Brooke, Collin. Lingua Fracta:  Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2009.

Chapter Four

Executive Summary:

In this chapter, Brooke goes over a lot of the same territory he covered in Making Room, Writing Hypertext. Here he recaps such issues as containerism, spatial practice (Lefebvre’s perceived space), and the situation of arrangement in contemporary hypertextual scholarship.  Yet, after rehashing and revising his thesis, he discusses the notion of patterning (the new rhetorical arrangement tool in hypertextual worlds) in the context of databases and tag clouds.  In his discussion, Brooke contends that databases are not what Manovich termed flat lists of items that don’t tell stories.  Rather, Brooke recommends looking at databases as sites of arrangement toward narratives.  Databases and narratives are not “enemies” as Manovich claims; rather, they are designed, structurally, to yield meaningful information about encounters between database and story.  This is most obvious in Brooke’s description of Amazon.com’s databases on pgs. 100-102.  Once patterns in database information are discovered, the middle ground between readerly and writerly text is found – the patterns shape the narratives but are shaped by them as well because they are always emergent.  To name this middling, Brooke uses the term “collection.”  This seems to be a nod in the way of social constructions of self for a couple of reasons.  First, the collection is the bridge between the narrative and the database.  In Brooke’s account, the collection is best understood as a bookshelf of YOUR books.  Others might see the books as a database; however, your ordering and understanding – as well as the narratives of attainment and use that accompany each book – and the social conditions that led to those narratives of attainment and use – are the stories.  Hence, kairotically (in Rickert’s sense), your collection will lead you to the perception of pattern – what Brooke claims as the new form of arrangement.

Writing Against:

Manovich

Key Questions:

1.  How do we conceive of arrangement in the context of the web?

2.  How do databases shape our understanding of the pattern in web technologies?

3.  How can we use databases on micro and macro scales to come to understandings of arrangement in hypertextual environments?