Two Virtuals, The: New Media and Composition

By Alexander Reid

In THE TWO VIRTUALS, Alex Reid shows that to understand the relationship between our traditional, humanistic realm of thought, subjectivity, and writing and the emerging virtual space of networked media, we need to recognize the common material space they share. The book investigates this shared space through a study of two, related conceptions of the virtual. The first virtual is quite familiar; it is the virtual reality produced by modern computing and networks. The second, less familiar, virtual comes from philosophy. It lies in the periphery of more familiar postmodern concepts, such as deconstruction, the rhizome, and simulation. In drawing the connection between the two virtuals of philosophy and networked media, Reid draws upon research in computers and writing, rhetoric and composition, new media studies, postmodern and critical theory, psychology, economics, anthropology, and robotics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Jul 30, 2007
• ISBN: 9781602355323

Alexander Reid

ALEXANDER REID is an associate professor and the director of Professional Writing at the State University of New York College at Cortland. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between writing, pedagogy, and emerging technologies and has appeared in journals such as Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, Theory & Event, and Culture Machine, as well as in collections such as Culture Shock and the Practice of the Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric And Composition, and Techknowledgies: New Cultural Imaginaries in the Humanities, Arts, & TechnoSciences. He maintains a blog, Digital Digs, on the issues of new media, writing, and higher education at alexreid.typepad.com.

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New Media Theory

Series Editor, Byron Hawk

The New Media Theory series investigates both media and new media as a complex ecological and rhetorical context. The merger of media and new media creates a global social sphere that is changing the ways we work, play, write, teach, think, and connect. Because this new context operates through evolving arrangements, theories of new media have yet to establish a rhetorical and theoretical paradigm that fully articulates this emerging digital life.

The series includes books that combine social, cultural, political, textual, rhetorical, aesthetic, and material theories in order to understand moments in the lives that operate in these emerging contexts. Such works typically bring rhetorical and critical theories to bear on media and new media in a way that elaborates a burgeoning post-disciplinary medial turn as one further development of the rhetorical and visual turns that have already influenced scholarly work.

The Two Virtuals

New Media and Composition

Alexander Reid

Parlor Press

Anderson, South Carolina

www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906

© 2007 by Parlor Press

Cover Illustration: Absorbed © 2005 by Eva Serrabassa. Used by permission.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reid, Alexander, 1969-

  The two virtuals : new media and composition / Alexander Reid.

         p. cm. -- (New media theory)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-60235-022-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-023-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-024-3 (adobe ebook)

 1. Mass media--Technological innovations. 2. Rhetoric. I. Title.

  P96.T42R445 2007

  302.23--dc22

                                         2007026553

Cover design by David Blakesley.

Printed on acid-free paper.

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].

For Rhonda, Mirabel, and Jameson

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: The Two Virtuals

Cognition, Consciousness, and Subjectivity

Learning to Live with New Media

2 The Evolution of Writing

Speech and Gesture

The Evolution of Writing

3 Nineteenth-Century New Media

The Discourse Machine Gun

24 Frames Per Second

4 Cybernetics

Homeostasis

Autopoiesis

AI-AL

5 Into New Media

Simulation

Digital Cinema

From Digital to Analog Virtuality

6 Waking Up in the Machine

Multiplicities and the Becoming of Thought

Cartesian and Topological Spaces

Paranoia and Simulation

Choice and Free Will

Machinic Enslavement

Virtually Autonomous

7 Virtual Composition

Ripping.Contagion.Mushrooms

Mixing

Burning

Electracy: Creative Affects

Rhythm Science

Burning Copyright

8 The Pedagogic Event

Pedagogic Communication

The Teachable Moment

Inventing New Media Pedagogy

9 Whatever Discipline

Excellence and Control

Whatever Discipline

Endit

References

Index to the Print Edition

About the Author

Acknowledgments

I must begin by thanking my fine colleagues at Parlor Press: Byron Hawk and David Blakesley for their excellent feedback as I wrote this book and Marc Santos for his close reading.

Certainly I could not have accomplished this work without the support of my friends at SUNY-Cortland. David Franke and Vicki Boynton have built a Professional Writing program with me, and I could not have written this book without their encouragement. Teaching and building that program has served as a necessary touchstone for what I have written here. Thanks also to those faculty who played an important role in our writing program and have been willing to hear me out: Mary Lynch Kennedy, Karen Stearns, Ross Borden, Bernie Earley, Tim Emerson, Mario Hernandez, Homer Mitchell, and Jane Richards. I also thank the students who have been open-minded and willing to take on the challenges of technology with me.

Of course new media is about more than writing. Paul van der Veur and Charles Heasley have helped me understand in practical and local ways what it means to say that new media breaks down the boundaries between disciplines. Lorraine Berry’s work with our NeoVox project has increased my appreciation of the international dimensions of networked education. And there are many others across our campus, folks who support our technology. If there is one thing I have learned about teaching with technology, it is that I cannot do it alone. In that respect, it is much like writing this book.

I must also acknowledge the great value of the community of bloggers with whom I have been fortunate to associate over the last few years. Collin Brooke, Jeff Rice, and many others have offered me a genuine appreciation of the broad and lively nature of our field. My thanks to those people and those who have read and commented on my own blog. The energy of this blogosphere has kept me going.

Finally I thank my family, my parents and my sister, as well as my in-laws, who didn’t have to believe in me, but did. And, of course, my kids, Mirabel and Jameson, and my wife, Rhonda, for their love and patience. Thank you all.

1 Introduction: The Two Virtuals

There are two virtual realities, neither of which is reality in the way we have traditionally understood it. Nevertheless, both have a dramatic effect upon our professional lives and the future of higher education. The first virtual is quite familiar; it is the virtual reality produced by modern computing—the broad range of technologies from cell phones to mainframes that have transformed culture in the U.S. as well as around the globe. While the adoption of these technologies has been widespread, there is also some apprehension about the cultural and personal impact they will have. This is certainly the case in higher education, which is divided between enthusiasm for the integration of technology into education and concerns about the effects this technological emphasis will have on traditional, especially humanistic, educational values. The second virtual is likely less familiar; it is the virtual of a minor philosophical tradition that one can trace back to pre-Socratic philosophers, to the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, to Spinoza and Leibniz, to Bergson and Simondon, and many others, including Deleuze and Guattari. It lies in the periphery of more familiar postmodern theories and concepts, such as deconstruction, the rhizome, simulation, and so on. This virtual does not specifically refer to computers or even technology in general; instead, it is no less than an alternate theory of cosmos, of matter, time, and space. As I argue in this text, the second, philosophical virtual provides us with a theory of materiality and thought, a theory of composition (of the way in which thoughts compose as media and media composes as thought), that allows us to approach the first, the technological virtual, in critical and productive ways.

Speaking on the issue of technological virtuality, Derrida (2002) poses the following question:

This new technical ‘stage’ of virtualization (computerization, digitalization, virtually Immediate worldwide-ization of readability, telework, and so forth) destabilizes, as we have all experienced, the university habitat. . . . Where is to be found the communitary place and the social bond of a ‘campus’ in the cyberspatial age of the computer, of the World Wide Web? Where does the exercise of democracy, albeit a university democracy, have its place in what Mark Poster calls ‘CyberDemocracy’? (p. 210)

As Derrida observes, the university has been a significant site of transformation. Not only must one think of new computer majors and courses, computer classrooms, computerized class presentations, online course materials and discussions, and entirely online courses, but also all the other aspects of university life: online advisement and registration, online grading, online libraries, campus networking, wireless campuses, networked computers for every student in every dorm room. Nearly all of these are phenomena of the last twenty-five years, many of the last ten years. Indeed, there are entirely online universities. What does it mean to say they offer a virtual education and hand out virtual degrees? How real is an education that takes place largely or totally online? These are legitimate questions asked by skeptical academics, for clearly a virtual education is different from one that takes place in a physical classroom.

It is necessary for us to engage with the second virtual. Where the virtual-technological deals with producing simulacra of reality, this philosophical virtual, which I call the virtual-actual (following Deleuze and Guattari), addresses the production of materiality itself. Briefly put, where traditional Western philosophy describes a world of discrete objects organized by inherent characteristics and fixed, measurable distances, the virtual-actual maps a continuous materiality from which objects unfold in a perpetual flow of mutation. In this sense it is quite different from the virtual-technological, which deals with discrete, binary symbols, and, yet, the virtual-actual provides us with a theory of materiality, of time and space, that allows us to understand better the role information technologies play in knowledge production both on a cultural level and on the level of individual subjects. Such concepts may seem abstract and distant from the particular challenges of our discipline or the practical future of the academy. However, the distance is not as great as it might first appear. Information technologies have directly affected the ways we produce, organize, and communicate information about our world and ourselves. Our conventional way of understanding the relationship between a writer (or thinker) and technology establishes a conflict or at least tension where the broader the role technologies play, the more likely they are to be perceived as a threat to independent thought. In some respects, the apparent threat of technology is not unlike the implications of ideology in its questioning of free will and agency. However, the virtual-actual provides a means to investigate the material processes of thought that incorporates the material, technological, and ideological, as well as our lived experience of what we call free will. In doing so, the virtual-actual addresses the ways in which information technologies intersect with embodied cognitive processes in the composition of knowledge.

In short, this is immediately a question of composition. That is, if we ascribe to the belief that writing is not simply the recording of pre-existing ideas, but instead participates in the composition of knowledge, then we are committing ourselves to exploring these intersections between technology and the embodied mind. And I stress the status of embodiment here to emphasize that thought itself is material, even though we often think of the concepts that we manipulate in our minds as being abstract. Indeed in this text, thought or cognition is not only material but also distributed through a network of processes that are both inside and outside the body. This cyborgian dimension to thought is not a new phenomenon, though perhaps the computational power of modern information technologies and their rapid expansion over the past few decades have made the role of technology in cognition more palpable, creating increased apprehension. That point aside, rather than imagining technology as threatening to invade the sanctity of our consciousness, this text views consciousness as a product of the body’s intersection with technology. Investigating the virtual-technological within the context of the virtual-actual allows one to understand the composition of thought (and media) as a material process that involves technologies as much as it involves ideology and culture. Postmodern theory, cultural studies, and post-process composition have built a critical understanding of discourse and representation in terms of ideology and culture. The virtual-actual, which in many respects underlies much of this philosophy, articulates a theory of materiality and the composition of thought that describes the role ideology and culture play in the material unfolding of consciousness. This description includes understanding how and why ideology fails to capture human thought in totality; it also explains the potential cybernetic (or managerial) function technologies play in the composition of thought. Given this philosophical perspective of the two virtuals, it is then possible to conceive of experimental, material compositional practices designed to play on the structural limits of ideological control. While such experiments may not create freedom in the traditional, humanistic sense, they offer new embodied experiences and potentials for thought.

In short, drawing on the concepts of the two virtuals, this book investigates potentials for using new media in rhetoric and composition to move in directions other than the all-too-likely outcomes that give us cause for concern. Specifically, I am looking to avoid a situation in which new media and information networks become yet another, increasingly sophisticated and effective means for regulating and pacifying thought. My argument in this text is founded partly on the premise that one effective strategy for engaging in these complex disciplinary, institutional, and cultural changes is through a critical understanding of the technologies that are playing such a significant (though I would not say deterministic) role in our information society. That said, this is not a text aimed only at those rhetoricians who view new media as their specialization; it is more broadly a text for rhetoricians and compositionists as we collectively engage the challenges the virtual presents us. This inquiry pursues new possibilities for pedagogic and disciplinary practice with an eye toward imagining a rhetoric of new media that would provide us with the opportunity of engaging in the future formation of the university, to say nothing of the broader culture. The intersection between the two virtuals, the folding of the virtual-technological into the abstract materiality of the virtual-actual, suggests new approaches to the embodied, cognitive processes of media literacy that form the basis of our discipline. This in turn points to new understandings of compositional processes and pedagogy. These understandings, at least in this text, are not prescriptive. This book does not suggest how-to teach composition in the context of new media. Instead, it offers an alternate perspective from which new practices might unfold.

The question before us now is not if new media educational products and practices will be developed, as they already exist in many contexts. Instead, it is a matter of imagining how such experiences will unfold. Nowadays, most college classes get together for three hours a week. However, a robust multimedia environment could handle much of that activity asynchronously and on-demand. There would be no need for students and faculty to meet for a lecture or presentation. Even much of the class discussion could arguably be handled better this way, where students would have more time to be thoughtful. Though online learning will likely continue to become an increasingly popular option for non-traditional students and commuters, it is likely that many traditionally-aged students (and their parents) will still desire the conventional, on-campus college experience. For such students, not meeting face-to-face seems as impractical as meeting solely for the purpose of having students sit in a lecture hall and take notes. Instead, we will see the continuing development of hybrid courses (partly face-to-face and partly online), where the imperative for meeting would be different from our conventional practices: to satisfy our need to put a human face on learning and to ground our virtual experiences in the certainty of physical interaction.

Though undoubtedly there are many possible directions a hybrid, new media education might take, I see two primary trajectories that reflect two different ways of understanding the role of technology. The first, more traditional, perspective views technology as ancillary to human thought. Here the computer is a repository for information and a handler of mundane, repetitive computational tasks. Aside from giving us access to information and performing these calculations, computers do not, from this perspective, play a core role in human thought or creativity. However, because of their computational power, computers and networks do present dangers regarding information piracy and security, as well their academic counterpart, academic dishonesty, particularly plagiarism. Under such a model, computer networks become a way of distributing proprietary information (like textbooks) to students. Unless a student happened to be in a major that focused on computing, he or she would likely not use computer networks to produce media or information. Concerns of the proprietary nature of information and the potential for cheating would severely limit the use of such networks for student creativity. However, proprietary products would flourish. Instead of sitting through lectures with PowerPoint slides, students would sit in front of their computer clicking through on-demand video and interactive learning objects. Physical classroom time would be reserved for labs, extended office hours, study groups, and, of course, secure testing. Composition programs could employ networks to provide uniform, canned instruction across sections on subjects from grammar and MLA-style to developing a thesis statement and revising one’s writing. Networks would continue to be used as a watchdog, guarding against plagiarism by matching student texts with extensive databases of writing. In short, information technologies would be used to regulate and pacify human thought and creativity.

Alternately, drawing on the theory of the virtual-actual presented in this text, one might conceive of technology as integrated into processes of thought and creation and thus develop pedagogies that view new media as not simply a high-tech textbook. From this perspective, one would not eliminate the concept of proprietary media but would recognize that the protection of copyright must be balanced against other cultural interests. More importantly, one would not mistake the legal fiction of authorship, necessary for copyright and the media marketplace, with the material processes of composition, which indicate that thought and creativity are processes distributed across culture and technologies. As such, computer networks would serve as an opportunity for students to produce their own media through their integration of vast databases of information with their own compositional efforts. Courses would de-emphasize the largely uni-directional downloading of pre-formatted proprietary lessons and stress the multi-directional exchange of media among members of the learning community. In a writing class, much like composition today, the course would focus on becoming rhetorically effective and critical users of media, but instead of writing print texts, one would practice composing new media. Ultimately the students would construct their own learning objects, archaeologies of their own learning experiences. A large part of the process would be editing and mixing existing media objects and blending them with some new video, audio, and text. As I detail in Chapter 8, this composition process reflects the contemporary practices of ripping, mixing, and burning digital music. On some level, beneath all this content, is text, but the rhetorical effectiveness of the text lies in its ability to serve as a mechanism for a database. In this context, organization and arrangement become an issue of interface, of human-computer interaction (HCI), in relation to this database. Argument becomes secondary to what we call experience design today: the rhetorical effect of interacting with this learning object. Audience awareness is perhaps the one thing that remains constant, even if both the nature of the audience and certainly the way one addresses the reader-cum-user has changed.

Many academics will find neither option desirable. For those who have grounded their teaching on the time-honored practice of lecturing, the coming changes may be especially difficult. However, even for those with more experience in a distributed classroom environment, the notion of students composing new media learning objects may seem daunting, not only in terms of the technical challenges of learning to do such things for oneself but also in pedagogic terms of understanding how such practices might constitute learning. Certainly, in much of our regular ways of thinking about the teaching of writing, the focus lies on formal correctness, whether those forms reflect grammar conventions, MLA-style, or the organizational expectations of various generic forms of academic discourse. Beneath our everyday presentation of genre and convention lies a theory of rhetoric and composition, a predication of the compositional process and of the ways we think and learn. Undoubtedly, formal expectations will emerge for new media learning objects (if we pursue them as a mode of teaching), just as they have developed for websites. However, my argument here is that new media composition must be built upon a different theory of the embodied, cognitive processes of composition. Without such a theory, higher education is likely to move toward a more proprietary, corporate concept of information, which will increasingly restrict teaching and learning experiences. Such a theory begins in the virtual-actual, at the foundations of our understanding of materiality and thought.

Cognition, Consciousness, and Subjectivity

As this text details, the intersection between the virtual-technological and the virtual-actual deals heavily with the composition of thought. Clearly, the questions of how thought happens, of how the brain works, of how consciousness and subjectivity are produced, and what relationships may exist between these processes are fundamental to many disciplines from philosophy and psychology to cognitive science and robotics. They are questions of religious, scientific, ideological, and artistic concern, and certainly they are issues in English Studies, though perhaps more indirectly than in some other disciplines. The virtual-actual, as a theory of materiality, does not separate the question of thought processes from other material processes: that is, it does not separate thought from other material processes that provide its context. Though in English Studies we most often employ the term subjectivity, and in rhetoric and composition we most often conceive of texts addressing audiences on a conscious level, English Studies also recognizes the role of the unconscious (as in psychoanalytic theory). This text investigates the interface between the subject and networked, symbolic, information systems. However, the text also studies the intersection of technology and the body’s cognitive processes in the composition of thought at an unconscious level, and the emergence of thought into consciousness as it verges toward integration in subjectivity. In doing so, I make use of three terms: cognition, consciousness, and subjectivity.

Cognition describes the embodied processes that result in a thought of which the conscious becomes aware. I discuss extensively the concept of distributed cognition, which emerges from the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. The traditional model of cognition, from Plato onward, is a centralized, top-down model. That is, cognitive function is centrally located in the brain/mind and extends outward and downward to the rest of the body and into interactions with the external world. In the distributed model of cognition, thought processes not only occur throughout the body but also in the external, smart environment in which we are situated. For example, the eyes do not simply sense and transmit all visual information equally, calling upon a central processing brain to distinguish important from unimportant visual data. The eyes have their own filtering, information-processing function. Just as I rely upon various segments of my body to process information, I also depend upon my environment to record and process information for me. Obviously my computer performs any number of cognitive functions for me, sorting information on the Internet, filtering my e-mail, and storing data. However, I have any number