Jan 27th 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

CCR760 – Spilka et.al.

Digital Literacy for Technical Communication:  21^st Century Theory and Practice – ed. Rachel Spilka

Introduction – Rachel Spilka

• The author notes that the collection is valuable because work contexts and modes of production have changes so much over recent memory.  As technical communicators, Spilka notes that the need to adopt evolution is necessary to survive.
• Evolution not only in technical skill, but productive flow and socializing forces are necessary to be a technical communicator now and in the near future.
• She chooses the term “digital literacy” for the text because it “refers a bit more directly to the rise of computer techn0ology, and the introduction of computer technology” that led to the fundamental paradigm shift in tech comm.
• Structure of book:
  • Part I:  Transformations in work due to the digital environment
  • Part II:  New Foundational Knowledge:  What knowledge is important for tech. comm. To learn in order to remain relevant?
  • Part III:  New Directions:  This section is a collection of meditations on how we might revise existing theory and develop new theory to better understand how technology has transformed our work.

Computers and Technical Communication in the 21^st Century – Saul Carliner

• The chapter describes the development of different communicative/publishing technologies and how that has transformed the work of technical communicators.  Specifically, the author considers a couple of time periods:
  • Late 1970s – Large systems, technical writers, field experience for education, wordsmithing tech documents is essential skill, worked on typewriters
  • Mid to Late 1980s – Mid range systems and PCs, called “information developer,” required tech comm. Experience and possible university education, prepared information for end user, used automated text processing systems that resembled HTML
  • Late 1990s to early 2000s – PCs, high-end software for commercial application, called “software engineers” and “technical writers,”  degrees in computer science and wordsmithing experience, prepared information for end user, used web-based authoring systems, desktop publishing, no coding
  • Early 2000s to now – Software for managing networks and information on networks, customization of networks, same names as previous category, required degrees and wordsmithing experience, also experience with CMSs, designing large databases is primary responsibility, used CMSs that work on DITA standards (Darwin Information Typing Architecture.
  • The author grounds the development of technology in the same period of changing technological communication above in 5 phases:
    • Automation of production tasks:  use of typewriters, and more advanced printing mechanisms
    • Desktop Revolution – Desktop publishing addressed issues of output on crappy printing, formatting of documents, and graphics
    • The GUI Revolution – development of GUI to replace text based interfaces (think DOS to Windows)
    • Web 1.0 – static web content is generated through scripting languages like HTML and PHP.  Also the development and adoption of CMSs.
    • Web 2.0 – CMS as a way to manage dynamic content, interactivity, elearning applications and creation, open source software and a strengthening of division between web designers and web coders/producers.

Chapter Two – The Effects of Digital Literacy on the Nature of Technical Communication Work – R. Stanley Dicks

• First, let me say that I may not agree with the article’s logic, but I LOVED this article.
• The author considers the changing nature of tech comm. In the context of a couple of different aspects:
  • Economics – macro-changes in economic systems of distribution and production have changed the role of technical communicators.
  • Management – new management theories over the past couple of years affect the role of technical communicator in reminding management of their relevance.
  • Methodologies – the nature of “knowledge work” has changed dramatically.  These new production methods have also affected the role of the technical communicator and their respective workspace.
• Economics – A lot of this information is covered in Spinuzzi’s explanation of changing work methods found here (see the section on Chapter Six:  Is Our Network Learning?).
  • The new movement to knowledge work is fundamentally wrapped up in a new value of customer experience and individualization.  New products will be specific to specific people, no copies will proliferate.  Mass production will die in favor of customizable products that meet multiple customer needs.
  • This is referred to as the “support economy.”  Because the customer-corporation relationship is currently poisoned, new modes of customer prioritization will appear (and are appearing).  Web 2.0 technologies are allowing instant feedback mechanisms that will force companies to care about their customer in a much increased way.
  • There are problems with this new model; most notably, because work will become a new experience each time it is performed (as opposed to production models), the knowledge worker will be left looking for new work at the completion of each individual project.  This is a precarious place to be – especially in light of insurance, etc.  Contractor agencies look like a future alternative for knowledge workers in a modular production model (Spinuzzi 2007).
• Management Principles – These come and go; however, tech. communicators need to know how to make themselves relevant in changing management paradigms.
  • Value added – tech. communicators need to demonstrate how they add value to their company by highlighting how they can reduce costs, avoid costs, enhance revenue and by their intangible contributions.
  • Reengineering – Think Office Space.  You remember the mangament gurus that came in to evaluate how successful the company is?  That’s “reingeneering.”  It also goes by names like restructuring – Ford just did a bit of this, so did GM.  The author traces reengineering to the transition from industrial capitalism to knowledge-work capitalism or post-capitalist models of distribution and consumption.
  • To combat outsourcing, downsizing, and rightsizing, tech. communicators should make sure they are doing knowledge work and not commodity work.
  • Globalization is changing things – REALLY? – to combat this tech. communicators need to move away from commodity work toward knowledge work (no filling out forms and getting into coding/design), develop more efficient technologies of development, and understand that translation and localization are the future (other languages, relevant to small contexts).
  • Flattening – layers of management aren’t needed in post-production models.  So, remove management and let teams perform complex tasks together.  Sounds good in theory if everyone is an egalitarian!
• Methodologies – these are the new ways that technical communicators need to engage with their work of production, deployment, and teamwork to remain relevant:
  • Single sourcing – a concept whereby individualized documentation will accompany products in the new support economy.  Databases will query small amounts of information and reassemble them per the end document designers code.  This is the future and highlights the split in workflow between documentation and presentation or writer/interface producer.
  • Agile Development Methods – These are new ways of development that put the end user in the driver’s seat with respect to development.  User-centered design, iterative design, agile development, extreme programming, and scrum all either develop criteria and develop from there (rather than via technical specifications), or use “stories” of end-users to dream new coding.  Tech. communicators need to enmesh themselves in all these processes to remain relevant and be able to fully understand what they are expected to document in a team-based work atmosphere.
  • Distributed work – because of the advance in communicative technologies and contract work, tech. communicators need to understand how to work in non co-located environments.
  • Web 2.0 – This poses an interesting question for documentation specialists.  Why not let the documentation get generated organically instead of exhaustively documenting everything?  You can do this via blogs or user wikis with support.  LOTS of companies are moving in this direction.

Chapter Three – Shaped and Shaping Tools:  The Rhetorical Nature of Technical Communication Technologies – Dave Clark

• This chapter is about “how do technical communicators learn about and assess “broader implications” and “potential influence”?  To answer this question, the author explores what methods and technological approaches have been articulated to consider the ways that technologies structure, shape, and influence the ways we communicate.
• The first section defines technology – or attempts to anyway.  The author wants to get away from instrumentalist (tools to an end) conception of technology.  The author also works hard to differentiate the rhetoric of technology from the rhetoric of science by noting how the rhetoric of technology is primarily concerned with human-made objects whereas the rhetoric of science often deals with “nature.”  To differentiate between the two, Clark notes:
  • Science produces mostly symbols through rhetorical means such as articles or grant proposals whereas technology aims at producing objects and material processes (but doesn’t science also?!?)
  • Scientists validate their findings by outside professionals whereas technologists protect trade secrets and let market forces determine success
  • Science has a “more closely bounded rhetorical terrain” whereas technologies must enlist the help of publics to be functional and carried through to fruition (91).
• Focuses and Approaches to the rhetoric of technology – the author notes that four modes/methods have been used to study technology rhetorically:
  • Rhetorical analysis – a rhetorical perspective for analyzing the problems and issues raised by new technologies through an examination of public discourse.
  • Technology transfer and diffusion – a really diverse field across disciplines, this considers how technologies are transported between populations.  Interested in such things as technology adoption and practice in new contexts.
  • Genre theory – focuses on the rhetorical construction of the writing produced and encouraged by particular tools.  This deals with things like “genre ecologies” (Nardi) and Spinuzzi’s work on the role of genres in technical communication / organizational communication.
  • Activity theory – a form of analysis that can provide a broad cultural understanding because it considers common language, structure, and context in understanding organizational cause-effect relationships.

Chapter Nine – Beyond Ethical Frames of Technical Relations:  Digital Being in the Workplace World – Steven Katz and Vicki Rhodes

• This chapter considers how ethical frames define human-machine operations.  In so doing it asks questions about : What are the relations?  How are they shifting in digital communication?  What are some of the professional implications of the digital relationships of machines and the humans who increasingly depend and exist alongside them in all walks of life? (231).
• Utilizing a successive framing method, the authors describe the following conceptions of technology and ethics:
  • False frame – technology isn’t valuable, it’s just a form of indulgence and entertainment.
  • Tool Frame – Technology is a means to an end – the instrumentalist approach – examples might be a calculator or a hammer.
  • Means-End frame – Technology is both a means and the end of those means.  An example might be something like a website to generate internet sales.
  • Autonomous frame – technology becomes a value system whereby means-ends relationships are conceived as operating unto themselves.  In this sense, technology produces moral codes (productivity, speed, efficiency).  “Societies whose economic goals are the accumulation of material things, wealth, and power, require and enforce the complementary ethical values of speed, productivity, and efficiency as ends as well as means”  (234).
  • Thought frame – technology as rational calculation – In this frame, technological rationality through the assistive technologies of something like Microsoft Word are important because they have become integrated into the composing process.  They are technologically embedded to a really high degree.  Examples are uses of terminology that permeates everything.
  • Being frame – this is when technological thoughts become the dominant mode of consciousness.  Modern technology becomes a way to order nature and our relation to it.  This considers humans as resources or a “standing reserve”  to be harvested.  In this process of Enframing (we only understand being in the world through technological ways – Heidegger), the personal is the technological. . . not just business.  Think of iPhones, Blackberries, Facebook, etc.  We exist everywhere with technology as technology; we stand with resources as a reserve.  Think of the department “human resources!”
• Digital being – This is the accumulation of all frames of being.  It rationalizes the technological order and naturalizes it so that it can only increase.
• To combat these frames, the authors argue for “human-machine sanctity” or the constitution of a new frame that encompasses all previous frames but also values the “I-Thou” technological relation as one based on reciprocity and mutual respect.  This is a reintroduction of the human to the technological.
• “Because human-machine sanctity, ideally, would be based on non-technical relations – not on means-end, but on reverence and caring for the whole – it would directly improve relations between:  employee and employer, employee and machine (equipment), company and clients, and company and nature (conservation).

Nov 9th 09 Posted by justin in CCR601

CCR601 – R&P 42.3

Bayer, Thora I. “Hegelian Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 42.3 (2009): 203-19. Print

• Rhetoric is an antistrophe to dialectic (antistrophe is the “turning back” of the chorous on the audience in the traditional ancient Greek play).
• Kant considered dialectic the “logic of illusion” that occurs when reason takes its powers beyond experience to make claims concerning the nature of the soul, world, and God (203).
• Kant is responsible for banishing rhetoric from “philosophical idealism”
• The author wants to answer two questions:
  • How does Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit embody a transformation of the Aristotelian conception of rhetoric as an antistrophes to dialectic?
  • How does the Hegelian connection of dialectic to rhetoric suggest a sense of the sublime? (204)
  • Hegel wants philosophy to not be a “critical reflection” ; rather, he wishes to return it to its ancient function as “speculation” (207).
  • The Phenomenology of the Spirit is an “account of the systematic development of the self itself and has been rightly called a philosophical Bildungsroman” (207).
  • Hegel’s philosophy – because it’s speculation – is an intellectual and spiritual adventure.
  • Hegel gets beyond the “thing-in-itself” or “in-itself” problem by applying dialectic to experience.  In other words, Hegel makes experience dialectical. To do this, he replaces “the reflective sentence, which affirms and denies connections between classes of objects, with the speculative sentence” (209).
  • Reason is the inner life of experience.
  • The double Anisch – ok, what an interesting concept.  This is the idea that when we come across an object we are:
    • First aware of the object
    • Second aware of our awareness of the object
    • When we move from the 2^nd awareness back to the 1^st awareness, the 1^st awareness becomes a new in-itself.  During this process, bits of the original in-itself are preserved and transformed in their new actuality.
    • This system of opinions – progression of opinions – is the system of human experience itself (211).
    • Hegel’s rhetoric in the Phenomenology is a counterpart to his dialectic.  None of his claims – according t the author – are achieved by philosophical proofs; rather, the “reader is drawn into the movement of consciousness itself” (216).

Loehing, Melanie, and Jeff Motter. “Publics, Counterpublics, and the Promise of Democracy.”  Philosophy and Rhetoric 42.3 (2009): 220-41. Print.

• This article seeks to look at both Habermas and Fraser again in order to revisit the “original point of theoretical contention in an effort to specify the different normative commitments of the two perspectives and reevaluate the role each envisions for rhetoric as a potentially democratic praxis” (220).
• Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer have addressed the public sphere and counterpublic sphere in rhetorical scholarship.  Check out their work
• The differences between the two:
  • Frasers scholarship asks how existing and future publics can be treated democratically
  • Habermas’ scholarship inquires into the means by which publics create democracy
  • The authors will compare the two to try and determine what the two authors envision as the role for rhetoric in their conceptions of the public sphere.
  • Fraser’s articulation of the public sphere includes:
    • Subaltern counterpublics – the “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (223)
    • She finds that Habermas’ public sphere doesn’t account for the social inequality of different interlocutors in the public sphere.
    • She demonstrates how many counterpublics were existent in the same period that Habermas demonstrates his public sphere to highlight the exclusions occurring in burgeois public sphere formation.
    • The excluded included “race gender, and class identities”
    • The multiplicity of publics highlights the “contestatory relationship” between counterpublics and a dominant public
    • The idea of an a priori “common good” is impossible in the universal public sphere because of loads of folks that are marginalized.
    • Habermas’ articulation is also deficient for Fraser because it presumes that there is a false separation between civil society (for her, the public sphere) and the state – on other words, the bourgeois public are not state officials.  But this isn’t the case.  Hence, the “public opinion” generated by the bourgeois public is not actually capable of being independent of the state’s influence.  Hence, it constitutes a “weak public.”
    • For Fraser, a “postbourgeois” conception of the public sphere to attend to the democratically deficient version of the public sphere pushed by Habermas.
    • Habermas’ conception of the public sphere for the authors of this article is not a celebration of one historical example, but actually “an argument on behalf of transformed publicity as a key force in the reinvention of political power” (224).
      • Habermas focuses on shifts in the “public” in three eras: feudal, capitalism, and social-welfare democracy
      • Public authority is highlighted for each era (224-5)
      • For feudalism, publicity was representative in the person of power (nobility)
      • In early capitalism the representative of power was forced to submit – at least in some degree – to the “public opinion” through the salons and coffeehouses of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th century.
      • The social welfare democracy era is marked by something of a return to feudalistic systems of representation.  “The public sphere becomes the court before whose public prestige can be discplayed – rather than in which public critical debate is carried on”
      • Counterpublic studies “focuses on inclusion in order to promotea  kind of equality that illuminates ‘questions of fairness and justice’ in an actually existing democracy” (228)
      • “Counterpublic signifies the collectives that emerge in recognition of various exclusions from wider publics of potential participants, discourse topics, and speaking styles and the resolve that builds to overcome these exclusions” (228).
      • Counterpublic studies marks power as the key means by which exclusions from political participation are maintained
      • See Habermas’ critique of Fraser on 228-9
      • There are two forms of power circulating int his article:
        • Extra-rhetorical power – singular in nature and shifts only to the extent that it is exercised by different groups
        • Rhetorically constituted power – exists by virtue of the critical publicity issuing from functioning public spheres – this form of power is multiple an doften incompativble, but it arises and is continually challenged and reinvented as the product of citizens’ rhetorical engagement in public (230)
          • Democracy means two different things for Habermasian and counterpublic sphere theory:
            • Habermasian perspective understands democracy to thrive as the ongoing constitution of democratic culture from public spheres’ rational-critical debate
            • Counterpublic studies views democracy both as the setting in which counterpublics operate and at the level of optimally universal access to participation (democratic treatment of publics) (231).
            1. The final change in the public sphere that Habermas articulates is a threatening force of neoliberal market infiltration of the democratic public sphere (231-2)
            2. Habermas’ theory – according to the authors – is more suited for questions about how to better create democracy as a result of civic (rhetorical) action instead of how to include excluded groups in the (for Habermas now dead or dying) democratic process.
            3. If counterpublic sphere theory comes to dominate, the authors are worried that “turning the question of power into the achievement of political interests shifts our attention from democracy as a practice of political contestation to the very aggregative politics Habermas opposes in refeudalization” (234).
            4. Get a copy of “Between Facts and Norms” by Habermas

Rubini, Rocco. “Humanism as Philosophia (Perennis): Grassi’s Platonic Rhetoric between Gadamer and Kristeller.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 42.3:  242-78.  Print.

• The essay “closely narrates how Grassi’s notions of metaphysics and “rhetoric” developed in his early writings in order to dispel some of the misconceptions that have prevented readers from entering what Grassi himself defines as the “originary tension” awakening his own, and, indeed, any philosopher’s interests and pathos” (243).
• A lot of “schools of thought” discussed in this article.  Heideggarian, Tubingen, Gadamerian, Aristotelian, etc.
• Grassi starts as a Christian, encounters Heidegger then moves on to humanism.
• Grassi’s encounter with Heidegger’s Daesin changes his life.
• The tension between Grassi and Kristeller is a manifestation of the philosophy/rhetoric divide in the late 20^th century.

Zappen, James P. “Kenneth Burke on Dialectical-Rhetorical Transcendence.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 42.3 (2009-): 279-301. Print.

1.    The relationship between rhetoric and dialectic in Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives is deeply complex and intertwined (279).
2.    References Burke’s notion of rhetoric as identification to build cooperation.
3.    Definitions
a.    Dialectic:  explores the substance of a person or thing – all that ‘supports or ‘’substands’ it – from multiple and shifting perspectives, viewing human action dramatistically as act, scene, agent, agency, purpose
b.    Rhetoric – complements dialectic and its multiple dramatistic perspectives by promoting “identification” and “cooperation,” building a “community, a sense of oneness amid diversity of conflicting interests and values” (279).
4.    Identification is problematic because it operates on the dualism of “us” and “them.”  These divisions are largely – for Burke anyway – political (think Christianity and the devil/turk/infidel, etc.)
5.    Dialectical-rhetorical transcendence – wow, what a term:

• a.    It’s roots are Marxist, Hegelian and increasingly Platonic (280)
• b.    Dialectical – a merger of opposing ideas at higher levels of generalization through a process of linguistic abstraction and transformation that respects a diversity of individual interests, even as it seeks to transcend them in larger unities.
• c.    The term defined vis-à-vis the Rhetoric of Motives:  “It is dialectical and rhetorical and also dialogic and mythic – a meeting of rhetorical partisans in dialogical exchanges that lead dialectically to higher-level generalizations represented in mythic images through the power of the poetic imagination” (281).

6.    This is really a theory of transcendence – persuasion and identification are not adequate to encompass individual and group differences.
7.    Transcendence is poetic because it’s emphasis on resolving contradictions and reconciling opposites is a characteristic of didactic poetry.  It’s also Platonic dialectic because of the upward and downward movement.
8.    The pentad with respect to specific schools of thought:

• a.    Scene: materialism
• b.    Agent: idealism
• c.    Agency: pragmatism
• d.    Purpose: mysticism
• e.    Act: realism

9.    On 287 the author demonstrates how Platonic thought is actually dialectical.  See the example of the Phaedrus and the selection from the Republic.
10.    Dialectical-rhetorical transcendence “is a process by which rhetorical partisans can rise above the pursuit of individual advantage through dialectical-dialogical exchanges that transcend their narrow interests in generalizations captured in poetic myths” (290).
11.    This is how dialectical-rhetorical transcendence works:  First, the setting up of several voices, each representing a different ‘ideology’ and each aiming rhetorically to unmask the opponents; next, Socrates dialectical attempt to build a set of generalizations that transcended the bias of the competing rhetorical partisans; next, his vision of the idea end in such a project; and finally, his rounding out the purely intellectual abstractions by a myth” (291).  Think the Phaedrus here.
12.    This is dialectical symmetry.
13.    A wider “scenic circumference” can allow Burke’s work to be applicable to the postmodern scene (297).

Sep 18th 09 Posted by justin in CCR601

CCR601 – Genealogy – 1st Generation

Rickert, Thomas. “In the House of Doing:  Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambience.” JAC 24 (2004): 901-927.

Executive Summary:

Rickert begins this article by discussing how Foucault and Barthes both challenged the existence of the autonomous author.  From the author, he moves on to writing.  Like the author, writing is spectral in the sense that it embodies the thoughts, writing, images, events, feelings of others as it comes from the author.  In other words, writing is haunted by the streams of discourse from time immemorial.  Rickert then connects this idea of writing with Heidegger’s statement that “Language is the house of Being.”  So, writing and being are, to a great extent, an interplay of language whose origin is everywhere and nowhere – both are representative of multiplicities or “overconnection.”

Because being and writing embody these multiplicities, Rickert makes the argument that they are representative of the emerging network culture.  In this world, no connection in web of language can be said to be primary because information proliferates ad infinitum (or at least infinity to human capability).  For Rickert, relying on Taylor, this interplay of infinite discourses, sounds and images is known as the “moment of complexity” (902).  So, the writer writing is, in essence, caught continously in this sea of complexity, dissolving notions of autonomy, boundary, and perhaps agency.

To complicate traditional notions of networks, Rickert advocates a consideration of the “ambient.”  Again taking up Heidegger, who claims that language is ambient (and that language constitutes being), Rickert proceeds to demonstrate how ambience, kairos and complexity complicate and extend the metaphor of network to describe contemporary culture.  In so doing, the ambient logic Rickert develops further collapses “the autonomous, willing subject” (904).

In describing how ambience works, Rickert first takes up Brian Eno and music.  In Eno’s compositions, he used not only the tools of the studio, but also the natural aural sounds of multiple different environments to create his compositions.  In so doing, Eno participated in the “moment of complexity” where the ambient environment and the music co-evolve to create new, more intricate interrelations.

For ambience to work in such expansive ways, a consideration of the Greek concept of kairos is useful.  As Rickert notes, “to understand ambience is the particularity of a situation, which is to say, its timliness.  Things take place, but only insofar as they take part in the unique specificity of their time.  Ambience, in other words, is inseparable from a consideration of kairos” (911). To summarize, Rickert makes the claim that the kairotic moment is one where the participant is both inventing and invented, writing and written, constituting and constituted by the ambient environment.  When this occurs (because it is always occurring), language (as constitutive in the Heideggerian sense) and kairos (in the doing and being done upon sense by the situation) blend into one another, creating creation.

To return to writing, Rickert uses complexity theories notion of “tipping point” (or the point where all strands of thinking, experience, idea become too much to handle) as the moment when writing “emerges.”  This logic of complexity explains that “all strands combine, and recombine, continuously adapting and re-adapting to each other. . . and a new (albeit temporary) level of order emerges” (914).

As Rickert recalls, this moment of complexity is also the ambient moment.  For the writer, it’s the moment that dictates what is written next.  The ambient moment takes into account what is written before, and that what was written before was a response to the aggregated accumulation of events, sensations, thoughts, affects, texts, EXPERIENCES in total that the writer remains mostly unaware of but which shape her thoughts and writing.  In other words, the writer emerges from the ambient environment, she does not act.  She willingly is willed into the kairotic emergent. . . and that’s how stuff happens.

Major Influences:

Heidegger.  On the Way to Language and Poetry, Language Thought

Mark Taylor.  The Moment of Complexity:  Emerging Network Culture

Hawhee, Debra.  “Kairotic Encounters.”  Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention.  Ed. Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer.  Knoxville: U of Tennesee P, 2001.  16-35.***

Brooke, Collin Gifford.  “Forgetting to be (Post)Human:  Media and Memory in a Kairotic Age.” JAC 20 (2000): 775-795.***

Miller, Bernard. “Heidegger and the Gorgian Kairos.” Visions of Rhetoric. Ed. Charles Kneupper. Arlington: Rhetoric Society of America, 1987. 169-184.***

Barthes.  “The Death of an Author.”  Image, Music, Text.

Foucault.  “What is an Author?”  Language-Counter-Memory, Practice.

***  =  2nd generation pieces

Major Questions:

1.  Voices from the past and present inform our ideas of writing, “but to what extent is the overall environment present in such work?  What would come to constitute the logic of composing in network culture if we push against the metaphors of connection to, first, metaphors of environment, place, surroundings, and second, metaphors of meshing, osmosis, blending?” (903)

2.  How is subjectivity worked out in networked culture?

3.  How does agency work in networked culture?

4.  How do environments or ambience determine experience?

Methods/Methodologies:

1.  Rickert seems to be working with the “create a method from an existing concept” method for this piece.  Working with Heidegger (language is being), Taylor (complexity theory and network theory), and multiple conceptions of kairos, Rickert blends to create a new ontology.

Useful Quotes:

“Thus Eno is simultaneously composer and audience, active agent and passive recipient; the music is a series of bits that take on more complexity in interaction with each other and the environment, and it thereby emerges as something strikingly different from what is suggested in most compositional theories, like input/output or social constructivist models.  Not even dialectical models are adequate, as they cannot ultimately account for the radical discontinuity between each emergent order and the power of small changes to produce disproportionately large-scale effects” (907).

“The full implication of network culture is that individuals, society, and environment can no longer be clearly separated.  The explosive proliferation of connection accelerates change, moving things toward points far from equilibrium and near chaos, the tipping point where change happens.  Such change transforms the world and the categories that emerge to make sense of it.  Insofar as we come to be what we are within language, this amounts to a transformation in the human and its relation to the world” (915).