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Granny! What a Big Blog You Have! The Logos of Ethos in a Mass-Pathological Century,
and Other "Truthinesses" in Web Communication*
by Cynthia Jeney
Computers & Writing Conference
Texas Tech University, Lubbock Texas May 27, 2006
Type “blog” into your Google search engine, and it kicks up 2,450,000,000—that’s Billion-with-a-“B”—entries. It’s a capital “B” and that rhymes with “G” and that stands for info-Glut.
While trying to help my students pick their way through the ‘info-lingo gridlock’ that happens when we’re overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the internet and its possibilities, I’ve found that they—and frankly, I, too—are sometimes all but silenced by its mass, by its existent and ever-increasing volume of written and multimedia content.
Therefore, the exploration I’ve embarked upon is a way to help writers in my tech comm classes jar loose their intimidation, to break open their fear of the “economy of attention,” and crack apart the ways they get “stuck” in what they believe to be a kind of limited, humdrum catalog of tactics and strategies they use as online technical communicators. The way I usually begin—believe it or not—is by reviewing a concept I wrestled with when writing my dissertation.
SLIDE—INTERNETWORKED SYMBOLIC ACTION
Six years ago in my dissertation, I Introduced a term that I thought sufficiently ugly to elude adoption by anyone with the least bit of musical aesthetic sense. I used the immense and brilliant body of Kenneth Burke’s work to study the online textual interactions of what bloggers, chatters, emailers, and other internetizens do to coin the phrase “Internetworked Symbolic Action”
And because of a talk I heard at 4C’s this year, given by Keith Miller, the wonderful Martin Luther King scholar who incidentally chaired my dissertation, I’ve decided to revisit and promote –if not the usage of this term—at least an argument for placing it among the foundations of the rhetorical frameworks of teaching web writing. Keith’s talk was about spiritual songs and how the music and lyrics were adopted and treasured by negro slaves. He traced the role of music that came to be called the “Negro Spiritual” through its history, and one point he made struck a deep chord with me (pun intended) as a teacher of technical writing. He said that the reason the spiritual song was treasured, sung, and passed along through generations, why it was so lovingly preserved and is known and held in esteem today, is in part the narrative that the song embraces. Songs about Jesus and the sweet chariot, the one that is coming to take us home, songs about the afterlife and our reward in heaven are not about some past story, not about some past event, not about things gone, but about the present—the spiritual hymn or song is about where we are NOW. The spiritual song is not about Jesus of Nazareth 2,000 years ago, but about Jesus in the world today, and the desire for devine rewards and everlasting peace that WILL come. Spirituals are not sung about things gone by, but about our lives, our needs, our hopes and dreams, NOW.
So. What is a technical communications professor doing getting all teary-eyed and inspired by a paper about Negro Spirituals? My brothers and sisters, I will tell you.
The Spiritual is in the present, and the present is SACRED. That’s what Keith Miller said, and that’s why my brain almost exploded. My students had been doing two web sites in their Web Authoring course, and Two Robohelp projects in their Electronic communication course. The first project is always a “fun project,” on any topic, using any media, and written just for their own amusement or desire.
The first project (with few exceptions) is always stinky. It satisfies the minimum requirements and specifications, but that’s all. It’s derivative, dull, silly, imitative, and crass. My favorite band. My favorite Karaoke bar. My favorite movies. And so on.
The SECOND project, however, is MUCH better. It’s not just that it’s called “The Professional Project,” or that it gets more points toward their grade. It’s got to be real. It’s applied learning, and they—not I—make it great. They clean up the grammar, check the spelling 10 times, they create extra information, off-links I would never have thought of, incorporate media in ways that they have to work to learn—sometimes picking the brains of more advanced students in other classes. They do it because the main requirement of the assignment is that it be REAL. For a local organization, business, institution, or group. It has to satisfy the assignment requirements, but it also must satisfy the client. The assignmnet, I would argue, is sacred, not because of its subject matter, specific requirements or its content, but because it is NOW. It is an ACT that they are performing on the world, one that will have tangible results. Which may seem obvious, but goes back to my approach to the whole two-and-a-half BILLION blogs. With all that noise and “content” pinging around the web, I keep coming back to it, because it helps me to describe the notion of action – of conceiving our tech writing not as “content” or “design,” but as something our texts DO for readers, rather than something they ARE.
[Insert clever quote by Habermas or someone equally smart]
[The following is something that I do—and I think we all do—when approaching different courses we teach. I usually need to get my own thinking grounded in some philosophy or theory that seems not just to make sense, but to HELP me in some way form a foundation for students’ ways of digesting the materials and then developing their own methods and strategies for inventing, drafting, and revising their web or help texts]
SLIDE----virtuality, cybertext, ergodic literature, and internetworked writing
I think I can support an argument, for purposes both rhetorical and critical, that the term "internetworked symbolic action" is more sturdy and reliable for forming conceptual frameworks that move our students with greater agility into the realm of writing in these online spaces than other proposed and used terms. such as "virtuality," "cybertext," "ergodic literature," and "internetworked writing."
SLIDE--Virtuality
"Virtuality" is an especially problematic term, particularly because it is arhetorical and ill-defined. In The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold (1993) makes a less than comprehensive attempt to define "virtuality." To Rheingold, "virtual" means "on the screen" – messages, narratives, thousands of lines of data, a future in which information can be downloaded at unimaginable speeds – these things make geographical location irrelevant. Rheingold illustrates that a downloaded amalgam of images and text that converge on our desktops is an important key to virtuality. But I wish here to go further, to uncover a deeper and broader understanding of virtuality.
Sherry Turkle (Life on the Screen, 1995) makes a case for equating virtuality with "a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real." Turkle is concerned largely with role play and identity, centering the bulk of her writing on the culture of online real-time Multi-User Dimensions (MOO/MUD), electronic gathering-places programmed with various textual objects, spaces, places, corridors, settings, and background narratives that users nevertheless insist upon calling "virtual" rather than "textual” (233).
While Turkle does not make a conscious effort to conflate text and imagery, her treatment of what has become an increasingly vague term, "virtuality" comes to mean all that appears on the screen (and any accompanying sounds), all that is computer generated and interpreted by human eye, ear, and brain. It is not so much a lack of precision as a feature of the main focus of her work – social psychology – that renders the "virtual" merely an opposition to the "real," or the "physical" objects and events in the everyday lives of people who are compelled to spend significant amounts of time in front of their computers. Her project is the investigation of their sense of being "in the computer," interacting through internetworked programming, or immersed in sophisticated animated games that visually and aurally approximate the real – or surreal – physical world.
In Burkean terms we could say that, as a psychologist, Turkle’s first obligation in her study is to focus on man as the "psychological" animal (LSA 23), or in her capacity as a social psychologist, to focus on the psycho-social content of the "virtual" experiences she details, whereas a rhetorician’s study of these online phenomena requires what amounts to a greater precision in terminology about language, in order to come to a "more general starting point," a way into a discussion of symbolicity, that is, of human language.
In a sense, I am arguing about crocodiles, virtual crocodiles…and…well….even more virtual crocodiles. I sometimes ask my students to differentiate the real from the virtual, by setting up the discussion Turkle suggests: can we separate the biological species crocodile – the real crocodile – from the Disneyland robotic crocodile, which could in some sense be considered a "virtual" crocodile? And then do we further separate the animal and robot from the Peter Pan film-animation crocodile – once again, another candidate for "virtuality." And finally, all of those must be separated terministically once again from the textual crocodile in story-books. Just as computerized robotic crocodiles or animated crocodiles appearing on a computer screen present many crocodilian elements, their "crocodileness" does not share the particular kind of symbolicity present in a textual crocodile.
When trying to nudge tech writers toward the idea of technical communication as symbolic action, I sneak in some of Pierre Lévy’s thoughts. In Becoming Virtual (1998), Pierre Lévy concentrates recursively on the textual nature of "virtuality," and seems to be reaching for a concept that equates with, or at least approximates, the “symbolicity” of language as action:
Language virtualizes a "real time" that holds the living captive in the here and now. In doing so it opens up the past, the future, and time in general as a realm unto itself, a dimension with a consistency of its own. Through the creation of language, we now inhabit a virtual space – temporal flux taken as a whole – that the immediate present only partially and fleetingly actualizes. (91)
Lévy’s ideas about virtuality and textuality, like Burke’s ideas about symbolic action, both complicate and deepen our understanding of human symbolicity. Yet Lévy’s project is philosophical, not rhetorical. "Virtuality" spills loosely into too many possible perlocutionary directions, and thus will appear only sparingly in reference to online textual interactions, primarily because "internetworked symbolic action" invokes the stasis and kairos of action, while "virtuality" is an umbrella too large and too vague to be useful when we’re engaging in rhetorical invention for our online technical writing assignments. If I were to say “Make it virtual!”—I think my students would be justified in organizing a revolt.
SLIDE-----Cybertext and Ergodic Literature
"Internetworked Symbolic Action" is also much more useful for me as a framework in teaching online technical writing than terms such as Espen Aarseth’s (1997) "Cybertext" and "Ergodic Literature." While these terms have provided foundations for fruitful discussion of hypertext fiction and other belletristic online texts, the terms are better applied in relation to literary analysis than in rhetorical invention. Aarseth appropriates the term "ergodic" from physics, stating that "In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text" (1). Although the study of online hypertext fictions, gaming scenarios, and other “ergodic” works is worthwhile and valuable, I’m trying to teach my technical writers to lessen the amount of effort required by readers to understand and respond to their texts. Internetworked Symbolic Action, then, serves me as a tool for thinking about UN-complicating their texts.
SLIDE----Internetworked Writing
I do not, however, completely ever leave behind the concept of "internetworked writing," the terminology James Porter finds more appropriate and comfortable for rhetoricians who analyze textual exchanges and interactions on the web. Instead of relying on terms such as "virtual interaction" or "CMC," Porter argues that "computer-networked activity is a type of writing," and that is an important designation, especially when I am trying to create some kind of balance in my technical communications classes. Students spend a huge portion of their lab time learning and working with powerful software applications such as RoboHelp and Dreamweaver, and it can sometimes require Herculean efforts to focus their attention on the issues of writing.
Part of what I’ve been attempting in my teaching and research is the importance of realizing that the internet itself, even in its largest scope, is primarily a site of action, of internetworked symbolic action. As internet commentator David Hudson (1997) has observed, we are not always along the way careful to keep in mind what part of this textual interchange is human, and which part is machine:
Granted, computers are changing our lives, but are they changing us? Our ability to crunch bigger numbers faster means we can now walk around with our offices tucked under our arms, but aren’t we still writing the same dumb memos to each other? Whether we fear or embrace any new technological development, the extremity of our reaction is directly proportionate to the inability to recognize that it is merely an extension of what was already there. (121-122)
[aside—one reason the $100 computer idea bugs me….what do we DO when we distribute these machines? Leave them in an ethical, technical, philosophical, and political void? Or do they come with HUMAN guidance and interaction as well?]
Thus Porter’s conceptualization of "internetworked writing" folds into what I mean by "internetworked symbolic action" (not motion). Language carried via the internet, and language about the internet, is encased in various terministic screens both valorized and vilified in 20th Century narratives about the computer sciences and the development of the internet. At the same time we seek definitions, it is still not a bad idea to keep in mind the vision of hypertext inventor, programmer and pioneer Tim Berners-Lee (1999): "[The internet] should be like clay to mold, not sculpture to look at from a distance."
Which brings me back to my students and their RoboHelp/Dreamweaver projects. They work so much harder, so much more diligently, with so much more HEART when the project is what they deem “real” and for some PURPOSE than when it’s just the “Do a neat web site” kind of assignment. There is something sacred, something more than just “internal” or “external” motivation going on when student use of technology is fired by PURPOSE.
In the “global scene” of pervasive technology Burke has also suggested a world in which we see ourselves, our work, our values, connected strongly with ethics and values of “service” and “use.” In a discussion of technical, professional writing, we might ask “What do people want to do for one another?” If work is the valued term, and we’re all working to transmit ideas and messages, we can concentrate finally upon a further question, “What kinds of motives help or hinder such (ideally) ‘fraternal’ services?” (ATH, pp. 358-359).
[DIGRESSION]
As even the most hardened FBI hostage negotiator might tell us, it is impossible to go into a hostile negotiation situation carrying the assumption that “hostage-takers are crazy, they are criminals, and all we can do is kill them.” Since most hostages who are killed lose their lives within the first 15 minutes, negotiators have learned to work from the outset with the assumption that, even though the kidnappers may appear insane, and their acts may seem senseless to us, to themselves they are making perfect sense. There is a logic operating somewhere, and it usually is in line, albeit a warped and twisted line (from “our” perspective), with some ideal or justifiable human goal. The job of the negotiator and her rhetorical strategies is not to force conventional logic upon the assailants, but to quickly learn their point of view, to work through various “clusters” of terms as they are voiced, so as to somehow find a common ground for negotiation and resolution (Shell, 2000).
The reason this strategy has served in tense criminal situations is that human beings are, as Burke so often reminds us, “rotten with perfection.” We internally align ourselves with “the good” – even if that alignment does not match up with what “we” would consider to be logical, right, or the cultural norm. To have any dialogue at all, to buy enough time to calm the urge to act, one might say the negotiator is helping the hostage-taker to impose structures of logic that lead him to delay and then to kill the urge to act upon the internal force of his attitudes.
That is to say, if writing is performing work or even service, then we can ask ourselves whether or not the job is getting done in excellent, fine, or just mediocre ways. We can jump into the contentious, professional, “public sphere” with our rhetorical tools and devices, to complete the work, perform the services entrusted to us…except that students often are left with a limited repertoire of strategies for doing so in the small, cramped, pixellated spaces of the computer screen.