Last day in Detroit

The last Ford driven by Henry Ford

The first panel at Computers and Writing that I attended on Saturday was Orality and Literacy: The Next 25 Years. It was rewarding because I got to hear a bit more from Aaron Barlow, who offered some insightful comments after our panel on Friday, meet Michael Day, and shake hands with the man in the know at the Ong archive, John Walter. Doug Eyman connected his work on media ecologies with Ong and made me wonder if any two scholars in rhet/comp use the term “ecology” in the same way. I didn’t know that Ong had, so that makes one more book or article for me to read. Thanks Doug. The other panelists were informative as well, but I can’t really cover them all.

Michael Day impressed me in his generosity/selflessness in that he read a selection form his first book that was self-contradictory, admitting that what we think we know is often confused and in flux. I certainly agree with that. Barlow followed up on a point that Day had raised regarding the vocabulary we use to describe digital literacies, invoking Ulmer critically, which I was glad about because he is often cited haphazardly, shallowly, as if he were somehow infallible. What seems certain to me is that the way that people prefer to talk about new media is in a vocabulary of neologisms that set it apart from the path of history. If you accept that history is discontinuous (as Foucault or Benjamin constantly argued) then this point is a given. But it only takes a moment for us to reconstruct the myth to create the continuity between orality-literacy-neteracy (or whatever). This tends to mitigate the novelty, to rescue the new from the curse of materiality. It becomes a “spirit of the age” instead.

That spirit, in effect, helps us to castrate it. I like what Aaron had to say about the relationship of scholarship to the world in his recent post:

Why, then, do we continue to work through divides, even accepting one by the very fact of our classrooms that are divorced from the life of our cities and towns? Why do we merely look out upon them, stare, and then put our misconceptions into words that we then call “scholarship”? Why don’t we get out there and grapple?

We are in danger of creating a new window, a new barrier between us and our subject matter. Assuming we are in the real world—hah!—we peek into the virtual world, wondering about all that sound and fury and deciding (not you and me, of course—those others) that it all signifies nothing.

Why not indeed. It took me 1200 miles in a Ford to get here. I think I’ll grapple my way on to Cincinnatti and then Nashville. I was listening to a BBC podcast yesterday which suggested that epistolary novels (as exemplified by Richardson) represented a sort of “soap opera” form where readers were drawn into close identification with the characters, while the novels of Fielding were more aligned with road movies. I like that analogy a lot. I’d like to compose missives about the other panels I attended, but the road is really calling now.

May 21, 2007 7:44 AM