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Why my future Kindle Fire is igniting a war on the internet and other things we don't appreciate about hypertexts

Jakobs is impenetrable to me. I thought I understood hypertexts until I read her piece. Now I understand nothing. I hope tomorrow's class clears some of this up.

Sosnoski, on the other hand, speaks to my soul. As a writer, with aspirations of publication, writing and reading lengthy texts on-screen is a part of my daily life. All of my word processing is done online. I read blogs, news and short fiction on my computer.

But I edit in print.

Essays, stories, poetry, articles. Whatever I am writing at the time. I print it out, mark it up, and type in the changes. And I've wondered before, in a distant sort of way, if that was a problem, or something to consider changing, but I've never given it much serious thought.

Now, though, it takes me back to last weeks discussion and my assertions about the significance of the way we write. I applied online writing to the idea that one for, has more or less merit than another, but now I am confronted not only with my own desire to signify the way I write, but with a critique of the way we read.

I contemplated starting this blog post by talking about my recent obsession with e-readers. Despite the presence of hypertext both on and off-screen in my life, this decision has been most inspired by the realization that moving my (tiny) library is going to be miserable. Books are heavy and take up a lot of space. A Kindle Fire can ride along in my purse (and lets me play Angry Birds).

But as I've begun shopping around for the e-reader I want once I'm gainfully employed post-college, I've encountered a bizarre cultural movement that coincides nicely with this article. There is rampant hate in certain circles of the internet for the idea that someone would dare to read on an e-reader rather than pick up a hard back book. To me, this seems someone egotistical and a little bit classist. To assume that someone is uneducated, lazy, or stupid for choosing the "less romantic" reading option is also to make the assumption that they have the money and space to buy and store those books, to move them. But a part of that reluctance also comes from the idea (as Sosnoski recognizes in his article) that this hypertext reading is less attentive and sloppier.

I also think that a percentage of these complainers are following the comp/lit fault line laid out by Sosnoski. They are reluctant to set aside what they perceive as the true way to enjoy and immerse yourself in a book and welcome a new technology for the amenities it offers; their reluctance has more to do with applied significance than practical function.

I suppose that this debate, like many we seem to encounter in this class, will only be solved with time and settling cultural norms.

Pencils, pens and the slow but sure devolution of writing into the mere amusement of the masses, oh my!

Note: I won't be in class tomorrow and I'm sorry. I try not to get catastrophically ill during the first month of classes, but, alas, this sinus infection is getting worse by the day.

I had a friend once in high school who would only write stories longhand. She said it helped her to be able to see the words, even when she had them crossed out. The delete button had too much finality for her liking. She was a lousy friend and a mediocre writer, so I never paid much attention to her peculiar creative process, but Baron makes me think she may have been on to something.

My all-time favorite xkcd take on the evolution (or devolution, as some would argue) of writing can be found here. Indeed, the sentiment expressed in the post is almost entirely opposite Baron's early reminder of what in incredible invention the pencil was. We, as modern writers, tend to look on past technologies as bygone eras, useless but for their effect of paving the way to modern writing methods.

For example:
How we feel writing longhand:

  How it actually is:


The typewriter, as Baron points out, was considered "so threatening...to the traditional literatus that in 1938 the New York Times editorialized against the machine that depersonalized writing" (emphasis mine). How different is that from the opinions of modern word processors. But how, I wondered as I read his piece, can something depersonalize writing if its only function is to facilitate that transfer of words from your mind to the page? What about pen and paper makes writing more personal that keyboard and screen? Does our romantic outlook as writers really so define our ability to adapt to new methods of annotating our thoughts? And does it hamstring us along the way?

In all seriousness, the universal in the changing reactions to new writing methods is the fear that, somehow, this new method will make writing less sacred than the method it replaces. Writers attach a deep significance to the way in which they writer (much like my friend from high school). To displace that sacred form is not to steal the words from the writers head, but to convince them that without their pencil/pen/typewriter/computer, the words are not worth writing.

And in that sense, my old classmates dislike of the delete button is just as valid as Baron's idea of the innovation and evolution of writing technology. Both are thoughts on new technologies, and while one is far more eloquently expressed, the other is more visceral and, in that way, more effective as an emotional plea.



Here is another favorite comic of mine, dealing with writers and their processes, much more than with their mediums. However irrelevant to the topic, go ahead and have a laugh: XKCD - On Writing (bonus round)

Internet Memes: Discourse communities and intertextual relationships making the serious into the comedic

Story time, intrepid readers!

Over the summer, I played on my parent's billiards team. One night, the conversation turned to the internet and I asked my mother if she knew what a meme was.

"Of course," she replied. "Like Michelle Obama's hair!"

To date, I still have no idea what about Michelle Obama's hair made its way onto the internet, but my mother was convinced that because it was a heavily repeated "internet sensation" it was also a meme.

Now, I am a child of the LOLcats generation and soemthing of an internet hipster, so I unwisely attempted to convince my mother that whaterver the FLOTUS's hair may look like, it was not a meme.

"Fine," she replied, clearly nearing the end of her patience with my hair-splitting. "What is a meme?"

...

...

What is a meme?

I've carried that question around with me since our conversation, and in Porter and Intertextuality, I think I've found my answer.

I would suggest, albeit temporarily, that there is no difference between my mother's idea of meme and my own experiences of it. To many people, in particular those who spend little to no time lost on the internet, there is no difference. A meme to them is a popular internet fad - somewhat confusing and difficult to identify. There is no word yet (although I hope it will be soon in coming) that denotes a "thing" on the internet that is funny for its individual characteristics. 

I suggest the need for such a word because, thanks to Porter, I personally define a meme as a text that derives its humor from one or more levels of intertextual conversation. Of course, all things are comprised of many texts, but some things, such as a book or a movie, can be defined as a group by something other than intertext (i.e. a book is read, a movie is seen). A meme can be spoken, watched, read or seen (or many at once) but it always overtly incorporates two or more texts.

For example:

Deconstruction: The humor in this particular image is reliant on the audience understanding the first picture (text) through the second text, the knowledge that in the television show Spongebob Squarepants the character Patrick Star is so incredibly stupid that this could be a real-life Patrick question. Therefore, here the meme takes two very different and explicit texts and combines them to create humor.

Another, more complex example:

Deconstruction: Overly attached girlfriend, as this meme is known, is based on the slightly manic looking woman in question. The memes are defendant on her image (and its visual humor) as well as pithy text that seems like something a too-attached significant other might do. But here, someone has taken an old, accepted meme, well known for its topic and applied current events and the governments violations of personal privacy and combined them to use these two texts (not to mention the layers therein) to create a social commentary.

Which brings us to:

Deconstruction: Because memes are created using the texts of our times, so to speak, they are privy to our worst pettiness, as well as our most brilliant commentary. One example of pervasive, but less-than-savory, intertext memes is the Fake Nerd Girl.  This meme takes the worst of society's internalized misogyny and gives it artistic and occasionally humorous form. 

To break down the above image, we have a girl (conventionally attractive, nicely dressed, ) wearing glasses popular in "scene" style and NERD written on her hand. Beside her, we have a boy (conventionally attractive, nicely dressed) wearing glasses popular in "scene" style and NERD written on his hand. Both appear to be dramatically posing for a picture. That is all. We have no other visual or textual clues as to who these people are and what they like.

What the meme form allows us to do is take the visual image of a girl who does not look like the cultural expectation of "nerd" and attach a vapid, petty comment (although I object that Harry Potter is a soft-nerd book). The comparison of these texts tells us that she is a fake.

Meanwhile, her nearly identical (MALE) counterpart is assigned "real-nerd" books and taken seriously. Following my argument of intersectionality, the reason the Fake Nerd Girl meme is so easy to laugh at is because of a cultural reading of the feminine as less intelligent and passionate than the masculine.

The only reason this second image was made is because of a society-deep inability to accept that the women you know are not the exception to the rule: there is no rule. This is intersectionality in action for me; practiacl application of rhetoric to examine societal trends and pressures.

Wow, sorry. It's late and I got a little into my feminist soapbox ranting. But the potential of intersectional modern texts to show us how we actually see things, as opposed to how we think we see them, is crazy huge.

So thanks for your patience. My new text would be meaningless without you.

I knew the day would one day come when my massive, useless knowledge of internet culture would stand me in good stead.

I Hate My Voice and Other Things My Webcam Taught Me

Alright, kids. This is me, in all my video-inept glory. Probably, I should not have watched Emily Jo's before I shot mine. My self-consciousness is crippling.

All jokes aside, I'm pretty happy with this. For a self-taught "vlogger," it turned out okay.

A new tool for every task

I like Keith Grant-Davie in equal measure for his dedication to detail and his sheer readability. Coming out of Rhetoric and Composition at this fine institution last year, I was convinced that commentators on rhetoric adhered to some invisible guideline that their writing should either be derisive of the subject or nigh-indecipherable in function. Grant-Davie, refreshingly, seems to belong to a school of thought that encourages both thoughtful and approachable commentary.

You go, Keith Grant-Davie. Four for you, Keith Grant-Davie.

How Keith Grant-Davie Laid Waste to My Inner Descartes

From the perspective of student who wants readings that take less time that dinner needs in the oven, I wish that all we read were the Grant-Davies of rhetoric. From the perspective of a student who wants to build and improve a knowledge base about rhetoric and rhetorical encounters, reading Fish before Grant-Davie (to say nothing of Geisler) makes perfect sense.

If Fish uses his article (and I feel he does) to address the potential problems with rhetoric and the Socratic Method by exaggerating and polarizing both, Grant-Davie brings us back to the world of practical application and examines why rhetoric can be seen as a Power of Evil ™ and how it can be harnessed and used to better understand basic human interaction.

For example:

My time spent as a (secret-alter-ego) TA was one blessedly short-lived semester, wherein I assisted in teaching a section of the MSU Honors College seminar. Early in the semester, we read Descartes ("I think, there for I am") as a class and discuss the ramifications of his theory. In my experience, as a student and a TA, there is always, always, one student who becomes so enamored with the idea of "questioning everything," that discussion for the rest of the semester always comes back to the very existence of the physical world and everything grinds to a standstill. The best remedy, for the sake of class discussion, is to come to an early agreement that some things (such as the existence of sentient life on Earth) are to be accepted as "fact" so that conversation may roll onward.

Fish reminds me, in a distant way, of Descartes, posing necessary questions about the nature of rhetoric and of its opponents, questioning the very tenants of the idea. Grant-Davie, then, proposes the breakdown by which we, as scholars of rhetoric, can agree on some simple terms and continue building and learning. This way, once we have immersed ourselves in the actuality of rhetoric, we can come back to Fish and re-asses his questions. But for the moment, we can safely cross over the handy bridge of Grant-Davie's writing and learn about the function of rhetoric. While mindful of Fish and his theory, we need not be overrun by him.

All this is to say that Grant-Davie takes something as massive and confusing as rhetoric and breaks it down into a basic method of analysis. For me as a student and a rhetor, this both allows me to study the uses of rhetoric as an art and begin to amass an internal definition of rhetoric that I can carry with me into other schools of thought and use to compare against their definitions and theories. 

But…What?

What, as luck would have it, is exactly the word that makes all of the difference for me between Fish and Grant-Davie.

What is the discourse about? Why is it needed? What should it accomplish?

As someone who had been forced encouraged to study rhetoric for a handful of semesters, coming across these lines made all the difference in the week’s reading. I had always personally considered rhetoric to be a study of human communication, much of which is so ordinary as to be almost accidental. But to deliberately decide if a situation requires rhetoric? That implies a level of attention far greater that a simple conversation. These questions and their implications elevated my internal definition of rhetoric from everyday conversation to the study of communication. This questions introduces the stage at which morality and judgment enter rhetorical debate, in choosing whether or not to even enter an argument (see: YouTube comments section) and it demands a level of considerate thought be given to a project.  

In Conclusion

In my personal rhetorical studies, I need Grant-Davie as much as, or possible more than I need Fish. Up until now, my narrow focus has been on the morality of rhetoric and my attempts to build a staunch defense of it have suffered considerably from their basis in theory rather than practice. What Grant-Davie demands, not only with his questions of exigence, but his exploration of the rhetorical process and rhetorical situations as a whole, is the suspension of my reliance on theory until my understanding of practice is at least underway. And that, if nothing else, is the perfect, unsettling, useful way to kick off a new semester.