Keep Remixing

I had always wanted to read Remix, but for whatever reason never got around to it. I think it has very interesting implications for the future of media, culture, and the Internet. But its relation to teaching composition is less clear. How do we use Lessig's concept of "remixing" in English 101?

Two obvious (and non-exclusive) options present themselves. We could introduce visual media into English 101, and have our students remix it in some way to create media of their own. Or we could attempt to teach them how to remix written texts.

The first of these is appealing from a theoretical perspective as it brings in all the sorts of multimodal conversations we have been having in this class. Students would learn to compose in a different medium, and to use others' work in an interesting new way. But I do not think this could be the sole focus of English 101, as written text needs to be incorporated at some point. This leads to the second option, of remixing written text.

This is a significantly less clear concept. What does it mean to remix text? Our students cannot simply take others' work and rearrange it in an interesting way to create a new text. At least not while fulfilling the goals of the university. But as Johnson-Eilola explained, all texts are related to other texts. Texts are, by their very nature, already remixes. Lessig has a similar viewpoint:

"...remix with "media" is just the same sort of stuff that we've always done with words. It is how Ben wrote. It is how lawyers argue. It is how we all talk all the time. We don't notice it as such, because this text-based remix, whether in writing or conversation, is as common as dust. We take its freedom for granted. We all expect that we can quote, or incorporate, other people's words into what we write or say. And so we do quote, or incorporate, or remix what others have said." (82)

So if we are already remixing, perhaps we need to become aware of it. We need to show our students that they are remixing when they write an essay,

How do we do this? I'm not sure. We could stress to our students that they are participating in an ongoing discussion, show them the importance of entering that discussion. I think this is very important, if only because I was not told this until my senior year of college.

We could also allow the texts that students write to become the texts of the course. This has been mentioned briefly in English 501, but not really elaborated on. As I understand it, the idea is similar to showing students that they are entering a discussion, but instead of the discussion being between distant academics, they create the discussion in the classroom. The texts they write form the discussion, and future texts they write build on it. The students create a sort of microcosm of the academic community.

Whatever we decide to do, it seems clear that we have always been remixing, and that we will always remix. Maybe we just need to let our students know that they are too.

Welcome to the World Wide Web

Chances are you haven’t had much experience navigating the various kinds of spaces that have begun cropping up in what is increasingly being referred to as “the Internet.” It will be helpful, then, for you to think of this space as a sort of library, or maybe a city. Or a circulatory system.

Maybe a superhighway? It is hard to believe that in just eight years since its original printing, “our long-term cognitive abilities” have, in fact, caught up with “the immediate paradigm shifts underway between print and electronic sources.” We do not need to “rely on imagined geographies from the physical world to describe and comprehend complex discursive spaces.” Or if we do, we certainly don’t think about it and don’t need an article to tell us how. In fact, I think it is more likely that our students would rely on imagined spaces from the Internet to describe complex geographies in the real world. Sidler’s article maintains that the Internet is a confusing place that cannot be understood without relying on metaphors of the real world, which I think is somewhat outdated.

The other article from Computers in the Composition Classroom shows its age less, despite being written earlier. However the authors are somewhat vague about everything, and their discussion of web literacy could fairly easily be transposed to any other sort of literacy. Perhaps that is the point. But I think they miss some opportunities to discuss the interesting new things going on with the Internet, particularly in their discussion of the interplay between text and image, which they keep hinting at but never really say anything about. All of their examples in this section involve only images, not text.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s article is perhaps the most interesting, if only for the unusual ideas it presents. He stresses that all texts are intertextual, and that it is impossible to write without referencing some other written work. He moves to a discussion of Intellectual Property law, and then to the somewhat startling conclusion that databases and search engines should be considered texts.

I was initially (and, I suppose, still am) hesitant to accept this. Just because texts are, in a sense, a collection of other texts doesn’t mean that all collections of texts are themselves a text. Or does it? I think my problem here is that a traditional text is created with a certain amount of authorship. The writer collects various texts for a purpose. The creator of a search engine, however, simply creates an algorithm that allows a computer to search through a huge variety of texts and find certain words and phrases. The only real “authorship” here is the ability to privilege certain types of connection between search terms, and that is questionable at best.

Weinberger would probably like this idea of search engines as text, since he goes nuts for anything remotely “miscellaneous.” But I think it is this very - and I apologize in advance for this one - miscellaneity that causes search engines to be different enough that to analyze them in the same way as an intentionally composed text implies similarities that do not exist. Instead of lumping these two things together, we should be investigating them as separate, if somewhat related, entities.

Panopticomputer

Ohman argues that the agency associated with computers and how we use them is controlled by an elite group of people who design and manufacture them. This lends a large amount of credibility to the idea that we should be teaching students how to navigate the modalities of new technologies. We must teach students to be literate – in the fullest sense of the word – so that they can effectively communicate their thoughts, and function as individuals.

Foucault’s description of the panopticon, then, as a device which simultaneously increases visibility while separating individuals, which increases efficiency while removing communication, could be used to discuss the role of computers in literacy.

There are, I think, a wide variety of ways to apply the metaphor of the panopticon to the widespread adoption of computers in society. In the spirit of Foucault, here is a list:

1. The computer allows users to find a huge array of information, so the computer could be the panopticon, and the user the observer at the center, looking out at the cells filled with various parts of the Internet.
2. Individual users are compartmentalized while constantly relying on and, perhaps, being surveilled by the computer itself. So the computer could be seen as the observer at the center of a more nebulous type of panopticon filled with computer users, perhaps representing society, or at least digital society.
3. Combining both previous points, the users of computers fulfill the roles of both inmate and observer, each separated from each other, each having the opportunity to observe the other, in a sort of endlessly overlapping set of panopticons. Each individual is at the center of their own panopticon, while simultaneously in the cell of many others.

This last point is perhaps the most troubling. “We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism” (Foucault, “Panopticism” 217). We are all simultaneously observer and the observed.

We might argue that the computer-literate, and more specifically the computer creators, are at the center of the panopticon, and the computer-illiterate are in the cells. But I think Ohman’s point after visiting McDonalds about how the computer-illiterate can still use computers leads to a slightly different conclusion. If we do not know how to fluently use the machine, we are “prisoners” to those who made it. We are forced to use it how they intended.

Foucault makes a similar observation, noting that once the structure of the panopticon is in place, anyone can function as observer. In fact, the observer is theoretically unnecessary. Once the panopticon is created, it is impossible to use it for any purpose other than that for which it was created. Luckily I do not think that the comparison between computer and panopticon is so strict that this feature is present in both cases. The computer is much more malleable, and able to be used for whatever purpose the user desires. However, the users level of computer-literacy does impact the range of these uses. Therefore I agree with Ohman (and Selfe) that computer-literacy is as important as traditional literacy, and needs to be emphasized.