Category: Scholarship

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On Occupy UC Davis and its memes

Jeff Rice posted just the other day about the well-publicized UC-Davis pepper-spraying incident November 18, part of their Occupy protest on that campus.  More accurately, Jeff wrote about this photo. I’m linking here to the YouTube video, in part because I think it shows a little more nuance in terms of the event.  But the photo and its remixes are also important, as I’ll get to in a moment.

Jeff wrote (among other things, of course):

With the spraying photo, we immediately “know”  that someone should be fired because of this immediacy of emotional response. Barthes might call this response the arrogance of affirmation. Regardless, and as many note regarding the sense of immediacy or involvement digital dissemination allows for, we believe we know. We believe we know many things, but as the Occupy movement continues to demand attention, we believe we know this moment. We know based on a single image of a man pepper spraying kneeling protesters.

These are rhetorical questions and not value based questions. And they deserve some meta attention as well: The blog response, too, participates in such immediacy. I immediately blog in response to the photograph. My emotional response is different than what is publicly expressed regarding the photography, but it is still immediate (a focus of Internet critique – we don’t think through our ideas). Overall, then, I’m intrigued by immediacy in ways others are as well – via the blog or the photo. Immediacy is central to digital expression and understanding. We may not entirely understand that point yet.

Now, I assume he isn’t referring to my dissertation about this, but that word “immediacy” was/is an important one for me.  In my diss (this is a archive version– I think there is some kind of server problem as I write this), I write about immediate situations as being ones where digital media transform analog rhetorical situations.  In my dissertation, the examples were from the earlier, mid-90s version of the internets– email and basic web sites, for example.  As I wrote about it and as I still think about it now (I’ve been slowly going back to revising my diss since I have finally comes to terms to the whole process), immediacy has complicated connotations.  Rhetorical situations/events that are immediate are simultaneously very close to us and also very sudden, so they are thus intimate and chaotic.

The entire Occupy Wall Street situation (which I wrote about here earlier) is the larger and/or source situation for this most recent event, and that could lead to an entirely different discussion that I’m not going to go into now about what exactly constitutes a “rhetorical situation?”  Is it possible that a few years from now that we will think of the UC Davis protest as being unique relative to the Occupy Wall Street protests, sort of like the way the shootings at Kent State in 1970 have come to be seen as its own event and not inherently a part of the larger protests against war in Viet Nam and southeast Asia.

Regardless, I think this qualifies as a particularly immediate event in that it is transmitted to most of us (other than those who were there, of course) electronically and virally via YouTube.  On the one hand, there is a context that is missing here, including warnings before the spraying about the need to move or else.  But the casualness and brutality of the spraying here is hard to miss, and despite the bizarre interpretation of the event that took place on Fox (it’s just a vegetable), there doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground here.  This was just bad.

Which maybe why the meme parodies began so quickly, notably at the tumblr site Pepper Spraying Cop.  Jenny Edbauer (Rice’s) “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies” probably speaks to this sort of meme/viral media event, and one of these days, I want to go back and read that essay again.  Maybe one of these days soon.  But I think that one of the reasons why the parody/humor here works is because the event itself– again, because of the proximity we have to it via digital media– is so obviously one-sided and indefensible that it lends itself to parody.  And the way the image itself functions in relation to readily available Photoshop-like technology also is at play here:  contemporary digital media and technology makes it possible for those who would previously be restricted to an audience role to themselves become rhetors/speakers in this particular situation.

It’s hard to say to what effect.  I suppose it is possible that the hundreds (thousands?) meme parodies of Lt. Pike’s casual pepper spray could create a distance from the actual horrible event itself.  We don’t want to forget that all this fun has a pretty nasty origin point.  Then again, maybe it is preciously the meme that keeps this (and the entire point of the Occupy movement) on the publics’ minds.

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Post WIDE-EMU (#1)

Enough puns about Emus already:  the on-the-fly/on-the-cheap (un)conference of sorts that Derek, Bill HD and I set up, the WIDE-EMU, went off with pretty much no problems on Saturday.  It was all rather amazing to see, frankly, though my pictures and video of the day are all pretty lame, mostly people sitting around and listening.  I’ll have to work on that for next time around.  And I will try to put up the video of keynote session up online later today or so, too.

Where did this thing come from in the first place? My recollection was that germ of the idea emerged during a long car ride back from the CCCCs in Atlanta and a conversation about how so much that we value in conference is the face to face interaction and exchange over the standing and delivering of papers.  And we also wondered about the costs of conferences which has always struck me as too high.  Long story short, we kept talking about this stuff over the spring and summer, and the WIDE-EMU was born.

There’s lots of stuff at the web site— links to “phase 2″ proposals, an agenda of the day, a robust twitter stream represented on Storify, and (eventually) there will be the video of the plenary session with Troy Hicks, Danielle DeVoss, and a distant (via Skype) Elyse Eidman.  We had around 40 people registered, though I am certain there were many who didn’t get around to registering since we didn’t have people do it at all until they were on site and we didn’t really require it.

I’m obviously biased and we’re still waiting for some survey data to return, but I thought it turned out to be fantastic event, and not just because of the localness/”proof of concept” point I’ll get to in a moment.  I thought there were some legitimately great conversations/presentations.  A big part of it is we just so happen to be geographically located within an easy day’s drive of a lot of places where the idea of studying digital writing is being taken seriously.  But I also think our process helped.  Basically, we asked anyone and everyone to start by submitting a title in one of three different types of presentations, “talk,” “make,” “do.”  Lots of people came up with ideas.  But then we asked people in phase 2 to submit something more.  It didn’t have to be a lot or particularly complicated, but it had to be something– a few paragraphs, some slides, a short video, a web site, etc.  So since people had to come up with something before the conference actually began, people came to the conference prepared.  And I think that showed.  The stuff I saw was just as good as what I typically see at overpriced, oversized national conferences.

But again, I go back to the proof of concept issue:  I think what we demonstrated here is that if you have a “free” meeting space, if you use “free” electronic tools, and if you eliminate other elements that cost something (notably food and fancy speakers), you can do these kinds of conferences with only a modest amount of organizational labor and with no charge to participants.  And for me, this begs the question about what is it that we are paying for when we go to Computers and Writing or the CCCCs.

Obviously, size matters.  We had about 30 individuals/groups giving the equivalent of presentations, and these were more or less “self-vetted” in that the people who went through the process of proposing something for phase 2 got on the program.  And again, I think that worked.  If we had a lot more people proposing and we needed to make some real choices about who is in and who is out, then it would have been more complicated and labor intensive, probably.  Still, I’ve reviewed proposals for both C&W and the CCCCs and as far as I can tell, no one gets paid for that service.

And size matters in terms of the number of participants.  I think we could have easily handled twice as many attendees, but if we had become 200 people, then I suspect we would have been forced to contend with some more complex organizational issues– for example, I’m not sure we could have gotten away with telling that size of a group that they were simply “on their own” for food, beverages, nametags, programs, etc.

I also think cost matters in interesting and paradoxical ways.  In the “DIY” spirit of things, we didn’t charge anyone for this, but one of the possible implications of this was that the conference wasn’t seen by some as having “value.”  I talked with folks about this in the last session of the day, and Tammy Conrad-Salvo told a story about a dairy farm that used to offer free tours and had virtually no customers, but then started charging for the tours and they had many more customers.  That’s entirely possible with something like this too:  had we charged a modest fee– say $20 or less a person– we might have had more attendees who saw the conference as a “serious” and “real” thing.  On the other hand, charging money would have meant significantly more labor for the organizers.  We would have had to have done something to actually collect money (not always the easiest thing in the world at a public university), and people would have expected some basic stuff for that fee– a program, nametag, coffee and doughnuts, etc.  In other words, still more labor.

There are a lot of other issues here too that I’m still wrapping my head around.  I guess what I’m left with though is I wondering about the “major conferences” in our field.  Don’t get me wrong; I like the “working vacation” of the CCCCs or C&W or whatever as much as anyone, and I realize that these kind of conferences have to pay for space.  Still, I wonder if there aren’t ways to do these things differently.  Maybe we need a lot more smaller events like this.  Maybe the bigger events need to do a better job of using easily available electronic tools to crowdsource conference organization and planning.  Maybe we need to cut costs a bit by getting rid of some of the doo-dads that aren’t really that necessary.  And maybe if the CCCCs and NCTE (for example) are using their conferences for financing their existence as organizations, maybe they need to rethink that, too.

 

 

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The Situations of Occupy Wall Street

Just the other day, I came across this useful post from Jill Walker Rettberg, which is also discussing this useful post from Mike “Rortybomb” Konczal, both about the use of social media and the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Walker Rettberg is more or less summarizing Konczal’s analysis of the Tumblr site We Are the 99 Percent and also of the site Occupy Together, which is a sort of hub for all things “Occupy-ish.”

The point here with Walker Rettberg’s post and these (and other) sites is that these sort of events are perhaps only possible nowadays with social media of the sort you are reading right now, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.  I’m inclined to agree, and I’ve been thinking about all that lately because I have been fiddling around with finally getting off my butt and doing something book-like with my dissertation.  I don’t want to make promises here; saying that I am going to write this book is a little like saying I am going to stay on this diet, both the kind of things that are probably wise to bet against.

In my diss, I used the term “immediacy” to suggest both the profound sense of intimacy that can happen in these situations from proximity (albeit electronic proximity at times) and chaos that results in the immediate speed of these situations playing out.  The Arab Spring uprisings are another good example of this, of course.  The other aspect of the Occupy Wall Street movement (and the Arab Spring, for that matter) is that there is a lack of a singular rhetor/leader offering a single message.  This is probably more true with Occupy Wall Street, though that’s the point of Konczal’s post:  he’s trying to analyze the text on that Tumblr site to ascertain the concerns of the movement as articulated there.  And in brief, those concerns are student loans, children (which I also think might be interpreted as “the future”), unemployment, and health care.

As for my own thoughts about the whole Occupy Wall Street thing:  I am very torn.  On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the broad concerns about student loan debt, jobs, taxes on the rich (or a lack thereof), health care, and I guess what I would describe as the just general frustration that makes people think “nothing else is working; I’m going to go out into the street and beat a drum.”  On the other hand, the lack of a unifying message and leader(s) makes it unlikely that this group is going to get a lot of traction in the analog and very traditional situation of government:  that is, I don’t think the federal government is going to pay a whole lot of attention to these folks until they are able to swing elections.

The other issue I have is the “99 Percent” depicted on Tumblr and other places is that who is in that group is a little problematic to me; or maybe a different way of putting it is there is a certain level of inequality regarding who has it worse.  Most/many of the folks on that blog have legitimate “that sucks” kinds of stories, but there are also many that frankly look like college kids looking for something to protest/join.

Of course, I suppose all of that is just normal and is not a reason to not be frustrated.  I mean, I’m not in the 99 percent of most of the people depicted here– that is, I’m securely employed, I’m not worried a lot about debt, I have decent health insurance, etc.  At the same time, I want to help folks not as lucky as me, and I do worry about the future for my son and his generation, I worry about stupid government cuts in taxes to rich people, etc.

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The rise of the web as the source of knowledge– in a book to be released soon

I went to the JSB Symposium with Derek on Monday over at the University of Michigan, which was an event that featured David Weinberger as the speaker.  Weinberger is the author of books like The Cluetrain Manifesto, the excellent Everything is Miscellaneous, and a forthcoming book that was more or less the topic of his talk, Too Big to Know.  It was an interesting talk, though not as provoking (for me) or as popular as the last one of these I went to in 2009 with danah boyd.  But I digress.

Weinberger talked about a lot of things, but I think it’s fair to say that his new work continues in the same vein as what he talked about before, and how, in a digital age, knowledge is no longer expensive, rare, logical, and locked into books, and that the problem with books is they as objects freeze knowledge at the point of printing.  And he talked through Darwin quite a bit as a pretty good example of how knowledge used to work and how it works now, how nowadays Darwin would probably have a blog.

A lot of what he was talking about here reminded me of an article on Prof Hacker I had been meaning to blog about here for quite some time, “Do ‘the Risky Thing’ in Digital Humanities” by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is the “director of scholarly communication” for MLA.  Basically, Fitzpatrick is offering encouragement to dissertation writers to “be bold” by producing dissertations that distinguish themselves potentially in form if not also content.  For example, she writes:

Writing a standard dissertation that meets everyone’s expectations for what a dissertation should look like, how it should argue, and what it should say is the safe path to a completed degree. But having taken that path—the path to a book—the candidate is likely to find herself on the job market with dozens of other Ph.D. holders with prospective books. Getting her work out of the pile is helped enormously by having done something more than what was expected. That is not to push experimentation for experimentation’s sake, but it is to say that reining in a project a graduate student really wants to do to conform with a traditional structure is counterproductive, deflating both the student’s passion and the thing that makes her work distinctive.

On the one hand, I don’t disagree with either Weinberger or Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald is pretty much praised in the comment section on ProfHacker.  I’m all for “breaking the rules” in terms of scholarship, my dissertation has been online now almost as long as it has existed in print, and I’m proud of the fact that I’ve published lots of stuff online.

On the other hand, let’s check in with reality.  By definition, taking the experimental/alternative path is a risk, and I don’t know if a dissertation is a good place to take that risk.  There are a lot of variables here, of course.  When I was dissertating 15 years ago, there was no “taking a risk” in that dissertations were double-spaced and bound chunks of text by definition.  My assumption that much of this has changed nowadays with electronic publishing possibilities and it is more normal for even traditional dissertations to reference web-based content.  But if someone doing a dissertation on the use of multimedia in the teaching of writing and then produced it only as a web-based chunk of video, then I think that person would probably have a difficult time having that work taken seriously by scholars or the job market.  The cautionary tale that already Alexandra Juhasz tells about her multimedia work/book on YouTube “A Truly New Genre” outlines the problems for an established scholar in publishing this kind of work; freshly minted PhDs just entering the profession would have an even bigger challenges.

Hey, I don’t make the rules.  I’m just telling you what they are.

As for Weinberger:  well, he’s telling us about the powers of the web and its transformations of what constitutes knowledge based on a book.  He isn’t working at Harvard and hasn’t been invited to the University of Michigan to give a speech (one that he has and will surly repeat at other similar venues) because he keeps a blog.  I don’t know how much money Weinberger makes from his books, but I guarantee you that in direct and indirect ways, he makes a lot more from them then he does from his blog.

So, while it is true that we technically don’t need books anymore (though there is something to be said about the permanence and unalterability of print as well) and we might not even be buying books like we used to, books have far more capital in an information economy than anything in the blogosphere.

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My submission(s) and examples for the WIDE-EMU

We’re all a little behind in WIDE-EMU -land right now– a new semester, a new building, new classes, etc., etc.  But in an effort to power through my “to do” list and to encourage the folks who have proposed things, I offer two very modest examples of the same (more or less) submission:

  • This Google Doc text of what I’m thinking in the whole “Learning Not Teaching” thing.
  • Here’s a link to a slideshow that is more or less related to the text– though it isn’t necessarily the same thing.

I tried to put together a couple of things that are pretty simple because we don’t want to make this a whole lot more complicated than necessary for folks who have proposed things.  We just want folks throw something against the wall that might stick, and then we’ll link to it for others to admire.

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The conference that was #cwcon 2011

Technically, the conference is still going on:  in fact, as I (at least start to) write this, some of my colleagues from EMU (and others, of course) are presenting at the ever-popular first thing Sunday morning time-slot, which of course comes after Saturday night’s conference-sponsored bowling and Karaoke night.  But for me, things have wrapped up at C&W, and after this (or perhaps at different times of the day while writing this), I need to get back to spring term teaching, stuff around the yard, etc.

A few thoughts in no particular order:

  • In the end, I thought the folks at the University of Michigan Sweetland Writing Center pulled off an excellent conference.  I know there were some hiccups early on in the process and I’m still not a big fan of the conference web site, but these criticisms are trivial at best.  The facilities (mostly the North Quad, but also the UM art museum and the UM union) were fantastic, the food was great, things were well-scheduled and timely, the keynotes were provocative/interesting/sentimental (in a good way)/engaging (more on that below), and it is of course great that it was in Ann Arbor.  I’m hard-pressed to recall a better Computers and Writing conference experience– maybe when it was at UC-Davis, but that also was because of the side-trip to Napa.
  • Going to a conference that is this close to home has advantages and disadvantages.  It’s nice to sleep in my own bed and to save a little money on lodging, and it’s also really nice to know the town and the campus.  I enjoyed my quasi-tour guide role.  But it was also kind of a pain in the butt to have split roles in my life– doing things at the conference, while being expected/needed to do things around the house.  If I had been staying at the conference, either at one of the nearby hotels or the dorms, rolling out of bed for those morning sessions (including my own) would have been a little easier.  And I might have also been tempted to stay out later, though that perhaps would have been a bad idea.
  • I saw some great sessions, and as an aside, I think it turned out to be pretty smart for the Michigan folks to limit submissions to one per person and to have a space for folks to post materials online. I hope that web site hangs around for a while.  I learned a lot at the B02 session on “participatory publics,” especially some theoretical writers I don’t know at all (note to self– email Brown to get a copy of that essay).  I was going to go to Derek’s presentation, but the room was too crowded, so I went to the Dan Anderson and other UNC folks’ presentation about “peersourcing.” Cool stuff, and one of the things I took away from the conference overall was the growing interest in software aided peer review.   And I was really happy to see a presentation by some of my colleagues and students from EMU about ePortfolios:  they did good stuff, and I know that for a couple of them, it was their first conference presentation.  C&W was my first conference presentation back in 1994– ah, memories…. Anyway, congratulations to them!
  • As far as the keynotes go:  I’d say 2 out of 3 were good.  Tim Wu was generally a “miss” for me, not because he was wrong about what he was saying, but because he was being a little simplistic about it.  He concluded his talk by suggesting (basically– I didn’t take any notes or anything) we can either have a future internet where everything is open or everything is closed, and that’s it, and he pulled out the clichéd and incorrect argument about the “closed” system of the Apple store, the “lack of production” iPad device, etc.  Well, as Joyce Walker put it to me when we were chatting about this, had Wu made this kind of point at the beginning of his speech and then gone on to problematize that claim a bit, it would have been much better.  And Wu basically didn’t answer any questions.
  • As much as anything, Hawisher’s presentation was a trip down memory lane, but you know what?  She deserves that for everything she’s done for this community.  Congrats to her on all she’s done!
  • And I thought Kate Hayles’ talk was great.  I’m not sure I agree with all this cognitive science stuff as an explanation for how or why people read things like books, but I do find it quite fascinating.  She probably sold me a book, assuming it’s available on a kindle or other eReader.
  • I collected my plaque certificate for the John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award, which was very nice, albeit a little embarrassing.  Getting awards/recognition always makes me simultaneously egotistical and self-deprecating, and as lots of people (many who I don’t really know even in the “folks I see at conferences” category of things) said nice things to me about my blog and such, that just went on.  Anyway, thanks again.
  • And then there was our 3 minute per person roundtable, “Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other.”  I’m obviously quite biased, but I thought that was great.  Honestly, I think this lots of people/three minute per person opener/lots of time and motivation for discussion is the way more of these things ought to go.  I liked how the conversation circled around the various terms and definitions, even to the point of trying to define what it is we mean by “dead,” and I learned a number of cool things– about storify, for example.  Denniz Jerz (among others, I suspect) put together all the backchannel tweets from that session in a storify space. I might figure out a way to lift this (and/or do something similar myself) and to then set up a space/place for presenters to share their thoughts on those tweets.  Stay tuned.
  • Oh, and last but not least, the unconference goes on (I hope).  The piece I submitted, “Is There a There There,” comes out of a “suspended” video project that will hopefully find a new home in the next few months.  I haven’t received a lot of feedback on it yet, but what I have heard has been pretty positive.  So if more people take a look at it, that’d be cool.
  • Funniest moment for me:  “Dude, a laptop is a computer.” Had to be there, I guess.

Anyway, that’s a wrap for me.  Now it’s on to (and/or to continue with) the home front and thinking about possibilities for next year.  Thanks again, #cwcon!

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“I’d like to thank the academy” and other prequels to C&W 2011

The other day, I received an email informing me that I’ve won the John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award for 2o11. Go figure!  This comes after I’ve decided (or, employing the passive tense, it was decided) to shelve my research on blogs as writerly spaces, and at the conference where, on a panel I organized around the question “Are Blogs Dead,” my answer is “maybe” (see below).

But in all seriousness, I am honored and thankful for the recognition, and I am happy to once again point to the memory of a blogger that influenced many of the past winners of this award, John Lovas.  I touch on John’s blog in my presentation briefly:  his work (along with a lot of the past winners of this award) represents a very different kind of blogging then what I see going on now.  If you look at John’s blog from way back when (this link is from the Wayback Machine) just for a moment, I think you’ll see what I mean.  John’s blog (and many others from back then, including my own) have a decidedly more autobiographical, “diary-like” turn to them, more than ones nowadays, I think largely because of Facebook.  So it’s interesting for me to be getting this award about “Weblogs,” something that sure seems a lot different to me now then it was back then.

Anyway, thanks again.  And I also really want to point people to what I think is my most successful blogging project, EMUTalk.org, which receives many many more hits and comments than this site and which is devoted to local issues about Eastern Michigan University.

In other prequel for C&W news:

I’m of course looking forward to the fact that the conference is about seven or eight miles from my house and in a town that I know reasonably well.  I kind of will miss out on some of the dorm/hotel/late night “hijinks” I suspect, but it’s always nice to sleep in your own bed.

Either before, during, or after the conference (I don’t know which), check out the “unconference” space I put together with some of my former students, something I’m calling “Is There a There There? A Meta-Review and Meta-Analysis of a Meta-Performance Video.” We’ll see what happens with that.

Thursday, I’m planning on golfing– which I mention because if there are others out there who are interested in potentially joining us, let me know.  Right now we’ve got a 3-some, and I could probably get two tee-times if there’s interest.  I’ll probably get us on at either the EMU course or at a more user-friendly (read “easier” and “cheaper”) course in the area.

Friday, I’m going to conference stuff, and Saturday morning, I’m chairing a roundtable I set up called “Is Blogging Dead?  Yes, No, Maybe, Other.”  It’s at 8:30 AM, and it is going to feature Aaron Barlow, Bradley Dilger, Virgina Kuhn, Carrie Lamanna, Liz Losh, Brian McNely, Brendan Riley, and fellow local and certainly non-academic blogger Andre Peltier.  We’re going to stick to a strict three minute (or less!) opening statement format followed by lots of discussion.  I think it’ll be pretty good. Here’s my talk, all YouTubed and captioned:

By the way, adding those captions was bizarrely easy.

Saturday night I’m thinking about getting out the word to convince some folks to come over to the Ypsi side of things– Depot Town, The Corner, etc.– though that might be a hard sell since there’s plenty to do in Ann Arbor and I am sure that plenty of people will not have a car.  And then there’s bowling, too.   So we’ll see.

And Sunday?  Well, the conference goes on Sunday, though I may or may not partake.  Depends on how far behind I fall in my pesky spring term teaching.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing various C&W types soon.

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A late entry into the C&W “Unconference:” Is there a there there?

After things didn’t work out with going forward with publishing the movie I made with some former grad students, I decided to go ahead and put it into the “Collaborvention 2011,” which is more or less the unconference/online portion of things that is along side the official Computers and Writing conference, which will be in Ann Arbor in a couple of weeks.

Our piece (I say “our” because it is based on the movie I collaboratively made with Dave, Carrie, and Andrea, though I put this part of things together myself) is called “Is There a There There? A Meta-Review and Meta-Analysis of a Meta-Performance Video.” Go check it out!

Besides what I wrote about our motives and what we’re looking for on that site, I have to say that getting this up online for some commentary and review from others (hopefully) is part of one of those “all things converging” moments in scholarship and practice.  Alexandra Juhasz has a really interesting article in Inside Higher Ed titled “A Truly New Genre.” It’s about her video book project Learning from YouTube— which also looks very interesting and cool– and the many problems of getting it published and making things “fit” into the conventional publishing process.  Heidi McKee and Danielle DeVoss have a call for contributions to an edited collection on “digital writing assessment” that I’m thinking about, and my CCCCs proposal is about the problem of “amateur” video (including ours) as a part of writing scholarship.  So lots of different angles on video for the next few months at least, I suppose.

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A quick post on 9/11, killing Bin Laden, and the Internets

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was at home not feeling particularly well– a cold or something.  I mowed the lawn, and then came in and just happened to turn on the TV and saw a story about a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers, a crash that network news first reported as an accident.  Until the next plane hit, and then the Pentagon, and then a field in Pennsylvania. I think it’s fair to say that pretty much everyone in the U.S. (maybe the western world) who had a television (especially with cable) spent the next 72 hours or so watching the news, with breaks to nap, go to the bathroom, and drink.

Ten years passed and many many things happened.

Then, Sunday night (which, oddly enough, was the eighth anniversary of Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” speech) I was getting into bed with my iPad at 10 pm or so, planning to read a bit on the kindle app before getting to sleep and ready for the beginning of the spring term.  I checked Facebook first and saw someone (I can’t remember who) in my feed had posted that Obama was giving a previously unannounced speech at 10:30.  Uh-oh, I thought, and got out of bed to turn on the TV, my iPad (with Twitter and Facebook) by my side.

You know the rest, and I am sure there will be many more examples of this sort of piece that is running on The Atlantic’s web site.

Anyway, that makes me think of at least two things:

  • 9/11 was a very clear “exigency” in that it was obviously the beginning of a new situation, although arguably from the point of view of Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and related groups, 9/11 was merely the middle of a fight that began much much earlier– CIA involvement in Afghanistan,  The 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Africa, etc.  On the other hand, the death of Bin Laden doesn’t seem like an “ending” or a “decay” of this situation.
  • I’m not quite sure what it means that I have heard about this (and nearly all other “breaking news” in the last year or so) first via Facebook and/or Twitter, and then I follow it up with live coverage on TV, and then still later, with writings published on the web or even on paper.  But it means something for sure, something about what “main stream media” is and is not still  capable of doing well.
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#cccc11 recap

This is kind of scattered because I started it over a cup of coffee Monday morning and finished it Wednesday morning before meeting meeting meeting/grading grading grading.  I’m super DUPER busy with wrapping up the winter term.  The last day of classes was yesterday, and I’ve got at least four stacks of things I need to/want to assign grades to by the end of the day a week ago.  I know.

But before I get to more detail than you want to know, I thought I’d make four general comments:

  • Partly in response to Derek and Alex and Kyle and I am sure others:  I’m not particularly grumpy about the quality (or not) of the panels or anything else at this year’s conference.  Yeah, the hotel was too expensive, but that’s why I didn’t stay at the conference hotel.  Yeah, there was no decent wifi and I think that should indeed be addressed, but most major conference hotels have the same problem and I always plan ahead and assume I won’t have decent wifi anyway.  Yeah, I kept running into the same people, but I kind of like that and I always have the odd experience of running into the same people at a particular year of the CCCC and not others– for example, last year I ran into Brian McNely everywhere, but this year, I didn’t see him once.  Etc., etc. I think I preferred the Louisville location to Atlanta for a variety of reasons (though I had a lot of fun in Georgia), but Atlanta was a lot more reasonably priced than New York or San Francisco.  And I don’t want to be too critical because….
  • … I don’t want to get involved.  While I do have some complaints about how the CCCC and the NCTE do business in all sorts of ways (its conferences and a lack of willingness to offer alternative formatted presentations like poster sessions, its publications and its confusion about the paperless publishing world, its view of what an organization is and how it ought to fund itself, its dumb as a bag of rocks view of anything resembling the internets, etc., etc.), I feel like I more or less give up my right to complain too loudly when I am unwilling to do anything about it by getting involved in the organizations’ governance.  I’m not willing to run for the Executive Committee of the CCCC or anything else involving the NCTE.  I thought about it at one point, but it just isn’t the sort of administrative/service work that interests me– at least not now.  So if I’m not willing to pitch and and “make a difference,” so to speak, then I can’t complain too much about the people who are willing to do that.
  • I don’t know if the conference has changed that much or not, but I know I’ve changed.  The first CCCC I went to was (I think?) in 1995, and I attended and presented at the conference pretty consistently through about 2005 or so.  When I was a graduate student and first starting my career down the tenure-track, listening to what people had to say at the CCCC was part of my education and presenting at the conference was real scholarship.  But this year wasn’t my first rodeo, and I’m all tenured/promoted -out.  I still learn some things from panels; but mostly, it’s variations on things I’ve heard before, simply by virtue of the fact that I’ve been around long enough to have heard a lot of stuff before.  I still propose to the CCCC so I can get on the program (and thus some funding for the trip), but I need another CCCC presentation on my CV like another hole in the head.  So sure, the conference isn’t as “new” and as “exciting” as it once was; but neither am I.
  • Having said that, I do think there’s more that the CCCC could do to reorganize itself (more like– dare I say it?– MLA by having subject areas organize panels instead of assuming that we’re all there to talk about freshman comp in some variety; have a wider variety of presentation-types; have published proceedings; etc.); and, in an era in which I can communicate with like-minded scholars all over the world via email and the blogosphere and I can publish a media-rich version of my presentation for free, I think the fundamental purpose of the “academic conference” has to be questioned.  Why do we spend the time and resources to do this anymore?  The answer to me is not panels; it’s being in meet/meat -space with other scholars in the field.

The biggest thing I get out of the CCCC at this point is the incidental contact.  So, along with the actual and direct activities, here’s more or less the order of things as I remember it:

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