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FCJ-062 Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media
Cheryl Ball, Department of English, Illinois State University Ryan ‘rylish’ Moeller, Department of English, Utah State University This in an interactive text—click here to open. Abstract This webtext demonstrates the possibilities of using new media to teach students critical literacy skills applicable to the 21st century. It is a manifesto for what we think writing scholars should be teaching in general-education “writing” classes like first-year composition. In order to answer the question of what we should teach, we have to ask what kinds of academic literacy, if any, we value. We argue here that rhetorical theory is a productive way to theorize how meaning is made among new media texts, their designers, and their readers. We use the Ancient Greek concepts of topoi and commonplace to explain how designers and readers enter into a space of negotiated meaning-making when converging upon new media texts. That negotiated space offers a new-media…
FCJ-061 Composing and Compositing: Integrated Digital Writing and Academic Pedagogy
Jamie ‘Skye’ Bianco Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Composition, Queens College, City University of New York Prelude: Formal Anticipation and Origins[1] This middle does not play the role of an average but rather serves as the means by which life enjoys ‘the absolute speed of movement‘ (Pearson, 1999: 169) As the epigraph might be understood in the context of this essay to point to movements or to methods of composing, let us begin with the premise that Part I of this essay need not necessarily come first and that the reader might happily jump from ‘Collisions, Collusions, Compositions’ directly to Part II, ‘Composition, the Discipline, the Course and the Product.’ And of course a reversal of this premise might also possible. And yet the force to read through the form of this piece as presented and ‘from the beginning’ ‘to the end’ pulsates in the adherence to or rebellion against…
FCJ-060 Toward an Algorithmic Pedagogy
Holly Willis Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California Colleges and universities in the United States currently face a daunting challenge: how can we transform longstanding definitions of literacy to account for not only the vast social shifts wrought by the centrality of networked, visual and aural media, but epistemological shifts as well? Calls for reconsidering literacy in light of digital tools are multiple and varied in approach and orientation, ranging from the declaration that every grade school student deserves access to a computer by then President Bill Clinton in 1996 (U.S. Dept. of Education, 1996), to the articulation of multimodal literacy outlined by Gunther Kress in his seminal book Literacy in the New Media Age to the taxonomy of skills characteristic of a new generation of students who currently inhabit a digital and participatory culture listed by Henry Jenkins in his 2006 paper for the MacArthur Foundation, ‘Confronting…
Issue 10 – New Pedagogies
This issue of fibreculture journal is based on an invitation to respond to the following provocation: It is easy to argue that much of the rhetoric attached to “new media” and the internet in relation to pedagogy has mistaken quantity for quality. It has been a conversation that has confused the qualitative changes that our new conceptions of media, knowledge, and networks afford with the quantitative changes beloved of those who confuse teaching and learning with instruction and consumption. These new qualities are the differences between the vector and commodity, blogs and books. However, imagine if our universities had been invented now. What would pedagogy be? What form would teaching and learning take? What would count as knowledge? Expertise? What forms would this knowledge take? Taking this as a departure this issue of the Fibreculture Journal invited those working in new media, internet studies, education, and cognate disciplines to discuss…
FCJ-059 Domestic ICTs, Desire and Fetish
Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Chris Shepherd Unviversity of Melbourne, Australia We make our objects from what we make of our world, and in return they teach us: this is fetishism’s object lesson. Ellen Lee McCallum (1999: xxii) Introduction Matthew lives alone in a run-down, one-bedroom apartment in Melbourne suburbia. Visitors to Matthew’s home are extremely rare. However, if visitors should enter the apartment and attempt to navigate through it, as we researchers did, one does so at a risk; the sides of the walls are piled ceiling-high with old technological items—keyboards, computers boxes, typewriters, monitors, amplifiers, radios, televisions, cables, circuit boards and other artefacts. Once in the living room, visitors may proceed along a narrow path between haphazard stacks to find a desk with a computer, a telephone and a stereo. Matthew sits here up to 12 hours a day, downloading from the Internet, chatting to one or two of…
FCJ-058 Contact Aesthetics and Digital Arts: At the Threshold of the Earth
Warwick Mules Central Queensland University, Australia ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable’. (Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 1863) Aesthesis Modern aesthetics has always been concerned with the human senses in apprehension of art objects.[1] In modern aesthetic experience something is discovered, perhaps an inner sense of harmony or proportion, or some essential function of the human mind in relation to the sensory experience itself. But, in a paradoxical way, modern aesthetics denies sensory experience as foundational for human creativity, setting up a distance between inner reflection and outward sensory perception whereby an art object might be judged.[2] The senses are treated as suspect, misleading humans away from truth and into error. As Hans Robert Jauss has argued with respect to the emergence of aesthetics in early European modernity, aesthetic experience is: a new kind…
FCJ-057 The Case of ‘Mafiaboy’ and the Rhetorical Limits of Hacktivism
Gary Genosko Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada Canada proved to be the home of the most notorious Web hacker to date, “Mafiaboy,” a Montreal teen who intermittently crippled the Web sites of Amazon, CNN, Dell, eBay, and Yahoo! from 7-15 February 2000 by means of a distributed denial of service attack in which Web servers were flooded with so many requests for data that they were effectively clogged. He was charged under subsections 342.1(1) (unauthorized use of computer) and 430(1.1) (mischief in relation to data) of the Criminal Code (R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46) and sentenced on 12 September 2001 to eight months detention plus one year probation (R. c. M.C., [2001] J.Q. no. 4318 (C.Q. jeun.) (QL)). Craig McTaggert (2003, at para. 81, note 112) Introductory Remarks On September 12, 2001, Cour du Québec, Chambre de la jeunesse, District de Montréal Judge Gilles L. Ouellet sentenced a 17-year old male…
FCJ-056 Cultural planning and Chaos Theory in Cyberspace: some notes on a Digital Cultural Atlas Project for Western Sydney
Bob Hodge and Elaine Lally University of Western Sydney A perennial issue for digital politics has been the debate between those who claim a liberatory role for digital technologies and those who see them as instruments for a more effective oppression. We prefer to avoid such abstract oppositions and ask more specific questions: what kind of digital technology, used in what way by whom, for what purposes in what contexts, may support the efforts of those who work for a better, more open society? To focus our enquiry we look at the intersection of digital systems and “planning”. “Planning” in a general sense is a fundamental human activity in all societies exercising the “rationality” that has come to define humanity since the ancient Greeks. Yet the dominant form of planning in western societies today employs a specific form of ‘rationality’ which has emerged only recently, labelled ‘Occidental rationalism’ by Weber…
FCJ-055 Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body
Erin Manning Concordia University, Montréal Explorations of new technologies and dance, led by Mark Coniglio, Scott de Lahunta, Antonio Camurri and others, focus on the difficulty of locating gesture-as-such. One key to developing sensitive software is understanding — and embedding into the software program — what a gesture is. In a recent paper, Scott de Lahunta suggests that the best way of coming to an understanding of gesturality is to work collaboratively with dancers such that ‘the choreographic and computational processes are both informed by having arrived at this shared understanding of the constitution of movement.’[1] A similar tendency is expressed by Mark Coniglio when he suggests that live performance work must ‘delve beyond direct mapping and the metaphor of a musical instrument; to building systems that could better sense qualities of movement; to represent something of the “gestalt” of movement’[2] An engagement with the technogenetic body demands an encounter…
FCJ-054 Digital Bodies and Disembodied Voices: Virtual Idols and the Virtualised Body
Daniel Black Monash University, Australia Introduction The virtual idol, a computer-generated media celebrity, is a figure representative of a cultural milieu in which arrangements of data seem interchangeable with physical materiality. We are currently in an historical moment when form, information and data are widely understood to be rendering matter, physicality and flesh increasingly redundant. Popular and academic accounts of the body as discourse, behaviour as genetically programmed and digital information systems as rendering spatial relationships and physical interaction irrelevant, for example, are all dominant discourses of the ‘information age’. This mode of understanding is perhaps a prerequisite for the appearance of the virtual idol, a figure animated by digital data, an immaterial substance into which seemingly anything – even the body itself – can be translated. The virtual idol seeks to simulate a particular kind of human body: the celebrity who is already heavily mediated and virtualised through her…
Future Issues and Archives
Connections
- ARCDigital
- C-Theory
- Cntr History & New Media
- CoDE
- Computational Culture
- Cosmos and History
- Ctrl-Z
- Culture Machine
- Digital Culture and Ed…
- Digital Humanities Alliance
- Digital Studies
- Eludamos
- Film-Philosophy
- First Monday
- Future of the Book
- Hyperrhiz
- Inflexions
- Institute of Net Cultures
- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
