The journey along the continuum of understanding how to work with and through sound constantly shifts from traditional, empirical ways of knowing  and nontraditional, non-rational ways of knowing. In this first foray into understanding these phenomena I provide three layers within that continuum: analysis, composition, knowledge. Below, I identify how each of these layers can be utilized and presented using tools available through modern digital technologies.  Interestingly, I’m finding that the ease of writing (a rational, empirical rhetoric) about these different layers diminishes as I move from analysis (which is also rational) to trying to describe in words what I mean by “sound knowledge” — a non-rational rhetoric based on affect and deep, cultural traditions and belief systems. This will eventually become the larger theoretical problem of my future work.

Pt. 1 : sound|analysis

New medias allow for a variety of ways to present, engage with, and analyze sound. When reading traditional scholarship that includes within its scope the aural, it is frequently disappointing that the reader can’t actually hear the sound, be it music, sound effects, or whatever, that is being discussed.

Sometimes this can result in a misreading and even misunderstanding of the scholarship in question. For example, when I first read Jeff Rice’s “The making of ka-knowledge: Digital aurality” in the Spring 2006 issue of Computers and Composition, I was confused. I read the title as KA-knowledge, thinking that “KA” was something akin to the Egyptian ka that is roughly translated as “life-essence”. This was close, but maybe not quite on point to Rice’s thesis. Instead, “ka-knowledge” was a quote from the Beastie Boys song “The Sounds of Science” but, still, without hearing the song, I couldn’t really understand fully how Rice heard it and therefore have complete access to his argument. The article contains three other direct quotes of various musical artifacts and many other less specific musical references, each of which silently languish on the page.

Of course, our easy access to the internet can solve that problem easily enough, but something organic is lost when a reader has to stop reading, do a google search, hope to find a YouTube video or something with free access to the song and then, finally, listen to the sonic artifact.

Modern web publication such as that found in a simple blogging application have the capability of making reading and listening a much more seamless process more akin to visual studies where a painting or photograph can be easily reprinted in the publication. What follows are three options that Rice could have used had he published his article as a web-document.

First, he could have very easily embedded the song at it’s first mention:

“And the Beastie Boys (1989) highlighted droppin’ science in the song “The Sounds of Silence.”

This is a full-song link out. A similar link might be shared that has only the selection of the song that is quoted. I created this edit in 5 minutes using GarageBand. This seems to me a more concise way of going about the citation (and one that may be exempt from having to pay copyright royalties!).

Finally, for more detailed analysis projects, scholars might consider using software such as that offered at SoundCloud, a site created to encourage a social media-like conversation to happen around a shared song (usually of the users own creation), but also has a secondary use of offering visual comment points.

The Sounds Of Science by jwstone

Pt. 2 – sound|composition

As we move away from analysis into composition, it is immediately clear how very different the two are from one another. Analysis allows for a sense of artistic and rhetorical distance between object and critic, whereas composition requires the critic to become the artist and rhetor. When this transition is made, suddenly the sometimes long-forgotten principles  of delivery are useful again. Attention to tone of voice, sonic layering of music and effects, clarity of speech, etc. are important. I offer here two examples of how this kind of work my sound.

The first is a short sound piece that I made for an in-class presentation. In it, my main agenda was to play  around with sound and scholarly argument. I intentionally made the piece quirky and semi-musical. I wanted to demonstrate how very different arguments are when we hear them, especially when the speaker (as I was) is less interested in communicating a linear, logical argument and more interested in the sound itself: the tone of the voice, the shifting layers of speech, the meta sounds, and the affect of hearing.

Sound Presentation by Jon Stone.

The second is a link to Cynthia Self’s collection of sound essays she titles “The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.” The essays collected here represent, for the most part, a more traditional approach to bringing aurality back into our disciplinary communication. The essays generally play out like radio programs: There is usually a narrator and then various other voices are used as the “cited” elements of the project. So, rather than quoting an expert, you can hear the words and voice of that expert in the actual essay. One essay, “The Legacy of Music” is able to have as a soundtrack the very instruments and music that the essayist profiles in the piece.

Both of these examples provide insight on reasons for considering the aural when teaching and creating rhetoric, and bring to the surface many rhetorical principles (delivery foremost among them, but surely not the only one) not present when composing with alphabetic texts.

pt.3 sound|knowledge

The impetus behind my interest in studying sound as rhetoric is not, as you might imagine, based solely on my  interest in music. It is related but not, in the end, what intrigues me. As I mentioned in my presentation, what fascinates me about sound is that its power towards affect is largely mysterious. And further, within the sonic realm are engrained cultural ways of hearing — these “ways” are tied to deep, embodied, shared cultural value systems that can be enacted unconsciously. My children, for example, know at what pitch to whine to get me to do what they want. And beyond that, my hunch is that there are sonic cues, be they vocal, musical( see also here and here), and even related to our sound effects, that correspond to ways of knowing that go beyond empirical notions of what it means to “know.” That, indeed, the sounds we make are audible evidence of deeply held cultural and ideological beliefs.

The trick, of course, is to find ways to make that argument. Felt experiences are not generally something that are easily reproduced and surely not guaranteed, so while sound analysis and composition might be used approximate the kinds of knowledge that I refer to here, the work on how to properly investigate and document this phenomenon will now become my task.

She argues that “Texts are always embodied in relation to physical production and consumption” (241) – and since our reception of texts is always mediated by our bodies, it is impossible to separate one from the other. I get this. Crowley, she reminds us, taught that rhetoric isn’t in the texts themselves, but in our reception (and production) of them. Describing materiality in this way, as I see it, is another way to think about affect, but, funny thing, I didn’t really see that word come up much in the article).

These embodied realities map easily into mediated spaces. “For example,” Pigg writes, “at the simplest level, online writers stomp their feet by writing in all capital letters, they signal pauses with ellipses. This physical sensory element of digital writing often is clear in the actual texts that students create while writing online media…” (241).  Again, I get this. She then moves us through a variety of assignment prompts, each with elements encouraging students to remediate, use a variety of voices or perspectives, and/or blur the lines between work and play in the electronic artifacts they produce. These assignments as she presents them give students a variety of rhetorical analysis opportunities, all of which I think are useful in one way or another.

But what is missing here, again, is an acknowledgement of the reasons that these textual variations produce different rhetorical results. Why does using the words “haven’t passed shit” on a blog and then using the more official version of that phrase in a different context  (see p. 249) result in a different embodied response? There is such a close tie between embodied experience and emotion, that it seems almost ludicrous that that connection goes unacknowledged here. Is it that we have become so reticent to discuss emotional response that we have had to come up with a new phrase (“embodied materiality”) to discuss it? Maybe I missed the point here somewhere.

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I’m still processing the Sorapure piece. I clicked around the web and found a few of the projects she cites are still available on the web:

Paetzold’s “Grey Area”

Bouchard’s “Autoportrait”

Nold’s “Greenwich Emotion Map”

Perhaps the most interesting connection here is the way in these examples that the database (that virtual filing cabinet of facts and figures) is utilized by artists to create what I would call rhetorical artifacts (isn’t all art, after all, rhetoric?). The reason that this seems to connect is that the database seems to be the furthest thing from an object capable of producing affect, but Sorapure’s examples all show potential ways of eliciting emotional response using unembodied information. I’m kind of amazed that I used the word database and artist in the same sentence, but there it is.

What is writing instruction for?

When we talk about literacy, what goals do we have in mind for our students? What literate practices do we hope that they will engage in?

How do these questions play into the issues that Carmen Luke raises regarding knowledge capital and the globalization of post-secondary education?

In other words, is literacy instruction focused on an eventual “invention of knowledge” or, rather, is it another competency/skill we hope to pass along.

So what IS writing instruction for, anyway? And, again (because I’ve asked it before), I’m serious about this question. Certainly, of course, it is about students learning to write well (whatever that means). But more so, it seems to be about students learning to think well and then express that thinking clearly in a textual artifact.  Things get a bit convoluted when the debates begin as to what exactly students should be thinking clearly about, so let’s just leave it at this general summation, and complicate it slightly: Writing instructors want their students to be able to articulate textually an clearly rendered argument about a fairly complex matter or (perhaps even better) the collusion of related matters.

So, then, does thinking about (and teaching towards) literacy lead us toward that goal? As I ask above, what literate practices to we hope students will engage in that will lead them to success as writers in the above mentioned areas? Yi and Hirvela argue that a key to understanding school-based writing instruction might be to examine the self-based writing that they engage in (especially, in their case, for 1.5 Generation adolescents). Though, in their argument it appears that the only thing we really learn about school-based writing is inferior to self-based writing since literacy is a choice and not a requirement in self-directed writing practices (106).

1.5 Generation students “can be encouraged to look for ways in which to incorporate their self-sponsored writing into more academically-oriented writing tasks or apply more formal writing strategies and techniques to what they have previously composed outside school,” (106) but how, then, does that connect back up with the primary objectives of writing instructors? But do journal writing activities (as they suggest) help students become better critical thinkers?

Yo and Hirvela actually go on in their conclusion to show how journaling might move to more robust genres of academic writing in their conclusion (442). While reading their article, I couldn’t help but think of them any different kinds of self-based writing I have done over the years. I’ve been a fairly active private journal writer since I was around 13 years old. In 2002, I started writing in online spaces, and from their my online/offline self-based writing has blossomed. I currently tweet, write for at least 3 blogs, and engage in a variety of other writing, both public and private. These spaces move in and out of what might be considered “academic” genres. Undoubtedly these kinds of writing practices have aided in my “formal” writing development, in fact, many of them have been encouraged by zealous writing instructors over the years. It is no mistake, I think, that my interest in personal journaling roughly coincided with a 10^th grade assignment from my English teacher to journal each week.

I hoped to connect this back in with Luke’s article by pointing to her concluding portrait of the university in transition, so I’ll move there now and try to draw some conclusions.

The university is in transition: from its historical self-definition as a public national good to an entrepreneurial industry with tradeable goods, from a world of students to one of “customers”, from pedagogues to “facilitators”, from teaching to “delivery”, and from a focus on the invention of knowledge to the production of competencies and skills. (114, my emphasis)

Luke casts a skeptical eye at globalization and its effects on university education. I wondered where, specifically, the types of composition teaching practices—indeed, the focus on literacy itself—fell on the scale between “invention of knowledge” and the “production of competencies and skills.” And since teaching composition instruction in general seems more about the teaching of competencies and skills, are we complicit to the shift in university education that she is so concerned about?

Here’s where, in a personal admission, I acknowledge one possible result of this kind of pedagogy and what it means to have been raised on “competencies and skills,” a customer to college and university education for over 10 years: I have often felt like, despite my many years of schooling, I don’t know much of anything. I have tools galore for gaining that knowledge, indeed, I have limitless potential (that much has been part of the dogmatic, post-secondary, chant).  But, like a late-night infomercial, college has made promises that have not been fulfilled regarding their product, specifically that it will lead to gainful employment. And while the economy in general may be to blame for this phenomenon, the numbers of college graduates who head back home to their parents’ house is on the rise. They, like me, bought into college’s promise of helping them get to their future of success and happiness, but, with only shiny tools (competencies/skills, whatever you want to call them) and nowhere (and sometimes no knowledge on how) to use them, well… better head to grad school.*

*I’m perfectly happy to be in graduate school, of course, and find that I may actually have both the knowledge and the know-how to find gainful employment this go around, but wow, it’s been a long road and my pockets are nearly empty.

Composition and rhetoric has used Bakhtin’s work like a mix-tape, sampling from his theories of dialogism to build a social theory of language. Language, as Bakhtin notes, does not exist in isolation, but is appropriated from where it already circulates: “in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts.”  As language participates in conceptualizing the self, we can conflate this linguistic heteroglossia to identities, as we construct identity through language from a variety of experiences that manifests itself differently within specific contexts.  This panel examines the dialogic nature of identity construction as manifested within specific new media contexts. We argue that these processes of identity construction and representation are not new, but are visible in new ways through what are commonly referred to as “Web 2.0″ social media applications. Much as Bakhtin famously argued for the “plastic possibilities” of novels, this panel argues that the ever-changing, heteroglossic genres of Web 2.0 media present a unique opportunity to witness the messy, ongoing processes of self authorship.

Dialogic Identities: Authoring Self Across New Media Spaces

Speaker 1 uses Bakhtinian dialogic notions of self from Dorothy Holland’s work in order to analyze the case studies of two individuals using social networking sites in their daily lives. This presentation examines these Internet users’ literacy practices as they situate their identities in different professional, personal, and leisure communities using various social media sites (from Facebook to Flickr to Etsy). Examining online practice across different sites demonstrates the dialogic nature of identity as individuals negotiate self for different audiences and interfaces, challenging divisions between online and offline identity construction that are both dependent upon social contexts and material conditions.

Eldergeeks: Contrasting Practices of Digital Literacy and Learning for Aging Adults

Bakhtin’s notion of “unfinalizability” identifies the messy incompleteness of cultural practices. For Bakhtin, ongoing creativity is intrinsic to everyday processes, including the making of the self. With this unfinalizable self in mind, Speaker 2 presents a comparative analysis of two online practices of informal digital literacy education for elder adults: a single-authored advice site and a blog supplemented by user commentary. By providing a space for seniors’ contributions, the blog makes visible what the site erases: the unfinalizability of “eldergeek” identities among frustrations, new technologies, and stereotypes about what seniors can learn about and do with technology.

Sonic Rhetorics: Aural Identities and the Heteroglossia of Sound.

Bakhtin’s notion of a heteroglossic reality attempts to account for the layers of discourse within speech that occur during a moment of typical utterance. These layers can never be fully excavated, but each layer carries with it the richness of our identities, our pasts and potential futures. These layers emerge in our voices: in our tone, in our timber, and in the dialogic process of speaking and listening and being. Podcasting is a new way of capturing this age-old oral/aurality as an artifact. Speaker 3 will explore podcasting as a dialogically rich alternative for composition in the post-print classroom.

I’m feeling that way this week particularly about Kalantzis and Cope’s impossibly-rich-for-being-only-seven-pages piece “On globalisation and diversity.” Upon reading it again for this short response, I am feeling the way I often do when I come across a piece with such brilliant density: you could structure a whole course around the issues and topics discussed here, let alone have a 20 minute discussion about it as one of three articles in a series.

But this is what writing is for, eh? To delve deep, to grapple with the topics and issues to complex to mount in a discussion, so that is what I will attempt here, you know, in a cursory way (ha!).

Where to start!? Perhaps I’m most impressed by Kalantzis and Cope’s ability in so few words to successfully build a theory of what might be called “globalization and the ‘collaborative competencies of socially directed work’”(408). But even that simplifies it too much. Kalantzis and Cope ask us to reimagine the disparateness that has hitherto existed between the globalization and diversity. And while they acknowledge the (often commercial) commoditization and homogenization of lands, peoples, and cultures and call them “the enemies of diversity,” they argue that “diversity is deeper than that” (403).

That depth, while not found on the internet (per se), can be found through and because of it – as it has given our species further opportunity for divergence (404). This divergence, or our species’ ability to “constantly remake its representations of the world and by remaking these meanings remake itself,” increases exponentially when the Network is introduced and then utilized to uproot non-networked, hierarchies, wherever they exist.

While everything about this article operates on a macro level, it helps to give new perspective to our more micro-level articles from this week. Black’s fan fiction ethnography and even Abelmann’s long look at Korean students and their families here at the U of I both, in a way, are studies situated firmly (or maybe tenuously!) at the turn from what Kalantzis and Cope call the second and third globalization. Black and Abelmann report on the both the symptoms and possibilities of the turn that Kalantzis and Cope describe and predict in their piece. Fascinating, I tell you!

Resisting the urge to pick this thing completely apart, I’ll add just a few more observations focused in on the implications of this “networked society” (Castells anyone?) Kalantzis and Cope see the upheaval of these long-standing hierarchies central to a “globalized” society. “Whatever the domain,” they argue, “there is a shift in the balance of power and in the moral economy of agency which favours egalitarianism and liberty. And this despite and beyond prevailing systems and structures of the power. Something new could emerge” (371).

Kalantzis and Cope seem to have a handle on at least the larger brushstrokes of that “something new,” and I wonder how the work we do as scholars might aid in pushing away from the second and towards their conception of a third globalization. Kalantzis and Cope almost make it appear as if these changes will happen themselves and are happening constantly all around us. While this may be true, there will always be those darned conservative ideologues –  resistance to change is as inevitable as change itself. Unlike change, however, difference – “layers upon layers” (408) of it – doesn’t wait for cultural or ideological acceptance, it’s just there, waiting for us to recognize and make way for it.

The paradox I’d like to explore here is located most prominently in the Lisa Nakamura’s piece, but is present in all three articles from this week, and was present to an extent in our readings from last week as well. The paradox can be summed up quite nicely in one word, actually: difference. Nakamura and Ow take up difference as their primary theme, and while I think they are able to hammer out well the problems of depicting difference in the media (“new” or otherwise). I was especially persuaded by Nakamura and her argument about what she calls the “spectacle of difference” (21): “Difference, in the form of exotic places or people,” as she says, “must be demonstrated iconographically in order to shore up the Western user’s identity as himself” (notice her intentional use of the masculine pronoun) (20). And surely this is the case. Nakamura uses this premise to argue against the ways that advertisers use difference to sell technology as ethnic tourism, especially when the ethnicity is constructed iconographically.

But what she doesn’t do is explore the implications of a culture where recognizing and appreciating difference (a value now taught from nearly kindergarten on) is still closed off enough from that difference as to find these kinds of advertising messages affective. In other words, the western audience Nakamura critiques here are likely to share the value that difference is good, thus the attraction toward message that seem to be promoting the benefits of [feaux]cultural diversity. But that “we” are persuaded by the ads is evidence that we still are far from truly understanding/embracing those differences. The Other is still the subject selling us stuff.  Nakamura and other scholars like her are very good at detecting the results of certain kinds of troubling cultural attitudes (agism, sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, homophobia), but less efficient at offering potential solutions or exploring the deeply embedded causes of these problems (there’s the paradox). Ah, but cultural critics are critics, after all, and not fixers (It’s the job of first-year writing classes to come up with all the fixes, after all;). But who better than those who study the problems than to offer some potential solutions?

On the other hand, sometimes when scholars offer solutions they seem flaccid and obvious — or worse, beside the point all together. I found this to be so with the case study at the end of Kirkland’s piece. Here’s my basic reading of that section:

Do your working-class/poor/under-privileged research subjects (or so we are led to imagine by the careful black-English transcriptions of the “community-based digital literacy program” subjects) have difficulty connecting to anyone in their real world because their lives are too fraught with social problems? Try Second Life!

And while it is not quite that blatant, Kirkland’s argument of the ways that technology “affords spaces within spaces and spaces beyond spaces” (8) hangs together uncomfortably for me – again, because of the elephant in the room that is quickly elided by a quick move to the scholarly agenda of the article. It is almost as if Kirkland offers Second Life as a haven from the “real and imagined dilemmas … found in … everyday life” therefore erasing the arguably much more prescient real-life issues of his subject Raymond who is so obviously in need of real-life help.

My argument here suggests that I believe that the answers to these problems are easily fixed or that Nakamura or Kirkland are automatically qualified to fix them. I don’t. I am merely commenting on a phenomenon that I see in many scholarly arguments: the paradox of commenting on the cause of a social problem (or an easy fix) without exploring the nuances of where these social problems come from or offering viable/potential solutions. It is very likely that our scholars this week (and I know this for sure with Nakamura) have book length treatments of these vexing social issues where they are able to humor me by delving into the causes of the problems that they critique. Indeed, I bet a few of them are even activists working toward changing those causes as well.