Nov 18th 09 Posted by justin in CCR691

CCR691 – Network – Ch. 6 – for Comment

Spinuzzi, Clay. Network:  Theorizing Knowledge Work in Communications. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Chapter Six:  Is Our Network Learning?

Summary:

In this chapter S. discusses how the nature of work has changed fundamentally in the age of informational capitalism.  By referring to workers as “deskilled” (Haraway), “dividuals” (Deleuze), “reskilled” (Castells), and “lifelong learners” (Zuboff and Maxmin), S. points out that the worker in the informational age will be in a constant state of negotiating different tasks and demands.  This argument is laid out in more detail at the beginning of Chapter 5.  Anyhow, after illustrating that Telecorp’s primary problem is a modular-production training model (well suited for Fordist economies, but no more), S. argues that they must do more associational – or rhizomatic – training in the future.  Instead of vertical integration models of learning (it all comes from the top down), what needs to happen more is horizontal learning practices – learning predicated on associations across departments.  While S. criticizes the formal training, apprenticeship and self-learning at Telecorp, he recognizes that learning did occur – to some extent.  He categorizes that learning in the same way that he characterizes networks in chapter 2.

1. Heterogeneous – Workers at Telecorp were able to juxtapose different things – humans, individuals, nonhumans, groups, tools, belief, etc. – into assemblages that collectively perform activities.  They even learned in a heterogeneous manner through heterogeneous genres and tools.
2. Multiply linked – Because of all of the hidden passages and Hannibal’s passes at Telecorp, learning happened through multiple links to multiple people and technologies.  This learning subverted the vertical integration model.
3. Black-boxed – There was a problem with black-boxing at Telecorp.  Because the various assemblages wherein work occurred had so many facets and were changing so often, the information to that needed to be transferred between actants became too idiosyncratic and specific.  According to Spinuzzi to more effectively traverse the assemblages at work, more horizontal training in confidence-building and negotiation needed to be attended to.  This sort of training would result in the closure of some of the more problematic black-boxes in the network.
4. Transformative – Transformations are central to any network because they allow for new pressures (Actor-Networks) to be assembled.  While Telecorp did a good job transforming texts, they did not provide for a way to transform their workers (training) so that the workers themselves would be capable of working through the associations and away from siloic modularities.

Method:

• While the method has been pretty clear throughout the book, Spinuzzi again attends to Actor-Network-Theory and, to a lesser degree, Activity Theory in this section.
• Spinuzzi’s work is ethnographic.

Questions:

• I wonder to what degree Spinuzzi’s method is a rhetorical-analytical schema to make sense of an ethnographic study.  Bonnie Nardi, in her new book (forthcoming 2010) on activity theory and World of Warcraft calls her activity-theory informed research as “go-with-the-flow ethnography.”  To what extent is this work ethnography with an ANT/AT inspired data analysis sieve?
• How can we see ourselves using ANT or AT in our own work?  We’ll try to take this question up more at the end of our presentation tomorrow.

Nov 7th 09 Posted by justin in CCR691

CCR691 – Final Project – Rudy

Rudy, Alan. “Actor-Network Theory, Marxist Economics, and Marxist Political Ecology*.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 6 (2005): 85-90. Print.

• The relationship between Marxism and ANT is logical because of Marxisms longtime engagement with the historical concern with relations between natures, sciences, technologies, and societies.
• ANT is characterized as a “non-modern relational mode of analysis” that isn’t comfortable with the dualisms of modernity:  science-politics, subject-object, macro-micro, etc.  In Marxist terms, it utilizes a materialist conception of history.
• Power in ANT is a network effect – not something wielded by social individuals over objectified others or natures (87).
• Latour and ANT background many of the “sociopolitical worlds” infusing technoscience.
• ANTs goal – as articulated by Callon – is to permit “an explanation of how a few obtain the right to express and to represent the many silent actors of the social and natural worlds they have mobilized” (90).  In this sense, ANT is an exploration of political representation and the genesis of sovereignty.

Nov 7th 09 Posted by justin in CCR691

CCR691 – Final Project – Spinuzzi – TEXTS

Spinuzzi, Clay.  “TEXTS OF OUR INSTITUTIONAL LIVES: Accessibility Scans and Institutional Activity: An Activity Theory Analysis.” College English 10.2 (2007): 189-201. Print.

• Spinuzzi defines “web accessibility” as “the ability for any user to read and understand a website with appropriate adaptive technology  If a user is visually imparied, for instance, she or he should still be able to ‘read’ the site by listening to a screen reader” (189).
• That being said, Spinuzzi recognizes that web accessibility is something that can’t really be defined by a set of regulations.  In fact, it’s usually defined in practice, or in activity, or in a series of several overlapping activities.  Because of the inteference among the activities that occur in web accessibility, the term becomes quite difficult to define.
• Because accessiblity is the result of competing overlapping activity – and because the levels of accessibility are contestable/d, Spinuzzi notes that “Accessibility is a rhetorical enterprise” (190) and as such should be taken up by rhetorical scholars.
• Spinuzzi uses AT to “investigate accessiblity as a contested, polymotivated object(ive) of overlapping activites” (190).
• AT states that activities are organized around an object(ive) – the object of our labor – that is preatedly achieved and cyclically maintained (190).
• Instruments and rules are mobilized in a community in an AT system.
• A division of labor exists that assigns actions that collectively comprise the accessibility project.  Finally, outcomes are the hoped for ends that this project undertakes.
• The definitive AT graph occurs on 192.  I’m going to try and post into this blog post.
• 
• There are structural guidelines (ALT text for a missing picture), interpretive guidelines (what the ALT text for a missing picture says), and many other objectives.  Here’s another of Spinuzzi’s lovely graphs to describe this activity network:
• 
• Even if the structural components are in order, the interpretive (accessiblity as an object(ive) of user experience) isn’t as easy to achieve.  In other words, the “informational ecologies” that make up the user’s experience also play a huge role in accessibliity.  (195).
• Contradictions in this activity system occur when accessibility is both met and not met.  Consider, for example, the embedded YouTube videos.  The tags that these videos contain are coded correctly, so they are structurally correct; however, they are not accessible in the interpretive sense because the users won’t be able to hear them and they aren’t captioned.  This isn’t UTs problem per se, but if the web pages on which the videos are embedded are on UTs servers, then accessibility is both achieved and not achieved.
• Spinuzzi ties this activity to a rhetorician at the end of the article by noting how the seemingly beuracratic work of compliance with “procedures and rules” is actually – when traced back to their originating activities – a rhetorical act filled with the lively discussions of policy in which he can participate directly through his iimplementation of the policy (199).

Nov 7th 09 Posted by justin in CCR691

CCR691 – Final Project – Linstead

Linstead, Stephen. “Ethnomethodology and Sociology: An Introduction.” The Sociological Review 54 3 (2006): 399-404. Print.

• Ethnomethodology’s goal is to create an “alternative program to reveal social order as dynamic, contingent ‘ongoing accomplishment” (399).
• Ethnomethodology doesn’t consider the micro or the macro, rather, it tries to concern itself with the different contexts of accountability in which both individuals and institutions are given identity and reproduced.
• Ethnomethodology was first articulated by Garfinkel.  Latour references him as an American theorist working toward similar goals as ANT.

1. Garfinkel’s work looked at neither macro or micro sociology (sites); rather, because Garfinkel doesn’t study either institutions or individuals, but contexts of accountability (think the network and relations inside the network, the black box, etc.) because this is where and how social institutions and individual members are reproduced holistically” (400).

Nov 7th 09 Posted by justin in CCR691

CCR691 – Final Project – Johnson-Eilola

Johnson-Eilola, J. “Living on the Surface:  Learning in the Age of Global Communication Networks.” Page to Screen:  Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. Snyder, Ilana. London: Routledge, 1998. 185-210. Print.

• In this piece, J.E. makes the argument that we are living in an age of the “surface” or of ahistorical existence.  This makes the older folks (the essay is from 98) uncomfortable because the surface ignores the deep histories of existence; however, there’s no need to fear.  Play – in all it’s wonderfullness – is the way that rhizomatically associating learning takes place now “on the screen.”
• This article explains the difference between instrumentalist (type, print, etc.) technologies and “substantive” (TV, the web) technologies.  The surface technologies are actually substantive in ways that the instrumentalist technologies could never imagine – they form their users as much as the users form them (189). 
• The chapter demonstrates the “postmodern” communication consumption of children by investigating 1) simultaneous, parallel reading and 2) free-form, ill-defined problem domains. 
• Smart observations about free-form nature of games nowadays opening up narratives that linear, modernist board games could not. 
• These new sorts of interfaces and games emphasize space over time.  The space is to be explored and the temporal accumulation – so valued by modernity – is entirely tangential to the overall enterprise. 
• J.E. posits that the database is the fundementally postmodern way to aggregate, store, sift, and contain information.  This is in opposition to the linear-hierachical list (197).
• Ludic vs. resistance postmodernism is dicussed at the end of the article.  The ludic is the complete free associaotion of signifiers – nothing means anything.  Resistance asks us to look at the free-play of signifiers and attempt to demonstrate how the breaking down of traditional hierarchies can be reconstructed in more equitable and just ways. 
• The “moving terrain” of postmodernism doesn’t completely negate truths.  Working from Benhabib’s theororization of pomo, J.E. notes that it is important to consider HOW truths enter into discourses.  That’s the real question . . . not whether something is a truth at all.  This work must be extended to computer literacies.  J.E. notes that we must teach this critical ability – the ability to recognize how structures/interfaces are legitimated in order to function on the surface.  In other words, understand contextualization.