Feb 28th 10 Posted by justin in CCR760

Shirky – File-Sharing Goes Social

Shirky, Clay. “File-Sharing Goes Social.” Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet.2/15/2010 (2003).  <http://www.shirky.com/writings/file-sharing_social.html>.

Shirky highlights the RIAA’s “Crush the Connectors” strategy in this article.  Specifically Shirky notes how the disintegration of highly networked, multiply linked node systems via RIAA action will work to deter file sharing among groups; however, he also recognizes that the nature of networks and the desire to get music will far outpace the efforts of legal action.

After highlighting the weaknesses like the “internal horizon” in distributed p2p networks like KaZaa and Gnutella, Shirky claims that the next development in file sharing technologies will have “real membranes” that are social as well as technological.  As this article was written before the advent of bittorrent, Shirky describes a proto-bittorrent system characterized by controlled membership and encrypted file transfer that is  invite-only, socially constituted and communally produced.  Shirky, not anticipating the transnationalization of private, invite-only bittorrent communities claims that file sharing will likely take the model of small reputation based communities of 6 to 36 members.

Nov 6th 09 Posted by justin in CCR691

CCR691 – Final Project – Routledge, et.al.

Routledge, Paul, Andrew Cumbers, and Corinne Nativel. “Grassrooting Network Imaginaries: Relationality, Power, and Mutual Solidarity in Global Justice Networks.” Environment and Planning A 39 11 (2007): 2575-92. Print.

• This piece looks at the Latourian notion of “translation” to see how connections are created and sustained within a network of global justice – People’s Global Action Asia.  In so doing, this piece discusses how ANT is political and introduces the notion of “grassrooting vectors” to demonstrate how power relations work in global justice networks.  The authors hope that this work will inform how social movements can form and cohere through mutual solidarity more successfully
• “Antiglobalisationism” is actually a collection of movements striated across geographical space.  As such “antiglobalisationsim” is a misnomer because the antiglobalisation movement itself is global.
• Instead of “antiglobalisation” movements, the authors hope to use the term “global justice networks” to describe the multiple intersecting and layered movements that demand social, economic, and environmental justice in the face of neoliberalism.
• GJNs are fractured along “political, operational and geographical faultlines” that include ideological differences (Marxist, feminist, anarchist, socialist) and postideological (autonomist) positionalities.
• The authors characterise GJNs as either verticalist (hierarchical, Modernist organization) networks that are interested in garnering large amounts of power to determine how we should best live.  In this sense they are “macrosocial.”
• There are also horizontalist GJNs that are about nonhierchical networks of organization, rhizomatic relations, multidimensionalities and varying intensities of affiliation.  These are usually direct-action groups instead of groups that rely on elected representatives.
• The authors defien “translation” as the “processes of negotioation, representation, and displacement which establish relations between actors, entities, and places, and how actors and organisations mobilise, juxtapose, and hold together heterogeneous association so they can act” (2577).
• In characterizing PGA-Asia, the authors note that certain “free radicals  and key contacts” act as the “imagineers” of the network  who hold the entire network together so that it might continue to fight neoliberal capitalist developments in specific countries.  These imagineers work to effect the moments of “translation” :  in other words, they problmatise network functions so that the network might function more effeciently.  They also designate networked roles for actors, enroll other movements and materials into the networka nd they work to mobilise all the enlisted entities.  In other words, they are the actants (2578-9).
• Because PGA-A works on a nonhierarchical, decentralized model, the authors define their work as “transnational counterpublics (Olesen 2005, pg. 94 – LOOK THIS UP FOR ADAMs PAPER).  Defined:  open spaces for self-organized production and circulation of oppositional identities, discourses and practices.
• The PGA-A utilizes a couple of different strategies to achieve network “translation”:
  • International and regional conferences – material space-times where folks can exchange information, coordiante actions and mobilise collective resources.  As the authors note, “Actor networks, when embodied in collective experiences such as the Dhaka conference, enable connections and exchanges between activists to be made, ans such interrelations can shape political identities and imaginaries:  a recognition of common opponents and common problems and the creation of common political strategies” (2582).
  • PGA-A, despite its horizontal organization, is not a completely equal-power organization.  Because of the power of the “imagineers”, some actors have far more capacity to direct the course of relations than others, which stems partly from their ability to condense ‘power’ within networks.
  • The authors term this ablity to condense power “network agency.”
  • Power – in terms of the network – becomes one’s ability to enroll others on terms which allow key actors to “represent” others (2485).
  • Grassrooting vectors are the agents that work to further the act of communication, information sharing and interaction within grassroots communities (2587).
  • These vectors, through “relational dynamics” can enlarge the geographical imagination and practical political knowledge of remote, poor populations.
  • PGA-A is a great example of Latour’s contention that all networks are both local and global (2588-9).
  • Instead of “protest” the participants in the PGA-A often recourse to a need to more fully develop “critical consciousness” a la Friere to be able to more sustainably support acts of empowerment and resistance in the face of neoliberalisation.
  • The PGA ‘process” (worked out via actor-networks) helps “constitute alternative counterpublics, which form the communicational basis for transnational social movements, understood as highly complex and contradictory spaces of convergence rather than unified collective actors” (2591).
  • Networks, in all reality, embody both horizontal and vertical organization.  What’s important is that sustainable forms of “material resistance” must be developed so that the peformative events of the network – conferences, actions, etc. – are not merely “memories” of grassroots communities but are central to their sustainability and agency.

Nov 4th 09 Posted by justin in Uncategorized

CCR691 – Final Project – Eyman et.al.

Eyman, Douglas, Stephanie Sheffield, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. “Developing Sustainable Research Networks in Graduate Education.” Computers and Composition 26 1 (2009): 49-57. Print.

This article argues that because of the rapid changes in knowledge production and circulation in academia from a top-down, print culture (journal) to distributed, bottom up systems of the web the format, curricula and research networks developed at the graduate education level must be changed.  As such, the article lays out a way to combine the power of digital networking and collaboration through “communities of practice.”

Interestingly enough, the graduate education is marked by individual milestones and collaboration on other works.  In other words, the originary author is still the gate keeping/assessment measurement for graduate school work in rhet/comp
Some definitional work for networks in this article include:

• A set of actors connected by a set of ties
• Actors as people, teams, organizations, concepts, etc.
• Communities of practice definition:  groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly (Wenger 2005).
• Difference between “networks” and “communities of practice”:
  • Communities of practice lead to an improvement in activity for the individual but are conceived of in terms of the group.
  • Networks lead to an improvement or an accrual of social capital for the group
  • Networks are facilitative while CoP are supportive
  • A combination of the two leads to a research network.
• After laying out the composition of a research network, the authors demonstrate how DigiRhet.net – a digital research network that arose from a class in digital rhetoric at MSU – defined itself and operated as more than just a research network (a teaching/collaboration network as well)
• For a research network to be able to sustain itself, Eyman et.al. claim that it needs a three-fold framework:  community (community of practice), critical engagement, and applicatio
• Community – the core requirement.
• Develop community outside, inside, beyond the classroom
• Explore and understand the research network as a community support mechanism
• Encourage open debate and dialogue
• Examine what technologies are supportive or suppressive of community building activities
• Create digital compositions that enact or support community building
• Engaging critically – This is a really difficult thing to ask because it presumes that research network members will be willing to attend to the methods and approaches that have already been used as well as considering the implications for the methods and approaches being explored.  This is really a serious question about how thoroughly the entire research network takes up the question of method.
• For collaborative research, a practical understanding of the different methods, tools, and resources available must be considered by all members participating in the research project.
• Much of the work toward graduate research networks results from a desire to reflect the collaborative efforts of the field in the disciplining process

Nov 4th 09 Posted by justin in CCR691

CCR691 – Final Project – DeVoss, Cushman, Grabill

DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. “Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing.” College Composition and Communication 57 1 (2005): 14-44. Print.

• The authors are going to take up the “moment in time, space, institutional relations, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles” involved in student created new media projects (15).
• The political and institutional infrastructures that allow new media composition will be a focus of the article
• A central premise to this study is the idea that these political and institutional infrastructures that allow new media composition to take place are also “deeply embedded in the decision making processes of writing” (16).
• By taking up the institutional and political infrastrucutures of new media writing, the authors hope to provide an analysis gthat takes up “the ways in which new-media writing becomes defined, shaped, accepted, rejected, or some combination of these; who gets to do new media; who gets to learn it, where, and how; and what values get attached to this work (and to its writers and audiences)” (17).
• The infrastructures the authors are discussing are composed of just about everything physical and political (policies) that you can imagine.  For the article, they give a breakdown in the following form:
  1. Embeddedness – how is the infrastructure “sunk” into other structures, social arrangements, and technologies?
  2. Transparency – Infrastrucutres are “invisible” to use – they don’t need to be reassembled each time we use the space (which is part of the problem)
  3. Reach or Scope:  spatial or temporal – infrastructure must exist in more than just one place or time.
  4. Learned as a part of membership – the “sin qua non” of membership in a community of practice is the “taken-for-grantedness” of artifacts and organizational arrangements
  5. Embodiments of standards – infrastructures work on standardized fashions or practices
  6. Installed base – Infrastrucutres are build on bases – and the limitations that come with those bases are our problem
• Drawing from ANT (Engestrom), the authors argue that a tool is not something that exists a priori; rather, it’s something that is given meaning by specific users working “on particular problems in specific situations” (22).  Extending this definition to infrastructures, the authors argue for a new understanding of the term that includes a “productive and activist understanding” (22)
• A main question for the study:  “What material, technical, discursive, institutional, and cultural conditions prohibit and enable writing with multiple media?  How does an infrastructural approach offer a lens through which we can better interpret and understand the multiple conditions at playin our writing classrooms?  How can an infrastructural interpretation support and enable new-media writing? (23)
• After recounting a policy problem in Cushman’s digital writing class, the authors begin to discuss networks.  Cushman et.al.  think of networks as central to the “when” of new media composition; however, their definition of “network” seems to be overly technological: “network paths trhough wires, cards, ports, and servers and across policies and standards” (30-1).
• In thinking about infrastructure, Cushman et.al. make a very Latourian statement, “Infrastrucutre needs to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task” (34).  The rupture points that Cusman and her class encountered are spots where the network needs reconfiguration.
• The article states that the infrastructure (I would call it a network) is both always emergent and always present – again echoing Latour.
• In closing, Cushman et.al. recommend that teacher and students must be able to “account for the complex interrelationships of material, technical, discursive, institutional, and cultural systems” (37).  For me, this means that a tracing of the network must occur before new media composition can be undertaken.

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).