Jeanne Bohannon's What Is Multimodal? handout for students. See Summer-Time Multimodal Mondays: Digital Drop-ins to Elicit Students' Voice and Choice Summer-Time Multimodal Mondays: Digital Drop-ins for Visual Analysis and Meme Crafting https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-english-community/bedford-bits/blog/2016/11/28/multimodal-mondays-engaging-student-activism-in-writing-classrooms  ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon (see end of post for bio). Summer time is prep-time for many of us. We write; we plan; we explore multimodal assignments that will  [hopefully] compel our students to engage and find their own voices as they produce various kinds of texts. So, I'm going to craft my summer posts on Andrea's channel as a series of digital drop-in assignments, both from me and my writing studies colleagues, complete with templates and deliverables for readers to edit and use as they want.  As one of my colleagues put it, "let's get a jump start." Context for Assignment #1: Student Voice and Choice Often, the first weeks of class can be an interesting combination of awkward, "getting to know you" moments. This assignment uses democratic teaching methods and multimodal options to give students opportunities to showcase their voices and share them with their coursemates. By using the Scholar's Choice template, and editing it to suit their individual needs, instructors invite students to write their personal introductions as blogs, video essays, podcasts, or e-posters. Students use the first-person Grading Criteria​ to formatively assess and reflect on their own work.  As a final nod to choice, students may present their digital pieces for the class to introduce themselves to the community. Measurable Learning Objectives for the Assignment Practice digital writing strategies across multimodalities Reflect on self-choice in one's own composing Create texts for a specific audience and invention heuristics Digital Deliverables for Classroom Use Scholar's Choice Assignment Letter/Template​ Sample Feedback Criteria/Rubric​ Traci Gardner's "Teaching With Blogs" My Five Visual Essay Elements My Podcast Checklist​ Multimodal Elements for Students​ In-Class/Out-of-Class Work Based on the assignment template​, students may choose to introduce themselves to the class by composing blogs, video essays, podcasts, or electronic posters.  They write and design their personal introductions based on the general and specific criteria in the grading checklist​.  For example, blogs are a more conversational genre of writing, so students should write less formally, inviting dialogue with readers with elements such as embedded audio/video/images and tags (Pictochart is a good resource).  When writing video essays, students should attend to elements of voice, design effects, and sound.  Likewise, they must attend to sound and cover art when recording podcasts.  With e-posters, made usually from PowerPoints or Prezis, students should make sure to emphasize arrangement. An adaptive feature of this assignment is that it provides students with their choice of genre and can be modified for each instructor's rhetorical focus.  This assignment also lends itself to digital, democratic learning, because students choose their methods of composition, reflect on their process, and have the opportunity to present their work to their peers.  Students' Reflections on the Assignment  My Reflection I think that this spin on class introductions reaches out to student-writers to give them voice and choice in their own compositions. The Scholar's Choice Introduction Assignment counts for me in terms of multimodal composition because it provides a digital artifact of students' rhetorical reflections on their own invention and affords them opportunities to use their digital texts to connect with their classmates. Please try this assignment and let me know what you think! Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org ... View more

Jeanne Bohannon​'s grading criteria checklist, designed for the Web. See Summer-Time Multimodal Mondays: Digital Drop-ins to Elicit Students' Voice and Choice ... View more

Jeanne Bohannon​'s grading criteria checklist. See Summer-Time Multimodal Mondays: Digital Drop-ins to Elicit Students' Voice and Choice and Summer-Time Multimodal Mondays: Digital Drop-ins for Visual Analysis and Meme Crafting ... View more

Jeanne Bohannon​'s Podcast Criteria Checklist. See Summer-Time Multimodal Mondays:  Digital Drop-ins to Elicit Students' Voice and Choice ... View more

Jeanne Bohannon​'s template for Scholar's Choice assignment. See Summer-Time Multimodal Mondays: Digital Drop-ins to Elicit Students' Voice and Choice . ... View more

During the early 70s, James Moffett—distinguished author of Teaching the Universe of Discourse, Active Voice, Coming on Center, and other books devoted to education and to educational reform—developed a progressive textbook series for schools in West Virginia, a series that in 1974 became involved in a knock-down-drag-out censorship battle. In 1988, Moffett wrote a book about this galvanizing experience: Storm in the Mountains: A Case Study of Censorship, Conflict, and Consciousness. It is still a timely and informative read, as Moffett traces the history of the conflict, delves deep into the psychology of those who so violently objected to the textbooks, and along the way takes a close look at his own assumptions and biases. But I think of the book today because of its focus on what he sees as one of the roots of the key problem in West Virginia, which he identifies as agnosis. From ancient Greek, “a” (against) and “gnosis” (knowledge), agnosis refers to culturally constructed or willful ignorance, what Moffett calls the will NOT to know. It seems to me that today, the U.S. is awash in agnosis, as citizens resolutely refuse to accept facts (that President Obama was born in the United States, for example) and rather believe what is “culturally constructed” for them by the loudest and most headline-seeking media. Agnosis seems to be at the heart of Donald Trump’s success, as millions take part in a mass willful and willed ignorance. I see agnosis at work in other campaigns as well, though none as startling and dangerous as in the case of Trump. In such a time, it is more imperative than ever that teachers of writing engage our students in understanding agnosis, finding and tracking it in ourselves as well as others, analyzing its powers, and, most of all, looking for ways to address the fears that often underlie agnosis and to provide concrete alternatives to it. Which is all to say, we need to teach students to practice rhetorical thinking, and to do so consciously and systematically. ... View more

Recently a former student of mine wrote me a nice thank you note in which she mentioned how she would never forget the moment I told the class that I averaged thirteen major drafts per story.  This—a casual remark I happened to drop in my lecture—was the most illuminating moment of the semester for her. I remember mentioning the number not because I find it revelatory, but because I find it amusing: Thirteen! So unlucky! And so weirdly consistent.  The remark certainly wasn’t written into my lesson plan, and it wasn’t one of the sound bites that I’m careful to repeat all semester. It was tossed off, the kind of thing I don’t usually say because it’s about me rather than them.  And yet, out of the whole semester, that was the lesson this student found most important.  Teaching is like that much of the time.  The off-the-cuff remarks, the of-the-moment lessons, the things you didn’t notice much are the things that strike chords with students. I haven’t been a student since 1999, so this incident made me think: what things do I remember? (I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so I’m mentioning names.  I know I have been absurdly lucky to study with these masters, and I give thanks for it.) Joyce Carol Oates: “This is a good sentence. You don’t usually write sentences like that.”  I actually remember the sentence, which was in a writing exercise, not a story, and was long, full of clauses, which I now know to call appositives, that went much further with description than I usually did.  I’m sure I remember her remark because of the backhanded nature of the compliment, but it was one of the most helpful things a teacher ever told me. It showed me where to go as opposed to where not to go. Ron Carlson: “Make your dog a real dog.” When I first started writing fiction, I was really focused on character, and as a result, I sometimes had characters who felt real, but who existed in front of a fuzzy background.  In order to create the illusion of an entire world, you need to surround your characters with things (and animals) that also feel real. Russell Banks: “You’re funny.”  One of the things about the faculty-student relationship is that you actually know little about who your students are outside of the classroom.  I like to think I’m funny, but there was no way for my professor to know that, and I was remarkably unfunny in class.  So when I finally relaxed a little in a story and showed that side of myself, he was surprised.  His surprise led me to realize that I wasn’t writing with my whole self.  I was writing as some serious student-self who I thought was more like a writer should be. Alberto Rios: “Stay in the moment.”  It took me a long time to realize that not every scene in a story is equal, and that some moments that are over in an instant in life should take a long time on the page.  At first it seemed ironic that I learned this from a poet rather than a novelist, but now it makes sense to me.  Poets are masters of depicting the moment. Stephen Wright: “There’s a voice here.” I have always resisted the idea that writers have to find “their voice.”  I have always wanted to be able to use different voices.  That small difference, that he said “a voice” rather than “your voice,” when talking about my story, was very reassuring to me. So what’s the lesson for teachers? The obvious one is none of these are critical remarks—they are either descriptive, supportive, or generally applied; apparently whatever specific criticisms I got have long departed my memory. I also think there is a lesson related to being in the moment.  To have your plans, your go-to words of wisdom, but to be in a living, breathing conversation with your students. They’re listening, and you never really know what they’re going to remember… [[This post originally appeared on September 11, 2012]] ... View more

This past April, at the Council on Basic Writing’s Wednesday Workshop at 4C16, Houston’s Writers in the Schools teaching artist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton offered a session on writing and movement.  In the late afternoon of a very long day, Deborah had teachers of Basic Writing out of our seats and striking pose after pose. The purpose of this exercise was twofold. First, we learned how and why to use movement to break the frame of classrooms generally tethered to desks and often glued to screens and social media. Second, we learned to apply our learning to facilitating a more embodied and physically present writing situation for our students. The directions for the exercise are simple, and that simplicity allows students to understand complexity from a kinesthetic perspective: Invite someone to strike a pose. Ask the audience to describe the pose. Have someone else interrupt and change the pose. Discuss with the audience what changed and why the change was significant. I brought this activity back to class when we were working on analysis. The students asked for a bit more direction, so I invited them to strike a pose that has to do with the writing process. At the end of the semester, we were actively seeking motivation to regenerate writing for a strong finish. One student took a water bottle and enacted an exaggerated scene of partying, pretending to imbibe the water as if it were a magical elixir. —What does that have to do with the writing process? I inquired. —It’s why we’re having trouble writing, someone suggested. Too many distractions. —Okay, I said, someone change the scene. Make it productive. Students shifted a bit in their chairs, while the student holding the water bottle tried to stay still in the pose. Finally someone stood up to transform the scene. The second student held the water bottle up to their eye, as though it were a telescope. The first student sat down. All of us applauded. —But what does that have to do with writing? we wondered. The conversation that followed focused on turning around stereotypes and expectations. In the ninety-degree heat of the desert in April, one might think that all students would prefer partying to studying. Yet the movement activity showed how easily someone could break the frame. The water bottle, first an instrument of leisure, became an illustration of extreme focus, a necessary part of the writing process. —Does the scene also show resilience? I asked. We had discussed resilience quite a lot in class, about finding the strength to carry on when dealing with the contradictions and frustrations of student life in 2016. How was it possible to create quality time for writing in the face of gatekeeping first-year classes and full-time jobs to pay high tuition and fees? —Yes, the students answered, the scene shows resilience. It shows that it’s possible for us to stop partying and go back to studying when we need to. Additionally, I used this scene to discuss the idea of rebuttal. Some people complain, I said, that all students want to do is party. However, as you have suggested, that assumption is incorrect. Students need balance in their lives. After taking time away from their studies, students are better able to focus. The two scenes illustrate these seemingly opposing views by showing how an instrument of distraction becomes an implement of deep concentration. By the next class period, I knew I wanted to write a blog post about this idea, and I asked the students to take photos as I reenacted their poses from the day before (above). Doing this work helped me to remember my own experiences as a teaching artist with Writers in the Schools, just after the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed in 2002. Some of the second graders that I had taught during that time had already graduated or were about to graduate from college. I remembered the movement activities from our time together and how much those activities contributed to our focus on writing. NCLB was repealed in 2015, and the world has changed a great deal in this last decade and a half as these children have grown to maturity. Perhaps we are more apt to argue for the importance of screen time and multimodalities to facilitate writing. But movement also is a modality, and we need to remember the significance of breaking the frame. For these reasons, I remain grateful for Writers in the Schools and Deborah Mouton’s work with the Council on Basic Writing. She reminded us of the potential of movement as an inseparable step in the deeply transformative process of writing. ... View more

Imagine a really, really tough inner city school, where students are often out of control. Imagine a classroom of students of color, seemingly waiting to drop out. Then imagine them reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. That’s what happened in Bronwyn LaMay’s classroom, where she worked with a class for two long, arduous years. Resistant to writing and reading, and (rightfully) suspicious of school and what they saw as utterly meaningless assignments, these students were a hard sell. But Bronwyn is a master teacher—tough and street smart and full of conviction that her students are bright and ambitious. So she designed a curriculum aimed at maximum engagement. She designed five assignments around the theme of love—and then introduced the students to Morrison’s work. It wasn’t quick or easy, but the students slowly responded to the first assignment—a personal essay on “what is love”?  While the students couldn’t define “love” precisely, they all felt its power in their lives, whether they embraced or rejected its principles. As one student writes, “the love’s there, it might be hard to find, but it’s one thing that can keep us together.” Others insisted love didn’t exist—or that it hurt too much. Or that it was always denied. Eventually they read Morrison’s magnificent work—page by page—and debated the kinds of love they saw at work in it. Now LaMay has written a book about this group of remarkable students and their journey through and beyond Song of Solomon (or SOS, as the students called it, without apparent irony). Writing Love and Agency in the High School Classroom, is a richly theorized look at how students disaffected from school can become engaged. With love at its heart, this book introduces us to Hazel, Diego, Kylie and others who come to life in its pages. Throughout, LaMay shows that as the students begin to learn about narrative structure and other literary elements that animate SOS, and as they explore various meanings and forms of love, and as they begin to write—and write—about these issues, they begin to rethink their relationship to school. Eventually, they begin to rethink their life stories, again through writing and reading. While personal narrative is key to this journey, it would be a mistake to read Writing Love and Agency as grounded only in the personal or concerned only with personal stories. Rather, LaMay shows how deeply intertwined personal stories and academic writing can be. We meet Kylie, for instance, a student diagnosed with a learning disability and a quiet, unobtrusive presence in the class who didn’t participate and who rarely did any of the work, especially writing. The “love narrative” got a response from her, however, and she wrote all the assignments, both personal and academic. And as she wrote, LaMay notes that her “personal and academic writing began to inform one another in ways that were representative of many students in the class.” The flexibility of the five core writing assignments, LaMay’s steady but non-directional guidance, her steadfastness, and her intense and careful listening all helped students to connect to this “school writing” on their own terms in ways that allowed them to grow and, potentially, to change. As their personal narratives and their academic explorations of a literary text intertwined, their sense of agency grew. It may go without saying that choosing Morrison’s novel was a gamble. At first, many students resisted; they would not read. But as LaMay began to read the book aloud, they came closer, and then closer. The characters and their life stories emerged as real, living people, people whose stories and counterplots in some cases matched those of students in the class. And then they read. They read this book with what I call a “fine tooth eye,” exploring, questioning, investigating, pushing to dig deeper into the narrative and to find both meaning and truth. They argued passionately about “Milkman moments” and about whether the characters had agency or were simply acted upon. They returned to scenes over and over, searching for deeper understanding. And most of all, they connected this book and its stories to their own lives. Together, these students stand as a testament to the power of Morrison’s imagination and to her concept of “generous love.” Writing Love and Agency is a book about what really matters in school. And what really matters is courage to know ourselves as teachers, with all our biases and flaws; love for ourselves as teacher/learners and love for our students as people as well as students; openness and listening and respect that open the doors for strong relationships; and time to commit to the effort. LaMay’s book is in production now, being published by Teachers’ College Press. I believe teachers of writing everywhere will gain as much from it as I have. And, yes, love has everything to do with it. [Image: Reading by Sam Greenhalgh​ on Flickr] ... View more

This week I am giving myself a reflection assignment.  In my last post, All's Well That Ends Well,​ I described the final assignment I gave to my first semester composition students, who were co-enrolled in either a standard or ESL-focused co-requisite course.   I wanted to provide students with space and language to analyze, question, and evaluate their writing experiences, in hopes that such reflective articulation would enhance writing skills for transfer into later courses.  Given the obligations of their lives outside of the classroom, most of the students would not initiate this sort of reflection on their own.   I cannot fault them for this; after all, with my 3-course summer teaching schedule, departmental responsibilities, a new QEP project, and a joint research project, I find myself relegating reflection to a low spot on my list of priorities—hence, my self-imposed assignment: review and reflect on how students in ENG 111 theorize reading and writing, as demonstrated in their final essays. Theorizing reading and writing isn’t just for teachers, after all.  In her 1997 article, “The Role of Reading in the Composition Classroom,” Nancy Morrow argues that students need to “compose a theory of reading,” just as James Thomas Zebroski recommends that they construct a theory of writing.  Looking at just six of the essays my students composed for this assignment, I must ask whether there is evidence that my students are indeed theorizing reading and writing, and if so, how.   The assignment could be construed as an exercise in matching:  I gave the students my core principles, and I asked them to explore them in reference to my comments and class activities during the term.  Four of the six students approached the essay primarily in that “matching” sense:  they took concepts and matched them to specific comments I made during the term. This exercise is not without value; it is important that students recognize how specific feedback is derived from an underlying principle about writing.  It is also gratifying for me to note that students frequently selected comments which were conversational in nature (“Does your reader know this context?” or “I’m confused.  What does ‘it’ refer to?”), as opposed to directive comments (“You need a citation here”), as helpful to their writing and their understanding of core ideas. Nonetheless, illustrating principles, while necessary and valuable, does not constitute theorizing, as I understand it. To theorize, students must include personal adaptations, expansions, or revisions to my core concepts.  In fact, two students moved beyond illustrating my principles to drafting their own.  One student, for example, took two ideas and combined them to create his own precept: a writer can learn to give himself feedback by reading carefully, and such self-feedback can lead to improved composition. A second student, who has given permission for me to quote her work, theorized the role of mistakes in writing, as well as the role of reading in writing development: “Every time I see the comments, I am aware of the importance of reading every day. The more mistakes we make, the more important things we notice. The more writing we do with a lot of mistakes, the more focusing points we can find. So, forget embarrassment. Write out what you want to say. Don’t write usual or ubiquitous things!”  This student, who is originally from Japan, took advantage of my comments on English usage in her writing to develop attentional skills in reading and build confidence in her own expression.  She theorized “mistakes” as evidence not of failure, but of progress.  (Of course, her use of “ubiquitous”—the focus of a class discussion one day--brought a smile, too).   All six of these students could find evidence of my core principles at work in comments and in class activities, and all six celebrated progress and specific achievements as part of their reflective writing.   And my own reflection suggests that this assignment is worth keeping, although I will surely hone it for future semesters.  But my reflection also leaves me with a question: how can I encourage more students to theorize reading and writing for themselves in future semesters?  That question lingers in the back of my mind as I design my summer syllabus.  If you have suggestions or assignment ideas, please share them in the comments.  I’ve completed my reflection assignment.  I must remember to give myself more such tasks in the future, when the constraints of the job conspire against time for thoughtful review.   Maybe if I attach this blog to my faculty evaluation form, I might even get a good grade. But that’s for another post.    Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I’m spending time this summer revising some course documents and creating some new resources. Right now, I’m trying to make my syllabus more engaging. Some aspects of the syllabus are easy to convert, like shifting to a pie chart to show the grade distribution as I demonstrated in that previous post, Converting to a More Visual Syllabus. Other portions of the syllabus offer particular challenges. There are certain policies and details that have to be included, like details on the honor code and our departmental assessment. These policies feel a lot like the Terms of Service agreements: no one reads the details; we all just scroll to the end and click the Agree button. My goal this summer is to increase the readability of my course documents so that students resist the urge to invoke the TL;DR response (“too long; didn’t read”). To get there, I want to break up the information, add more color and negative space (e.g., white space), and revise the test to use a friendlier tone. I will share several of these revised sections with you this summer. To get started, I’m working on the required resources section of the syllabus, the place where I list the books and websites that students will need for the course. Here’s the old version of the section on the resources as it appeared in the Spring 2016 syllabus: Required Resources Course Website: http://3764s16.tracigardner.com/ Markel, Mike. Practical Strategies for Technical Communication. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013. Bedford e-Book to Go for Practical Strategies for Technical Communication Amazon paperback Barnes and Noble paperback Virginia Tech Career Planning Guide (available online or in print from Career Services on the Blacksburg Campus). Additional required and recommended readings and resources available from the course websites. A reliable computer with working, dependable Internet access. A word processor or Google Drive. It’s a customary arrangement, but not very interesting. The bulleted list makes the different resources obvious, but they still appear as a giant block of words. To improve the section, I broke the information into two lists, one of free, online resources, and the other of things they need to buy (or have). I added some icons to highlight those two sections. Now that the textbook is in the second edition, I want to be sure students get the right version, so I included an image of its cover. To balance the other section, I added the cover of a free guide from our campus career center. I also added line breaks to make the list more open. Here’s how I’ve revised the section so far: Resources to Bookmark Course Website: http://3764su16.tracigardner.com/ [Not live yet] Virginia Tech Career Planning Guide Course Logistics 20 Most Common Errors 10 Ways to Improve Your Writing Lynda.com Tutorials (free with your VT PID and password) Additional (free) online readings are posted as needed Resources to Buy, Borrow, or Find Markel, Mike. Practical Strategies for Technical Communication. 2nd Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. Amazon eTextbook or paperback Barnes and Noble paperback A reliable computer with working, dependable Internet access A word processor or Google Drive That’s what I have so far. What do you think? Is the new version easier for you to read and use? How do you think students will respond? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below. I’d love suggestions as I work to revise other portions of my course documents. [Browser and Shopping Cart Icons are copyright © 2015–2016 Hand-Drawn Goods and were purchased by the author.] ... View more

Eight years ago, Stanford’s Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education established an award in my name for students’ multimedia presentations growing out of their 2 nd Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) course, taken in their second year. I am still astonished and humbled when I remember the day of this announcement—for once in my life, I was absolutely speechless! Now these awards are very much a part of the fabric of our Program, and though I am retired I look forward to this occasion every year, when I get to meet the year’s six winners and hear some of their presentations. It has been instructive and inspiring for me to see how much the student presentations have improved over these years—and that means, of course, that our instruction has improved. When we first started teaching “multimodal composition,” we were making it up as we went along. But now there’s a robust body of literature on the subject and students everywhere are getting into the action. This year, I was particularly impressed with the students’ use of slides, which was minimalist in that the slides were understated but so much more powerful for being so. One student’s presentation focused on research he had done on how Stanford students spend their time, using interviews, surveys, and observations to determine that, while students regularly declare themselves to be “crazy busy,” they in fact have more time at their disposal than they realize. In some of his interviews, students found that with a little mindset adjustment they even had time to read for pleasure. Another student’s research focused on the My Lai massacre and the attempted cover-up. Again, she used photographs sparingly but powerfully: in this case, one picture was indeed worth a thousand words. In every case, the student presenters were poised and perfectly at ease. While the presentations did not seem “memorized,” none used notes of any kind, nor did they rely on their slides to guide them. Rather, they spoke as what they clearly are: experts on their subjects! I compare these presentations to those from some years back (like these: The LOPRA Awards!) and am impressed. PWR has archived all these presentations, and so I’ve enjoyed going back through the years and comparing. For these students, the oral/aural mode is one they embrace, as does our curriculum and our program in general. As a result, all of us are much more aware of ourselves as speakers, as presenters, as performers—than we were even a decade ago.  Here are some of the winners and a very happy member of the audience!  ... View more

Ever since the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland conducted an experiment in 2010 on student digital usage, it has been pretty well known that there is something quite literally addictive about life in the cloud.  Reporting that students who were asked to refrain from accessing their digital devices for only 24 hours experienced physical and emotional withdrawal symptoms usually associated with opiate drug addiction, the investigators provided some of the first hard evidence that all that time spent updating Facebook pages and posting to Snapchat is a lot more than a matter of communication and convenience.  More recent reports (like this one or this one), citing the emergence of such phenomena as digital addiction rehab programs, indicate that the problem is only intensifying as mobile technology use becomes nearly universal.  But lest you fear that this blog is going to turn into one of those "kids these days" rants, have no fear: adults are almost equally likely to be addicted to their digital devices (just watch your colleagues, or yourself, at a faculty meeting some time!).  So the matter isn't generational; it isn't even cultural: it's human.  And it begs for some semiotic attention. Not that the affects of digital technology on people haven't been getting a whole lot of attention already, especially on the part of the corporate players who have made, and stand to make, practically inconceivable sums of money by exploiting whatever it is in human nature that draws people from around the world, regardless of cultural origin or condition, to the same apparently irresistible gadgets.  Finding, for example, that people will do almost anything to get a lot of "Likes" tallied up on their digital contributions, web administrators everywhere have adopted the Facebook model, itself adapted from MySpace, and have applied it to their sites.  Heck, you can even "like" this blog (as if). Indeed, any semiotic analysis of digital addiction would do well to begin with an analysis of the hegemonic role that corporate profitability has played in creating and encouraging the phenomenon, for in a postindustrial economy dominated by digital capitalism, it should hardly be surprising to see the psychographic techniques originally applied to advertising now transferred to the world of smart phones and social media.  Think of it as The Hidden Persuaders Move to Silicon Valley. Still, there's hegemony, and there's hegemony, and whatever hegemonic forces are at work in the proliferation of digital addiction, they would be largely ineffective if there wasn't something in us all that makes us ripe for manipulation.  But what is it?  MRI scans indicate that specific pleasure centers in the brain light up when we log on, but that doesn't take us very far.  Of course there is something pleasurable about the matter, but not only are there quite a number of non-addictive experiences that also light up the pleasure centers, digital addiction also involves, paradoxically enough, a certain measure of pain as well—as the much-cited misery factor in Facebook usage can attest.  Indeed, what makes digital addiction so puzzling is the way that, when we think about it closely, it is constituted by paradoxes all the way down. Consider, for example, the social/anti-social nature of the Internet.  On the one hand, it seems to be irrefutable that part of the universal appeal of life in the cloud lies in the essentially social nature of human beings.  In short, we like to commune with each other, and digital devices enable us to be in constant contact with literally innumerable numbers of people from all over the world.  Such predecessors of mobile technology as the telephone, television, and even Ham radio anticipated this capability, but not at anything like the same scale. But at the same time, for all the socializing that takes place in the digital hive, there is not only a whole lot of anti-social behavior to be found (I hardly need to provide examples of that), there is also the mind-boggling phenomenon of digital desensitization—that is, the declining capacities for emotional empathy experienced by many who have been brought up in the social network, along with a certain atrophying of the ability to handle simple face-to-face socializing.  Couples on dates staring not into each other's eyes but into their smart phones, groups of people sitting together, but not together because they're sending text messages and posting to Instagram, gamers who have trouble talking to other human beings .  . .  the list of paradoxical anti-social digital affects is practically unending. Then there is the paradox that digital technology is simultaneously a means of democratic access to media control and a major agency in the ongoing economic redistribution of wealth upward as such corporate giants as Apple, Google, and Facebook enjoy a top-down relation to billions of Net-addicted consumers whose every move they can track and monetize. Indeed, there are so many paradoxes involved in the question of digital addiction that it is impossible, at this still early stage, to fully assess what is going on.  But if there is one thing that you should be telling your students these days, it is that they would do well to give the matter a good deal of thought, with as much self-awareness and objectivity as they can muster.  And to do that, they will have to log off for a while, because the kind of critical thinking that the digital era requires is best conducted when not under its spell.  [Image Source: Duncan Harris on Flickr​] ... View more

[[This post originally appeared on September 27, 2012]] Sometimes literary theory is pretty distant from the practical work of teaching. Think back to that time you brought your panopticon or your phallus (Lacan’s, I mean!) into the classroom, and to the moment in the middle of your excited explanation of the revolutionary ideas delivered to you across the Atlantic and through that one class in grad school when you realized it wasn’t helping  your students understand “A Rose for Emily.” The connections between the work with theory that we do in our training and our research often can seem part of another world than the one in which we teach. I was reminded the other day—on the occasion of one of those curious confluences of events that happen when you’re doing a lot at once and all of the different things swim together in a river of caffeine—that this is not always the case. I’d just read D. T. Max’s new biography of the late David Foster Wallace, and in an interview I did with him (here​) asked him about the revelation that Wallace had voted for Reagan. It seems to have been a surprise to many of his readers, who had come, through their reading of Wallace’s fiction and essays, to see him as squarely on the other end of the ideological spectrum. They thought they had a sense of the man from reading what he wrote, and this bit of news blurred the picture they’d constructed of him. That same day the interview came out, I had a meeting of my course on the rock novel (fiction about, inspired by, and formally influenced by rock and roll, a course I’m teaching for the first time and not at all because I get to play a lot of loud music in class).  We were reading Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses, a little-known but interesting quasi-sci-fi novel about a man, Ray, who has an obsessive relation to the history of rock music, and many students, despite the course’s own obsessive concern with that history, were finding the main character’s behavior a bit much. Why was Ray driven to such lengths by his obsessions? One answer to this conundrum—which kept some students from identifying with Ray—was supplied by another student who raised the idea that Shiner, in his presentation of Ray, was actually critiquing the character. That is, maybe there was some ironic distance between Ray’s behavior and the author’s opinion about that behavior. With this issue raised, I played The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” a second time, because it’s awesome, and class was over. One of the pitfalls of reading (and teaching) fiction is the temptation to think we know an author. Readers of Wallace think they know him, especially because some of his work seems intensely personal. Another pitfall is the tendency to conflate the main character in a story or novel with the author, especially in an autobiographical work like Shiner’s. Decades of literary theory have explored the relationship between author and work, arguing alternately that we must ignore the author, that he is dead, that he is a conduit for the knowledge available given the social structure of his time, etc. In fiction, narrative theory, narratology, and theory of the novel have kicked around different responses to the problem, from Wayne Booth’s idea of the implied author to John Brenkman’s rejection of that concept as, well, a fiction, and not a very helpful one. Similarly, theories of narrative and the novel have worked over the relation of character to text, none better than Lukacs, who understood the relation of the modern novel to its writer as one in which the writer divides his subjectivity between a main character who gets the world wrong and a story that refuses to tell us what right is. We want our stories to hold together—those that we read and those that we construct about the world. Many of the best stories, however, admit a complexity that challenges their coherence. The picture we have of an author can’t really hold a book together, just as the belief that the author completely agrees with the main character—or completely doesn’t—can’t really hold a book together. Things are more complicated than that. One of the gifts of teaching fiction is the chance to help students see how, for all kinds of stories, complicated ≠ bad. One of the ways to help them see this is to bring in the literary theory that has helped us to see it. ... View more