Feb 5th 10
Posted by justin in CCR760
The first time I read through chapter five in Eileen’s class I became very, very frightened. I suppose my initial terror was directly tied to my now slowly deteriorating allegiance to Marxist modes of material production and the realities capitalist enterprise in the West’s progressively post-industrial age. The more and more I read about the changing nature of work in the 21st century – especially with respect to Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (it’s on the reading list ASAP!) – I am left in a bit of a crisis of conscience. It’s not that I was just longing for a socialist/communist state on the order of China, the USSR, or Vietnam; in fact, I think that their “socialism” and “communism” was really just a state-administered, extremely monopolistic brand of capitalism. What I’m realizing more and more is that capitalism on the order that Spinuzzi describes in chapter five is a lot different from any proprietary or managerial capitalism that preceded it. So in this new capitalism – often described as “support econonmy” or “distributed” – is there any more room for self-actualization and liberation from the modes of production that have long exploited labor or does it’s distributed nature simply increase the deleterious effects and leave consumers ever-questing toward more “authentic” consumption habits? Well, first I’ll try a bit of recap. . .
Before Spinuzzi demonstrates how networks are “enacted”, he describes the transfigurations that have occurred in the time period between the waning of the industrial age and the development (or negotiation) of what Castells has called “informational capitalism.” This new brand of capitalism is different from the modular form that Marx envisioned in that the “deskilling” that occurs when tasks are “broken down into easily learnable and repeatable components” is challenged. No more assembly lines and workers who can’t see the final products. Rather, in information capitalism the complete net work is interpenetrated, deeply rhizomatic: “it has multiple, multidirectional information flows” (137). Because of this characteristic, some folks claim that capitalism will move toward a more distributed form. Distributed capitalism will come to look a lot like shareholders in companies – distributed, desires for “unique support” from vendors, and trustworthy relations among consumers (think Amazon.com’s comment function). This process of co-configuration – whereby producer and consumers configure one another at all times reciprocally – will disrupt supply chains and create “advocates” or “professional relationship workers” who “assemble temporary ‘federations’ of suppliers for each transaction or service. In effect, the layer between producer and consumer will have an individualized shim. While these new ways to describe capitalist paradigms in the information age could be positive, they also have a negative side.
In the move toward this new distributed capitalism, Spinuzzi notes how some negative social practices could come into being. Working through Deleuze, we get a new picture of social interaction that moves society from a Foucauldian pantopticonicism rooted in systems of discipline from above toward a distributed, control-based horizontal & vertical social competition between all workers in the capitalist agora. In this new field of work, laborers who are able to participate in the information economy are in a constant state of competition that renders job security, benefits, and retirement static for only the most successful or sought-after workers. It seems natural that champions of neoliberal economic systems like Milton Friedman and his fellow Chicago School economists would eat this hyper-competitive, cream-rises-to-the-top labor model up . . . and as long as Friedmanites continue to occupy influential positions at the IMF, World Bank, and other organizations, this new model will likely be championed as the future of economic Development.
While I’m not naive enough to believe that unions and collective resistance have near the power that they once levied against big-business capitalism, I see distributed capitalism one of the last steps in the progressive deterioration of collective resistance in labor systems. Once Haraway’s “homework economy” blurs the boundaries between life and work (lifestreaming) and the quest for individual consumptive experiences dissolves mass production (which itself is pretty debatable if you’re a believer in the herd mentality), the consumer is left in a ecstatic state vis-a-vis the instant and constantly individual gratification of extreme commodity fetishism. All the while the worker – now left without affiliation and only existing in the network as a fluid, constantly re/de skilling cog – moves on to new “opportunities.”
I know I’m being a bit melodramatic here, but I do think that the changes in the way that consumption and production are occurring could have damaging consequences. I do feel like some capitalist entities are looking to offset the inherent contradictions of capitalism (capitalism can’t produce labor and non-renewable natural resources for example) through partnerships between capital entities and philanthropic organizations – this is a crude, but promising example. .. anyone know of anymore? That being said, the future of my work looks a lot different from the sort of things my folks did for a living.
I wonder though, am I as scared as Socrates of the quill & tablet or Zola of the factory? A little help here! 
Nov 18th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 6th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Rice, Jeff. “Urban Mappings: A Rhetoric of the Network.” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 2 (2008): 198-218. Print.
- Rice begins with the contention that websites such as Google Maps and MapQuest are really sites of invention where new media is used for inventive practices of informational arrangements
- The “spaces” being mapped on the net are not only spatial. . . they are often ephemeral and personal. The “territories” where all this mapping occurs are databases. For Rice, the database is a place “that store and assemble vast amounts of information hosted by their own and related services” (199). As such, the database is, according to Rice, the place where space is mapped at the site of rhetoric.
- According to Rice, his articulation that databases are “emerging rhetoric” speaks to traditional rhetorical concerns regarding “arrangement, delivery, and space” (200). To demonstrate this, he notes how the database “gathers spaces of information (streets, routes, places), arranges information (brings them together in an interface), and delivers that information to a specific audience for a specific situation (the end user) (200).
- The database is a site for arrangement; however, it’s distinctly anti-Ramist because it allows for multiple hierarchies/structures/outlines that are determined by user content. In Rice’s words, the database remains “open to how information might be navigated or finally arranged by not dictating the exact structure of the arrangement” (202).
- This conception of the database is similar to Carolyn Miller’s notion of “novelty” in topos-bound invention.” According to Miller, the topos of degree – or of ways and means – “suggests a conceptual shape or realm where one may find – or create – a detail, a connection, a pattern that was not anticipated deductively by the topos itself. The topos is a conceptual space without fully specified or specifiable contents; it is a region of productive uncertainty” (Miller 141). When thought about this way, the database acts as a “novelty” of topoisic invention because of the ability to “search” or find your way through spaces to useful data.
- What Rice is calling database rhetoric “is not only what may allow a speaker, writer, or rhetoric to change or evoke different notions of self through various arrangements; it is also a way for a composition to be “stylized” in a “myriad” number of ways as well”. In other words, the user and the database construct the space for each individual interaction between the two. As such, arrangement isn’t replaced by invention in this process; rather, rice contends, they interacting – or networked.
- The economy of presence – or the ability via new media to see more than one set of data at one time – allows for multiple intersecting presences at the place where interactions intersect (205).
- Using Lyotard’s proscriptions as a framework, Rice argues that databases can be used to imaginatively connect information across boundaries - boundaries disciplinary, ideological, compositional, etc. The grand narrative is the opposite of Lyotards database – a place where “rhetorical turns, memory associations, spatial searches or travel metaphors” aren’t allowed presence.
- On 208 we get a specific reference to ANT when defining the network. Rice notes, “Networks. . . are bodies of relationships that shift as new bodies are introduced or subtracted. Networks are found in personal relationships, textual readings, political issues, the Web, and elsewhere” (208-9). As Bruno Latour notes, “Network is a concept, not a thing out there”
- Again relying on Latour, Rice contends that the “Network is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described” (209). Working from this definition of network – and the Latourian contention that the network is always changing to accommodate new kinds of informational relationships – Rice then travels through the “various network spaces” that compose Detroit.
- Rice uses the memory, imagination, history, space and other features of his brain – of his process of knowing Detroit to describe his “database” of the personal. The complex interaction of all of these features are what – for Rice – compose the space or the “informational scheme” he knows as Detroit.
- After reflecting on his own “database” of richly layered features, Rice reflects on the basically unchanged narratives of “renewal and rejuvenation” that tend to map city spaces in decline (213-4). Again using Latour’s notion of the ever-shifting network, Rice relies on his network to assemble Detroit. In this assembly process, Rice notes how database driven new media like Google Maps is not “wrong” but that it isn’t complete because it can’t take into account “personalized data.” As a generalization tool, it’s super useful; however, it’s important to note that it’s not “codified” or complete.
- All this personal databasing eventually leads to the moment of complexity a la Mark Taylor. Rice hopes that more full articulations of personal databases and their integration into networked systems can produce new ways of thinking about urban renewal, and the “rhetorical mapping of that urbanism” (217).
