digital digs - Latest Comments

Re: humanities, universities and sustainability

digitaldigs — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:55:14 -0000

Approve.

Re: humanities, universities and sustainability

David Grant — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 13:56:06 -0000

Where do you see folks in literacy studies in all this? Deb Brandt has argued for pretty general trends in reading and writing that hold across the US and abroad. I do take your point, though: what is the central and more generalizable "outcome" for English Studies. We may bristle at that question and for good reason, but it is being asked of us in ways that will affect the future of the fields.

Re: teaching technical communication again for the first time

Steven D. Krause — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 10:15:18 -0000

I'm not teaching this fall for the first time in (I think?) 29 years, counting my time as a grad student and part-timer. I had a sabbatical in the winter term a few years ago (what everyone else calls the spring term) and I've had other sorts of releases and breaks and stuff, but never a complete fall term off. So I read this simultaneously wishing I was preparing to teach this fall and being glad that I'm not. ;-)

PS, the "kids today" are the same-- almost EXACTLY the same-- as they were almost 30 years ago, just with different tools/technologies at hand. I think you know that too even not dealing with undergrads a whole lot for 7 years. The only (subtle) thing I've noticed over the last couple of years is the increasing reliance/need/demand for a "rubric" of some sort for every writing assignment. My theory is these students, who are a product of the public school nonsense known as "no child left behind," cannot imagine completing some kind of assignment-- particularly one with a grade!-- that doesn't have the assessment mechanism spelled out in exacting and cookie-cutter detail. Other than that, the "kids today" are just like their parents (e.g., the "kids" when I started teaching in college).

Re: Reflections on serving as a WPA

Steven D. Krause — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 07:57:01 -0000

Congratulations on becoming a former WPA!

Re: living the post-American dream

Steven D. Krause — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 11:22:53 -0000

It's interesting that you are pointing to Baudrillard here, Alex. I've been thinking about him a bit more lately too-- or rather, I've been thinking about how I thought about him in my dissertation 20 years ago. The two books I referenced the most were Simulations and, even more, The Gulf Ward Did Not Take Place. I don't know what it says that the likes of Baudrillard are as (if not more) relevant today, if it means that things have always been kinda bad or if things are about to get a lot worse. But it does make me think about re-reading.

Re: The fantasies and limits of experts and elites

craniac — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 22:46:50 -0000

"which has the added benefit of pissing off almost everyone" <--this seems to me to be the only sane, ethical stance to take at this perilous point in time.

Re: pluralism and the nonmodern, nonliberal society

digitaldigs — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 08:20:02 -0000

I think that's close to Lilla's point: that all voters in the US can be included within the identity of "American." However, I disagree with that, as I note above. All identities are disjunctive. Even without getting overly postmodern about it, I think I can say that I am not identical to myself. I just think about that scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian: the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea, the Popular Front of Judea... splitter! So I don't think identity works as a basis for forming agreement. Sure we can be pseudo-democratic, take a vote (as Americans) and elect Trump, but such results only demonstrate the disjunctive function of identity. We acted as Americans and end up more divided than ever. Indeed in this election, nationalism became an identity formation designed to divide Americans and oppose them to one another. And really both democrats and republicans used that rhetorical strategy.

Maybe it's hyperbole to say we're more divided now than at any time since the Civil War. Maybe we were just as divided during the Civil Rights/Vietnam War era of the 50s and 60s. The only way we've ever accomplished a fiction of an American identity is by excluding significant portions of humans living in the country. Right now the shifting demographics of the country, plus the economic pressures of post-industrial global capitalism, have intensified affects around those differences. That's why I'd say the only thing "we" share are disagreements.

Re: designing rhetorical technologies of deliberation

digitaldigs — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 07:47:14 -0000

I agree with you about the economics. I would imagine that many of the suggestions above wouldn't be undertaken by a social media company itself. Almost everyone knows on some level that a site like Facebook is primarily designed to make money by keeping you there and getting you to interact in some way. However, I think about the way cable tv works. We pay for that but is it really designed for our benefit? Even the premium channels that are ad-free? I would think it would be more accurate to say tv is designed to appeal to our desires but not necessarily to our best interests. I'm not interested in telling others what their best interests should be. However, if we can build rhetorical media tools to appeal to and shape our desires, it seems that we might also build tools and practices to counter such efforts. And yes we'd need to pay for them, including paying for an education that develops critical thinking and rhetorical awareness.

Re: pluralism and the nonmodern, nonliberal society

Skydaemon — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:24:44 -0000

Identity politics is taken to mean subdivisions within America, hence inherently divisive and destructive to policy forming. The American identity is special in that it's a uniting distinction. Anything that group agrees to is politically accomplishable. Nationalism is an important exception.

Re: designing rhetorical technologies of deliberation

Skydaemon — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 23:06:45 -0000

Here you present it as a design choice, and to some small extent it is. However, it's much more about the economics driving the design. It is too cute by half to suggest that you can change the design goals merely by pointing out undesirable elements.

Social media etc make money by a) selling advertising which is tied by the nuts to eyeball counts, b) selling user usage info which also increases in value with constant, pervasive usage. Further, they raise funding and gain clout by being able to claim they have billions of active users involved. These financial motivations are 100% of the orientation of the design. The designers know exactly what their apps push in behaviour and why, they also know how to alter it towards other ends. This is not a question of awareness, the designers are serving their paymasters excellently, and the people writing the cheques are not the users.

If you want a healthier app, change the economics. If people pay to use social media directly, the apps will be designed to benefit the people doing the paying.

Re: pluralism and the nonmodern, nonliberal society

Stephen Downes — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 15:48:46 -0000

I don't see how "appealing to Americans as Americans" is distinct from identy politics. Nationalism is just a special kind of identity.

Re: pluralism and the nonmodern, nonliberal society

Seth Long — Sun, 20 Nov 2016 17:06:17 -0000

A quick thought on "identity politics": the identity of the identity politics messenger is too often overlooked (there's a link to rhetorical delivery here, I suppose). The fact is that a non-trivial plurality of identity politics texts circulating at any given moment are not written by down-and-out blacks or Nahua day laborers but by white people with elite(ish) backgrounds. Speaking on behalf of the dispossessed is often done with so much glee and self-righteousness that it makes me skeptical of motives (and I'm predisposed to agree with the message). The last thing we need is another Ivy League professor or Manhattan journalist telling others to check their privilege.

Re: pluralism and the nonmodern, nonliberal society

Seth Long — Sun, 20 Nov 2016 16:51:57 -0000

This rings true to me. An extreme example: An old climbing buddy and I used to spend most of our trips arguing values, philosophy, and politics. We rarely agreed, but we could maintain mutual respect and even enjoy our arguments because when we were together our actions centered around common goals, activities, practices---specifically, not getting each other killed while climbing rocks and mountains. I came to graduate school expecting I could similarly enjoy political argument, but it never really happened. Such argument was always taken very personally. I chalked up to the fact that there was no material or "practical" context for such argument----just the discursive space of the grad class. A discursive space without practices is a bad place to be.

The space of social media likewise provides no common goals or activities, just a space in which people talk. However, in other digital spaces---e.g., online shooter games---I've noticed people can banter and disagree about politics without forming a strongly antagonistic relationship because they have a common ground in playing the game itself. I know you're using "practices" in a much broader way than I am with these examples, but I suppose what I'm taking away from your post is that it would be nice if the 300 million people in this country could start looking at the country itself as a cooperative game or a climb or whatever---a practice---and not just a space where people talk without basic common goals and activities. That's never gonna happen, though.

Re: Steven Pinker’s Sentience

Jonathan Dunn — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 15:51:18 -0000

So, non-scientific abilities can detect and explain sentience... ? We have intuitions but they can be fooled, no? The ancients inferred sentience to exist in various natural phenomena we wouldn't today - wind screaming in trees - Zeus sending thunderbolts - volcanoes demanding virgins. The closer we are to describing something in purely reductionist terms, the less inclined we are to see any sort of "mind" at work. Science has progressed via increasing reductionism, leaving minds behind. Also, this sharpens for any given conscious person, the "problem of other minds" http://plato.stanford.edu/e...

Re: the missing masses of educational software

best essays — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 06:16:35 -0000

Educational software has some merits as well as demerits. If they the child think of the ages that they can do anything about the process flows of software education in precise manner then before mentioned one is important in the entire possible manner. In that case each ideology are important to make the possible mark worth in doing the round of applause for smoother educational belongings.

Re: risk, reward, and revolution in an object-oriented democracy

digitaldigs — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 19:55:00 -0000

no worries.

Re: risk, reward, and revolution in an object-oriented democracy

Marc Bousquet — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 13:10:15 -0000

Just a note to say I didn't mean to impute any negative intentions on your part regarding NH or elsewhere. The negative stuff is intrinsic to the larger discourse on these issues, but not to your writing, as usual.

Re: risk, reward, and revolution in an object-oriented democracy

digitaldigs — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 12:34:53 -0000

Thanks Marc. I'm sure you're right about the 2000 election, and I didn't mean to suggest that NH voters stole the election. That would suggest they did something wrong, which they didn't. I only meant to indicate that third-party voters, even if they amounted to less than 5% of the vote as they did in 2000 (and probably will be more this year), can play a powerful role in the outcome. I'd hate to see something like the Brexit vote where people wake up the next day and say "I voted for it but I didn't really think it would pass. I just wanted to express my displeasure with the status quo." But that's not how votes work.

I would say that I do share many of the aims of the Green party. In fact, I would say my personal political values are closer to the Green party than any US political party I know of. I haven't decided my vote for November, though living in NY I'm fairly sure where my electoral college votes will be headed. If Hillary can't win in NY on the strength of voters who see her as the person they most want to be president then she has no shot nationally. The same thing is probably true for Trump in Georgia. Maybe we just need to get rid of the electoral college.

I also don't think any vote is pathetic or misguided, unless the voter completely misunderstands (or is ignorant of) the positions held by the person for whom she is voting. When one is voting for a candidate one knows will not win, one simply has to be confident s/he understands what the consequences of that choice might be in relation to the eventual winner and be content with that.

I'll have to think about whether or not third-party votes in presidential elections strike me as an effective way to reshape our democratic structures. Undoubtedly they get more media attention than such efforts would garner at other levels of government. I guess the problem right now is that winning even fairly small elections like for state assembly seems out of reach of the Green party.

Re: risk, reward, and revolution in an object-oriented democracy

Marc Bousquet — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 11:01:29 -0000

As always, impressed with the nuance here. I have two thoughts. First, most good analysis agrees that the Dems failed to win an election, for many good reasons; a few thousand Greens in NH didn't steal it. That's like saying Britain stole New France; by what calculation did it belong to France?

Plus, despite the "kidding," you do seem to share a central aim of Green voters, which is to break up the duopoly. I get that you're kidding when you say that we could all "just agree" to do that. I also agree that a lot of us, regardless of the presence or absence of party affiliation, want to change the rules. The in-party revolts, plurality independent registration, and growth of third, fourth, and fifth parties are all evidence of that.

So perhaps voters peeling off from duopoly isn't best seen as a pathetic or misguided "protest vote," but instead as the working out in the world of "networks and assemblages" to achieve the new rules you want.

Re: changing your mind in social media

digitaldigs — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 08:40:35 -0000

I'm not sure what you're describing would work, but voting clout rewards would be an example of a structure designed to give strength and durability to a way of speaking politically. It would be interesting to see how it worked within the context of Congress where there is a lot of voting on which to base the values and voting records are public. I should point out that in terms of Congress there is an established structure giving strength and durability to political speech. You or I or others may not believe it benefits us either individually or collectively; we might say it doesn't share our values; we might even think it is unethical or destructive. Honestly I can't say I have any novel ideas for making it better. Reforming the role that money plays in elections and restricting the potential personal financial gain of those who would take office for some period following their term might help, but one could easily say that's just covering up bigger problems. I could certainly point to more systemic problems: the powerful drive to achieve short-term political or financial gains, the ongoing clash between pre-modern religious/social values and an increasingly global, cosmopolitan community, and the inability to listen to science and technology in a political forum.

However, in saying that, I would be entering into the kind of political discourse I was addressing in my post. Perhaps you or another reader would already be inclined to agree with me. Certainly other possible readers on the web would not. If this was happening among my Facebook friends, some of my academic friends would "like" what I wrote. Others have different political-theoretical commitments that are generally more activist and would find this insufficient. Then, when you add in family, high school friends, former students, and other random folks, one would find something closer to the general spectrum of American politics. What would be the point of trying to have a conversation about such matters with such a community? I would say none, except possibly entertainment, if one could imagine finding such a thing entertaining. And while I'm not sure many people would describe such online battles as fun, I do think that our commitment to them is affective.

In order to make such conversations productive, we would require solutions that went far beyond social media itself. When one side of an argument says "I know I'm right because it says so right here in the Bible," and the other side says "I know I'm right because the evidence is here in this scientific study," there's no mechanism for persuasion or agreement. Latour's point, in part, is that politics needs it's own mode, it's own way of establishing truth, separate from the modes of science, religion, and so on. It would have to be based upon a commitment to form a group despite differences in other modes.

In such cases I think one could find a recursive relationship among discourse, rhetoric, and other substances. (I would say discourse and rhetoric are substantive.) A common example of this is a lecture hall. It is built to make certain rhetorical-discursive practices strong. The lecture hall follows the demand for lectures. In turn, we are inclined to inhabit the lecture hall as members of an audience or as a lecturer. Discourse and rhetoric follow the substance of the lecture hall. Turning to the matter at hand, one might think of the Capitol Building with its chamber for formal meetings and votes but also many offices and meeting rooms as a space that both fosters certain kinds of political discourse but was also clearly designed (and then expanded) to reflect ideas about how political discourse should function. We don't have that in social media. Instead, on Facebook, I think we adopt the rhetorical practices of arguments over the Thanksgiving meal with your uncle or with the locals at a bar or some such. In such instances I don't think we're really looking to resolve political differences. I think we're simply looking for group identification, to affirm that there are people who are like us and that we are part of a group with them. That's fine and perhaps even necessary, but it is not a means to address differences.

So I suppose the root observation that drove my writing this post in the first place is to that while one may have many reasons/feelings that drive one to get into political arguments in social media, let's not imagine that this is a way to persuade people to think differently or come to some agreement. The mechanisms for doing so really don't exist in social media. Maybe we'd like to build them. I don't know.

Re: changing your mind in social media

Skydaemon — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 11:48:55 -0000

"How do we build structures that support felicity conditions, giving strength and durability to a way of speaking politically that might lead us beyond the shambles of political discourse we currently “enjoy”?"

I would describe this as framing the question wrong. Intentionally "building structures" is essentially the command-economy approach to discourse, and likely to meet with failure for similar reasons. To ask the same question in a capitalistic way, how do we align motivations and incentives to produce the kind of discourse and analysis we desire. Do that right and watch the structures build themselves.

Politics ends up being about either personalities or parties because the metrics that ought to matter aren't the focus. This is a self-feeding loop. If the public doesn't study the outcome of policies, then the details don't matter beyond the soundbite. This is how you get a reality show circus of vapid and meaningless pronouncements, which have little more substance to them than the name. It devolves into identity politics and tribes which is inherently stupid. So how do you generate interest in studying the impact of the proposed policies of politicians?

The chief problem with political discourse is the majority of the voting public do not have a significant and immediate personal stake in the outcome of their personal choice. It sounds counter-intuitive, since politics affect us all, but this is the crux of the problem. There's no personal cost to being wrong that doesn't also affect everyone else in the same direction. Equal losses are viewed as a wash. If the wrong politician gets elected and tanks the economy, "everybody" is worse off, so it doesn't really matter. If they were personally penalized differently than the rest of the public, they would care far more. Rewards and punishments could be financial, or involve voting clout for example. (Remember that experiment where people are paired up and given money, but only if they can agree on a split. Person A offers 60/40 and Person B tells them to go to hell and they both lose it all. Politics is like that, it doesn't matter if you both lose as long as the other guy doesn't win more than you.) Throw in the lack of apparent value to a single vote, and it just multiplies the apathy towards studying policies.

I'll give an example of voting clout rewards. You could alter voting requirements. In addition to voting for a candidate, you vote for expected metric outcomes (gdp growth, debt change, unemployment, etc etc) on both candidates. At the end of each cycle (which could be annually or an election cycle) the actual performance of the elected candidate is compared to your expected outcomes, and the strength of your vote is adjusted. Voter A has unrealistic expectations compared to average, so next election his vote is only worth 0.80 votes. Voter B has very accurate estimations, his vote next election is worth 1.2 votes. The same outcome for the same voters a second election in a row widens the gap. Perhaps now voter A is reduced to 0.7 votes, while Voter B has 1.35 votes. A real model would have a bit more to it, but you get the idea. This is essentially how the stock market works, by removing votes from people who prove themselves to be incompetent judges and passing them to people that are. The key is that you aren't punished for the candidate you choose, only for being out to lunch on the performance of the candidate that is chosen. If the anti-democratic nature bothers you, you could reward/punish people financially instead.

Now imagine how the discourse around politics changes in the system above. It's no longer about how the President ate a burger at fast food joint today, or how good their golf swing is. Suddenly, it's about how an amendment to the budgetary bill to aid a special interest group in a certain politicians riding will affect gdp and potentially screw everyone who bet on it. Or about how a new jobs program will affect unemployment in one direction, and debt in another. Voters vote on, and are judged on, the outcomes of policies, so that's what the discourse revolves around.

Discourse and rhetoric follow substance, not the other way around.

Re: looking at college from the other side

digitaldigs — Thu, 26 May 2016 10:39:56 -0000

The point about scheduling is well-taken, but part of the challenge is in the variability. In addition to the Mon-Wed-Fri 1-hour (or 50-minute) class and the Tues-Thur 90-minute class, there are recitations and labs, 3-hour once-per-week classes, and classes that are 1-credit. Of course we have online classes and hybrid/blended classes that are part online. One could imagine classes with a wider range of credits and classes that met on all kinds of variable schedules. The result though is an increasingly complex game of scheduling Tetris</em.>

Re: looking at college from the other side

Skydaemon — Wed, 25 May 2016 22:26:58 -0000

Indeed, the course selection process is more an exercise in the illusion of choice. And as you mention, a key culprit is course scheduling. Yet, you don't propose doing anything about it.

Do courses really need to consist of 1h sections 3 times a week? Would scheduling be markedly more flexible if most of your required courses were 3h instead? Or even 2 sections of 1.5h? From what I remember, that was one of the things that changed as I went from 1st to 4th year. Fewer of my courses were mwf and more were single large blocks of time.

It seems like unchaining students from such scheduling restrictions is one of the potential upsides of the digital age. Yet nobody seems to be able (or willing?) to take advantage of it.

Re: laptops, classrooms, and matters of electrate concern

Steven D. Krause — Sun, 22 May 2016 12:18:27 -0000

Picking up a little on Katherine's comment and some conversations I had at #cwon with some folks: one thing that also occurred to me later as I was thinking about these sorts of "taking notes is better with paper" kind of studies is I don't ever recall a lot of explanation about what any of these studies mean by "taking notes." It's not unusual for me to come across first year students (actually, even more advanced students) who really seem fuzzy on how to do this, who don't follow any particular pattern/technique. So I I guess what I'm wondering is if someone did a study with relatively inexperienced students and they let them use whatever they wanted to use to take notes, but one group they taught a particular technique and they other they didn't.

Re: Slavoj Žižek on Objects

digitaldigs — Thu, 19 May 2016 15:27:57 -0000

That may be true, but Bryant is a significant outlier in this respect.