So I
read this
article about note-taking in the NY Times.
No actually, I saw a tweet about the article in the NY Times on Bronwyn Williams’ feed.
I started following Bronwyn because I saw his presentation at Watson and really liked it.
Well, that’s not how it actually happened. I didn’t seek Bronwyn out on Twitter. I followed some other folks I saw at conferences and he came up a recommended person to follow and I saw his presentation at Watson so I did.
But I recognized Bronwyn all the same because I had read his book, Shimmering Literacies, and really like the idea of fan culture, especially the one surrounding Star Trek.
I grew up on Star Trek. My dad watched it.
The point is that I read this article on note-taking.
Wait, that’s not the point. What is the point? It’s far more complex than I-read-this-article-because-my-dad-watched-Star Trek-and-Bronwyn-wrote-a-book-about-it-so-now-I-follow-him-on-Twitter-and-go-to-see-his-conference-presentations. It’s about understanding text, how we remember it and how we re-deliver it. The paradox here is the same one that technologist Stephen Carr explores in Is Google Making Us Stupid?: Digital technologies have powerful abilities and operate in very complicated ways, but they also obscure their complexity in favor of access. We can find answers more easily, but think less critically. It’s far easier for me to show the simple trajectory of the I-produced-this-and-it’s-published-here rather than the tangled rhetorical webs Sheridan et al use to illustrate the complexity of composition in the digital age.
The webs also bring up the idea of intertextuality. Just as the article I hyperlinked at the start of this ramble outlines how technologies themselves also change the way we record our thoughts and how those records inform our memories, this blogpost reappropriates what we’ve learned in this class (from readings, discussion, videos, etc.) and puts them in communication with other ongoing conversations. The connections between the texts, the conversations that happen around them, is where knowledge is generated (like Bakhtin’s dialogism). I read the NY Times article differently when I viewed it as something posted by Williams—it put it squarely into what I recognize as one of his fields of interest (something I know from reading his book and seeing him at conferences). At the same time, I am seeing it as a news story and reading it within my own contexts, including this class. When I put them together in a move of juxtaposition, I develop new understandings of not just the texts, but their contexts. Digital technologies give me the ability to create mash-up composition. Yes, we can talk about audio and video mash-ups, but I’m talking here more about the authorial mash-up. I can include hyperlinks, images, videos—or traditional block quotes and excerpts—to create “new” texts.
No actually, I saw a tweet about the article in the NY Times on Bronwyn Williams’ feed.
I started following Bronwyn because I saw his presentation at Watson and really liked it.
Well, that’s not how it actually happened. I didn’t seek Bronwyn out on Twitter. I followed some other folks I saw at conferences and he came up a recommended person to follow and I saw his presentation at Watson so I did.
But I recognized Bronwyn all the same because I had read his book, Shimmering Literacies, and really like the idea of fan culture, especially the one surrounding Star Trek.
I grew up on Star Trek. My dad watched it.
The point is that I read this article on note-taking.
Wait, that’s not the point. What is the point? It’s far more complex than I-read-this-article-because-my-dad-watched-Star Trek-and-Bronwyn-wrote-a-book-about-it-so-now-I-follow-him-on-Twitter-and-go-to-see-his-conference-presentations. It’s about understanding text, how we remember it and how we re-deliver it. The paradox here is the same one that technologist Stephen Carr explores in Is Google Making Us Stupid?: Digital technologies have powerful abilities and operate in very complicated ways, but they also obscure their complexity in favor of access. We can find answers more easily, but think less critically. It’s far easier for me to show the simple trajectory of the I-produced-this-and-it’s-published-here rather than the tangled rhetorical webs Sheridan et al use to illustrate the complexity of composition in the digital age.
The webs also bring up the idea of intertextuality. Just as the article I hyperlinked at the start of this ramble outlines how technologies themselves also change the way we record our thoughts and how those records inform our memories, this blogpost reappropriates what we’ve learned in this class (from readings, discussion, videos, etc.) and puts them in communication with other ongoing conversations. The connections between the texts, the conversations that happen around them, is where knowledge is generated (like Bakhtin’s dialogism). I read the NY Times article differently when I viewed it as something posted by Williams—it put it squarely into what I recognize as one of his fields of interest (something I know from reading his book and seeing him at conferences). At the same time, I am seeing it as a news story and reading it within my own contexts, including this class. When I put them together in a move of juxtaposition, I develop new understandings of not just the texts, but their contexts. Digital technologies give me the ability to create mash-up composition. Yes, we can talk about audio and video mash-ups, but I’m talking here more about the authorial mash-up. I can include hyperlinks, images, videos—or traditional block quotes and excerpts—to create “new” texts.
And
it’s the flexible idea of newness and ownership that I think underlie the whole
of Sheridan et al’s book, though they call it kairos. In the 20th
century we’ve become really tied to the idea that books are commodity and the
name of the author on the spine owns the thoughts put into print. (Side story:
I remember growing up and marveling at the first time I saw my dad highlight in
a book. “You can do that?” I asked. “It’s my book,” dad said. Some part of me
believed the book could not be deconstructed. I’ve gotten over that obviously.)
The point (again) is that texts and ideas are not these monolithic creations.
They are collaborative and formed through various spheres with varying degrees
of accessibility. By detaching the text from the physical page it becomes
easier to access it and mash it up (or, in the case of music or film, to
“pirate” it). Just like the print age and the format of the codex ushered in a
construct of sole authorship, I think the digital age is breaking down this
notion. Which leaves me asking how we should be thinking of authorship now.
Besides being dead (thanks, Barthes), what does an author actually do? Is this
the age of Arrangement as the key rhetorical canon?
This was an enjoyable post. When I first started my Master's program, I was really taken by the idea of “ownership” in online spaces. (Maybe I was still working out of a Romantic paradigm). One of my first projects as an MA student was a paper wherein I asked if a wiki can be “owned”. My hunt for literature, to no so surprise, brought me to works that dealt with intertextuality. I remember coming to the (not so groundbreaking) conclusion that web based, hypertextual texts more explicitly show how intertextuality is at work in all texts. Thus, “ownership” is no longer an issue. Anyway, your post and description about how ended up writing the post made me reflect on my experiences with intertextuality.
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