessing you were going to need those things anyway. That's $32K for a four-year degree. Even if it went up every year (as it seems to these days), it would still be under $40K. Just as a point of comparison, the average cost of a new car in 2010 is $28K. Why are we happy to pay that much for a new car, which will be worth less than $5K as a trade-in in five years, and upset by the cost of college? Typically 16 million new cars are sold each year in the US. In 2008 that number crashed to 13.2M, resulting in a multi-billion dollar bailout of the auto industry as we all remember.

This conversation is far from over, but I'm already so tired of it. Yes, great, let's find a way to make college more affordable without reducing its quality. And yes, let's explore the DIY route, which can work for some people. I can think of at least 10-20 students I've had over the last 15 years that could probably succeed doing that. 

But don't tell me that a college education is less valuable than your gas-guzzling SUV. And if you have to come to college to get the job you want, then complain to the corporations. Colleges don't require you to get a degree in order to get some entry-level corporate job. The probably isn't that college isn't worth the money. The problem is that people are forced to pay for a college education that they don't actually want.

Some time ago (about three years past), I posted here about academic co-working spaces. And I won't claim to have made the kind of sustained study of the topic that Clay Spinuzzi has. However, sitting in my office today, the issue returned to my mind.Here's my office, fairly typical, at least in my experience. All that's missing from the image is the obligatory bookshelf that is just off to the right of this image.

Here's the good thing about this space... I'm betting the furniture is bullet-proof. I'm sure it won't burn. But otherwise, it's fairly useless, except as a surface. Right now, I'm sitting in the chair (which I must say is new and very comfortable) with the laptop on my lap, because the desk is really too high to be a good surface for typing (though it's ok if one is just surfing the web). I've got a phone (which I never use--voice mail goes straight to email). And a printer (which is nice, though a video camera or some new software would have been more useful to me). The file cabinet is empty... I think. I've never actually opened it. You can't quite see it, but there's another table behind the chair. I usually drop my coat and laptop bag on it.

So the space isn't really very good for writing or research. I do that at home, as I imagine most academics these days do. It's marginally acceptable for meeting students, though I prefer to meet with students in small groups and the space doesn't really accommodate that. I could probably dump all the furniture and set up a card table and chairs and have a more functional space than I currently do.

But my point is not to complain. I know that plenty of my colleagues have worse working spaces. In fact, the point I want to make is somewhat driven by that fact. I occupy this space less than 8 hours a week because, aside from being a place to be available for office hours or otherwise to meet with students outside class, I can't imagine any reason to be there. Of course meeting with students is an important part of the job; I'm just not sure I need a space that's dedicated 24/7 to me for that purpose.

I think it's possible to argue that the faculty office reflects an outdated model of labor, one that corporate America has shifted away from, at least in some instances. Humanities scholarship is still a solitary venture. And unfortunately I think our teaching and curriculum remain equally atomized. And in part I think that the office model reinforces that. 

I wonder what kinds of academic communities would evolve if our academic workspaces were more communal?

Of course we are all familiar with the story since Plato of the divide between philosophy and rhetoric. But I have to say that composition is a discipline that loves to ask philosophical questions of itself. Why does composition exist? What is its purpose? What makes for good writing/teaching/etc? To say nothing of the many ethical and political philosophical questions we ask of ourselves from adjunct hiring practices to preparing students to be good citizens.

That said, composition has never thought of its pedagogical task as philosophical in the conventional sense of making/teaching constative truth statements about writing (though our turns through cognitive and social science represent our scholarly forays into the constative). Instead, we have operated more in the area of performance and pragmatics. Unfortunately we have run afoul of the problem of the relation between the particular and the general. As we have seen in discussions not to be rehashed here, we have come to doubt the general value of the particular writing performances we have our students practice. The traditional notion of teaching students an understanding of particular writing skills that are then generalizable to future writing situations doesn't seem to hold. 

So while there's no doubt that, in composition, students can learn particular writing skills, discuss and write about important topics that interest them, and generally have a positive learning experience, the question of how this connects with future writing practices remains. Last night in my grad class, I was making the following observation. In the typical composition class, 10-20% (2-4 students) will walk in the door as demonstrably better writers than the others. At the end of the semester, they will leave the same way. I don't believe that composition classes can transform the long-term writing ability of students in any substantive or predictable way. And honestly, I think that's an unfair demand. What other course has to answer demands like that? After all, we are talking about a practice here and how our students practice writing once they leave composition cannot be our responsibility. 

Still, that observation evoked a strong reaction in the class. I know that in composition we like to tell stories of pedagogic transformation and link our teaching to narratives of citizenship and political empowerment.  But if we can set aside this predilection, can we be satisfied with the more modest goal of having students write some things and learn some things about writing that may or may not help them down the road. Do we really think that other gen ed courses offer more?

I don't.

As such, I was thinking about composition as philosophy... not in the Platonic, constative sense but in the monstrous Deleuzian sense. Deleuze and Guattari write (in What is Philosophy?) that "it does no credit to philosophy for it to present itself as a new Athens by falling back on Universals of communication that would provide rules for an imaginary mastery of the markets and the media (intersubjective idealism). Every creation is singular, and the concept as a specifically philosophical creation is always a singularity. The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained." A few pages later, they write

The post-Kantians concentrated on a universal encyclopedia of the concept that attributed concept creation to a pure subjectivity rather than taking on the more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments. If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third-an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism.

So here is where I see composition, as a pedagogy of the concept. I'm not going to claim that what I have in mind is what they had in mind. However, I do believe composition must stand between the will for universal communication on the one hand and the concept as a PR/marketing tool on the other. When Dan Pink talks about the arriving "conceptual age" in A Whole New Mind, I fear he means the latter. I prefer, like Deleuze and Guattari, to view the concept as singular... not as a particular linked to a generality, but as a singularity.

Of course composition is decidedly not that. It is mostly a desire for constative, encyclopedic knowledge, represented by the ubiquitous handbook. When it is not, it tends to slide quickly to the other pole, where writing instruction becomes professional training. This is not to say that composition is a philosophy course, a place where the discipline or content of philosophy is taught. This is not a post about what one says or does in the classroom as a composition instructor. Sure, D/G say that "composition is the sole definition of art," but by this they mean strictly aesthetic composition, compositions of sensation. Our compositions are certainly about invention and communication but not in the aesthetic sense, rather in the singular, conceptual sense. 

Composition is not about learning particular concepts so much as inventing singular concepts that fuel thought and writing. Those concepts ultimately fold back on those basic philosophical questions I raised earlier. Not so that we can answer them finally or so that we can demonstrate value in training writers as future professionals and/or citizens. To close this off in a dense fog of theory speak, composition operates in this way because it can only be the impossible arrival of the event of writing; impossible in the sense that, in its singularity, it cannot result from thought-out possibilities but only virtual potentialities. 

  

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The Futurity of the Archive: Remix and Catastrophe on Prezi

This is my third post on CCCC 2010 (here are the first and second).

There's conversation on the #CCCC10 tag about the number of tweets (is it high or low? what does it mean?) and exchanges on the WPA list about the metrics of panel attendance and what drives it.

I didn't do an exact count, but there were over 600 panels across 16 sessions. That means that you could attend at most 2.6% of the sessions, including your own. Assuming you miss one session per day to eat or something, the number is closer to 2%. Of course most people are not on site for all 16 sessions. For example, I was on site for 11 sessions. Subtract a two for lunch, planning our panel presentation, and going through the books. That leaves nine. Of those nine, I attended five. I probably could have gotten to one or two more, but I got involved in some interesting conversations, plus I had other work to do with a grant project and classes that kept me from getting to some early sessions on Friday.

That's life. Plus, to be honest, there were a couple sessions where I just didn't see anything that was all that compelling to me. 

So call me bad if you want. As I mentioned in my last post, I was raised by one or several wolves. But I think it isn't unreasonable to believe that the typical attendee gets to 6 panels, or 1% of the conference, including his/her own panel. Based on that totally spurious calculation and the guesstimate of 3000 registered attendees, the average number of people attending any given session would be around 30, including the panelists. Of course average doesn't do one any good since some panels will have hundreds of people and quite obviously some panels have less than 10, including presenters.

Perhaps the reality is that the mode number of panel visits is lower than 6. I wonder how many of the 3000 come in one day and leave the next? Presenting their own papers and perhaps attending one or two other sessions?

It would be interesting, hypothetically, to have RFID tags on every lanyard and readers at each door as a way of measuring the number of people in each room in each session. Though generally it would tell us what we already know. There are large sessions and small sessions, and fewer people are around on the last day. Though maybe it would be interesting to see which category clusters draw the best.

Anyway, this brings me to the Twitter stream. Bill Wolff's analysis notes the following about the #CCCC10 hashtag: "total: 1191 from 176 Twitterers; Mean: 6.9; mode: 1; most tweets: @johnmjones with 87. 65 tweeted once." Personally I posted six times with the hashtag and 10 times without it during the conference. So I guess that makes me about average.

So here's how this all connects for me. Who is interested in #CCCC10? Not me. I mean I'm interested in about 3% of the conference. And I'll only get to 1/3 of that. There were more than 50 sessions in the 106 Information Technology category (the category I most closely associate with), about 8% of the conference. That's a good 2-day conference all on its own. I could maybe deal with a #106 hashtag. If there were 100 people following it, maybe it would be worth it to participate. There were only 111 people who posted more than once to the hashtag anyway, less than 4% of the attendees, most of whom, I'm guessing, also associate with the 106 category.

I'm not very interested in abstracting to the level of the field, to the level of #CCCC10. I want to connect in other ways through twitter that are more particular if not singular.

The Friday panels I saw addressed themes such as time, circulation, meshworks, loops, and channels, but I want to start here with a single image from Collin Brooke's presentation taken from an old cover of the magazine Field and Stream. It was a Rockwellian image of a father and his son sitting in a small boat, pulling a fish out of a stream. Collin used the image as a launchpoint for thinking about our disciplinary field and its relationship to the streams of information which pass through, over, and alongside it. 

However, I was also thinking about the patriarchal relationship depicted in the scene, the kind that leads to the reproduction of disciplinary progeny, the kind that takes you out into that field and says "one day, son, this will all be yours." And the stream? Well the stream has always been there as well. A natural boundary perhaps. You look at the field, and you see the possibilities: the logical, the thought-out. The stream, on the other hand, is perhaps potential (and here I am thinking of how Deleuze and Guattari parse the difference between these terms). The stream can be tapped, of course, for irrigation and so on. When it becomes larger, perhaps it powers a water wheel or facilitates travel. But I don't want to carry the analogy too far from this little scene of Americana, of field and stream.

I suppose I have always had a less than sanguine relation with "the field." No blood relation that mediates the field and stream in Collin's slide. Maybe this is the case for many/most of us? I don't know. In my case though, I believe it is, at least in part, because I was raised by one or several wolves. No one took me fishing in the disciplinary stream. No one ever showed me the field that would one day be mine. Please don't take that as a "pity me" or a romantic lone wolf scenario. The several wolves Deleuze and Guattari reference are multiplicities:

The proper name can be nothing more than an extreme case of the common noun, containing its already domesticated multiplicity within itself and linking it to a being or object posited as unique. This jeopardizes, on the side of words and things both, the relation of the proper name as an intensity to the multiplicity it instantaneously apprehends.

So the goal is not to domesticate the wolf here, to create the loyal dog who patrols the field, but instead to investigate, and perhaps intensify, the multiplicity that goes here by many names: meshwork, loop, stream. 

If one comes to CCCC and feels as if they are standing in their own field, then, I don't know, maybe it does feel like a Norman Rockwell painting, like one has come home. But if not... well then, there are many loops and circulations. Spencer Shaffner, Collin's panelmate, focused on the looper, a digital audio looping tool, and asked about the potential of looping for scholarly composition.  I hear the loops every year. I suppose this could be a negative criticism (e.g. same crap with a new theme keyword crammed in), but that's not what I mean. Instead I mean the iterative, ambulant emergence of intensities emerging in different concepts. On a macro scale, the stream loops through the water cycle, but in the more immediate scene one finds the eddies and micro currents of flows that establish temporary orders. I hear talk of chronos, aeon, time, timing, rhythm. I hear autopoiesis, meshworks, embodied rhetorics. Circulations, linking, findabilty, viral potential. All loops and layers, at least as I encounter them.

As always, the struggle seems to be with taking such concepts far enough, with returning them to their intensive potentiality or even slipping into the virtual. And it is here that I know I have been raised by wolves, that I can hear the guttural, nearly unspoken tones of disciplinary warrants that I can recognize but simply do not share. These warrants keep us in the realm of the "pragmatic" or more precisely the realm of the possible: what can be grown in this field? These warrants hold us, gravitationally, to a particular scale and point of view, where the individual counts as "one" and there are no fractions.

For example, Laurie Gries, Gage Scot, and Kristen Seas presented on time, meshworks, and circulation (Jim Ridolfo was the respondent and posted his response here). I thought it was a very good panel exploring some slippery concepts. At the same time, part of the struggle is their efforts to apply such theories, to show what is possible. And such a gesture is warranted at Cs, perhaps even demanded, and perhaps in many cases specifically demanded in terms of pedagogical possibilities (i.e. how do I use this in my class?). If we look at meshworks (or assemblages), we cannot stop at the level of the individual as rhet/comp might ask us to (or at least warrant us to). It's meshworks all the way down. We cannot re/construct a chronology with assemblages. Similarly if we are examining virtual time, the haecceity, we cannot talk simply of possibilities. I don't mean that as a knock on this panel, which I found thought-provoking (obviously since I'm writing about it), but perhaps as a prod to take up Massumi's articulation of invention in Parables of the Virtual:

a true invention is an object that precedes its utility... With invention, the perceptual direction of travel between the poles of necessity and utility, between intelligence and instrumentality it, possibility and reason, is reversed. An invention is a sensible concept that precedes and produces its own possibility (its system of connection-cases, its combinatoric. An invention is an in situ plumbing of potential rather than an extrapolation of disengaged possibility. It is a trial-and-error process of connecting with new forces, or in new ways with old forces, to unanticipated effect. Invention is a plug-in to the impossible. (96).

So this brings me back to the problem Collin raises: how to understand the relation between the field and the stream. The "field" is the abstract, thought-out possibility of object relations. It is one limit-pole extending out from each event. The stream, on the other hand, points toward another limit-pole, one of potential moving toward increasing latency and virtuality, until it is virtually unfelt. In Massumi's formulation, then, we cannot ask the field to invent ways to address databases or streams of information or the perennial problems people see with the conference (check the WPA list and similar venues today; I'm sure you'll find this going on). Instead, we must look toward the other pole, the potential, even the virtually unfelt.

I found my way to two panels, plus my own, on Thursday: "Octolog III: the politics of historiography in 2010" and "Autopoetic Processing: An Interactive Performance of Writing and Reading." 

As I tweeted at the time, Octolog 3 sounds like something that should involve a cage and Mel Gibson.... this time it's personal. There is something a little odd about an event that seeks to put historiography into question but is continually seeking to restage itself. It's like The Who's third farewell tour or something. As suggested in the title, the panel was politically charged. It was largely organized around protestations over who/what is counted as the history of rhetoric; that is, it was essentially canon-busting in what struck me as a fairly conventional way.

There are two kinds of panels that I have little interest in at Cs. Those that are essentially heroic pedagogy narratives about "what I did in my class last year," and those that argue that you should be doing what I am doing because it is so important. This panel smacked of the latter, which is not to say that I disagree with the panelists. I completely agree with the general argument that there are giant swaths of non-white/male rhetorical practice and theory that can and should be studied as part of our discipline. At the same time, I think it is an error to see the canon of classical rhetoric as a monolithic entity. In my view, anyone who would feel comfortable saying "this is what classical rhetoric tells us" needs to turn in his/her history of rhetoric decoder ring. In saying that, I'm not trying to point the finger at anyone on this panel, though I do think there was some of that kind of rhetorical move here. 

On the other hand, I was encouraged by another undercurrent trope among the panelists that focused on the importance of an embodied, material approach to rhetoric. It is in this context that I found Vitanza's response to panelists encouraging, particularly his cautions against chronology It is worthwhile to consider whether outside or other can be written into chronology. More importantly, from my view, there is a question of how the world of objects or things (pushing the panel's call for embodiment further) intersects the organ-izing plane of chronic-logical time. 

For me, this issue of things extended into the next panel. I have to say that I thought autopoiesis was the wrong cybernetic model for what they were exploring. Autopoiesis models the self-sustaining cybernetics of an organism or system. Instead, the panel was really focusing more on the mutative potential of exposure and relations of exteriority, which I find more interesting, so I was happy about that. Where the Octolog focused on identity politics, this panel focused on our exposure to technological innovations. Johndan Johnson-Eilola had some interesting things to say about spimes. From his, Anne Wysocki and Marilyn Cooper's presentations, there was certainly a thinking about things.

As I have said, I don't have much interest in calls for others to do what I am doing. However, I do think it is clear to many that rhet/comp has long been mired in subjectivity, discourse, and ideology with no real way out. Maybe embodiment is one way out, a step toward things. Which is not an argument to say that others should study the particular things I study or in the way I study them. But I do think we need some kind of shifting.

I'm back on readings for my graduate course on Digital Research and Pedagogy: this week, Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual. Massumi's text stirs mixed responses, I think. It is a hard text to swallow for many reasons. For example, he writes

It is meaningless to interrogate the relation of the human to the nonhuman if the nonhuman is only a construct of human culture, or inertness. The concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice versa. Let matter be matter, brains be brains, jellyfish be jellyfish, and culture be nature, in irreducible alterity and infinite connection. (39)

In a way, I think this resonates with assemblage theory via Delanda (of course both are departing from Deleuze and Guattari) as well as with Latour. And yet, there are significant deviations from these other thinkers that I believe would disturb other object-oriented thinkers out there. However I want to keep these connections (and tensions) in mind as I move forward here.

Specifically today I want to talk about the second chapter in Parables which deals with the concept of quasi-corporeality and does so through a parable of acting: a scene from a Ronald Reagan autobiography. It is acting though that interests me, in part because it connects the course back to our reading of Ulmer's Heuretics, which takes interest in method acting and Gary Cooper. In particular though, my question is this:

Why is acting important for the digital humanist?

In part, the answer is self-evident, at least it is if the digital humanist is engaged in video scholarship. Of course we can talk about performance more abstractly across media, but it is the particular demands of performance before/within the camera that interests me. The camera (plus editing technologies and, especially now, the media network that distributes video) participates in actualizing potentials and capacities in actors that are different from those demanded of writers by the pen/paper, typewriter, word processor. That's obvious, right? A whole new set of cultural practices, including the method, arise to deal with the challenge of acting before the camera. Even those of us who "act naturally" (as the Beatles song goes) learn that behavior in relation to the camera. As Massumi writes, "Susceptibility to possession and ventriloquism ... define the actor's talent: self-affectation. That term should be understood in the double sense of the artificial construction of the self and of the suffusing of that self with affect" (63).

In writing and even in teaching, one remains within the mirror-vision of the self. As Massumi notes, the mirror image is always one of stasis, the self at rest. In order to see yourself, your head has to remain still in relation to the mirror. The movement-vision (a vision of the body in movement, as captured by the camera) is one of included disjunction: "a continuous displacement of the subject, the object, and their general relation: the empirical perspective uniting them in an act of recognition. It is an opening onto a space of transformation in which a de-objectified movement fuses with a de-subjectified observer" (51). Reconnecting to assemblage theory here, there is the moving actor, the moving camera, and the eventual movements of the editor. Traditionally film demands the stationary viewer, but here I want to jump forward to the digital media user who moves as well. I also want to note that the camera capture of the body in motion is always partial and abstracts a new secondary, coded movement).  By now, we have all seen ourselves on video somewhere I imagine. This is more than/other than the uncanny. What is emerging here is a different notion of body through our exposure to these assemblages.

In short, I am thinking that digital media demands something very different from us rhetorically than traditional oral or written communication. In those we act from mirror-vision. We develop the "voice" that expresses, reflects and/or secures presence, intention, and/or thought. We compose and revise with the mirror-vision of thinking. Even if we ascribe to the power of ideology/culture to shape identity and agency, we hold on to the hope of critical theory to create space where this mirror-vision can work.

The movement-vision of digital media works differently. It is composed of that which mirror-vision cannot see. And we do not have to take it literally, as if to suggest that it is only video that presents this challenge. As Massumi notes, vision is a bifurcated sense, registering both movement and identity. Movement belongs most properly to proprioception and viscerality: muscle-memory, habit, and gut. In perhaps a surprising move, I might suggest that digital "life-streaming" connects with this movement-vision. It is surprising because we connect life-streaming with navel-gazing as the epitome of mirror-vision. And perhaps each individual status update, each tweet is mirror vision. But each tweet is like a still taken from a video, a reconstitution of mirror-vision. But maybe the whole stream in action is movement-vision, a kind of digital proprioception. I'm not sure, just thinking out loud here.

To bring this around to a close... In thinking through the implications of movement-vision, particularly as those implications were addressed by acting methods, we can gain access to the new rhetorical demands of digital media to move us beyond reterritorializing moves of mirror-vision typical of voice and style toward the potential becomings available in our inescapable exposure to digital assemblages.

I was reading Ian Bogost's "Rhetoric of Video Games" and was interested in his use of the term "procedural rhetoric." The term is also central to his book, Persuasive Games. The term caught my eye in part because it is the same term that Richard Fulkerson employs in his 2005 CCC essay "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century." So I started wondering about the potential for interesting things to happen between these texts.

Not surprisingly, Bogost and Fulkerson are referring to different things, at least on the surface. For Fulkerson, procedural rhetoric, along with expressivism and critical/cultural studies, represent the three dominant forms of composition pedagogy. For Fulkerson the WPA Outcomes Statement is a good example of procedural rhetoric, and he describes procedural rhetoric in the following way:

an axiological commitment to judging writing by suitability to the context (“situation and audience”), including concern for classical issues of pathos, ethos, and logos. Its theory of the writing process says that writing is a complex extended set of (teachable) activities in which a wide variety of invention procedures may be valuable, and an equal variety of drafting and revision activities....Epistemologically, adherents of this view believe that values and decisions are reached through dialectic, but they do not take a radical antifoundational view.

In short, Fulkerson's procedural rhetoric includes some of the dominant pedagogic modes in FYC. Of course one can take issue with his taxonomy, but that's not what I am here to do today.

Instead, I want to juxtapose this with Bogost's use of the term: 

Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes. Following the classical model, procedural rhetoric entails persuasion—to change opinion or action. Following the contemporary model, procedural rhetoric entails expression—to convey ideas effectively. Procedural rhetoric is a subdomain of procedural authorship; its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In computation, those rules are authored in code, through the practice of programming.

So here we have something interesting, I think: argument through the composition of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In a way, I think this is what is going on in Fulkerson's model as well. There, as a procedural rhetorician and pedagogue, one is teaching students a variety of writing processes. The students undertake the processes in the composition of essays, but one teaches procedures as a mode of persuasion and expresson. Now there is an argument that would suggest that all texts are procedural. Books carry with them rules of behavior. Reading a book is a procedure, and a procedure that must be learned. Different books demand different procedures. As such, one might argue that Bogost's distinction between the "construction of words or images" and the "authorship of rules" does not fully hold. And here, like Bogost, I'm not talking about the content of the media but rather the mechanisms by which media are composed and consumed/used/played. What we might say is that the procedural rhetoric of print-textual writing and reading have become regularized. Where we are quite conscious of our choices as game players, we are perhaps less conscious of the choices we make as readers, even though our choices with texts are likely more open.

In saying this I am not trying to dismiss the point that Bogost is making, because I think there's certainly value in thinking through the rhetorical issues here. To the contrary, in trying to establish the connections between these concepts of procedural rhetoric, I'm thinking it might be possible to open up this conversation to think about the role of other rhetorical theories. In particular I am interested in the notion of a "post-procedural rhetoric" that builds upon post-process theories. In this essay, Bogost is particularly interested in the potential for video games, through procedural rhetoric, to undertake the kinds of cultural critique Fulkerson would associate more with the Critical/Cultural Studies brand of composition pedagogy. However, I would push in a different direction where rhetoric processes are less deterministic and become articulated as components in a more complicated assemblage or network.

Undoubtedly, processes in a more technical/computer programming sense conform to a stricter logic than rhetorical processes. Despite that, if we think of a game like chess, with a reasonably limited number of procedures or rules, we can see rich variety of potential interaction and unfolding composition: particularly once the system is exposed to (and exposes itself to) two human players. Chess can be as much a game of human psychology as anything else. Post-process composition asks us to consider the broader cultural and material contexts in which writing practices are situated, that writing cannot be simply the undertaking of pre-established procedures or processes (not that anyone would ever say it could be, right?... right?). A post-procedural rhetoric for games (serious/persuasive/educational/etc.) would similarly investigate the social assemblages or actor-networks or whatnot in which games operate. This is not to suggest that a game or text cannot be persuasive, because obviously things are persuasive. Instead it is simply a way of stepping beyond the perceived process to investigate how rhetoric operates in these assemblages.

I was reminded earlier of Don DeLillo's White Noise and the scene early in the novel where Gladney visits the "most photographed barn in America" and his friend observes that, of course, no one can actually see the barn. It's an observation that summons Baudrillard's precession of the simulacra. 25+ years later, seeing the same barn through an augmented reality lens (e.g. layar on a smartphone), what might we be able to say that we see?

My response has been that all subjective experiences (all the things we see) are mediated and directly material, that all mediations are material. And by material, I mean that all mediations are comprised of objects and forces that are actual and virtual in a Deleuzian/post-Deleuzian sense. As such, in the sense that we think about the "withdrawal of objects" (as a term of art) and the limits of human cognition/epistemology, our consciousness can only ever sense our exposure to the exteriorized relations in the assemblage that include us and the barn. Augmented reality, then, changes the assemblage to which we are exposed. I don't know if we can say we are exposed to "more data" through AR, but we might say that we are exposed to more information if we define information as a subjective, value-laden evaluation of data (i.e., information is data we value). On the other hand, another person might find the AR data interferes with the experience/information s/he's looking for. Either way, though, we have the same chance (i.e. none) of seeing the "real" (as in unmediated) barn. But we can be exposed to the barn (and AR) through an assemblage of exteriorized relations that are material (virtual/actual), real but abstract, and that's what we need to deal with.

Anyway, that's just a brief philosophical prelim to thinking about AR and serious/educational games. I'm directly involved in a game development project right now, and it has me thinking about these issues on a general philosophical level that I feel comfortable sharing here.

The first thing that strikes me about serious gaming is the fundamental disconnect between the rhetorical stances of games and schooling. Here are a few key ones. Generally speaking, schooling is compulsory and transactional. The discourse is rational and formalist. For example, you go to school and the teacher says, "we are going to learn about the American Revolutionary War." You get no choice in the matter. The teacher gives you a series of assignments, and you do them. And through the teacher's lectures, the school textbooks, and the student assignments the primary goal is clarity: to make available any and all knowledge about the war that is requisite for the curriculum. Rhetoric is simply a matter of style-correctness.

Games obviously present a different set of conditions. I'll circle back to the questions of compulsion and transaction in a moment and deal with the question of gaming discourse first. Obviously there are many kinds of games. However, I would suggest that in all games (video or otherwise), there are secrets. All games come with rules of play, but the rules do not, cannot, tell you how to play the game. The discourse is both hermeneutic and heuristic. That is, one must recognize patterns to discover the secrets of gameplay, but then one needs to turn that knowledge into inventive action. Games hide things from players; winning a game means discerning hidden things (e.g. the cards your opponent is holding, the next pitch to be thrown, whether the defense will blitz, the weakness of the boss creature at the end of a level, etc.). Often such discernment is intuitive (it cannot be reduced to rational thought) and draws upon an assemblage of data that we cannot fully account for in our conscious minds. 

As such, while such gaming exchanges are transactions, they cannot be reduced to the zero-sum game of rational exchange (i.e I do a, b, and c, and you give me an "A, B, or C."). And here is where I think we uncover the "compulsory" experience of schooling. The negative compulsion of schooling is its demand that we reduce our experience to rational exchange. One could suggest that this insistence on rational exchange is intended to condition students for the exploitative, vampiric exchange of labor for capital (i.e. the hourly wage), but I'l just gesticulate in that direction.

In any case, the question I see serious games posing to schooling is "can schooling accept learning as a nonrational, irreducible experience?" Obviously, it's an open question.

So now let me reintroduce AR as part of a particular kind of serious gaming environment. Here is the player, mobile device in hand, interacting with a physically proximate object and receiving augmented data in relation to that object. In schooling discourse, the AR data is rational and transactional; there is a compulsion that it be reducible to some set of objectives about "what we are supposed to learn here." In short, the AR data rationally informs us about the otherwise secret/inaccessible knowledge about the object we are compelled to know by curriculum. However, we (ought to) know (by now) that AR does not "reveal" but rather alters the assemblage to which we are exposed in our relations to this object. Furthermore, in a game, we know the key knowledge is not plainly visible. In fact, the key knowledge is often intentionally obscured. As such, in an AR serious game, the data presented to the game player contains secrets that must be discerned and may even be potentially misleading in some regard. That is, something is missing that must be figured out and then acted upon in an inventive way.

When we win the game, it is fair because we all play within the rules, but it is unfair in the sense that the winner acted on knowledge she discerned that others did not (unless it's a game of pure chance, but that's not for today). In schooling discourse it would be akin to a test that asked questions that "weren't in the textbook or lectures." Supposedly that's not fair, even though all students take the same test. On the other hand, in reality, I know students who succeed in a composition class often do so because they are better writers coming in through the door. Is it fair that my kid is a math genius and yours maybe is not?

All this should really tell us something about schools, right? Though, ideologically, they operate according to a transactional, rational rhetoric, their claims to reveal knowledge must operate by simultaneously hiding other data and information. As most students eventually figure out, school is a game, but it is a cynical game because the rules are unevenly applied. As such, it is like all the mind games we play in life. Winning the school game means discerning the hidden curriculum and recognizing that the information presented to you ("learn/do a, b, and c and get an 'A, B, or C.'") is just legerdemain, that the winning tactics are not simply rational, and that what can be valuably learned is irreducible to the crap in the printed curriculum. 

One can see this taking place in the little game where students come to you and ask "how can I revise this paper to get an A?" Maybe this is a naive question of someone with faith in the transactional rationality of pedagogy. But maybe it is gameplay. However the professor's office isn't the place to find the cheat codes or the walkthrough. If I tell you how to win the game, then you aren't playing the game anymore, right? But the secret is that you can't do a, b, and c to get an A. How do you get an A on your paper? How do you serve an ace in tennis? Hit the ball hard enough, in the right place. How do you do that? It's a secret that you can't be told but must interpret and invent. In school that seems unfair because of this illusion of rational transactions, but in almost any other context we understand this implicitly. You don't walk up to a beautiful stranger and ask them how to convince them to have sex with you. We reject the implicit terms of the car salesperson who asks "what do I have to do to get you into a car today?"

This may seem far afield from AR and serious games (ok it is). But I think my underlying point here is that the study of AR and serious games ought to be able to tell us some things about the schooling pedagogies that emerged in the context of industrial capitalist culture. Serious games give us a real opportunity to rethink education in a way that might lead us back from the brink of absurd instrumentalism on which we totter. 

Yesterday NCTE hosted this conversation with Selfe, Hesse, and about 65 other folks. We were in Elluminate, if you are familiar with that. If one is very optimistic, one could see the potential in such conversations, but we'd need much more practice and better technology. An hour obviously does not allow 65 people enough time to really converse. One has to appreciate Selfe and Hesse being willing to do this, but I do wish we might all have made better uses of our time.

That said, a recap and some thoughts.

Selfe presented an argument which is familiar if you have followed her work. Her main point was that multimodal composition allows students to communicate in different ways, thus not restricting education to those with facility at alphabetic literacy. Hesse didn't take up a position counter to that. In fact, the whole thing was mostly people agreeing with each other. Hesse's FYC program at Denver does quite a bit with digital composition, so at least in practice it would seem he has a fair degree of support for the concept. Furthermore, though not everyone participated, my sense is that the audience was one that was largely in agreement with the value of digital composition.

The only issues that were really raised had to do with resources and professional development. Those are certainly issues, but mostly if one hasn't decided that digital composition is a priority. And by "one," I mean as an institution and/or profession. IF, in a very hypothetical sense, at UB we decided, with the support of the administration, that digital composition was integral to composition, we could acquire the technological resources and provide the professional development needed. In fact, I think we are overly stuck on the notion of "computer labs," so when we get stuck on those costs, we may be going down the wrong road.

I appreciate Selfe's call for us to address students with non-alphabetic literacy strengths. However,  I fear that such an argument is one of dozens of things that universities should do. I think compositionists like to frame their arguments as ethical imperatives, and they respond well to such arguments. So while I agree that we should do this, I don't really see that as a positive path toward digital composition. For as much as Selfe states her dislike of the term "disability" (and I agree with her about the term's problematic status), her argument has a problem of situating digital composition as an "assistive technology" (at least for those less troubled by the term disability). And while these technologies certainly can be assistive in this sense, that's just one small portion of their functioning.

The other argument touched upon is the inevitability argument: all these students doing all these techie things and changes in communication in the workplace... inevitably we will need to address these technologies. I agree with that as well, but the argument does suffer from a few problems, which were discussed yesterday. First, what sense do we have of the prevalence of digital composition in the workplace or elsewhere in the academy? For the latter, the sense is not much is going on overall. Of course I always want to ask how many people are writing humanistic research essays in their workplace or in their other courses? So in part, I think this is a misleading concern, even though I do think composition ought to engage with such writing practices (but in a critical way, not in a way that is slavish to their trends). The second concern has to do with how much value we are willing to put on informal social communication, from texting to YouTube videos. Can we take these as indicators of where other rhetorical practices might go?

The other problem with inevitability is when. It suggests "some day" this will happen. But it doesn't necessarily create any exigency to do this now. Similarly the "should" argument is compelling, but there are lots of things composition "should" do.

I might add a different argument that essentially says that we have always taught composition in the context of available technologies. At some point in history, I'm not sure when, it became necessary to turn in typed essays (that was the case when I was an undergrad). Before that, handwritten essays were acceptable. Somewhere in the 90s, essentially all students started turning in word-processed essays. Each of these changes radically altered the materiality of composition, but we could ignore that because the materiality of the final product was the same (so much for our so-called "process orientation"!).  Now the materiality of our compositional spaces are changing rapidly. Not some day, not inevitably, but already and we are behind. 

We do not get to choose IF composition should change. Composition has changed. No matter what kind of assignments you create in your FYC course, the compositional contexts in which they are produced have radically altered. And we risk our intellectual and professional future by ignoring that fact.

As a side note...

The question I didn't get to ask was about networked, collaborative composition. Honestly I am more interested in the possibilities of students writing texts together using a range of networked technologies than I am in their bringing in non-textual media (though I think that is also significant). I think once you start composing online it is inevitable that you will bring in other media. I know I don't do it much here in the informal space of my blog, but if you look at my online publications, you'll see plenty of other media. If you were to look in the online spaces of my courses, you'd see a variety of media as well. But I digress. As I said, I think one of the important things to have happen in a composition class is for students to get practice in real collaboration. Not necessarily on a single document or paragraph, but on a site.

I didn't ask in part because we ran out of time, but also because I didn't see the point in asking. Just like conference panels, a conversation like that is highly performative and in my mind not really an opportunity to work through things. 

As a second side note...

One question I did ask when I registered got folded into the presentation and was answered (sort of), but there was certainly some miscommunication. I had asked if we thought that the fact that many rhet/comp folks have little/no expertise with digital comp was a problem for us in having this conversation. Selfe answered by saying that our state of not-knowing wasn't an excuse. That's an answer of sorts, but it doesn't really address the problem I was describing. The problem I was trying to describe is one where a majority of rhet/comp faculty do not agree with the argument that digital composition is integral to FYC and part of the reason they do not agree is that they have no facility with digital composition themselves. Yes they could be trained, but first they would have to want to be trained. They would have to see digital composition as integral to their work. 

So maybe this state of things isn't an "excuse," but I certainly think it is a problem we have to face.

In other words, right now I think it would be overly generous to say that 30% of rhet/comp PhDs have the facility with digital comp necessary to teach it in FYC. And I would think less than 5% of FYC instructors have that capacity (though they could be trained/supported if the programmatic/institutional priority was there). If the situation were reversed and 70% of r/c phds had this facility, I doubt we would be having this conversation. 

So to me, "excuse" or not, the whole problem we are really facing in this disciplinary question is the general lack of fitness among r/c faculty to address the concern.