I agree with you when you say that hashtag study ‘is heady in weight’. I never realised just how much research went into such a study - not for the slacktivists that’s for sure. I also like how you you revel in social media and for you ‘social media’ is life’. I have certainly used it to maintain relationships and to garner up-to-date information at important stages in my life.  I am intrigued by the possibilities that these media have for social movements and how they had the potential to move struggle and resistance to new areas of resistance. I always get the feeling that activists are one step ahead of those who wish to dominate and discriminate but they are certainly trying to fight back. I loved the article by Dr Monty on how poorer students can develop their social identities in different spatial areas which allows for the participation in communities of practice.

My favorite

This week has to be one of my favorite topics. Social media. The use of online spaces and feminism, for gender equality.  In the readings for this week, we look into factors for social media which include connections, injustices, equality and everything that goes In and out of that topic. A Feminist Approach to Social Media explains 6 approaches we can actively practice, which include ways to be supportive, create a place that is safe, and builds on a community that builds each other.  I have agreed with most of these approaches however it seemed that the information provided was old news. While thinking about this approach, I think it is easy to think about feminism as a general topic and think about the kind of places we need to create to influence positive vibes. In Baby, We Were Born to Tweet it suggested that, “Early users of Twitter were finding ways to hack the writing space to fit their composing needs and “craft creative, meaty, and to-the-point messages that attract other people’s attention” by using Grounded theory they influenced the way we did the thing and soon defined how the thing has been done and will continue to be done. “Grounded theory studies have the potential to continue to transform how scholars, teachers, students, and the general public understand the community-wide importance of composing, even especially in 140-character bursts.” The work seemed to be heavy in weight, however i felt that I got lost in the atmosphere, so much to read and acknowledge, while already understanding how hashtags worked.Springsteen fans, #bruceleeds, and the tweeting of locality tied hand in hand with what we were talking about in the earlier article, no comment really on the information, however I will say that hashtags are more meaningful when understood and related in topic.

On a side note. Social media is life. Social media is the new thing to do, and I will say that I feel that anyone who says that they do not need social media in their life do not understand it. Social media goes beyond Facebook and twitter it is the internet, and websites that build relationships.

You make super-important points about the positive and negative aspects of social media. The potential for liberation and destruction are always 2 sides of the same coin but your emphasis on collaboration between groups who desire the same outcome is crucial. Many progressive movements have been hamstrung by internal conflicts that there enemies have used to divide them. Another interesting point you make that I hadn’t thought of is to ‘find your identity as an activist’ for the purposes of accomplishing more. Internal contradictions seem to be the motor for change in our societies and Twitter and other social media can play a valuable part in this. 

Cheers to Social Media!

One thing that I think that I’ve mentioned in almost every single one of my graduate courses is my love for social media. I absolutely love social media for what it has done for my life, what I’ve learned on various sites, and the power that it currently holds to change the world. 

Twitter specifically has changed the way that I view the world and has exposed me to various layers of inequality. There, I learned about womanism and ableism. I also learned more American and world history than I had been previously taught in school. 

It is admittedly painful to be on social media at times, as I have gotten exposure to the most insidious of perspectives. Also, at times, two seemingly “socially progressive” users get into arguments and I have to reevaluate my stance on certain issues. This is something that Alexandra Hidalgo and Katie Grimes point out in their video “A Feminist Approach to Social Media.” They discuss the “varying and contradictory ideologies that sometimes result in feminists arguing with feminists over social media.”

They also discuss the idea that some feminists discredit the work of younger feminists who focus on online activism. This binary, which concerns online activism versus protesting, is one of the topics that I think about often as I try to find my identity as an activist. Is it enough to advocate for rights online? Is it enough to only protest at marches? What do doing both of these things accomplish and can there be any grounds for understanding those who only want to do one or the other? I do like the idea of collaboration that they state as, “Following this feminist tradition, we propose a collaborative approach to social media at various levels, such as having more than one person involved in developing social media strategies and collaborating with organizations and individuals working toward similar goals on Twitter chats and campaigns.”

Dialogue, collaboration, and a willingness to evolve is what, I think, makes movements most effective. 

Social Media - Barriers

As Yancey said (in Wolff’s article) we need to know how and why people are writing outside of the classroom - because nobody is making them do it, nobody is making them tweet. So what is it about social media that has the world hooked? If I have learned anything this term, it is that Identification is intrinsic to understanding rhetoric and we were made mindful of this in regards to feminism and cross-border students. Both communities make use of social media to circumvent and challenge the temporal and physical restrictions that are placed in front of them in their daily lives. Monty’s article connected clearly with post-humanism and the concept that mobile media have become an extension of people’s bodies in the way we connect and identify with communities of people.

 Hidalgo and Grimes touched on 2 concepts that resonated with me - the false premise that there is a separation between the physical and the virtual (the shallow premise that struggle through digital forms is not really struggle) and the development of social and digital fluidity - especially in the content of media such as Facebook and Twitter. Both tie in with our previous readings on accessibility and post-humanism. After our class discussion, I also kept thinking of the concept of barriers - the ones we put up in social media to prevent unwanted attention and the very same barriers that those who may wish us harm (trolls, advertisers, viruses, etc.) try to smash through on a daily basis. This thought helped me link to the methods both barrier builders and smashers try to use and Wolff’s intensive research around semiotics helped me to do this. Wolff illustrated what Bowker and Star (1999) describe as the extent to which classification systems are representations of the cultures from which they emerge. The use of Hashtags showed to me the lengths that those who wish to follow us and analyse our intentions will go to - the amount of effort and ingenuity expounded to understand our behaviour is phenomenal - and as we know, it can be used for benevolent or malevolent purposes.

 The digital world didn’t land from outer space - it is not external to us but comes from us - a tool created by humans just like a pen or a watch. The problem is we have also taken our discriminatory practices and views with us and infested much of our digital media with the darker side of humanity. But, the brighter more progressive side of humanity is there to. It can be used as a tool for struggle and resistance - take for example the use of social media in combatting the oppressive regimes in the world. But social media is not just a tool as Monty’s article states. Social Media and communication augments the user’s cognitive ability. History tells us that humanity always and everywhere struggles and resists injustice and inequality and Monty’s and Hidalgo and Grimes’ article are evidence that this will continue through digital media. The struggle to break down the barriers to social progress, be they feminist struggle or class struggle or any other form of discrimination, will also be followed by those who mean to destroy these struggles. We do not escape our social relationships online.

Your blog made me think about what technology actually is - can it be defined as something separate from humans or embodied as an intrinsic part of ourselves. Where do clothes come in to the equation - are clothes tools in the same way that technology is? Is writing also to be defined as a tool like digital media and if so where does it end..is my mind just a tool for my body or vice versa? Does the tail wag the dog? I agree with you when you say that’ humans embody their technologies to write with the world around them’. All societies, whether technologically advanced or not use themselves to interpret and define the world and their experience of it but then I am not really sure where the social/private nexus begins and ends - maybe it doesn’t and its just a continuum. However, I feel that I need to read more because the articles have given me just as many questions as they have answers - maybe that is the point, eh Derrida?

For my blog post this week, I’d like to write about a few chapters in Rhetorics and Technologies. In the piece by Cooper, she states that “writing is always an interaction with other beings and objects in our surroundings, an interaction that we habitually misconceive as autonomous action that begins in our minds.”  This suggests that writing is socially embedded, and this is something that I agree with because humans interact with the world around them everyday.  Humans, therefore, embody their technologies to write with the world around them. 

In the chapter by Killingsworth, I encountered a statement that made me think about embodiment, “If techno-rhetoric resents the demands of the body and seeks to remake it in the image of the machine, overcoming its limits with extensions and enhancements, eco-rhetoric celebrates the body’s connection to the earth and strives to accept the limits of the body as part of the perpetual struggle against the human hubris and overreaching that deplete resources of the earth.” This statement makes me wonder about how the body has been remade into a machine, where the hands become prosthetic extensions.  The picture that I posted of human hands typing on a laptop is meaningful for me because, in my view, hands and fingers have become extensions of the human, and the human becomes one with the machine.  Are humans really aware of the connection that exists among their hands, fingers, brains, and the screen with a blinking cursor on which they are writing?

An interesting way of viewing embodiment may be found in the quote from Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass, where he writes of his experience with nature: “It seems as if peace and nutriment from heaven subtly filter into me as I slowly hobble down these country lanes and across fields, in the good air, as I sit here in solitude with nature.”  He has become one with nature because he immerses himself with his environment; this analogy can be likened to the way in which humans interact with their technologies.  In a similar sense, humans do become one with their machines, just as the poet has become one with nature.

It is an interesting connection that you make a connection between past, present and future in your blog because it is something that I rarely do. What is going to happen to humans and technology in the future is the question that dominates a lot of the social sciences’ discourse at the moment. Is digital rhetoric and post humanism the new paradigm by which we theorise on human evolution and interaction? I also sense some nostalgia in your blog for print media but coupled with a sense of hope - something that I felt Hayles was trying to say also. I also felt that Killingworth’s eco v techno rhetoric debate helped me to understand the ‘embodied’ debate better and in the class we discussed the lack of evidence for digital media ruining reading capabilities of today’s students. However, everything is not necessarily rosy in the garden because with advancement - there are usually (game theory!!) winners and losers and in our digital age there are definitely huge gaps between the technology rich and the technology poor

The Medium Again!

In the Hayley text, “How We May Think,” she states, “The Age of Print is passing and the assumptions, presuppositions, and practices associated with it are now becoming viable as media-specific practices rather than the largely invisible status quo.” Again, I thought that this sounded eerily similar to what Marshall McLuhan expressed in “The Medium is the Massage.” If I have learned nothing else in this course, I have learned that it is critical that we pay attention to the medium through which information is relayed. This, in effect, influences how we see the text, interact with the text, and the type information that we gain from the text. 

I am still grappling with the idea or learning to think critically about how mediums affect how we read but I think that Hayley does a good job of pointing out exactly how this works. She states,“Learning to read has been shown to result in significant changes in brain functioning; so has learning to read differently, for example by performing Google searches.” 

What if we had a generation of readers who only learned how to read from the internet. As Hayley points out, we have a breadth of information at our disposal on the internet. Would educators show students how to google words that they don’t understand? Would teachers use dictionary.com to hear the right pronunciation of words? Would this generation learn to read more quickly or would it take them a bit longer, as they would have to learn a variety of skills at once?

Perhaps we are moving towards a world in which this becomes the new status quo. I am eager to witness these changes as the humanities become more inclusive of digital technologies. However, as I have mentioned in the past, it is important to reflect on what is lost. 

Music for the brain

Music to get you energised or relaxed - there is no halfway house for the next month of study

Kop and Ciutat Morta. Not my usual cup of tea (language is Catalan) but a tune to get the anger flowing against authority and digital media abuse by news networks. Gets me energised any road.

Caoineadh Cu Chulainn.I love the Uileann pipes and this relaxes me after I finish one job and don’t want to think for an hour or so

Buster Bloodvessel always cheers me up

Liverpool tune which takes my mind of any post structural brain fog - take that Derrida

Posthumanism 2

OK - so in keeping with the theme of duality, I picked up on 2 tensions in the reading. Firstly, are we a mind and a body or are we an embodied being without separation of mind/body? Secondly, do we need to stop reflecting and concentrate on practice? This is a recurrent strength and weakness for me of posthumanism - namely that it not only has many different meanings but also many different applications.

With the proliferation of digital texts, Hayles says that neurologists know that to rewire the brain we must undertake repetitive tasks again and again and this also resonates throughout Killingworth’s eco v techno rhetoric debate. Killingworth says that we do not use a body; we are a body and the mind/body separation needs to be challenged by embodying humans when he says ‘For techno-rhetoriticians, the problem is with embodiment - they seem more concerned with the mind than the body. In their world, the mind is embodied not only in the carbon-based shell of earthly existence but also in the electronic body of the Web surfer or the gaming avatar’. Likewise, Cooper says that ‘Writing is always an interaction with other beings and objects in our surroundings, an interaction that we habitually misconceive as autonomous action that begins in our minds’.

So then, we are not just ghosts in a machine but a unity of body and spirit - Just when I think I might be having a religious moment, I realise that they are talking about reading and writing and I return to reality. However, I did like the words of Boyle who says that ‘posthumanism It is not the end of humanity but of a certain conception of the human’. This resonates with our widening compass of humanity away from a strictly normative man/woman, normative/deviant duality - this also links with our previous readings on accessibility and disability. I also thought the readings linked with earlier works- such as maybe we our becoming more automated due to our interaction with process driven texts rather than people - this ties in with Forster’s The Machine Stops where people become machines throughout the story.

Hayles is against envisaging a post-biological space. We cannot upload ourselves and live in cyberspace and her work made me focus on the question, ‘what is consciousness?’ and at this point I think the penny dropped about the importance of embodiment - embodied interactions with thought are needed otherwise it is different consciousness. Boyle also says that ‘Since posthumanism seeks to avoid strict separations between knower and known, practice must rely less on reflection as its central mechanism. My task then turns to de-emphasizing reflection, since reflection and its sibling, feedback, amplify one way of being above all others. In this section, I wish to recast reflection’s role and argue for practice to be understood as a serial activity. 544. In the class this made us focus on ‘what is reading and writing?’ and whether or not posthumanism is a never-ending process and I at last realise that I am still on the poststructural bandwagon - no wonder my head hurts!! Or is it my mind…..

It was interesting when you mentioned about humans being an advanced species and it made me think about where we are and where we are going. Is Haraway right when she says we need ‘to reconstruct an identity not based on materialism but by affinity where individuals can construct their own identity by choice’? Will we no longer define ourselves by man/woman or male/female? The technologies that we develop do not come from outside humans or our society but from our own ingenuity and necessity, so nothing we can create can be non-human (as opposed to inhuman which we create daily) even if as Hayles says that ‘being human is a historically specific construct’ so unless we are all wiped out in a cataclysm we will in the future surely be an advanced and evolved human?

For this week, I decided to post a picture of a robot to accompany my post.  The readings seem to suggest that we have become mechanical and we are robotic in our behavior.  In The Cyborg Manifesto Haraway writes that a “cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”.   Cyborgs have, therefore, emerged from the social and political conditions in which we live.  This makes me wonder about my own existence in the year 2017 where a political reality of everyday life is receiving notifications about terrorist attacks in Europe and mass shootings here in the USA on my smartphone.   I wonder, “What have I become because of these events occurring in the world?” Maybe I’ve become immune (machine-like) to these events. I do feel empathy in some cases where extreme violence occurs throughout the world, but not extreme sorrow at every single one of these incidents.  Maybe I’m a construction of the world around me? That’s certainly a possibility.

I also found the reading by Hayles to be quite interesting. The title of her book How we Became Posthuman suggests that we are no longer humans; we are already embodied in our machines, and no longer exist within ourselves. We no longer have blood flowing in our veins; rather, we have become complex circuitry.   Hayles writes, “Hackers are not the only ones who believe that information wants to be free.  The great dream and promise of information is that it can be free from the material constraints that govern the mortal world…if we can become the information we have constructed, we can achieve effective immortality”.  This idea is quite fascinating. I do believe that information and technology can be liberating and can create room for possibilities to flourish.  

In some regards, I find it a bit disturbing that these authors suggest that we are no longer humans, and the readings make me reflect on how I exist in relation to the world, and my technologies, particularly.  However, these readings are also liberating as they seem to suggest that humans have become an advanced species with the capacity to create the most powerful machines for the advancement of the human race.  

I am constantly amazed by how we all pick different things from the readings - especially those I never thought about. Your application of the material artefact to your Kindle made me think about how technology has evolved so much over my lifetime - and it made me think about the application of post humanism and technology to the future. Will we still live under patriarchal and exploitative social relations in 50 years? Will we all be atomised and enclosed in our own technological worlds with only virtual interactivity? Will women have control over their own bodies at last? So many questions on existentialism blew my mind as well but then I calmed down and began thinking about today - and just today!

Reading in the Digital Age

In “Writing Machines” Katherine Hayles points out, “Still another is comprised by the people initiating change and resisting it, writing books and creating digital environments, struggling to see what electronic literature means and ignoring its existence altogether.” I love the idea of electronic literature and examining what this means in the digital age. I, like many other avid readers, was initially resistant towards the idea of reading online or through apps. However, as I started using apps such as kindle and audible, I became amazed at what I could do with these books. With my kindle, if I don’t know the definition of a word, I can press on the word and a definition will pop up. Also, I can easily highlight a part that I think is important. I enjoy these things along with a few other benefits.

I do understand the allure of physical books. People (myself included) have commented on how books carry a certain smell and have a nostalgic feel to them. Also, seeing the books that you have read collect on a bookshelf can instill a sense of pride. However, I do think that we can give digital texts a chance. 

Continuing, Hayles also states, “Materiality of the artifact can no longer be positioned as a subspecialty within literary studies; it must be central, for without it we have little hope of forging a robust and nuanced account of how literature is changing under the impact of information technologies.” We have discussed this concept of the medium influencing how a message is received in other class sessions. Essentially, Hayles is saying that, at the present moment, the medium is essential to the discussion of literature.  

This concept blows my mind a little bit. I always knew that eventually technology would be a huge part of our lives and that eventually it would be an integral part of our lives. But to see these concepts taking place and evolving in my lifetime is astounding!

Post Humanism or the sheep in wolves’ clothing?

This week’s readings links in to the previous few weeks topics of procedural rhetoric and accessibility - movements around disability, ethnicity and gender rights which challenge the loss of credibility of traditional norms of what it means to be human. For Hayles this means that ‘bodies have lost their boundaries’. This also links in nicely with Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto which is, although ironic, a feminist project located in a desire to reconstitute identity politics, particularly as it concerns assumptions about gender norms.

So it begs the question ‘What does it mean to be human?’ or equally ‘Should we define humans by what we are not?’ Since Darwin showed that humans were not exceptional the barriers between humans and animals have been disappearing so maybe we should apply this same argument to advanced technology? Haraway and Hayles both emphasise the ‘disintegration of the liberal humanist subject as the core characteristic of posthumanism’. Moreover, they both suggest that this change in subjectivity leads humanity towards a situation where it treats seriously claims about the moral status of artificial life.

 I remember reading an article years ago on animal rights by Springer where he discussed speciesism and all 3 texts resonate with the same arguments. Why do we separate human and animal rights? Humanists argue that humans are exceptional and distinct from other life forms because we possess reason - but does a baby human have more reasoning ability than a dog or a robot? Haraway considers our relationships with animals and is critical of these sort of assumptions by humanists. Hayles’ also takes to task Humanists on the separation of mind and body and alludes that ‘disembodiment through cybernetics reveals a lack of fixity to humanness that also diminishes the value of stable biological distinctions, such as species categories’.

 I understand posthumanist rhetoric creates new ethical dilemmas such as ‘Is the era of mankind approaching some form of end?’ Or are we now moving towards a post-gender world where being a cyborg is preferable to being a goddess? I don’t think that Haraway is expressing a utopian break with evolution - but is expressing the existentialist need for socio-cultural reform by attacking uniform ideas of what it means to be human. All is going OK but…just when you think it is safe, back comes Derrida and McLuhan and suddenly I feel like a clown running across a minefield in ever decreasing circles. I realise that Derrida’s focus on the undecidability over crossing boundaries is very relevant again and so is McLuhan’s claims about technology changing subjectivity that is a theme throughout Hayles’ Writing Machines. God (dess) help us all!

I like your focus on the ‘normal’ and I found myself coming back to Derrida and the destruction of the centre. What exactly does normal or abnormal mean? What does it mean to be disabled or able bodied? In Selfe and Howes’ article, we are all TABs -temporarily able bodied and it made me think of whether old age is a disability in regards to digital texts. In regards accessibility, anything that prevents or discriminates against access creates a disability so it helps to look at things from a very different and non-normative angle. As Yergeau illustrates, ‘we need to focus on agency and not simply helping’ really resonated with last week’s readings on procedural rhetoric and on the need for creating user-centred processes. In Orem and Simpkins’ article, the focus on mental disability provided me with some opportunities as to how accessibility can deal with this kind of disabllity and to not look at it like an illness that needs curing.

For this week

The Normal family brought attention to the things that most of us fall short of. While it was obvious that the Normal family had their own life obstacles, the reality of the drawn out scenario is that it is the reality of most families. Acknowledging that are factors in life is hard on some people taking account that sometimes it is a new element, one that someone has not been around or seen before. Melanie Yergeau, addresses the predicament that follows in the classroom,  “Attention to disability, whether in a class exercise or major assignment, has tremendous potential to reshape the ways in which students come to understand themselves and the world around them.” This is where I believe it is important that educators need to step in to grant acceptance and acknowledge to material that will bring awareness yet stabilize the perceptions about what being disabled means.

In “Disability.” Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, it is stated that, “As teachers, we need to consider the ways in which our classrooms, and our own positions and privilege, recreate the dynamics that disability studies has long sought to dismantle: that of the distal researcher studying marginal subjects, without their consent in the subjects that concern them most.” While I felt like I knew what this field contained and how to go about my future class I was shocked that there was still a lot I didn’t know, “The Imagination Gap: Making Web-based Instructional Resources Accessible to Students and Colleagues with Disabilities by John Slatin,” help bring that to life. Because I do not have any disabilities I found it hard to understand what kind of modifications were needed in the digital life, I thought that computers and online websites were already pretty assessable and wow I was really wrong. If there was one thing I learned from that reading it was to think about all the things I could do right now and then take them away, and try to do things like before…… I could not, and that is the idea behind making the instruction accessible.

In  “Multimodality in Motion,” Kairos 18.1 “There’s no such thing as a universally designed text. There’s no such thing as a text that meets everyone’s needs. That our webtext falls short is inevitable.” We have to re think the normal, while addressing the needs of those around us who can not do something quite the way others can. Melanie expresses, “The importance of kairotic space will be more obvious to a person who—for example—can hear only scraps of a conversation held among a group sitting at a table, or who needs more than a few seconds to process a question asked of her in a classroom discussion.”

In “Weepy Rhetoric, Trigger Warnings, and the Work of Making Mental Illness Visible in the Writing Classroom,” we are introduced to yet another concept in the classroom, trigger warnings. They question how “How does online writing about trigger warnings rhetorically construct mentally ill students and scholars? How do mentally ill persons intervene in such discourses? And what work could trigger warnings perform in the writing courses we teach?”  This has to do with acceptance in the classroom, acknowledgement by others, being Vulnerable in a safe environment.

It is an extremely important aspect of this reading that there is an application of the theory around accessibility so I liked your practical use for the classroom. It also made me think about what it means to be disabled or able bodied and how the terms themselves are normative and up for some form of post-structural debate! The struggle in accessibility is in identifying the problem - as the reading from Orem and Simpkins point out ‘how do you identify mental illness in a world full of taboos?’ I did like Yergeau’s exposure of the problem of numbers. ‘Surely we need to focus on agency rather than simply helping’. This fits in nicely with last week’s readings on procedural rhetoric and making the process a user-centred method. I also spent a great deal of time trying, as Slatin advises, to imagine disability - to have a mouseless week or an image-free week - and it really brought home the discriminatory and disempowerment aspects of the digital world in general. There are some excellent digital resources out there but even looking around our own UTRGV campus, it becomes very clear just how little attention is paid to accessibility.

The readings for this week were about disability. For my final project, I want to build a website where students can post their work, and this piece is particularly relevant for my purposes. In the process of planning a website, I had really had not stopped to think about the fact that a digital space needs to be accessible, but it is something meaningful to consider when designing a space for students to post their work online. 

When asking students to publish their work online, the issue of self-disclosure becomes a real concern.  Students may disclose things about themselves that they don’t want everyone to know about, and this is why the use of appropriate hashtags is necessary when composing in these online spaces.  For example, if one student is writing about the issue of suicide, they would have to write the following: “WARNING: SENSITIVE CONTENT #SUIDICE” The use of caps and bold text calls the readers’ attention to the fact that the topic they are discussing is sensitive.  It is important that the readers are made aware of the sensitive nature of such a serious topic, because this topic may make them feel uncomfortable or, perhaps, even cause them to feel anguish.  The use of hashtags on Twitter, for example, are appropriate because this helps to categorize posts. Also, users have greater control over the content they want to see on Twitter because they can block tweets from users that post content that disturbs them.

The YouTube video was also very relevant and really enabled me to view (dis)-abilities from a different perspective.  The normal family has members with special needs, and the issue of accessibility becomes a concern for them. This video was useful because I learned about the 4 aspects of universal design:  Discover, Define, Develop, and Design.  In the context of the video, these principles were applicable for the development of accessible physical spaces, but these same aspects are also relevant for individuals who want to design an online space that is accessible and safe for their users.

The Importance of Being Earnest

I had only sporadically thought about disability and access - usually when campaigns made the news or when discrimination cases made the local paper. I had NEVER thought about the accessibility of digital texts. The sense from the readings was that instead of focusing on helping and accommodation, we should be focusing on agency. The central theme in Wolff, Fitzpatrick and Youseff’s paper ‘Rethinking Usability for Web 2.0’ is the need to locate the user at the center of the design process - which links in very clearly to the Bogost and Ryan readings from the previous week. Procedural rhetoric illustrated the power of processes and designs that we rarely question in the digital or the analogue world and accessibility is one reason for the need to resist and challenge inbuilt discrimination at its source.

The readings build on the post-structural emphasis on understanding meaning through opposites. So the question becomes not ‘what does it mean to be disabled?’ but ‘what does it mean to be able-bodied?’ There continues to be issues around the identification of disability - especially with the stigma that accompanies many disabilities, such as cognitive disability and personality disorders. Many disabilities remain to be identified and may be very personal and individual. It was an eye opener to read Selfe and Howe’s article stating that in reality, we are all TAB - temporarily able bodied. Disability in this regards means anything that prevents equal access to a resource - be it old age or blindness. As the authors point out, disability is not an illness that needs to be cured but can be an opportunity to make a resource even better in its design for everyone.

 Slatin says, ‘we have to imagine disability, try a mouseless week, a week of no images’. This was illuminating for me when I tried to picture how on earth I would be able to work, live, socialize and be entertained. Slatin made me think strongly not just about how we can move toward an ethic of inclusion and not simply accommodation but how most implementation of accessibility is usually reactive not pro-active. As Yergeau says about numbers, that ‘it suggests that disability is only important to consider when it impacts the nondisabled’ . This also made me think about those disabilities that are hidden and not part of the statistical roundabout. As Orem and Simpkins outline, our society makes ‘assumption that experiencing mental illness prevents your authority as a rhetor - having kakoethos or bad character’ - digital texts hold out so much hope for the future of accessibility that we have to all ensure that we do not make the same mistakes of the past.

I agree with the timing - it seems as if there is a subliminal convergence between different classes! I think there is so much potential in Game Theory and Procedural Rhetoric in exposing the discrimination many feel in society - be it bullying, sexism or any other form of inhuman intolerance. As Bogost stated on Page 12 ‘The portrayal of characters in videogames like all cultural artifacts, is not produced in a cultural vacuum. All bear the biases of their creators. Video games can help shed light on these ideological biases. Sometimes these biases are inadvertent and deeply hidden’.  The papers of both Bogost and Ryan illuminate the persuasive power of procedural rhetoric and how it can seed changes in us that last over time and change our culture. What inspired me was the illumination that procedural rhetoric as computer game players can be a new way to interrogate our world, to comment on it, to disrupt and challenge it. Videogames are not expressions of the machine but of being human

Game Changers

I found “Persuasive Gaming” by Ian Bogost to be absolutely fascinating! Initially the author talks about how video games aren’t widely accepted as a cultural form despite their commercial success. He states, “video games are considered inconsequential because they are perceived to serve no cultural or social function.” I immediately thought to myself, “Well, what if researchers looked at video games to see how they reinforce the status quo? Isn’t that valuable as a cultural or social function?”

Well, Bogost goes on to answer my question. He discusses how, “Video games can also disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world.” He states, “we must strive to understand how to construct and critique the representations of our world in video game form.”

This text is actually coming at a perfect time. Yesterday, while in my pedagogy class, my professor asked us to go around the room and state our research questions as they relate to pedagogy. One of the ladies in my class stated that she is highly interested in video games and wants to focus on procedural rhetoric. This is, as we’ve learned in the text, “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.” 

She said that one of her favorite gamers came up with this method called back scripting? ( I need to find out the exact name of the method, I might not have used the correct phrasing) and wants to use this method to teach players about empathy. Essentially, this game will take students through a series of challenges that show marginalized people in empowered situations. She gave an example of a girl being a doctor, solving crimes, etc. At the end of the game, the player will be introduced with a phrase such as “she hits like a girl.” Essentially, she is hoping that players will reflect critically about the messages that they might have heard throughout their life and learn how to empathize with others. I might not have gotten everything that said correct, and I know that she is still flushing out her ideas, but I found her proposed research question to be relevant and important. 

We can do so much with video games and therefore they should be taken seriously as a cultural and social forms. 

I think your focus on interactive narrative is right on the ball. I have always struggled with digital interactivity as to how interactive anything can truly be. As both Ryan and Bogost point out, procedural rhetoric highlights the rules and cultural norms that are already built in by the programmers, the computer hardware itself and infused with the cultural norms of the designers. Be it subliminal advertising or the post-structural effect of defining everything by its opposite - good v bad, hero v villain, normal v weird, acceptable v unacceptable - all to give an illusion of freewill and individual decision-making choices. Bogost states on page 6 that ‘Some games’ procedural representations serve mostly to create an entertainment experience, a fantastic situation that transports the player to another world. But other games use procedurality to make claims about the cultural, social, or material aspects of human experience’.

Interactive narrative

Interactive Narrative is something that is interesting to me ever since I tried to read Afternoon, although the links were not working I was intrigued by the idea of the reader interacting with the story and changing the outcome of the plot. As Ryan points out, “It would be of course easy to constrain the user’s choices in such a way that they will always fit into a predefined narrative pattern; but the aesthetics of interactive narrative demand a choice sufficiently broad to give the user a sense of freedom, and a narrative pattern sufficiently adaptable to those choices to give the impression of being generated on the fly” (99). Interactive Narrative takes its own form of life as the user interacts with it. This is the part that is so fascinating to me. Every reader creates his or her own choices and follows a different plot line. Of course, its own limitations are the development of the story already created but that in itself will not affect the storyworld. Each user can reach the same ending but though different means – or really depends on the textual architecture. In addition, “The ideal top-down design” Ryan argues, “should disguise itself as an emergent story, giving users both confidence that their efforts will be rewarded by a coherent narrative and the feeling of acting of their own free will rather than being the puppets of the designer” (100). Therefore, if reading is so attractive to so many people because they feel they get to know the characters, how much more will people will fall in love with literature if they get to control it, be part of it, and determine the outcome of their favorite character or most hated villain whether it is though hypertext or video game.

Game theory aka Rigged Rules Rule

This week’s readings by Ryan and Bogost shed light on definitions of rhetoric that I had long suspected but was unable to put into words. Ryan wrote on the need to redefine narrative away from the traditional image of written literary fiction and make us look at the hidden motivations of the designer and the process. In addition, Ryan illustrates that the way we tell stories helps us to redefine narratology and its relationship with media in the digital age. This is because stories are cognitive structures that transcend the boundaries of media, disciplines history and culture. For Ryan, stories are encoded in mental images, not material signs.

Bogost disagrees because the use of videogames is embedded with cultural and historical ideologies of their creators. Bogost highlights procedural rhetoric which refers to the ability to execute behaviors based on a series of algorithmic rules designed by the programmer. In videogames, these procedures entail not only a series of computational instructions, but constructs and interprets "a symbolic system that governs human thought or action. But why is this important? Both Bogost and Ryan converge on the idea (remember Derrida and McLure) that we can never be sure that sender and receiver have the same story in mind. For the powerful elites in society, it is essential for them to be able to ensure that it is their historical, cultural and social values that are the ones that are enforced as common sense.

Traditional game theory holds that all humans are strategic rational and self-interested individuals who will make decisions that reflect what is best for the individual and it is this concept that is embedded in the computer game narrative. Bogost suggests that procedural rhetoric exists in all videogames because the source of the rhetoric comes from the design, rather than from the gamer. For Ryan it is the interactivity that makes a medium digital and the relationship between games and ontology is similar to DJ Spooky’s rhythm science - especially when games provide choices which determine a path to follow. Videogames are not expressions of the machine but of being human and reflect a poststructuralist ethos in the decision-making process, for example, who is your friend/enemy, who is good/bad, which character is strong/weak or winner/loser. Fundamentally, game playing gives the false impression of freewill in decisions that are taken - they almost seem haphazard and contingent on the moment whereas the truth could not be further away.

I like the illustration that composition occurs over time and space and I also like the positivity that you have taken from the articles and books especially in the possibilities for new inventions as a teacher. What Rhythm Science taught me is the importance of improvisation and the way he linked it with the ‘overground v underground’. In the science of the sequence, he links with Brown’s article on ‘thinking about contemporary art as a collision’ which really confused me at first. What Brown did was help me to understand the importance of velocity for rhetoric, something which can clearly be seen in the mashup genre. As he says, the amount and speed of information has become dizzying and it is quite normal to feel disoriented by this. The appeal to the dromolgue is a useful way to help us all get to grips with this quantity and speed of digital information. Humanity is by its nature very inquisitive and inventive. Our use of language is fundamental to our communication and connection with one another and the digital media are an extension of this fact.

Before enrolling in this course, and as a graduate student in Composition, Rhetoric and Literacy studies, I thought that others outside of our discipline would perceive composing as monotonous and recursive. This perception, is, of course, not true.

Composition occurs in many different spaces and information flows through different channels and mediums. I’m writing this post within the Tumblr app on my iPhone and I see computer language as I begin a new paragraph. Those are semiotic signifiers that Tumblr utilizes while I compose. This makes me aware of the complexity of the digit environment within which I’m writing. Anyway, I’ve heard several of my professors talk about this idea (of composing in multiple spaces) before, but as I’ve continued my graduate studies, this concept of Composition happening in many spaces has come to make more sense to me.

The reading by DJ Spooky is precisely about how Composition can be remixed, like a dj spinning records on a turntable or mixing and combining bits and pieces of music from a variety of videos. I would have never thought that composing, in the traditional sense, could be remixed. But creative energy flows through our brains and bodies, and we need to find an outlet for this energy.

DJ Spooky writes, “Selection, detection, morphologies, and building structures, that’s what makes the new art go round. The challenge is to keep striving to create new worlds, New scenarios at almost every moment of thought, to float in an ocean of possibility.” This quote is a pedagogical imperative for me, as a future composition teacher, and it challenges me to invent spaces where students can create new worlds by remixing their existing knowledge with established knowledge.