10/3/2012

WEEK 5


How to prepare for class:

• READ THE THREE PIECES in our course Dropbox folder for Week 5. These readings take us still further into considering how digital technologies articulate with cultural structures and practices—especially practices related to the production and embeddedness of power. In the middle of reading you might find yourself asking, “Now what again does this all have to do with me teaching writing, again?” — so keep in mind that these readings are serving as background for us to consider what writing is and does and how it is produced and circulates as well as how writing is (perhaps) shifting as an object (?) and practice in line with changes in our technologies of production, distribution, circulation, and consumption. The readings for 10/3 are:

• Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Preface, Introduction, Conclusion, and Epilogue. from Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge: MIT P, 2011. Print.
• Galloway, Alexander R. and Eugene Thacker. Prolegomenon and Part I: Nodes. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2007. Kindle file.
• Nakamura, Lisa. “The Social Optics of Race and Networked Interfaces in The Matrix Trilogy and Minority Report.” Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2008. 95–130. Print.

• On the wiki, I want to see a page on each reading, composed through the efforts of all of you. That is, I expect to see each of your names in the page history for each reading. 

• On your blog, please do some informal reflective writing on how/when you know you are thinking well academically. How do you know when your thinking is focused and productive — and rigorous? What are the habits and approaches that help you achieve these conditions? Because a central class concern is what we value with writing — in academic and other settings — I think it matters to be investigating practices tied to writing and the values they have taken on. “Thinking” — as I think you are finding in some of our readings — has historically been deeply articulated to writing. (Considering our own practices as academics is also necessary for deciding what sort of academic we with to be — as we will discuss both individually and together.)

• Also on the wiki, and in line with the previous request for some blog writing, please work together to thicken and enrich the page on “academic rigor.” I am curious to hear your thinking on this, in terms of the subject of our particular class, as what constitutes “writing” comes into question—and as some perceive writing’s changes tied to multimodality and gaming as a decay in a rigor possible only with writing.

• Finally, if you have not looked at or commented on other’s writing charts from last week, please do so now.

All the blog and wiki posts are due no later than 5pm on October 3; this gives us all time to read each other’s thoughts and to prepare. (Note that there is a bit of panopticism here: I am keeping an eye on who posts when, not because I am power hungry but because I want to see your participation and ways of thinking together with others.)

Thanks!