It's Deja Vu All Over Again
Saturday, September 20, 2003
Reading others in Virtual Communities
So here are the thoughts I would like help with . . . we have talked in class on Thursday about creating, manipulating, developing self online. This feeds my interest in how we develop others online. In the discussion about 12 year old girls, and even angstful teenagers there is a sense of buying into stereotypes to develop a sense of self. Trying on what we would ideally like to be or like to be seen as, and I assert we do this through using stereotypes of how we view that self we want to be. OK, Eric is here and I have to go, but if anyone has time this weekend, could we think about how we read others online through associating them with stereotypes. Or, what I really think is more to the point, our need to figure out who is one the other side and our desire to create a person out of the identities we meet in virtual communities.
Maybe this doesn't make any sense, but then tell me so.
Bender
Thursday, September 18, 2003
control, psychology, and play
Rheingold made several interesting points though he did not fully elaborate on all of them:
The Net “stymies all thoughts of central control” (p.99). This is one of the most important reasons he listed as the potential for social change.
New communication technologies have been changing human psychology (p.174). I strongly agree. Technologies, are, in a sense, extension of human beings, when they gradually become part of our lives, especially an invisible part, they shape our ways of thinking, perceiving the world, or doing things. I have a friend who had to leave her apartment in the summer when the server was down. She said: “I cannot actually do anything at home.” It sounded as if she did not have electricity at her home. Carl’s post also suggests that his habit of reading is now more shaped by the Internet—he navigates!
We need to learn more about how computers and electronic literacy change the way we read, we write, we interact with each other, etc.
Human beings learn best while playing (p.194).
That is interesting to me because we talk about our students, we (at least me and some of my friends) tend to say that they expect to be entertained. How is that relevant to the ideal of “playing”? How can we incorporate “playing” into the teaching of writing?” Just some thoughts.—Lu
CNN.com - S. Korea leads world in Net speed - Sep. 16, 2003. So maybe capitalism is GOOD after all, at least for the advancement of tech. It's fun to read Howard Rheingold's Afterword, a time when Time-Warner was still Time-Warner and not AOL-TimeWarner, or however they interCap and hyphenate themselves now. I know we've kicked around ideas about democracy (Rheingold spends a very good chapter on it--and yes, sorry, I haven't been doing the reading as prescribed; I've been wandering, drifting in Howard's book as I might through any virtual text), capitalism, accesss, and net growth. But in the hypercapitalism of S. Korea and Japan, at least according to the article I've linked to above, good old survival of the fittest capitalism seems to be making Net access a great deal faster (and a great deal more widespread) on at least one Asian penninsula and one island.
What a change such access could bring to this country...I finally made the plunge, despite impending nuptials, etc., and ordered my DSL subscription not two days ago (I finally couldn't stand Kapper having a toy I don't). I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of my hardware from Verizon and from Netgear (as my brother put it to me in an email yesterday, "Definitely do NOT just jack right into the modem without a firewall, unless you don't give a flying [s-word] about the machine(s) on your network. This is especially true if you're running windows"; my brother's an IT person, you see). And while I'm excited for the chance to be able to transfer information more quickly (e.g., I'm doing all commenting on student projects using Acrobat this semester), I'm also excited by the proposition of having my Instant Messanger software up and running 24/7, and of participating (please, seriously, you guys CANNOT tell Amy about this the way you told her about the Voyeur Web stuff) in the latest MMPG (Massive Multi-Player Games, or something) online: there's already Starwars Galaxies, and coming very very soon, after the release of Revolutions, is The Matrix Online, a complete virtual world/community based on the movies. To give you an idea of just how Massive these things are, the Star Wars game brags that there are something like 26 square miles of explorable terrain, thousands of characters working simultaneously, etc.
As we move into more immersive Web (and beyond...look for Internet 2 coming soon) communities that push us beyond the simple text and icons of MOOs and MUDs, we'll get to see even more clearly what happens when "virtual" communities get pimped-out in stylish, full-color avatars in hyperreal 3-D environments...moving from a 1st-order simulacrum of text, to a 2nd- and darn-near-3rd order of environments, etc.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
I read chapter 5 in Virtual Community tonight. In this chapter, more than the first two (I skipped past chapter 3 in my excitement for MUDs), the information seemed to be to an audience very unlike the current C&W community. As we said in class, the C&W offshoot of R/C formed itself online, and often MOO and MUDspace were places for virtual conferences, birthday parties, brainstorming sessions, and long games of MOO scrabble. MediaMOO, which was a new-ish project in 1993, has become a virtual graveyard. Going in there is like embarking on an archeological dig, finding people’s old objects and rooms. I think somewhere along the way a method was installed to keep character’s objects from being deleted when the characters were reaped, but I’m not sure. And hasn’t the Tuesday Café gone away as well? What is becoming of C&W’s synchronous conversation spaces?
As for our earlier discussion on asynchronous vs. synchronous conversations, I think the mentions in this chapter of wizards snooping on characters, especially for the purpose of saving and posting newbie sex dialogues, makes the role of the lurker particularly insidious. The voyeuristic character if these actions seems much stronger to me than the role of the listener/learner/lurker on a bulletin board or public email listserv.
Also in reading this chapter, I realized that I like MOOing and MUDing more than blogging or listserv posting because synchronous online discussion features the *emote* command, which allows me the freedom of spontaneity with the guardrail of non-verbal cues during conversation. Participants on public lists seem to expect more thoughtful, polished writing, and you cannot receive feedback from the community until you have already showed all of your cards. By then, if you’ve stepped over the line, you’ve already entered yourself into an etiquette or flame war…
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Meg is afraid of the blog
“The agora—the ancient Athenian market where the citizens of the first democracy gathered to buy and sell—was more than the site of transactions; it was also a place where people met and sized up one another….Markets and gossip are historically and inextricable connected.” (50)
In light of this statement, I think Reingold’s character sketches throughout the first two chapters are particularly valuable. Truly we respond to folks in online communities, as in RL situations, according to the ethos they have built up with us.
Still thinking about this…more later…
Multiple literacies, multiple rhetorics.
I've begun to deliberate this notion of a need for native rhetoric(s) for computers and writing here. If you take the time to read it, I'd appreciate any feedback you wish to offer.
But basically the situation is this: writing technologies have been changing, emerging, and reforming (remediating?) since time immemorial, only because any language device is always already a technology. The problem is that the last 30 years has seen more radical and ubiquitous change in our understanding of writing and literacy (and of course the Great Rhetoric Revival). The introduction of immediacy in our writing technologies (as synchronous and asynchonous digital communication) has only exacerbated this situation; the computer was perplexing enough (and remains so) for early digital and rhetorical theorists; introducing the netowrked computer remains a puzzlement very difficult to get one's theoretical tentacles around. That's why figures such as Rheingold (can we call you Howard? :-) ), Julian Dibbel (which, blech), and others introduced their early theory-forays as narrative. We need to think about, then, the stories that we tell each other about online cultures, literacies, rhetorics, etc. and how those point towards or beyond the theory that surrounds them.
Democracy
Here I go again . . . since Rheingold is here . . . what is meant by democracy in the first few chapters and the potential of the net to further and change democracy. The idea of paying to access something as furthering democracy is bothersome. Or, having to know how to "prime it and mine it" (pg. 50 - see SB, I got this far) seems that the information remains illusive for those who do not have the time to learn.
Rheingold as not complete
OK. I really enjoyed the introduction to this book--what I perceived as the promise to examine "the impact of these newest media . . . on our daily lives, our minds, our families, and even the future of democracy" (xxvii). However, when I got more than four pages into the first chapter I was bothered by the lack of a critical perspective. Rheingold is so pro-online community that we do not get a full perspective of how this has affected his life. For example, in the second chapter Rheingold writers briefly about an argument he has with his wife (and I am unable to find the page reference) but he does not ellaborate on the implications of this argument or the alienation his wife felt. His children have learned what his swearing at a machine means, but they are not yet (as of chapter two) a part of the discussion (except when information is needed in an emergency situation regarding them). There are calls to pay attention to the capabilities of this media (pgs. xxxi, and page 8), but his own attention span is limited to emphasize what is good and excellent about the web.
Maybe Rheingold will redeem himself in chapters beyond the second.
One of the ideas that has captured my attention most in Rheingold's book is the notion of knowledge as a "valuable currency." This idea fits well with the alternative/Leftist politics of Deadheads, Farm alums, etc., in that knowledge--and, importantly enough for those of us in rhetoric teaching digital pedagogies in composition classes--and "manipulat[ion of] attention and emotion with the written word" (rhetoric) figure highly in one's social status within online communities (Rheingold 49).
I witness this firsthand in my own travels within virtual communities (usually the more commericialized chat spaces like MSN and Yahoo!). What Rheingold is really talking about here, without even consciously acknowledging it, is the rhetorical concept of ethos: in a digitally-mediated environment that gravitates toward anonymity (despite the ubiquity of user ids, user profiles, etc.), one's rhetorical prowess is ultimately the only bona fide credential anyone can offer.
What concerns me most, I guess, is that this opens up all kinds of ruptures in the notion of rhetoric as a written vs. oral art. I have, especially during my summers between college semesters, met people whose rhetorical skill online far exceeded any conversational skils available to them in F2F situations. Maybe I'm still coming down off of a weekend of conversations with folks in speech comm. at the ARS (Alliance of Rhetoric Societies) conference in Evanston, but I think that there is still room for introducing the orality of discourse into the formation of online communities. This certainly seems to be gaining feasibility, as services such as Yahoo! introduce voice components in their chatrooms (certain rooms are described as voice-only), there may be an opportunity to work orality back into the mix. The question, then, becomes one that asks what the role is of orality in rhetoric and composition classes, especially as they become more digitally-oriented (which, as Rheingold et. al. ad infinitum have shown, such an orientation uniformly favors the written word).
community/gemeinschaft vs. society/gesellschaft
One of the explanations Rheingold gives for the "unplanned" building of online communites everywhere is "the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives." Later in the book, drawing upon Durkheim, he brings up the concept of gemeinschaft/community vs. gesellschaft/society. So what are the fundamental differences between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft? Rheingold didn't answer these questions although he did offer some clues by situating "community" in its historical context of "the villages and small towns of premodern and precapitalist Europe" and "society" in the "historically recent" "nation-states." But the question remains, what exactly do people "hunger for" that can be provided only in a community, not a society? Or, in other words, what are the distinguishing and defining charateristics of "community" that motivate people to get together on the Net on a voluntary basis, or, as Rheingold would say, to coduct "a soical experiment that nobody planned but that is happening neverthelss"?
I started my search for answers to these questions by first looking up "gemeinschaft" and "gesellschaft" to see how they are used in the field of sociology originally. The two terms first appeared in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft written by Ferdinand Tönnies (German sociologist and political scientist) in 1877. According to Tonnies, the distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft is that the former, roughly translated as "community" is spontaneous and is "based on mutual aid and trust" while the latter, roughly translated as "society," is predominated by self-interest. So it must be this "mutual aid and trust" that holds together people from all over the world who have never met and may never meet in person. and from the many stories Rheingold told us, WELL is just such a community, characterized by "mutual aid and trust."
Not to discourage Rheingold and his fellow WELLers, but I wonder if Rheingold is selling us a utopian model of online commuity that either does not exist or won't last long. Isn't it true that the very nature of "commuity", its spontaneity and reliance on Netiquette to regulate the behavior of its members, determines that, as Rheingold himself admites, it is "fragile and "susceptible to disruption?" Of course, I am not suggesting imposition of regulations from without to hold people responsbile for their behavior as that'd defeat the whole purpose of building online communiites; I am just wondering besides systematic observation and analysis of Net behavior (which, according to Rheingold, is the job of "social scientist"), what else can be done, especially by each individual member of an online community?
Monday, September 15, 2003
Reading Rheingold: some thoughts (and Questions)
I enjoyed reading the intro and the first two chapters. Then I found that Rheingold actually autographed my copy (I bought it used online and did not know). Wow, talking about the power of writing to transcend space and time and reach people!
Rheingold’s remarks about the potential of technology calls for our attention: “The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost—intellectual leverage, social leverage, commercial leverage, and most important political leverage. But the technology will not in itself fulfill that potential; this latent technical power must be used intelligently and deliberately by an informed population” (xix). This reminds me of our question last week about technology and what we teach. We, I believe, want to inform our students of technology and teach them how to use technology “intelligently and deliberately.” This, of course, requires that we get ourselves informed and learn to use technology in that manner ourselves. Maybe we CAN effect changes by using technology “intelligently and deliberately.” Well, I do wonder who ELSE besides comp teachers are informers. In addition, can us as informers win our students over if “large commercial and political powerholders” launch endless campaigns to convince students that technology will “in itself fulfill that potential”?
Rheingold also warns us that if we do not develop “a citizen’s vision” of how the Net should grow, “the future will be shaped for us by large commercial and political powerholders” (xxi). I agree with him and look forward to reading more about “a citizen’s vision” in his book. This might answer my earlier question about whether the old system will keep reproducing itself.
Another important point Rheingold makes is about CMC and its political significance: “its capacity to challenge the exiting political hierarchy’s monopoly on powerful communications media, and perhaps thus revitalize citizen-based democracy.” Given Rheingold’s own background (he lived or probably still lives in the San Francisco Bay area), however, I am not sure who he refers to when he uses the word “citizen”.
