rhetoricat

As a photographer and self-proclaimed lover of snow, I found this PBS article interesting. (Not to mention cleverly titled: “Winter Forecast: Art to Blanket Region” –especially given the hyperbolic language of recent Weather Channel forecasts in which the “epic” snowstorm was discussed ad nauseum.) In 1885 Wilson Bentley was the first person to ever photograph a snowflake and I don’t mean in the beautiful fluttery “I’m in a snow globe” sense. Mr. Bentley ingeniously found a way to “jury rig” (as the article author describes it) his camera and microscope enabling him to photograph, in detail, a single snowflake. And, according to the article, Bentley photographed more than 5,000 snowflakes before his death in 1915.

Bentley was a pioneer in the world of photomicrography and his techniques have been used since. I was particularly impressed by the fact that Bentley was self-educated and by his dedication. By all accounts it took him years to get the microscope-camera combination right. Then there’s the brilliance of the idea–what prompted him to want to photograph a snowflake. Granted, having grown up on a farm in Vermont, he certainly had a lot of time to contemplate snow. Still, I am intrigued by the mental process that led him to photographing snowflakes. Perhaps it’s the rhetorician in me, but I want to know the motivation that led to the act. Perhaps part of the answer is in this quote:

“Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated., When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”

Well, regardless of motive, the act itself is most impressive. I suppose we can thank Bentley for our knowledge that no single snowflake is identical to any other, truly amazing given the sheer number of snowflakes that have fallen on this earth.

One question remains: how did he keep them from freezing? I can’t find any lengthy description of his process. Extreme cold temperatures should have interfered with the camera equipment. Any illumination (if you will) would be appreciated.

Photo credit: Wilson Bentley’s work is in the public domain and this photograph was copied from a website in his honor SnowflakeBentley.com

The following is an Animoto film representing Toni Morrison’s concept “rememory” as presented in the novel, Beloved. “Rememory” is the idea that past experiences are never really gone. Like traumas, they are types of living memory, and as Morrison’s character, Sethe explains, you can “bump into” someone else’s rememory.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Great news from The Library of Congress–they’re exploring ways to release open source software. Check it out on their website here.

While researching the use of Facebook in the classroom (I’m trying to find a way to create a version of my profile that allows me to be friends with my students while limiting the information that they can see and allowing them to limit the information that I can see. Not finding a way without creating an entirely new profile) I ran across an article about clear violations of free speech with regards to students using social media. Am I talk about posting status updates in the classroom? The use of disruptive technologies? Nope. I’m talking about a coach who required a student to provide said coach with her Facebook account information (including password), reading her private messages, and then penalizing her for the use of inappropriate language in her messages. Wow, I guess if you’re under eighteen freedom of speech isn’t allowed, even in the private sphere. Read about it at Citizen Media Law Project.

The following set of questions come from David Allen, developer of the Getting Things Done system of organization. I’ve been thinking of making resolutions and to do so well, it seems prudent to start with a reflection of what I’ve already done.

Completing and remembering 2009

• What was your biggest triumph in 2009? Dealing with my diagnosis of epilepsy, the disfiguring scar of my latest seizure and still managing to successfully defend my prospectus and apply for jobs.
• What was the smartest decision you made in 2009? Choosing to rise above the pain of a failed relationship and not allowing it to ruin my work.
• What one word best sums up and describes your 2009 experience? Difficult.
• What was the greatest lesson you learned in 2009? The importance of family and maintaining friendships in spite of how busy you get.
• What was the most loving service you performed in 2009? Providing support to a friend even though I disagreed with her decisions.
  
• What is your biggest piece of unfinished business in 2009? My dissertation
• What are you most happy about completing in 2009? My prospectus
• Who were the three people that had the greatest impact on your life in 2009? My dissertation director, my mother, and my best friend.
  
• What was the biggest risk you took in 2009? Taking the time to rest this summer rather than working obsessively.
• What was the biggest surprise in 2009? The end of my romantic relationship
• What important relationship improved the most in 2009? The relationship with my brother
• What compliment would you liked to have received in 2009? One that I did receive: [paraphrased] You’ve dealt with so many difficult challenges and yet you keep going on, so I’m proud of you.
• What compliment would you liked to have given in 2009?  I feel that I gave all of them. I constantly give my family and friends compliments on their skills and talents and express my appreciation. When I consider what I could have said, I’m at a loss. I’ll continue to contemplate it and update it if I can think of anything.
• What else do you need to do or say to be complete with 2009? Move on with my personal life, putting aside the pain of  a failed relationship.

Creating the new year

• What would you like to be your biggest triumph in 2010? Getting a job that I love with people that I get along with in a place that I enjoy living.
• What advice would you like to give yourself in 2010? Trust that things will work out and do not let stress overwhelm you.
• What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results in 2010? Consider carefully all purchases before making them.
• What would you be most happy about completing in 2010? My dissertation
• What major indulgence are you willing to experience in 2010? A trip to Italy
• What would you most like to change about yourself in 2010? I’d like to improve my organizational skills and stress management.
• What are you looking forward to learning in 2010? How to teach as a professor, adapting to the shift between graduate student and “professional” academic
• What do you think your biggest risk will be in 2010? Choosing the next step in my career.
• What about your work, are you most committed to changing and improving in 2010? My methods of organizing, collecting, and saving information in my research
• What is one as yet undeveloped talent you are willing to explore in 2010? Musical aptitude (if I can find the time)
• What brings you the most joy and how are you going to do or have more of that in 2010? Writing. I intend to set aside a special time each day for my academic writing and a separate time (at least a few times a week) for personal writing.
• Who or what, other than yourself, are you most committed to loving and serving in 2010? My mother
• What one word would you like to have as your theme in 2010? Success!

I just had a discussion with my dissertation committee about issues concerning personal blogs and how we define knowledge. We also discussed the debates regarding whether or not community can be established online, followed by a brief discussion of micro-blogging (Twitter and Facebook). So, it was interesting to see an email from The Chronicle of Higher Education linking to an article discussing these very issues.

The article, “Faux Friendship”, left me with a sense of dismay. I had just been talking about how personal experience is important knowledge, how community can be built online and successfully sustained, and how even micro-blogging provides us with a sense of connection to others. William Deresiewicz disagrees, falling under the umbrella of critics like Clay Calvert who refer to practices such as reading and writing blogs as “mediated voyeurism” and “mediated exhibitionism” respectively.  After a lengthy [which will be evidenced by my many quotations] discussion of the history and evolution of how we define friendship, Deresiewicz asserts that as a result of computer-mediated-communication, such as Facebook

the friendship circle has expanded to engulf the whole of the social world, and in so doing, destroyed both its own nature and that of the individual friendship itself. Facebook’s very premise—and promise—is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they’re not in the same place, or, rather, they’re not my friends. They’re simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.

and that

Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls.

Oh, chicken little, the sky is not falling! It seems so crazy that these same diatribes continue to be written. Sing me a new one, will ya?

To give Deresiewicz credit, he does provide an interesting historical perspective, provides us with information about the evolution of friendships and community, and links it to cultural change. This is certainly a nice break from the usual bemoaning of the loss of “real” world interaction and the evils of technology. But those who fear that technology will be the end of things that we value are repeating the same refrain that we’ve heard for centuries. When the telephone was invented, people feared that we’d no longer talk in person.

The advent and increased use of the internet may seem to be a new fear but is really only a reinvention (pardon the pun) of an old one. People have always worried that technological advancements will cause irreperable harm. In actuality (or at least in my opinion), it is that we evolve as people, as cultures and societies, and our tools evolve with us. Or, perhaps more accurately, we evolve in tandem with one another. It’s more of an iterative process than a static exchange. Fearing or hating change doesn’t make it stop, nor should we want it to. Growth is a beautiful thing, and we must make choices to determine how that growth affects us. In other words, I don’t believe that we are cogs in a machine over which we have no power.

Interestingly enough, Deresiewicz doesn’t seem to have a problem with email. (Providing further evidence that we grow and adapt as technology changes.) In fact, he says

The most disturbing thing about Facebook is the extent to which people are willing—are eager—to conduct their private lives in public. “hola cutie-pie! i’m in town on wednesday. lunch?” “Julie, I’m so glad we’re back in touch. xoxox.” “Sorry for not calling, am going through a tough time right now.” Have these people forgotten how to use e-mail, or do they actually prefer to stage the emotional equivalent of a public grope? [emphasis mine]

and again

I thought that Facebook would help me feel connected to the friends I’d left behind. But now I find the opposite is true. Reading about the mundane details of their lives, a steady stream of trivia and ephemera, leaves me feeling both empty and unpleasantly full, as if I had just binged on junk food, and precisely because it reminds me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, we exchange by e-mail or phone or face-to-face. [emphasis mine]

What, pray tell, is “real knowledge”? When we chat on the phone or see each other in the street, don’t we talk about mundanities, the minutiae of our lives? Why is it such a problem that we share this with multiple friends while online? How does this constitute “exhibitionism”?

A further claim that concerns me is

Finally, the new social-networking Web sites have falsified our understanding of intimacy itself, and with it, our understanding of ourselves. [...] So information replaces experience, as it has throughout our culture. [...] Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition.

This seems presumptuous. Has it “falsified our understandings” or has it changed them? What is the distinction and how does the author make it. Are information and experience mutually exclusive? Have we really “given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into machines.” Is this really “[t]he face of friendship in the new century.”? Or is chicken little screaming his head off again?

This is a sad case of women v. women. I read Bitch, feministing, and Bust. I am a feminist, have been for a long time (possibly forever) and this just annoys me. Jessica Valenti, thank you for appointing yourself the enforcer of the feminist definition. We’re glad to know that you’re here to enlighten us.

Sound bitter? Mostly just annoyed by people who try to “brand” feminism and/or make it exclusionary.

Et tu, Jessica? “BUST not feminist?” Really?.

In the Fall of 2006 I received an email, filtered down through the chain of departmental command, regarding my course website from the previous Spring. The email regarded a comment exchange between two students from my Technical Writing class. Now I make it a practice to at least skim all of my students’ comments. Early on in the semester I read them more carefully to ensure that students are “getting” the appropriate content, style, etc of blogging. Once I’m assured that they understand the basic principles, the 100+ comments a week don’t get the same careful attention. Nonetheless, I read to catch the flow of the commentary and the basic ideas behind their comments. I also use that time to choose blog entry “conversations” to promote to the front page for further discussion. Clearly it would be difficult for an obviously inappropriate comment to escape my notice. So, when I received this email I felt certain that there must have been some kind of mistake. However, navigating to the comment location I did indeed find three student comments disparaging a professor, a clearly inappropriate exchange for a Purdue course website. They were there; they had been posted; and I had missed them. And then I looked at the date. The comments had been posted several days after I had tallied and recorded comments for the semester. Why then, did my students post comments that, even if they were posted prior to the due date, would obviously not receive credit? What compelled them to air their grievances on what I considered to be my site? Most importantly (to me), why would they create a permanent record of their disdain? What could be gained by posting them and is there any consideration for what might be lost? Finally, whose site was it?

Last night at Starbucks two students sat down next to me and began to loudly complain to one another about the instructor whose class they were preparing for. The instructor’s name was mentioned on more than one occasion along with several expletives. Here we have the “old school” version of inappropriate student comments. I don’t mean that students should not express their opinions; I do, however, question the propriety (and prudence) of doing so in a public space. And it wasn’t as though they had forgotten my presence or that there were others within hearing. They turned from their conversation and addressed me with (roughly) the following comment: “I don’t want you to think that we’re awful people, but our instructor is terrible.” This was followed by the usual specific complaints that we’ve all received: too much work, etc. I wasn’t surprised by what they were saying; inappropriate conversations abound in public spaces (especially one cell phones, but I won’t get into that now). But in the public space of brick and mortar and fleshy bodies words disappear as they are uttered. Unless you are recording or transcribing, it’s difficult to repeat, much less remember over time, spoken comments. On the web we have no such restrictions; you are accountable for your words in a very different way. There is no “you must have misheard me” or “that’s not who I was talking about” to disassociate yourself from the spurious comments.

These are fairly benign anecdotes. The web has a sadly large number of hateful comments and folks aren’t usually too embarrassed to express the same sentiments in the world of flesh and brick-and-mortar. Still, benign or not, these posted comments are public (and to a large extent permanent) and they don’t just expose private information about the individual poster. They expose and make inaccurate claims about another. How do we ensure that kind of privacy? (Especially if we are using Blogger?) Is it our responsibility to monitor our students once they are no longer our students.

While searching YouTube for short documentaries, I came across the following video “Rock Paper Scissors” . I was fairly convinced that this was a mockumentary, but to be sure, I searched for the Rock Paper Scissors Society mentioned on the site. It’s a relatively large website with quite a few posts, and as I went through the site, it seemed credible. Still, I wasn’t convinced. You all know how many seemingly professional websites lack real credibility. More research was necessary. A short google later, I’m listening to an excerpt from NPR’s Morning Edition and the topic of said excerpt? You guessed it. RPS. Or more specifically it was about the winner of the World RPS tournament.

I’m not sure what I can say about this from a theoretical point of view. If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to share. I mostly just thought that it was an interesting example of how one defines a game. I would never have considered “rock paper scissors” as a game; although I suppose it is. I just never thought carefully about it. It is, however, my preferred way to make a decision. (And I wish I was kidding; but I’m not.) Beyond using it to decide where to eat, who gets the front seat, and what to name my first born child, I haven’t given “rock paper scissors” much consideration. Obviously, some folks have. So, here’s what I wonder: there are folks who think that LARPing is pretty insane; I’m trying to be open minded but I find this to be pretty crazy; where do you folks stand on this topic? It seems that RPS is pretty much the simplest game that you can have (other than maybe thumb war?) and to me, it seems strange to have such an investment in RPS to the extent that you travel across the world to compete in a tournament. How does the complexity of a game determine its significance? I mean; are these folks gamers as we define those who LARP or play WOW or the Wii? (Oh, I thought of another simple one–flipping a coin.) Are these games? Is there some overarching characteristic that a game must have? I mostly asking because I’m thinking about the restrictions that many want to put on the definitions of writing and texts. Is this analogous? Am I just crazy to be even making this a topic of discussion?

Well, will you look at that? I guess I had something remotely theoretical to say (or ask).

Another post from my former New Media class. This one inspired my post on gender and documentation.