The Writing Way

Link to class blog

2009-02-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

I'm teaching Language, Technology, and Culture again this term. Some of the students have posted terrific things on the blog, so I thought I'd provide a link to it.

http://blog.cmc.oregonstate.edu/mtblogs/lisa/

Taking a big Web 2.0 step--joining Facebook

2009-02-10T09:46:00.001-08:00

I have taken a big Web 2.0 step. At the urging (and downright pressuring) of my 9 brothers and sisters, I have finally joined Facebook. We are having our first family reunion this summer since our parents died--it will be in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, near where my sister Leni lives. Leni set up an Ede Family Reunion group on Facebook, and I am now part of it.

I've only been on Facebook a day, but it's definitely been an interesting experience. The best thing is that somehow some former students and colleagues and found and "friended" me. It's wonderful to learn what they've been up to.

Recent Pew Internet Report

2009-02-10T09:44:00.000-08:00

The Pew Internet Research Project recently released a report on how different generations use the Internet and Web. Here's a summary of the report published by the Pew Foundation.

Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the "Net Generation," internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life. Generation X is the most likely group to bank, shop, and look for health information online.
Boomers are just as likely as Generation Y to make travel reservations online.
And even Silent Generation internet users are competitive when it comes to email (although teens might point out that this is proof that email is for old people).

The web continues to be populated largely by younger generations, as over half of the adult internet population is between 18 and 44 years old. But larger percentages of older generations are online now than in the past, and they are doing more activities online, according to the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project surveys taken from 2006-2008.

Teens and Generation Y (internet users age 18-32) are the most likely groups to use the internet for entertainment and for communicating with friends and family. These younger generations are significantly more likely than their older counterparts to seek entertainment through online videos, online games, and virtual worlds, and they are also more likely to download music to listen to later. Internet users ages 12-32 are more likely than older users to read other people's blogs and to write their own; they are also considerably more likely than older generations to use social networking sites and to create profiles on those sites.

Compared with teens and Generation Y, older generations use the internet less for socializing and entertainment and more as a tool for information searches, emailing, and buying products. In particular, older internet users are significantly more likely than younger generations to look online for health information. Health questions drive internet users age 73 and older to the internet just as frequently as they drive Generation Y users, outpacing teens by a significant margin. Researching health information is the third most popular online activity with the most senior age group, after email and online search.

For the full report please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/275/report_display.asp

About the Pew Internet & American Life Project: The Pew Internet Project is an initiative of the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.
Pew Internet explores the impact of the internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life.
Support for the project is provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The project's Web site: http://www.pewinternet.org rnet.org>

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Syllabus for my Language, Technology, and Culture class

2009-01-06T17:59:00.000-08:00

This term I am teaching ENG 495/595 Language, Technology, and Culture for the third time. This is an incredibly exciting class to teach--both because of its content (which we can only begin to scratch the surface us) and because I learn so much from the students. By way of context, I'll note that as in the past this class is about 1/2 advanced undergraduates and 1/2 graduate students. Having said that, I'll just paste in the syllabus. I'd be interested in any responses, suggestions for readings the next time around. I'm sorry that this text lost its formatting when I imported it. I just don't have time to go back and reformat.

ENG 495/595 Winter 2009
Language, Technology, and Culture Dr. Lisa Ede
MWF 2-2:50PM
125 Callahan Hall

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND SYLLABUS
English department office: Moreland 236 (737-1636)
English department office hours: MWF 3-4PM
Center for Writing and Learning (CWL) office Waldo 125B (737-3710)
Email address: lisa.ede@oregonstate.edu

Please note: As Director of the CWL, I’m on campus a good deal during the week, typically at my Waldo Hall office. So if you have problems making my regularly scheduled office hours, feel free to stop by my Waldo Hall office or to schedule an appointment there at another time. Students are my first priority, so I’m always happy to talk with you.

Textbooks
· Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967; reprinted 2001)
· Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2008)
· James Paul Gee, Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy (2007)
· Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide (2008
· Selected readings available on closed reserve at the library, including several chapters from Knobel and Lankshear’s 2007 edited collection A New Literacies Sampler, Lankshear’s and Knobel’s coauthored 2003 New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning, and Lindquist and Seitz’s 2009 The Elements of Literacy.

Course Description
What are the effects of developments in communications technologies on the ways we think and learn? How can we best understand what media historian Lisa Gitelman refers to as the “data of culture”? And why would Gitelman, whose book Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture we will be reading have felt compelled to co-edit another collection of essays titled New Media 1740-1915? (Yes, you’ve got those years right.)

In considering questions of language, technology, and culture, we’re reading and working at the intersection of a number of related fields: rhetoric and writing, literacy studies, education, anthropology, internet studies, new media history, etc. We can only hope to scratch the surface here. But what an interesting surface it is to scratch!

Major Assignments
Informal writing and learning activities (20% of final grade)
Literacy and technology autobiography (20% of final course grade). Your essay should be no longer than one single-spaced, double-sided page. Students’ essays will be compiled into a class publication, which will serve as an additional text for our course.
Entering-the conversation essay. To be frank, this assignment represents an intervention into your writing/researching process, for you cannot successfully complete this assignment if you have not done a considerable amount of work on your seminar project. Whereas the first assignment encouraged creativity and flexibility, this assignment really is a report on the progress you have made toward completing your seminar paper. Students sometimes resist this assignment—but at the end of the term they always tell me that they’re grateful they did it. (20% of final course grade). The minimum page length for undergraduates is 5-7 double-spaced pages; for graduate students, 7-9 double-spaced pages.
Final project, topic and approach open. The minimum page length for undergraduates is 10 double-spaced pages; for graduates, 15 double-spaced pages. Students who wish to do so may pursue non-traditional projects in a variety of media—but please consult with me ASAP if you’d like to try this option.

Please note: You have the option of collaborating with one or more students in our class on your final project. If you’ve not written collaboratively, I encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity to do so. If you have questions about this option, please don’t hesitate to raise them in class or in conference. (Students who collaborate on final projects will also work together on a single entering-the-conversation essay.)

There will not be a final examination for this course.

On Distinctions between Undergraduate and Graduate Student Work
The major distinction in this class between undergraduate and graduate student work involves differing page-length requirements for the final two major writing projects. In addition, I expect particularly strong engagement on the part of graduate students in the informal writing and learning activities that comprise 20% of the final grade for this course. I also expect graduate students to be regular and lively contributors to our class blog.

On Our Class Blog
Advances in social media software are a key feature in contemporary communications. The development of blogs has provided new opportunities for ordinary people to “publish” their ideas on the Web. What are the consequences of this and related developments for communication? In our class, we’ll take a stab at answering this question via a class blog.

Course Attendance, Due Dates, and Plagiarism Policies
Because our class will function as a seminar, attendance is important. If you have three or more unexcused absences, this constitutes grounds for lowering your final grade one letter.

Assignments are due on the day indicated. Unless you request (and receive) an extension in advance of the due date, I cannot accept late work unless your situation represents an emergency, as would be the case with a serious health problem, accident, etc.

University policies involving plagiarism apply in this course, as do university and federal policies pertaining to students with documented disabilities. Students with documented disabilities who may need accommodations should make an appointment with me as early as possible, and no later than the first week of the term. Class materials will be made available in an accessible format upon request. I will also work with the office of Services for Students with Disabilities to make other relevant accommodations for students with documented disabilities.

Revision policy
You can revise any formal writing assignment for this class. If your revision merits a higher grade than your earlier draft, the new grade will entirely replace the former grade. Please note, however, that if you plan to revise an essay, you must resubmit it to me no later than two weeks after I return your graded draft to you. Only in special circumstances will I accept revisions after two weeks has passed.

Student Learning Outcomes
The academic discipline that has come to be referred to as literacy studies is profoundly interdisciplinary and includes research in such areas as history, classics, sociology, psychology, education, anthropology, English studies, rhetoric and writing, and internet studies. For this reason, it is unrealistic for students to expect to “master” research in this field. Rather, students can expect to gain an understanding of basic issues and questions at stake in the interactions among language, culture, and technology. More specifically, students will be able to demonstrate an understanding that:
Literacy is not a decontextualized, materially and ideologically neutral skill but rather is embedded in specific political, cultural, economic, and ideological contexts;
The consequences for literacy of developments in information and communication technologies are complicated and can not easily be predicted.
Developments in communications technologies raise important ethical, political, social, cultural, and economic questions that educators, politicians, and citizens need to consider.

Students will demonstrate this understanding in the following ways:
By participating thoughtfully in class discussions (and on the class blog) of course materials.
By writing several essays that reflect on important questions about language, culture, and technology.

Changes to Our Syllabus
A syllabus is always a work in progress, so changes to our syllabus can—and probably will—occur as the term progresses. I will always announce changes to our syllabus in class, and also via email. If you miss class, be sure to check with me or a classmate to see if there are any changes in assignments. I will also announce changes over email, using Blackboard’s email function. If you have multiple email accounts, be sure to check your ONID account regularly.

Syllabus
INTRODUCTION TO OUR CLASS
Week # 1
Monday, January 5
Class introduction
Discussion of class blog
Literacy and technology narrative assigned

Wednesday, January 7
Julia Lindquist and David Seitz, “Introduction” (from The Elements of Literacy)

Friday, January 9
Lindquist and Seitz, “Literacy and Technology” (from The Elements of Literacy)

Week # 2
Monday, January 12
McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium is the Massage
Entering-the-conversation essay and seminar projects assigned
Portfolio self-evaluation assigned

Wednesday, January 14
Continued discussion of The Medium is the Massage
Baron, “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies” (from Hawisher and Selfe’s 1998 Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Literacies)

Friday, January 16
Porter, “Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter’s Tale” (from Computers and Composition 2003)

HISTORICAL EXPLORATIONS: WHAT DO WE BETTER UNDERSTAND WHEN WE RECOGNIZE THAT ALL MEDIA WERE ONCE “ALWAYS ALREADY NEW”?
Week # 3
Monday January 19
Gitelman and Pingree, New Media, 1740-1915 TOC and introduction (xi-xxii)
Martin, “The Culture of the Telephone” (from Hopkins’ 1998 edited collection Sex/Machine)

Wednesday, January 21
Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture 1-22

Friday, January 23
Gitelman, Always Already New 26-86

Week # 4
Monday, January 26
Gitelman, Always Already New 89-155

Wednesday, January 28
Stubbs “Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fiction” (from Gitelman and Pingree’s New Media 1740-1915)

Friday, January 30
No assigned readings. Today we’ll reflect on what we’ve read so far, and look ahead to future readings. We will also talk about the topics that you are researching for your entering-the-conversation and seminar papers.
Literacy and Technology Narrative due. Please bring enough copies for me and for your classmates. We’ll assemble them into a class book, Literacy and Technology: Reflections, Questions, and Speculations, today.
“Valentines” assigned today. Between now and Monday, February 8th please read all the essays in our class book. In addition, please write 2-3 sentences of response to each essay included in our book. There are two stipulations: 1) Your response should be specific, concrete, and genuine; 2) Your response should be positive. We will distribute your “valentines” in class on February 8th and discuss the process of reading your peers’ work and responding via “valentines.” As you work on this project, please think about the specific technologies (of all sorts) included in this assignment. You have almost certainly been asked to respond to the writing of peers before, but how often have you been asked to respond only with praise? Also please consider the material form that you want your response to take. In the past this has varied from hand-written comments on small index cards to word-processed comments that have been composed and printed in one file and then cut up and distributed to various efforts to approximate something like traditional valentines. Please note: do not feel that this is a competition to determine who can be the “best” responder/creator of valentines. (Why is it that so much in education involves competition?) Just engage yourself with the process of reading and responding in a brief, authentic, and positive way to your peers’ work. Here’s one thing that past experience tells me I can promise you: the day that we distribute—and you read—your valentines it’s going to be a lot of fun.

GOOD VIDEO GAMES AND GOOD LEARNING: AN UNLIKELY COMBINATION?
Week # 5
Monday, February 2
Avrich, Johnson, Koster, and Zongotita, “Grand Theft Education—Literacy in the Age of Video Games” (from the September 2006 Harper’s)
Gee, Good Video Games and Good Learning 1-17
Midterm portfolio self-evaluation due

Wednesday, February 4
Gee, Good Video Games 18-45

Friday, February 6
Gee, Good Video Games 46-82

Week # 6
Monday, February 9
Gee, Good Video Games 83-128
Discussion of our class book, Literacy and Technology: Reflections, Questions, and Speculations, and distribution of our “valentines”

Wednesday, February 11
Gee, Good Video Games 129-173

Friday, February 13
Possible guest speakers and/or day for reflection
Entering-the-conversation essay due

ON LITERACY, NEW LITERACIES, AND EDUCATION
Week # 7
Monday, February 16
Lankshear and Knobel, “Sampling `The New’ in New Literacies” (from their 2007 collection A New Literacies Sampler)

Wednesday, February 18
Leander, “`You Won’t Be Needing Your Laptops Today’: Wired Bodies in the Wireless Classroom” (A New Literacies Sampler)

Friday, February 20
Stone, “Popular Websites in Adolescents’ Out-of-School Lives: Critical Lessons on Literacy” (A New Literacies Sampler)

Week # 8
Monday, February 23
Thomas, “Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction” (A New Literacies Sampler)

Wednesday, February 25
Lankshear and Knobel, “New Ways of Knowing: Learning at the Margins” (A New Literacies Sampler)

Friday, February 27
Class is cancelled. I will be at Appalachian State University giving a talk. Please use this day to work on your seminar paper.

CONVERGENCE CULTURE: WHERE OLD AND NEW MEDIA COLLIDE
Week # 9
Monday, March 2
Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide 1-58

Wednesday, March 4
Jenkins, Convergence Culture 93-130

Friday, March 6
Jenkins, Convergence Culture 169-205

Week # 10
Monday, March 9
Jenkins, Convergence Culture 240-260 plus afterword
Lunsford, “Writing, Technologies, and the Fifth Canon” (Computers and Composition 2006)

Wednesday, March 11
There will be no new readings for today. Instead, we’ll spend the class engaged in a closing conversation.

Friday, March 12
Class is cancelled. I will be in San Francisco attending the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Your seminar paper is due no later than noon of Wednesday of finals week. I would really appreciate it if you would bring your seminar paper to my Waldo Hall office, rather than Moreland Hall. If you are willing to allow me to share your seminar paper with future students, please also email me an electronic file of your essay as an attachment.

Here's the Humanities Center talk--sorry!

2009-01-03T11:26:00.001-08:00

Technical malfunction: Sorry. I'm trying again to paste in my Center for the Humanities talk. (Apologies for the loss of formatting.) My residency was in 2004-05, so be forewarned that this is dated.

Lisa Ede
Center for the Humanities

From the Monthly Review to Amazon.com Customer Reviewers:
Popular Culture, Technology, and the Circulation of Cultural Power

Who are Harriet Klausner, Henry Raddick, and Danny Yee? They are ordinary citizens who have achieved considerable cultural authority via unpaid online book reviews posted on Amazon.com and on personal web sites. Klausner, currently the top-ranked reviewer at Amazon.com (with over 9000 reviews), has been featured in articles in The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among others. Knopf publicity director Nicholas Latimer currently sends Ms. Klausner every fiction title his house publishes because he “likes her to weigh in” (Kaufman 2). Latimer does this despite the fact that Klausner’s sole claim to fame is her top-ranked reviewer status at Amazon.com. In her real, as opposed to her virtual, life, Klausner is a retired librarian who works as a paid columnist for two national magazines, Porthole Cruise Magazine and Affaire de Coeur. Klausner lacks the credentials typically required to publish reviews in such journals as The New York Times Book Review or The Atlantic Monthly. Yet her reviews are highly valued by those who visit Amazon.com and by many in the publishing industry.

Why should scholars in the humanities care about reviews written by ordinary individuals like Klausner, Raddick, and Yee? Perhaps the most obvious reason is this: online book reviews provide new opportunities for citizens who lack the cultural cachet of, say, a reviewer for The New Yorker or The New York Times to disseminate their ideas to a potentially broad audience. As such, they represent a powerful challenge to cultural hegemony. They also represent a potentially rich data set for scholars interested in popular culture; literacy; reception studies; the consumption of culture; rhetorical analysis; the history of authorship, publishing, and the book; and the sociology, psychology, and economics of taste and of consumer behavior.
Later in my talk I will look at online citizen book reviews in the context of the history of authorship, publishing, and the book; doing so highlights the significance of these reviews, which are the first major challenge to the traditional system of print reviewing since this system was developed in the 18th century.[1] I will also have more to say about potential lines of research on online citizen reviews in the humanities. For the moment, however, I want to situate online citizen reviews vis-à-vis such related phenomena as weblogs (or blogs), vlogs (or video blogs) and podcasts (do-it-yourself radio broadcasting), for all of these forms present direct and significant challenges to cultural hegemony.

Probably everyone in the audience today is aware of the extent to which weblogs (or blogs) have exploded on the communicative scene. In case you’re unfamiliar with blogs, however, I’ll quickly note that blogs are personal Web sites where writers can post whatever thoughts they want to share with whatever readers come their way. Posts on blogs are presented in reverse chronological order. Most blogs have functions that encourage responses to postings; most also enable bloggers to link to other sites.

Blogs would not exist if software developers like Corvallis’ own Paul Bausch had not seen the need for programs that would enable ordinary citizens to share their views on the web. Paul Bausch helped to develop Blogger, the first blogging program. This program enables people with no knowledge of HTML to set up web sites in a remarkably brief amount of time. I know because a year ago I used Blogger to set up my own blog, The Writing Way, in less than 5 minutes. To do so all I had to do was set up a blogger account, choose a title and template for my blog, and bingo: I had a blog. My blog is very simple. Here are two much more sophisticated blogs. The first is Paul Bausch’s blog, onfocus.com. The second is culturecat.net, a blog hosted by Clancy Ratliff, a Ph.D. student in the rhetoric department of the University of Minnesota.

As you may be aware, in the last several years, blogs, blogging, and bloggers have received a huge amount of attention in the popular media. In fact, blogs are proliferating so rapidly throughout the world that it is hard to track them. Technorati, an online site that describes itself as “the authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs” is trying very hard to do just that, however. As of this past September 20th, Technoratti, noted that its real-time search engine was watching 17.5 million blogs and tracking 1.5 billion links (“What’s happening on the Web right now”). Two years earlier, it notes in its “About Technorati” pages, it was watching only 100,000 weblogs.

From 100,000 blogs to 17.5 million blogs in two years: that’s quite a jump. But there are other key developments in online communication that are equally significant. In the last year or so, for instance, vlogs (video weblogs) have gained in popularity. Indeed, when well-known blogger Glenn Harlan Reynolds reported on the spring 2005 BlogNashville blogger conference, he predicted that “within a year or so we’ll see videobloggers beginning to compete with television news operations—especially local television news operations—in quite a few places.”[2]
And then there’s podcasting. Just as blog software allows anyone with minimal technical know how to produce and disseminate videos, so too does podcasting software, such as Ipodder, allow anyone to produce their own radio show. The Dawn and Drew show, for instance, (which is currently the third-ranked show on Podcast Alley) is hosted by a couple who live on a rundown farm in Wisconsin. Once a week they sit down in their diningroom and podcast whatever comes to mind. Not all podcasters are as successful as Dawn and Drew in getting their ideas out to the public. Already, however, some podcasts have as many as 10,000 subscribers and San Francisco’s KYCY-AM recently became the first radio station to convert to an all podcast format under the new call letters KYou-Radio..[3]

I’ve digressed a bit from my specific topic of online citizen reviews. But I hope the logic of this digression is apparent: online citizen reviews are part of a much larger phenomenon, one that is making it possible for ordinary citizens to not only to “publish” their views but also to challenge the norms of high culture and the authority of conventional expertise.[4] For just as online citizen reviews represent a challenge to the conventional system of reviewing, so too do blogs, vlogs, and podcasts represent significant challenges to the traditional Big Media, who are (hardly coincidentally) rushing to incorporate and commodify them.[5]

Before we exclaim “O Brave New World” and formulate utopian and dystopian visions of the future—visions that exist aplenty in the world of digital communication—it might be good to spend a moment gaining some historical perspective. While I am clearly arguing that online citizen reviews and related forms of online communication such as blogs, vlogs, and podcasts represent new developments in contemporary communication and thus are significant and worthy of study, it is important to recognize that for centuries tensions between high and popular culture, between those who claim authority and expertise as artists and intellectuals and ordinary people, have existed—just as gossip, satire, and parody have existed. Think of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s disdain for the “scribbling women” writers of his time or of Matthew Arnold’s lament for the decline of art and taste in Culture and Anarchy.

Not surprisingly, ordinary readers have often responded to this disdain by declaring the concerns of reviewers and critics irrelevant and have happily read—and written—texts that they find interesting. Contemporary fan fiction is a good example of this willingness to ignore—and even get in the face of—high culture. If you want to get a sense of just how many people are writing fan fiction, take a look at fanfiction.net. When I checked this site last week, I discovered that the site included not only spin-offs or parodies of the Harry Potter series—209,702 of them to be precise—but also of Homer, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, and the Bible. Though online citizen reviews differ in intent and nature from fan fiction, they participate in and continue this tradition of resistant reading and writing—if only by asserting that ordinary people are perfectly well qualified to summarize and evaluate the books that they read.

So how can we best understand and evaluate the nature and consequences of online citizen reviews and related forms of communication? Many who attempt to address this question are drawn to either utopian or dystopian narratives. In so doing, they are (often unconsciously) participating in a long tradition of extremist commentaries about the consequences of new communication technologies. Remember how suspicious Plato is of writing in The Phaedrus? In the 18th century, the French scholar Diderot was so alarmed by the rapid increase in the number of printed books that he feared that “the world of learning will drown in books”(Rudenstine A48).[6] Much more recently, in 1956—when some of us in this room were in or entering school—educator Gerald Thorsen complained that students at that time were lost “to a world of mass media: tv, radio, motion pictures, newspapers, and comic books.” As a result, he said, “the cultural uses of language have been excluded. We have forgotten about books” (Crowley 105).[7]

What is true of new technologies of communication is equally true of such online developments as citizen reviews, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, all of which depend on what is sometimes termed social media software. Some contemporary commentators agree with Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, that the texts generated through this software—Gillmor’s particular focus is on blogs—holds the utopian potential of overturning big media and bringing something resembling democracy to culture and communication.[8] Others fear that blogs, citizen reviews, and pod casts will weaken already threatened standards for knowledge, culture, and taste. They wonder, as well, if customer reviews on Amazon.com and other commercial Web sites represent not a laudable resistance to cultural hegemony but rather the ability of capitalism to coopt and commodify individual acts of self-expression and communication. (There’s a reason, after all, why Amazon.com calls its reviewers customer reviewers.) Those who hold this view are quick to point out the key role that customer reviews play in Amazon.com’s business model and the speed with which Big Media, business, and industry have attempted to capitalize on the blogging phenomenon by establishing their own blogs.

A few moments ago I indicated that online citizen reviews hold the potential to challenge cultural hegemony, and I’d like to take a moment to provide some historical context for this statement. To do so, I need to invoke the literary ferment that existed in Great Britain in the wake of the collapse of patronage. As Frank Donaghue notes in The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers, “literary production in [Great Britain in] the eighteenth century existed in a kind of limbo, between an age of substantial aristocratic support and the fully developed literary market of the nineteenth century” (1). As a result, during this period “authorship became increasingly defined in popular criticism. . .[so that] from 1750 onward, literary careers were chiefly described, and indeed made possible, by reviewers” who published their reviews in such periodicals as the Monthly Review (founded in 1749) and the Critical Review (founded in 1756).[9]

Since that time, this system of expert reviewing has spread throughout much of the West. In the United States, reviews published in such established venues as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and so on have played a key role in demarking the boundaries between high and popular culture. While many ordinary citizens demonstrate their indifference to these distinctions by choosing not to read these and similar publications, those who wish to be (or to appear to be) educated consult them regularly. And even if they don’t read these publications as often as they feel they should—even if they subscribe to The New Yorker as much for the cartoons as for its reviews and commentary—their sense of the different values accorded to “serious” literature versus such genres as romance, mystery, and fantasy novels reflects the power that reviews written by those credited with cultural authority have to shape and inform taste.

The mere fact that the publicity director of Knopf currently sends Harriet Klausner every fiction title his house publishes simply because she is the top reviewer at Amazon.com suggests that this balance of power may be shifting. It is certainly the case that with the rise of the Internet and of social media software ordinary citizens are asserting their right to produce, as well as to consume, content. A 2004 Pew/Internet study of “Content Creation Online” reported that, based on a national phone survey between March 12 and May 30, 2003, more than “53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files, and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online” (2). Many more persons have joined this group, of course, in the years since. A later report published in October, 2004 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that “Twenty-six percent of adult Internet users in the U.S. have rated a product, service, or person using an online rating system.” As examples of Internet sites that use online review, rating, reputation, or feedback systems the report cites Amazon.com, EBay.com, Epinions.com, Google.com, RateMyProfs.com, and INDb.com (or the Internet Movie Data Base).

As these examples suggest, just about anything can be—and probably is being—reviewed online. In my research and in my talk today, however, I am focusing primarily on online citizen book reviews. I do so because book reviews play a particularly powerful role in the academy, and in the transmission of literary and intellectual norms in the general culture. As such, book reviews make it particularly clear how much might be at stake when ordinary citizens claim the right to critique books—particularly when these citizens attract the attention of a diverse and substantial audience.

This is the moment, I think, when I should be sure that we’re all on the same page in terms of our understanding of just what online citizen book reviews are. Citizen reviews are reviews written by unpaid volunteers that are published on the Web. Reviews can be of any length, though you will probably not be surprised when I say that most online citizen reviews are briefer and less analytical than reviews featured in such venues as The New York Times Book Review. Perhaps the best known online citizen book review site is Amazon.com—but there are many, many others, including AllReaders.com (where citizen reviewers fill in a seven page form organized according to genre)[10], DearReader.com, BookReporter.Com, and Blether.com.

Many individuals also host personal book review web sites—some of which have garnered considerable public attention. When I was writing the proposal for my Humanities Center project, for instance, I typed the words “book review” into Google. The first five sites that Google presented included online sites for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Booklist, Bookwire—and a site titled “Danny Yee’s Book Reviews.” On his home page, Yee identifies himself as a Eurasian living in Sydney, Australia who supports his book-reviewing habit by working 20 hours a week as a computer systems manager for the Department of Anatomy and Histology at the University of Sydney. His personal Web site includes reviews for over 800 books. According to Yee’s humorously titled “Infrequently Asked Questions” web pages, in 2002 alone Yee’s site had “2.4 million page views by perhaps 900,000 people, [excluding, Yee assures readers] robots and other automated accesses as far as is possible.” Yee also maintains two mailing lists with 1500 subscribers who regularly read his reviews.

Yee is hardly the only ordinary citizen to host a personal book review Web site. There are literally hundreds, if not more, of these sites on the Web. Some sites, such as Steven Wu’s Book Reviews, Kristen’s Book Reviews, and Steph’s Book Reviews are straightforward book review sites. Others, such as Bob Corbett’s Book Reviews, Virtual Marginalia, and the Brothers Judd are mixed sites that include reviews as well as other kinds of texts.
Given the phenomenal growth of blogs, it’s hardly surprising to learn that there are an increasing number of blogs that include citizen book reviews. Some of these blogs are a mix of reviews, personal updates, and pretty much anything the blogger wants to post. Examples include Moorishgirl.com, The Elegant Variation, and Bookslut. A particularly interesting blog is The Litblog Co-op. This is a cooperative of literary bloggers who come together four times a year to choose a book to review, which they review both on the co-op’s blog and on their own blogs. This is definitely an effort to influence opinion and sales, especially since the members of the co-op intend to “pick a book from obscurity, an overlooked literary gem” to review.

If you’re like me, you may be feeling a bit exhausted—if not stunned—by all this writing. Talk about self-sponsored acts of literacy: the Internet is full of them! But why do ordinary people choose to write and read reviews of books and other products on the Web or send their thoughts out into the blogosphere via personal blogs, vlogs, and podcasts? And what are the consequences of their decision to do so?

There are several ways to address the first question. One is to look at a report published in spring 2005 under the title “Trust `MEdia’: How Real People Are Finally Being Heard” and was characterized by its authors as being “The 1.0 Guide to the Blogosphere for Marketers & Company Stakeholders.” According to this report, “peoples’ trust has shifted from authority to figures to `average people like you.’ “In fact, 56% of Americans trust only the opinions of physicians and academicians more than they trust the opinions of people like themselves” (2).[11]

The trend documented in his survey may help to explain why so many people consult online reviews when they are deciding whether to read or purchase a book or some other product.[12] But why would so many people be willing to spend so much time writing unpaid citizen reviews—particularly when many others have already reviewed a work? (Several weeks ago I checked Amazon.com to see how many reviews of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—a title I chose at random—appear on that site. The number at that time was 1297.) A quick answer might call attention to the role that personal gratification and social approval play in this process. (Those who write fan fiction sometimes refer to this as “egoboo” or egoboost [Rheingold120].)[13] As you are probably already aware, “egoboo” is merely shorthand for a much more complex and situated phenomenon—one that sociologists and psychologists might find intriguing to study.

But given the enormity and intentional redundancy of the Web, how might scholars who wish to study online citizen book reviews—or online reviews of any kind—begin? Amazon.com strikes me as a particularly promising site to undertake such analysis. I don’t know how many of you have noticed how rich this site is—how hard it works to create a space where a community of like-minded citizens can flourish. I know that I didn’t until I began my study. Since I want to leave time for questions, my comments about Amazon.com will be brief, but I want to point out that it’s hard to overestimate the richness of this site for scholarly work. Since Amazon.com is always changing, it’s also important to acknowledge the potential frustrations and difficulties that scholarly study might entail.

The first thing to note about citizen reviews on Amazon.com is that they are part of Amazon’s evolving business plan. As James Marcus describes in Amazonia: Five Years at the the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut, when Amazon opened, Jeff Bezos hired credentialed writers and journalists to write reviews of books they sold.[14] As part of Bezos’ plan to, in his words, “monetize” customers’ “eyeballs,” Bezos eventually substituted customer reviews for expert reviews (130). Initially reviewers were required to be anonymous; Amazon now encourages what the site refers to as a “Real Name” policy. For some time now, Amazon has made it possible for readers to rank reviews, and it publishes the rank of every single reviewer on its site.[15] If you find a reviewer whose writing and “take” on books you like—Henry Raddick, perhaps, the British reviewer whose witty commentaries have earned him a fair amount of celebrity—Amazon.com makes it easy for you to find and read all his reviews. If that reviewer has also contributed “Listmania” lists or “So you’d like to….guides” to Amazon.com you can easily locate these as well. (In case you’ve not noticed, these lists and guides generally appear in the left and right hand sides of web pages on Amazon.)

The next time you go to Amazon.com, you might want to take some time to look around, if you haven’t already, and do so with an eye toward its community-building features. If you’ve visited Amazon recently, you’ve probably noticed that it’s collecting post-Katrina collections for the American Red Cross, just as it collected political contributions during the last presidential election. In February, 2005 Amazon announced a new award for innovative nonprofit organizations. As the announcement for the award states, Amazon customers can participate in the competition for the award by “vot[ing] with their pocketbooks” (“Amazon.com Announces New Award).[16] In these and other ways, Amazon endeavors to create a profoundly personalized yet also multi-layered, multi-purposed community that embeds its primary mission—selling products and making money—in a rich social context. Central to this community is the ability for customers to contribute content freely and directly to Amazon.com. (Have you noticed, in that regard, that as of about six months ago customers can not only write reviews but also post images on Amazon.com?)

I’ve really just begun to scratch the surface of the riches that exist on Amazon.com’s site.[17] And this is just one site on the Web—though admittedly a large and complex one—where online citizen reviews are posted. It is the major burden of my talk today to argue that online citizen review sites represent a powerful and thought-provoking opportunity for scholars in a variety of disciplines in the humanities. A significant advantage they offer to scholars is their dependence on written text: we’re talking serious data here.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, scholars have largely thus far failed to take advantage of the rich opportunity for scholarly work that online citizen reviews provide. After a year of study, I have been able to locate only two research projects on online citizen reviews. The first was undertaken—prepare to be surprised—by a group of physicists. These physicists were interested in the physical movement of complex systems and thought they might learn something about this movement by studying the sales histories and reception of various books, as recorded at Amazon. I don’t fully understand the complexities of their research, which was reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, but I can say a bit more about it during the question and answer period if anyone is interested.[18]

The second research project of which I am aware is grounded in the humanities. Mikhail Gronas, the scholar who has undertaken this project, is a Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth. Gronas is engaged in an ambitious effort—one that is still very much in progress—to develop a quantitative measure of the literary taste of ordinary readers. To do so he is analyzing the number of stars assigned by readers to books on Amazon.com. He is also analyzing the personal commentary provided by readers who post reviews on this site. Gronas characterizes his research as an effort to develop “a palpable, probabilistic approach to literary criticism” (Dartmouth College Press Release)l

As you have undoubtedly already noted, the two projects I have just described are grounded in quantitative studies of the data on Amazon.com—though both studies do attend to qualitative or interpretative issues as well. In the time remaining, I’d like to suggest some ways that scholars whose primary methodology involves textual interpretation might engage the corpus of citizen reviews that exist on the Web. One line of research is, I hope, fairly obvious, for online citizen reviews should be of intrinsic interest to scholars in cultural and Internet studies. I can easily imagine a study of citizen reviewers that would follow in the tradition of Henry Jenkins Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participating Culture, a thought-provoking account of the culture of television fan culture and fan fictions.

Another related scholarly project is Rosa Eberle’s Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres. Eberle is a scholar of rhetoric and communication at Penn State. In her book, she looked at letters to the editor of newspapers generated by the publication of such controversial novels as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Easten Ellis’s American Psycho. (And, yes, my use of the term citizen reviewer’s is indebted to to Eberle’s study.) Eberle’s work engages research on publics and public spheres—something I’ll talk more about in a few moments—but it is also grounded in the longstanding tradition of rhetorical analysis. Her methodology could easily be extended to online citizen book reviews. As I have read these reviews, I have been intrigued by the various and often innovative ways that those writing citizen reviews deploy ethos, pathos, and logos in their writing. It could be quite interesting, for instance, to analyze the rhetorical strategies employed by the more than 2800 citizens who contributed reviews of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry to Amazon.com.

Another potential area of research is reception studies, a field that ranges from Heidi Brayman Hackel’s historical and literary research on the reading practices of early modern women readers to Janice Radway’s ethnographic research on female readers of romances and of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Online citizen book reviews represent an exciting opportunity for those interested in studying the reading practices and responses of ordinary citizens. Since the huge number and diverse nature of online citizen book reviews, the challenge for this kind of research will be to develop methodologies and data sets that allow scholars to approach and limit their research is realistic ways.

I mentioned earlier in my talk that online citizen reviews represent the first major challenge to the traditional system of print reviews since this system appeared in the 18th century. As such, these reviews—and the persons who write them—should be of interest to those studying the history of the book, authorship, and publishing. What does it mean that so many ordinary citizens are claiming the authority—and I hope you hear the word “author” in authority—needed to publish their work on the Web? How are online citizen reviews influencing the marketplace of ideas? What new topoi—to echo an issue that Rosa Eberly discusses at some length in Citizen Critics—might scholars discover if we undertook extensive analyses of reviews posted on Amazon.com and other sites?

Those engaged with the work of Jurgen Habermas and related projects might also find that online citizen reviews provide a thought-provoking object of potential study. In his study of the formation of the development of “a polite and informed public in the early modern period,” Habermas makes special note of the role that “coffee-houses, private salons, newspapers, journals, book clubs” etc. played in this process (Bermingham 9). According to Ann Bermingham, co-editor of The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800, Habermas viewed literary reviews and institutionalized art criticism as “typical inventions of the day” (10). Online citizen reviews, and the sites that sponsor them, are, I would argue, similarly “typical inventions” of the 21st century. What kind of publics are being formed among the community of readers who write, consult, and rank reviews at Amazon.com? And what can we learn about the consumption and production of culture by studying the reviews that appear at this site?

Online citizen reviews could also provide compelling data for those who, like Pierre Bourdieu, are interested in those activities and “systems of classification which structure perception of the social world and designate the objects of aesthetic enjoyment” (Bourdieu xiii-xiv). In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu attempts to inquire into what he terms the “economy of cultural goods” (1) via a materially grounded analysis of the “conditions of existence, habitus, and life-style” (170). [19]

There are other sites where ongoing scholarly projects might intersect in productive ways with online citizen reviews. The issues raised by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life—where de Certau argues for a shift of scholarly attention from the producer and the product to the consumer—is one such site. But for now I hope that I have demonstrated that online citizen book reviews pose a rich resource for scholars in the humanities. Like blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, online citizen reviews are providing new opportunities for ordinary people to share their views with others. We may not always like what we read when we read, hear, or view what our neighbor—or someone halfway around the world—has to say. But the opportunity to do so is unprecedented. I hope that scholars in the humanities will take advantage of these new opportunities to listen to the world.

[1] I use the term “citizen book reviews” to distinguish reviews written by ordinary citizens from professionally written reviews. I also do so to acknowledge the important role that Rosa Eberly’s Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres played in my research and analysis.
[2] Currently I know of at least one television show that relies heavily on vlogs submitted by ordinary citizens. It is titled “Zed” and airs on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

[3] Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” is an example of a podcast that has gained a wide readership. Curry developed the first podcast software, which he then released into the open source community, which further refined it.

[4] Another obvious example of such a challenge is the Wickipedia, which advertises itself as “the free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” As of June 28, 2005, Wickipedia—which was started in 2001—had 612,301 active articles.
[5] Organizations like Our Media and Creative Commons are attempting to resist Big Media’s effort to discipline and commodify these grassroots efforts—but the extent to which they will be able to do so is open to debate.
[6] A t roughly the same period, “a German treatise on public health warned that excessive reading induced `a susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, asthma, apoplexy,’ and a host of other disorders, indluding ‘hypochondria and melancholy.’ Fresh air, frequent walks, and washing one’s face periodically in cole water were prescribed for solitary readers” (Rudenstine A48).

[7] For an extended discussion of a utopian narrative see Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet.
[8] I do not mean to suggest that Gillmor is naïve about the dangers that those he refers to as “citizen journalists” face (xvi). Moreover, Gillmor “walked the talk” of his book in two ways. He and his publisher limited copyright from the current term (the life of the author plus 75 years) to 14 years. They also published his book Web and made it available for free downloading.
[9] In The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb argue that just as literary culture was transformed during this period so too was there “a consumer revolution in eighteenth-century England” (1).
[10] Reviewers on AllReaders.com can earn some money for their reviews. This appears to be determined by how useful others rate their review. I couldn’t determine how much money one might possibly earn by reviewing.
[11] This report was sponsored by Edelman, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing firms, and Intelliseek, a company that specializes in “consumer-generated media.”
[12] It also jibes with common sense. People have always turned to friends, neighbors, and family when making important purchases. “How has your Chevy held up?,” they might ask. Or “Was that new Grishom mystery a good read? I’m been thinking of reading it myself.”

[13] Ranking reviews and reviewers is one obvious stimulus to “egoboo.” Recently, Amazon.com added another, spotlight reviews. Customer reviews on Amazon are usually posted in reverse chronological order, with the most recent reviews appearing first. But these are often preceded by what the site terms spotlight reviews, reviews that have been identified as exemplary in one or another way. (It is not clear how these reviews are selected.) Amazon.com now also includes badges that appear next to the name of highly ranked reviewers. Such badges include the following: # 1 reviewer, top 10 reviewer, top reviewer.
[14] At what Marcus refers to as “The Golden Age of Content at Amazon” (117) the company had a staff of twenty-fire editors. Marcus makes it clear that the shift from a paid editorial staff to customer reviewers was not the result of an effort to cut salary costs. Rather, it reflected Bezos’ understanding that , as Adrian Chan, an analyst for the marketing firm Gravity 7 observes, Amazon.com customer reviews “work by creating the mirror world of social value: reputations, desires, comparisons, and other kinds of associations reflected on the surface of social relations” (Chan)

[15] How many persons have written reviews for Amazon.com? Like many other trade secrets of the company, it is difficult to impossible to know. For one thing, multiple reviewers regularly share the same rank. (Amazon.com has not shared the method it employs to determine rankings.) On December 6, 2004 I spend several hours scrolling through Amazon.com’s rankings. On that day, the last ranking level that I found was the rank of 1,449,043. Thirteen reviewers shared this rank.

[16] According to the article that appeared online on February 15, 2004, “Beginning July 19, 2005, the 10 nonprofit finalist organizations will be profiled on the Amazon.com site, where customers and visitors will be able to make direct online contributions to their favorite organization or organizations. Donations will be accepted through September 30, 2005. The organization that receives the largest total contributions from Amazon customers will be awarded the 2005 Amazon.com Nonprofit Innovation Award, along with a matching grant from Amazon.com. The 2005 honoree will be announced in October 2005” (“Amazon.com Announces New Award”).

[17]In spring of 2005, for instance, Amazon joined with the Tribeca Film Festival (which is dedicated to the revitalization of lower Manhattan after 9-11-2001) announced the debut of the Tribeca Screening Room on Amazon.com. This enabled millions of Amazon.com customers to view and rate as many short films as they would like using the Amazon.com star rating system. The announcement stated that Amazon undertook this project because it “seeks to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company” (“Amazon.com and the Tribeca Film Festival”).
[18] These physicists became interested in this topic when one of their books made a sudden leap in sales rankings on Amazon.com. This raised the more general question of the ways in which various books achieve success. What they discovered is that “top sellers tend to reach their sales peak in one of two ways. . .[M]any get there because of. . .exogenous shocks: a major media announcement, a celebrity endorsement, a dignitary’s death.” In these cases, the instant rise in sales is followed by a fairly quick decline. Other books, such as Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, inch their way to the top over many months, helped by tiny “endogenous shocks,” such as a friend’s recommendation.
[19] Bourdieu observes that the habitus is “internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions” (170). The habitus is the reason why academics as a whole prefer high culture—with the occasional popular culture passion thrown in—and why waitresses and truck drivers generally do not.

The project that got me interested in digital and online literacies

2009-01-03T11:22:00.000-08:00

I've just posted some thoughts on Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I was sure that I had notes on a variety of other books I read on saabbatical, but I can't find them in my files.

Memo to self: be more organized when saving electronic files!

So I thought I'd post the project that first got me interested in digital and online literacies, a study of what I'm calling online citizen reviewers. I had a residency at Oregon State's Center for the Humanities several years ago to study this topic. I'm pasting in the talk that I gave reporting on my research.

Some thoughts about Tapscott and Williams' Wikinomics

2009-01-03T11:14:00.000-08:00

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

I thought I’d write a few comments about this book, while it’s fresh in my mind. I was pretty skeptical when I started reading it. While this book does focus on collaboration and Web 2.0, it’s clearly in the line of popular books designed to help business execs adapt to changing times. There are definitely elements of hype, and there is definitely not enough critical reflection on the potential or real negative consequences of changes in the workplace. The authors say, for instance, that “The days of lifelong employment and pensions are already long gone” (265). I bet they have nice pensions, however. Tapscott, by the way, runs the New Paradigm think tank and consulting company and is the author of 10 books, including the bestsellers Paradigm Shift, The Digital Economy, Growing up Digital, The Naked Corporation, and Digital Capital. He teaches in the School of Management at the University of Toronto. Williams is research director at New Paradigm.

But back to the book. Despite its limitations, this book documents some pretty profound changes in the workplace. In so doing, it supports the point that Knobel and Lankshear make in their work—that new literacies involve both new technology stuff and new “ethos stuff.” Tapscott and Williams don’t use this language, but they are definitely talking about new ethos stuff in the world of work when they talk about wikinomics.

They do talk in interesting ways about their collaboration, which happened mainly via Skype (with Don in Canada and Anthony in England). They posted sections of the book on the web at Wikinomics.com and solicited reader feedback. They include, for instance, the subtitles that readers suggested for the book. And they conclude the book with a final chapter called “The Wikinomics Playbook” that has this single sentence: “Join us in peer producing the definitive guide to twenty-first-century strategy at www.wikinomics.com” (291), where they have a blog.

The following are some examples and notes from my reading of the book:
They begin with the Goldcorp Inc story, which has appeared in every study of Web 2 and convergence culture that I’ve read this year. Rob McEwen, the CEO of Goldcorp, a mining company, did the opposite of what most CEO’s of mining companies do. Rather than protecting the company’s proprietary information, he made it all available on the Web and offered $575,000 in prize money for folks who analyzed the data and suggested places to mine that proved successful. Ultimately, 1000 virtual prospectors from 50 countries participated. Over 80% of the targets they identified yielded substantial quantities of gold. “McEwen estimates the collaborative process shaved two to three years off their exploration time” (9).

They have a lengthy discussion in multiple places in the book of how Procter & Gamble has moved from doing just about all its R&D internally to using web-based programs like InnoCentive. InnoCentive matches “scientists to R&D challenges presented by companies in search of innovation” (13). According to the authors, 90,000 scientists have registered with InnoCentive to provide solutions to companies such as Boeing, Dow, DuPont, P&G, etc. (98). Innocentive works somewhat like EBay. “Companies—or `seekers’—anonymously post R&D problems on the InnoCentive Web site, while `solvers’ submit their solutions in a bid to capture cash prizes ranging from $5000 to $100,000 (98-99). The idea is to allow companies to easily find the persons who are best suited to solving a particular problem, which vastly expands their R&D possibilities (and also saving them permanent labor costs). There’s a similar company called Encore, which recruits retired scientists.

They say there are four principles of wikinomics: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally and argue that these are “very different from the hierarchical, closed, secretive, and insular multinational [model] that dominated the previous century” (30).

They discuss Cory Toctorow, one of the hosts of Boing Boing (one of the most popular and high trafficked blogs), who is also a writer of science fiction. He gives his books away for free (as downloads) on his Web site—so he can sell more books on Amazon.com. “Readers in developing companies can even resell them [his books] at a profit” and that’s fine with Doctorow, who says his “problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity” (35).

There’s a lot of discussion of blogging and of citizen journalism. In general, this is much less nuanced and helpful than Clay Shirkey’s discussion in Here Comes Everybody.

A fascinating example of peering on the Web is a site called TakingITGlobal. It’s both a social networking and a political action site run by a small staff of 15 people who manage core functions and work with volunteers from around the world. Currently, folks on this site are working together to develop “a set of tools and curricular activities that will get students collaborating with other students in other countries to complete projects, and learning through active projects that make a difference in their communities” (51).

Of course there’s lots of discussion of Wikipedia and of Linux. Something that I learned about Linix is that though it started as all volunteer “a growing number of people are paid to participate in Linux by the companies they work for” because Linix is now so huge as a software program (70).

There is a lengthy discussion of how IBM, which was failing as a company, joined early on with Linux and reversed its decline as a business. This required an almost complete change of business culture for IBM, which the authors say “has become a champion of peer production and a leader of the open world” (78). The authors say: “Giving up so much control is unconventional to say the least, but the rewards for doing so have been handsome. IBM spends about $100 million per year on general Linux development. If the Linux community puts in $1 billion of effort, and even half of that is useful to IBM customers, the company gets $500 million of software development for an investment of $100 million. `Linux gives us a viable platform uniquely tailored to our needs for twenty percent of the cost of a proprietary OS’” says someone in the company (81).

Another interesting project: The California Department of Education has developed a project called The California Open Source Textbook Project. Currently, teachers are volunteering their time to “create a world history text for tenth-grade history classes” (69). The authors say that this project is slated to save California taxpayers $400 million per year (281).

There are all kinds of examples of companies that use Linux to provide free Web-based services. One example is Pentaho, which provides open sources business intelligence that “competes with commercial applications provided by Cognos and Hyperion” (85). They give their baseline software away for free: “Like other open source vendors, it generates revenues from support, training, and consulting to customize the software for a company’s specific requirements” (85). No one is obligated to ask for this help, however, and they can fully use the software for free.

Another example is a company called Spike Source that tests and integrates new open source applications and updates. They crunch over 30,000 tests nightly and provide an integrated solution or “stack” every day. “Downloading the stack is free. Spike Source makes its money providing customer service and support” (88). Evidently the free service they provide is incredibly important to the open source community.

Companies are beginning to deal with patents differently. P&G used to strictly protect its patents. Then it did an audit and discovered that “it was spending $1.5 billion on R&D, generating lots of patents, but using less than 10% of them in its own products” (103). So they’ve opened up their patents and made “every patent in its portfolio available for licensure to any outsider” (with a very few restrictions) (103). As a result, they’ve seen a huge increase in the profit they make from licensing their patents.

“Virtually all companies with sizable patent holdings are now busy mining their portfolios” (104). This is a huge reversal of previous practices, which was to protect patents at all costs.

There’s a whole chapter on “prosumers,” consumers that blur the gap between producers and consumers. Second Life is a paradigmatic example, but they give many others. When BMW wanted to redesign their cars, the “company released a digital design kit on its Web site to encourage interested consumers to design them” rather than designing internally (129).

There’s a chapter on what the authors call science 2.0. As an example they cite OpenWetWare, “an MIT project designed to share expertise, information, and ideas in biology. . . .Twenty labs at different institutions already use the wiki-based site to swap data, standardize research protocols, and even share materials and equipment” (161). The Human Genome Project is another example.

There’s a really interesting chapter on open platforms, such as exist on Google, Amazon, and EBay. Open platforms mean that developers not only can but are encouraged to go in and build new applications with these site’s code. Paul Bausch write a book that is part of the O’Reilly Hacks series on using Amazon’s open platform, creating mash ups, etc. The authors argue that this has hugely increased these site’s business and reputation. They say that Amazon alone has “975,000 active seller accounts, 140,000-plus developers, and third-party sales generating 28% of Amazon’s revenues in the second quarter of 2005” (194). Amazon pays no money for this (other than the $ spent developing the basic open platform) and earns a lot from it. Amazon gives “developers carte blanche to build any application they see fit. No one has to ask for permission or await approval” (195).

They also discuss open platforms created by non-profits that perform valuable civic roles. Scorecard gathers and provides access to information about pollution. You just have to type your zip code into a box on their site, and you get lots of info about pollution in your particular area. Another example is Neighborhood Knowledge California, which was developed at UCLA’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge as a participatory research project. Citizens and community organizations use its online databases “to look for properties with tax problems, code violations, or other difficulties. . . .that could be precursors to abandonment and deterioration in their neighborhood” (204). They use this information to undertake activist projects.

There was a fascinating discussion of a computer called Geek Squad that “helps consumers navigate the increasing complexity of electronic gadgetry” (238). The CEO had a pretty wikinomic-centered philosophy from the start, but he learned something when he set up a wiki to encourage communication and collaboration. It didn’t take off, and when he asked a manager about it the manager admitted that workers throughout the US kept in touch by playing Battlefield 2 online during work hours. In the midst of playing, they exchange all kinds of helpful tips and info. The CEO learned a lot, he said, from this. He is happy to have workers/agents play on company time, and he says he now sees himself as “serving his agents’ agenda” rather than imposing his own (243). I won’t go into details but there are some wonderful, and at times funny, examples of how “Geek Squad agents have even come up with some of the company’s most successful PR stunts” (244).

In their conclusion, they talk about the kind of threat to the Internet and Web that recent telecom giant proposals represent. They are trying “to create a tiered Internet with different levels of service akin to first class, business, and coach” (273). The authors say that this works against the golden rules of the Internet as established in its basic design: “Nobody owns it, everybody uses it, and anybody can add services to it” (273). I just got a copy of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It (Yale UP, 2008), and the entire book focuses on these kinds of threats to the basic architecture of the internet. There’s a quote from Lawrence Lessig on the back cover. He says this book will “define the debate about the future of the Internet.”

They are also careful to say that while open source communities value openness, freedom, flexibility, spontaneity etc. “All successful open source communities today deploy highly structured and hierarchically directed processes for managing the tedious, tiresome work of joining together all of the fragmented pieces and contributions” (280). They say this balance between self-organization and hierarchical direction is essential for success.

I thought I’d close with the final wikinomics design principles that the authors articulate.

--Take cues from your lead users
--Build a critical mass
--Supply an infrastructure for collaboration
--Take your time to get the structures and governance right
--Make sure all participants can harvest some value
--Abide by community norms
--Let the process evolve
--Hone your collaborative mind (286-289)

As I said earlier, at times I was a fairly resistant reader of this book. There is some hype and not enough critical reflection for what this means for the least empowered workers. But finally I found the sheer accumulation of examples pretty darn compelling. When companies as big and established (and notoriously set in their ways) as Xerox and Procter and Gamble make such significant changes in their business practices, that seems noteworthy.

Trying to restart the blogging habit

2009-01-03T11:03:00.001-08:00

Well, it has been almost two years since I posted anything to my blog. Sorry about that! I was on sabbatical in 2007-08, and though I spent a huge amount of time during that year reading about digital and online technologies I'm afraid that I neglected this blog. This shows, I know, the extent to which I am NOT a digital native.

During the year, for instance, I wrote up a number of reflections about various books that I read. I wrote them up in Word, and I could have easily posted them here--as my friend and former student Michael Faris (now in the Ph.D. program in rhetoric and writing at Penn State) gently suggested a number of times. Somehow I always managed to find a reason to put that off to another day.

It's not that I didn't want to post my thoughts--it's just that I never really made this blog a natural, recurring part of my writing life.

To be truthful, I don't know if I can make that happen. But this weekend I am gearing up to teach ENG 495/595 Language, Technology, and Culture, and I feel the need to try to reimmerse myself in--and reactivate--this blog.

(I don't get many visitors to this blog, which is not surprising given how seldom I post, but if you don't already know me I teach at Oregon State University in Corvallis OR.)

I guess this post will serve as my reintroduction of myself to the blogosphere. Now I think I'll see if I can find some of those summaries/responses to books I read on sabbatical and post them.

Interesting article on Academic Blogging from The Chronicle of Higher Education

2007-01-31T09:48:00.000-08:00

This article appeared in the January 30, 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education.

Blog Overload
By Kara M. Dawson

I have a friend whose personal blog about her plight with breast cancer as a stay-at-home mother of two led to her job as an official blogger with the Cancer Blog. She majored in journalism. I have a colleague whose blog about the potential of social software in teaching and learning has attracted international recognition among edu-bloggers. He is a former English teacher.

Sure, blogs have changed the face of communication, and brought new opportunities, new relationships, new forms of recognition, and even new earning potential to many people. But not to everyone.

Certainly not to my two classes of graduate students who ended the fall semester blogged down and blogged out. In the past, when I had required students to write blog postings in my courses, the assignment was at least a novelty. But last semester, it just seemed a snore.
In some courses, I use a single blog on which all students are expected to post comments. In other classes, I require students to create individual blogs and to visit their fellow students' blogs through RSS feeds. Typically I expect students to write at least one posting a week and to comment on several others' blogs. Sometimes I require students to post on a particular topic, and sometimes I leave it open-ended. Whatever the approach, I found last semester that many students fell victim to blog overload.

I began to feel overloaded, too. Don't get me wrong. I love blogs. I have my RSS feeds set to a number of blogs that help me stay current on personal and professional interests. But the key difference is that I am not forced to read any of those blogs. None of them were created because of someone else's course requirement.

Frankly, the blog postings I required my students to write were just not very interesting. Those students are bright, insightful, frequently opinionated, and, as a whole, a pleasure to be around. Their blogs were not.

With few exceptions, the blogs would sit inactive until about 24 hours before our face-to-face class meetings (or 24 hours before the assignments are due in my online class) when a flurry of posts and comments would erupt. Then, I would spend an excessive amount of time reading and commenting in the hours before class. Some students did the same while others didn't bother to comment at all. Effective teaching and learning? I think not.

I have been using blogs for about seven semesters. On average, out of a class of 25 students, two to three post to their blogs once the course ends. Most of those who continue post personal vendettas, funny stories, or links to personally relevant resources. Their blogs have a known audience, such as family members or a group of interested colleagues. Few have readership outside the students' face-to-face network.

So I admit it. I got caught up in all the hype about blogs -- about their potential for communication, for creating global connections, for expressing oneself, for extending face-to-face discussions, and for building community in online environments. In most cases, my initial excitement has not borne fruit.

I don't fault my students. I am the instructor. And given my background in pedagogy and education, I should be a good leader. But when it comes to blogs, I have not been.
Still, I am not going to give up on blogs. What I am going to do is become a much more critical user. And so I offer some thoughts as I prepare to revamp the integration of blogs in my courses.

Keep a Blog Yourself
I have a blog. I just don't use it. I am too busy reading other people's blogs, responding to student postings, and writing for outlets that may one day secure me a full professorship. How can I expect my students to devote time to something that I don't find important enough to do myself? So if you're going to require students to create a blog, you should probably have an active one, too.

Recognize Individual Learning Styles and Preferences.
I find it funny that I would have to remind myself of that, given that I am expert in pedagogy. Before blogs came along, I offered my students multiple options for demonstrating their knowledge. Some created concept maps, others audio-recorded their thoughts (prior to podcasts), many kept individual journals, and others created movies or presentations. All students were responsible for demonstrating their interaction with class content from week to week and sharing the results. In retrospect, that is not such a bad plan. I can simply offer blogs as another possible option.

Encourage Bloggers to Produce More than Just Text
When I included a requirement that all students integrate at least three forms of multimedia in their blogs by the end of the semester, I envisioned creations like podcasts and Gliffy concept maps. What I got was links to YouTube videos and pre-existing podcasts and images. Clearly, the use of blogs has unintentionally decreased the way my students interact with course content. I need to recognize that. I need to be more explicit in my expectations for the use of blogs.

Recognize the Nature of the Beast
The most effective blogs provide important and cutting-edge information (e.g., Tech Crunch), communicate deeply personal experiences through narrative (e.g., the Cancer Blog), or write to a specific audience (e.g., chemistry teachers). Most people with successful blogs are deeply committed to posting, for personal reasons, such as a passion for their subject, the satisfaction of reaching a wide audience, or the ego boost associated with having others find their narratives important enough to read. Many people with successful blogs also have an innate slant toward the writing profession.

I need to recognize all of those facts, and redefine my expectations and purposes for using blogs in the classroom.

Don't Forget "Old" Technologies
Since the advent of blogs, I had moved away from online discussion forums. I viewed them as clunky, passé even. Now I realize they still have merit. It is very difficult to have an extended conversation within blogs. By their very nature, they position one person at the helm of all activity. The threaded format of discussion forums allow for multiple interactions among multiple individuals. It also allows subtopics to flow from a broad topic.

Don't Be Afraid to Punt.
I should have ceased -- or at least modified -- the way I used blogs last semester. I asked my students for their opinion on the topic but few responded. I am very open to student suggestions but know that is not true of all faculty members. My students may have feared retribution. They may have just not cared enough to comment. So from now on, blogs will be a socially negotiated addition to my coursework.

While some readers may take my comments as an attack on the merit of using blogs in teaching and learning, I still believe they have a definite role to play -- especially given what we know about the importance of metacognition and social interaction in the learning process. My hope in sharing these insights is merely to help others consider what that role might be in their own classrooms.

Kara M. Dawson is an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Florida.

Web 3 is on the way!

2006-11-12T10:15:00.000-08:00

I'm just getting used to the idea of Web 2, and now they're saying that Web 3 is on the way.

Here's an article from today's (November 12th) New York Times on this subject.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/12web.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=th&adxnnlx=1163354721-HeT1NR/0qr6rH1aLVoyPMA

Reuters has set up a real news site on Second life

2006-10-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

Well, it's real in that a real reporter is doing the reporting. But it's virtual in that the reporter appears via his avatar.

This really does blur virtual and material reality. Check it out--and thanks to Michael Faris for posting this.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6054352.stm

An interesting and moving project I just learned about

2006-09-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

A friend just sent me the URL for a project called Common Ties. Here it is.http://www.commonties.com/
This is a project undertaken by a brother/sister team. They've gotten a small grant to travel around the northwest to collect people's stories--and they've set up a blog to document their travels and the stories they collect. If you've got time, you might explore the blog. I listened to several very interesting podcasts where ordinary people told stories about their lives.
Lisa

I'm posting (gasp) two days in a row! Check out Michael Faris's cool research blog

2006-09-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

Hi there,
I'm trying to be better about posting, so today I thought I'd post Michael Faris's cool research blog, a Collage of Citations. I'd really encourage you to take a look. It's a very rich resource.

Here 'tis:

http://oregonstate.edu/~farism/blog/

Be sure to scroll all the way down so you can see the various categories that Michael has on the right side of his blog.

A new school year, a new class blog

2006-09-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

Oregon State University is on quarters, and this is our first week of class. Once again I'm teaching Language, Technology, and Culture--and once again I'm having a class blog. I've got high hopes for it, though as I learned when I used a blog for a different class, each blog follows its own course.

If you're interested in reading a comparison of my fall and winter term class blogs, just scroll down.

Here's the URL for my current class blog. I've encouraged the students to come up with a better title than Lisa's ENG495-595 blog--hope they do.

http://blog.cmc.oregonstate.edu/mtblogs/eng495-595/

It's been so long that I posted to this blog that I almost forgot how!

2006-06-20T11:42:00.000-07:00

This has been a very intense end of the term and end of the school year for me. There seem to have been many more social events all clustered together. In fact, beginning on Sunday, June 11th I had at least one social/professional event every evening until yesterday! Since my husband and I are country mice who hardly ever go out, this was really unusual and intense. It probably explains why Greg came down with a terrible cold.

It had been long enough since my last post that when I pulled up my blog I couldn't remember how to post. I actually had to go to Blogger's FAQ and remind myself. Pretty pathetic, huh?

Spring term was good. I taught a graduate-student-only rhetoric and writing theory class with 16 students. They were a diverse group, which made for really interesting discussions. Only two students in the class are majoring in rhetoric and writing (in our MA program--we don't offer a Ph.D), so most were taking it to fulfill a pedagogy requirement they must meet as TA's. Many had no idea that the field even existed before they began their MA and started teaching writing. Some were excited about the class; others were intimidated--but they all worked hard to engage the material. And they wrote terrific seminar papers. Some have posted their essays on our class blog.

Here's the URL for our blog: http://blog.cmc.oregonstate.edu/mtblogs/wr512/

This is the second time I've had a class blog. The first blog was for my fall Language, Technology, and Culture class. (This was a mixed group of undergraduate and graduate students.) It's interesting to compare the differences between these two blogs. The fall term blog, The Presence of Others, really took off. By the time the class ended we had something like 300+ comments, many of which were voluntary. In contrast, the blog for this term, boringly titled WR 512 (the course number) just never developed momentum.

I think there are some reasons why this is the case. Perhaps most importantly, the fall term class was in the English department's computer classroom. We not only had a computer console where we could project things, but we also had laptops--so the students could post to the blog in class. We didn't have a large number of in-class postings since it takes time to get the laptops out, fire them up, etc. We had had some early on, and seeing people's posts pop up on the screen really stimulated interest.

This term, by contrast, I taught WR 512 in a regular classroom in English. I could sign out the department's smart cart and bring a computer to class--though I never did. And we had no access to computers for students at all, so all posting had to happen outside of class. Posting in our computer classroom last fall felt a lot like playing. It was really fun to see people responding to posts as they appeared. I suspect that posting in WR 512 felt more like work.

The other reason the WR 512 blog didn't take off has to do with the subject matter of the class. In the fall, I presented the blog as central to our course inquiry: we would use it to explore the intersections of language, technology, and culture in our very own classroom. Several students in the class know a lot more about online technologies than I do--I'm thinking particularly of Michael Faris and Chris Villemarette (watch for them down the road!), and they helped generate interest and posted some really interesting comments, as well as "show and tell" items.

If I were a more creative teacher, I could probably have found a way to tie our class blog to the content, but I didn't. So while a few students posted non-required comments, and we did get some threads going, the blog never developed momentum.

So what's the lesson here? I guess it's a reminder that online technology--like writing and communication in general--is situated. Blogging offers the potential to create lively alternate forums for a class, but whether it will do so depends on the particular rhetorical situation, which includes everything from material conditions (like the availability or non-availability of laptops) to the personality of students to the content of the course.

Check out the streaming video of the presentations at The New Research Summit

2006-06-03T16:11:00.000-07:00

Hi there,
The New Research Summit blog now has streaming video of all the presentations at the conference. Check it out at: http://newresearchsummit.blogspot.com/.

Some reflections on the New Research Summit held at the University of Oregon on Friday, May 12, 2006

2006-05-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

Hi there,
I'm importing something that I posted on The New Research Summit blog. Here 'tis.

And here's the URL for the New Research Summit blog: http://newresearchsummit.blogspot.com/

There are many interesting posts there, including a number by my Summit co-presenter Michael Faris. Check it out!

My post to the blog:
It's been a bit more than a week since the New Research Summit. I want especially to thank Suzanne Clark for organizing the Summit--with great help from Carter Soles, Raphael Raphael, and Kom Kunyosying. (Please forgive me if I've omitted anyone else who worked on the Summit.)

I found all the presentations at the conference stimulating. I'm very impressed with the UofO Library's Scholars Bank project, for instance. And I loved learning about the various curricular and pedagogical projects that grad students and faculty discussed.In this post, however, I want to reflect on Jim Crosswhite's and John Gage's comments at the conference. I'd also like to encourage Jim and John to post their comments here, so that those who didn't attend the conference can read them.

Jim researched, organized, and established the first computer classroom for the English department at OSU. His opening comments for the Summit were, in part, a reflection on all that's happened in online and computer literacies since then. Referring to Richard Lanham's new The Economics of Attention (thanks for the tip, Jim!), Jim characterized contemporary life as "a comedy of abundance" of information, especially online information. Jim went on to emphasize the importance of rhetoric as "the building of attention structures" and argued that attention is best understood as an intellectual virtue: "the power to give the proper attention to the proper things."

My notes on John Gage's talk aren't as complete as my notes on Jim's. (Chalk that up to afternoon conference fatigue.) As I remember it, John's talk was a strongly worded critique of contemporary online discourse, especially blogs. John argued that things get posted to blogs, for instance, but that these posts never develop as arguments. The information is out there, and no one responds. I'm not quite as clear on the next point. In my memory it connected with Jim emphasis on the "comedy of abundance" that writers and readers now face."

John also, wondered, I believe, whether we need a new rhetoric to address these new discursive positions. He seemed less certain than Jim that the rhetorical tradition as we understand it could "build attention structures" because he was unsure that, with online discourse, it's possible to organize one's attention.

(Jim and John, please jump in and correct, add, etc.)

I want to thank Jim and John for characterizing so carefully our contemporary online discursive moment. As someone who never expected to have a blog, and who now hosts a personal blog and several academic blogs, I know the sense of vertigo that these new online forms of communication and technologies can bring. Jim and John do an excellent job of characterizing this feeling.

I guess I am more optimistic than Jim and John, however, and for two reasons.First, the kind of intellectual and rhetorical vertigo that they describe is characteristic of the experiences of readers and writers who are caught up in major shifts in technologies of communication. One of the most well-known examples of this is Plato's fears in The Phaedrus that those who learn to write will have the reputation for wisdom without the reality.

But there are other examples. In the eighteenth century, for example, the French scholar Diderot, alarmed by the rapid increase in the number of printed books, feared that "the world of learning will drown in books." At roughly the same period, a "German treatise on public health warned that excessive reading induced a susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, asthma, apoplexy, and a host of other disorders. Fresh air, frequent walks, and washing one's face periodically in cold water were prescribed for solitary readers" (source: Gertrude Himmelfarb. "A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/1-96, p. A56.

When I was growing up, there were many dystopian warnings that television would ruin my generation. In 1956, for instance, educator Gerald Thorsen, in a statement strikingly reminiscent of Diderot's, complained that students at that time were "lost to a world of mass media: tv, radio, motion pictures, newspapers, and comic books." As a result, he said, "the cultural uses of language have been excluded. We have forgotten about books" (Source: Himmelfarb).

That's my generation that Thorsen is fretting about--and we seem to have remain attached to books, at least those of us in the academy.

I think what we're experiencing is real: for someone of my generation there can seem to be an overabundance of information, as well as new technological developments that arrive at a staggeringly fast rate. Ask younger folks, like my copresenter Michael Faris, and he'll tell you that his experience feels quite different from mine.

I'll be briefer about the second reason why I'm a bit more optimistic than Jim and John. This is because I believe that the rhetorical tradition is exactly what we and our students need as we negotiate the dizzying world of online discourse and technologies.

Whew, this is a long blog entry, so I'll close for now! Would anyone like to develop my second point about why rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition are just what online writers and readers can depend upon?

And, again, John and Jim, I hope you'll post your comments for all to read.

Poet Stanley Kunitz dies at 100

2006-05-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted. I attended a thought-provoking New Research Summit at the University of Oreogn last Friday (May 12th), and once I catch up I definitely want to share some ideas from the Summit. Thanks to the amazing Suzanne Clark for organizing and hosting the Summit!

For now, I simply want to note the passing of Stanley Kunitz, a poet whose work has meant a lot to me.

Here is a poem from his 2000 Collected Poems. I have always found it to be a very powerful reflection on death.

The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loosefrom its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

Correct URL for social bookmarking site

2006-04-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

In the previous post I mentioned that I'm interested in social bookmarking and tagging and mentioned a prominent site that does this. I got the spelling of the URL wrong, however, so I'm putting a correct link here. The site is: http://del.icio.us/

Check it out and let me know what you think. If you already understand how this site works, feel free to add a brief explanation as a comment. This appears to be a rapidly growing phenomenon.

What I've been up to since I last posted

2006-04-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

I'm embarrassed that it's been so long since I've posted on my blog. I posted with some regularlity during fall term, when I taught an advanced undergraduate/graduate student class on Language, Technology, and Culture. That class was a blast--in part because of our class blog: The Presence of Others http://blog.cmc.oregonstate.edu/mtblogs/lisa/

Last term I taught a large (65 student) Introduction to Fiction class, and my thoughts were elsewhere. This is a very challenging class to teach as roughly 1/3 of the students really want to be there, 1/3 are neutral and just completing a requirement, and 1/3 really, really don't want to be there. Many in this last group are seniors who dislike literature so much that they have put off taking the class until their last term or so.

I like the challenge of teaching such a diverse group of students, but doing so is very absorbing, especially because as a writing teacher at heart I require lots of writing in this class--daily informal writing and four formal writing assignments.

That kept me busy, as you can imagine.

This term I'm teaching a graduate-student-only course on Current Composition Theory, so I have a bit more time to post here. I've also got another incentive. I and a student, Michael Faris, are participating in an exciting New Research Summit at the University of Oregon.

Here's the URL for Michael's blog, A Collage of Citations: http://oregonstate.edu/~farism/blog/
This is a research blog Michael has maintained since he started the blog for our Language, Technology, and Culture class. Michael did a terrific job writing a seminar paper on research or k-blogs. (K stands for knowledge.)

And here is a link to the blogsite for the New Research Summit: http://newresearchsummit.blogspot.com/

As Suzanne Clark's post to the blog says, the purpose of the Summit is to investigate "What has changed about writing and research? [thanks to the development of new technologies]. What are the new problems? New opportunities?

Michael Faris and I are speaking at the Summit, and the Summit's blog has a link to my blog. So, hey, I thought I'd really better post some new content!

I need to prepare for class, but before I close I'd like to add that in recent months I've become increasingly interested in social bookmarking and tagging. I have been to sites like de.li.cius (hope I've got that right), but I'm still not quite sure how they work. I do know that they hold the potential to create what are sometimes termed "folksonomies" rather than "taxonomies"--but I'd sure like to know more.

End-of-term reflections on my Language, Technology, and Culture class

2005-12-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

It's the end of the term--second day of finals week--and I thought I'd just post a few reflections on my class on Language, Technology, and Culture. This really is primarily praise for the students, who made this an extraordinary experience for all of us.

Many of us felt that our class blog played a key role in the class. I thought I'd post the ULR for it one last time in case anyone wants to stop by.

Just FYI the students are posting their final seminar papers on the blog, probably beginning tomorrow or in the next few days. They are working on challenging and interesting topics, so be sure to check that feature of the blog out.

Here's the URL: http://blog.cmc.oregonstate.edu/mtblogs/lisa/

Exciting developments in my class on Language, Technology, and Culture

2005-11-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

Last week several exciting things happened in the class I'm teaching this term. For one thing, Paul Bausch, co-developer of Blogger, came to class and gave a truly wonderful presentation. He began by talking about how technologies circulate, and he had a wonderful example to support this. He showed a slide of a 13th century church with a clock in the church steeple: in the 13th century that was how most people told time. Then he showed a grandfather clock, developed in, I think, the 15th or 16th century. The grandfather clock allowed people to bring the community time piece into their homes. Then he showed a pocket watch, which brought the technology of time even more intimately into people's lives. Then he showed wrist watches--and he ended by pointing out that currently information about time is available so many places (microwaves, cell phones, computers) that many people no longer need to wear watches.

Fascinating! Paul Bausch's entire talk with riveting--I could tell that the students were deeply interested in what he had to say.

That same day Jenniver Winters from KVAL Eugene came to campus to interview me, film some of the class, and interview some of the students for a story they're doing on blogging. She's also interviewing Paul Bausch. As I joked with the students, this was our 15 seconds of fame.

We're about 2/3rds of the way through our course, and this is definitely a situation where I wish the class was a year long, rather than a term. The students have been great, I've learned a lot, and it's been fun. What more could a teacher ask for?!

In which I take another baby step

2005-10-30T16:07:00.000-08:00

I just checked my blog to see if there were any new comments--there weren't. But I spent a minute admiring my new blogroll and realized that when we imported the blogroll from my class blog into this one we included the link to The Writing Way. It makes no sense to do that since this is The Writing Way, so I knew that I should delete that hotlink on the blogroll.

At first I thought I'd ask Emily to do this--but then I thought "Wait a minute. You can do this if you try." So I went into the template and made what I thought was the right deletion. And you know what: it worked! So I have now done some blog administration in both my class blog and this one!

Small steps, but each one takes me a bit further.

Check out my new blog roll--thanks to Emily Nashiff

2005-10-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm learning a lot from the students in my class on Language, Technology, and Culture this term. For me as teacher, I know that if I'm not learning along with the students then I'm really not teaching, at least not in any authentic way.

But this term I've been learning in an additional way. Today, for instance, Emily Nashiff--a wonderful student in our class--showed me how to set up a blog roll for The Writing Way. Well, okay, so Emily set up the blog roll, cutting and pasting from our class' blog (The Presence of Others) and I watched.

But I did add a new blog link myself! For most of my students this would be a fairly insignificant step, but for me doing anything with HTML is daunting--even when I have a good teacher, like Emily, sitting next to me.

So thanks, Emily--and thanks also Michael Faris, who helped me learn how to do hotlinks in our class blog. I'm taking baby steps, but at least I'm trying.

Thoughts on the blog for the class I'm teaching this term

2005-10-18T18:24:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, thanks to the help of Jon Dorbolo and Mark Dinsmore, from my university's TAC (Technology Across the Curriculum) program, I've been able to set up a blog for the class I'm teaching this term, ENG 495/595 Language, Culture, and Technology.

It's been a fascinating experience, and in multiple ways. Since I've only required students to send two posts to the blog, it's been interesting to see what they choose to write voluntarily and what kind of comments they make. I definitely feel that the blog is adding another layer to class discussion.

Before I forget, our class blog is called The Presence of Others. This is meant to evoke Hannah Arend's comment in The Human Condition that "For excellence, the presence of others is always required."

Here's the URL for the blog: http://blog.cmc.oregonstate.edu/mtblogs/lisa/

I'll just add a few more thoughts here. The first is that I was originally very intimidated about the new blog since I'm now used to Blogger and the class blog is on Movable Type. But what was originally a limitation or problem turned out to be a strength since I have actually, with the help of Mark Dinsmore, Emily Nashiff, and Michael Faris (Emily and Michael are students in the class) learned a few things. I actually went into the blog and made some administrative changes. For most folks this would be inconsequential, but for me it was huge.

Our blog also has categories, which really make it easier to move around the blog.

On Thursday the students are going to do some in-class writing on their experience of the blog, which I expect will be mixed as some have been more and less involved. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they have to say.

A quick clarification since I've given two talks at the Humanities Center in the last few days

2005-10-04T19:28:00.000-07:00

Hi there,
I just posted the text of a talk that I gave at OSU's Humanities Center on Monday, October 3rd. This was a longish talk on the research I did while a resident at the Humanities Center last year. I was scheduled to give this talk last spring term, but an emergency appendectomy changed that.

But I also gave a talk at the Humanities Center the previous Friday. This was a much briefer talk that I shared with members of the College of Liberal Arts Advisory Committee. This is a stellar group of graduates from OSU's College of Liberal Arts--people who have gone on to be very successful in business, industry, and the professions--who provide guidance to and support for the college.

The talk was also on my Humanities-Center-sponsored research, but it was about 10 minutes rather than 40 minutes or so, as my talk yesterday was. I want to be sure it's clear that the talk I've posted is the longer version of the two talks.

If any of the Advisory Board members visit my site, let me say again how much I and other faculty members appreciate the good work you do for CLA and for the humanities in general. You're terrific folks, and I really enjoyed spending time with you.

Lisa

Here is a talk on online citizen book reviews I gave at OSU's Humanities Center yesterday

2005-10-04T18:01:00.000-07:00

Lisa Ede
Center for the Humanities
October 3, 2005

From the Monthly Review to Amazon.com Customer Reviewers:
Popular Culture, Technology, and the Circulation of Cultural Power

Who are Harriet Klausner, Henry Raddick, and Danny Yee? They are ordinary citizens who have achieved considerable cultural authority via unpaid online book reviews posted on Amazon.com and on personal web sites. Klausner, currently the top-ranked reviewer at Amazon.com (with over 9000 reviews), has been featured in articles in The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among others. Knopf publicity director Nicholas Latimer currently sends Ms. Klausner every fiction title his house publishes because he “likes her to weigh in” (Kaufman 2). Latimer does this despite the fact that Klausner’s sole claim to fame is her top-ranked reviewer status at Amazon.com. In her real, as opposed to her virtual, life, Klausner is a retired librarian who works as a paid columnist for two national magazines, Porthole Cruise Magazine and Affaire de Coeur. Klausner lacks the credentials typically required to publish reviews in such journals as The New York Times Book Review or The Atlantic Monthly. Yet her reviews are highly valued by those who visit Amazon.com and by many in the publishing industry.
Why should scholars in the humanities care about reviews written by ordinary individuals like Klausner, Raddick, and Yee? Perhaps the most obvious reason is this: online book reviews provide new opportunities for citizens who lack the cultural cachet of, say, a reviewer for The New Yorker or The New York Times to disseminate their ideas to a potentially broad audience. As such, they represent a powerful challenge to cultural hegemony. They also represent a potentially rich data set for scholars interested in popular culture; literacy; reception studies; the consumption of culture; rhetorical analysis; the history of authorship, publishing, and the book; and the sociology, psychology, and economics of taste and of consumer behavior.
Later in my talk I will look at online citizen book reviews in the context of the history of authorship, publishing, and the book; doing so highlights the significance of these reviews, which are the first major challenge to the traditional system of print reviewing since this system was developed in the 18th century.[1] I will also have more to say about potential lines of research on online citizen reviews in the humanities. For the moment, however, I want to situate online citizen reviews vis-à-vis such related phenomena as weblogs (or blogs), vlogs (or video blogs) and podcasts (do-it-yourself radio broadcasting), for all of these forms present direct and significant challenges to cultural hegemony.
Probably everyone in the audience today is aware of the extent to which weblogs (or blogs) have exploded on the communicative scene. In case you’re unfamiliar with blogs, however, I’ll quickly note that blogs are personal Web sites where writers can post whatever thoughts they want to share with whatever readers come their way. Posts on blogs are presented in reverse chronological order. Most blogs have functions that encourage responses to postings; most also enable bloggers to link to other sites.
Blogs would not exist if software developers like Corvallis’ own Paul Bausch had not seen the need for programs that would enable ordinary citizens to share their views on the web. Paul Bausch helped to develop Blogger, the first blogging program. This program enables people with no knowledge of HTML to set up web sites in a remarkably brief amount of time. I know because a year ago I used Blogger to set up my own blog, The Writing Way, in less than 5 minutes. To do so all I had to do was set up a blogger account, choose a title and template for my blog, and bingo: I had a blog. My blog is very simple. Here are two much more sophisticated blogs. The first is Paul Bausch’s blog, onfocus.com. The second is culturecat.net, a blog hosted by Clancy Ratliff, a Ph.D. student in the rhetoric department of the University of Minnesota.
As you may be aware, in the last several years, blogs, blogging, and bloggers have received a huge amount of attention in the popular media. In fact, blogs are proliferating so rapidly throughout the world that it is hard to track them. Technorati, an online site that describes itself as “the authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs” is trying very hard to do just that, however. As of this past September 20th, Technoratti, noted that its real-time search engine was watching 17.5 million blogs and tracking 1.5 billion links (“What’s happening on the Web right now”). Two years earlier, it notes in its “About Technorati” pages, it was watching only 100,000 weblogs.
From 100,000 blogs to 17.5 million blogs in two years: that’s quite a jump. But there are other key developments in online communication that are equally significant. In the last year or so, for instance, vlogs (video weblogs) have gained in popularity. Indeed, when well-known blogger Glenn Harlan Reynolds reported on the spring 2005 BlogNashville blogger conference, he predicted that “within a year or so we’ll see videobloggers beginning to compete with television news operations—especially local television news operations—in quite a few places.”[2]
And then there’s podcasting. Just as blog software allows anyone with minimal technical know how to produce and disseminate videos, so too does podcasting software, such as Ipodder, allow anyone to produce their own radio show. As is the case with blogs and vlogs, getting your ideas out and having listeners are two different things. Already, however, some podcasts have as many as 10,000 subscribers and San Francisco’s KYCY_AM recently became the first radio station to convert to an all podcast format under the new call letters KYOU Open Source Radio.[3]
I’ve digressed a bit from my specific topic of online citizen reviews. But I hope the logic of this digression is apparent: online citizen reviews are part of a much larger phenomenon, one that is making it possible for ordinary citizens to not only to “publish” their views but also to challenge the norms of high culture and the authority of conventional expertise.[4] For just as online citizen reviews represent a challenge to the conventional system of reviewing, so too do blogs, vlogs, and podcasts represent significant challenges to the traditional Big Media, who are (hardly coincidentally) rushing to incorporate and commodify them.[5]
Before we exclaim “O Brave New World” and formulate utopian and dystopian visions of the future—visions that exist aplenty in the world of digital communication—it might be good to spend a moment gaining some historical perspective. While I am clearly arguing that online citizen reviews and related forms of online communication such as blogs, vlogs, and podcasts represent new developments in contemporary communication and thus are significant and worthy of study, it is important to recognize that for centuries tensions between high and popular culture, between those who claim authority and expertise as artists and intellectuals and ordinary people, have existed—just as gossip, satire, and parody have existed. Think of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s disdain for the “scribbling women” writers of his time or of Matthew Arnold’s lament for the decline of art and taste in Culture and Anarchy.
Not surprisingly, ordinary readers have often responded to this disdain by declaring the concerns of reviewers and critics irrelevant and have happily read—and written—texts that they find interesting. Contemporary fan fiction is a good example of this willingness to ignore—and even get in the face of—high culture. If you want to get a sense of just how many people are writing fan fiction, take a look at fanfiction.com. When I checked this site last June 28th, I discovered that the site included not only spin-offs or parodies of the Harry Potter series—189,582 of them to be precise—but also of Homer, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, and the Bible. Though online citizen reviews differ in intent and nature from fan fiction, they participate in and continue this tradition of resistant reading and writing—if only by asserting that ordinary people are perfectly well qualified to summarize and evaluate the books that they read.
So how can we best understand and evaluate the nature and consequences of online citizen reviews and related forms of communication? Many who attempt to address this question are drawn to either utopian or dystopian narratives. In so doing, they are (often unconsciously) participating in a long tradition of extremist commentaries about the consequences of new communication technologies. Remember how suspicious Plato is of writing in The Phaedrus? In the 18th century, the French scholar Diderot was so alarmed by the rapid increase in the number of printed books that he feared that “the world of learning will drown in books”(Rudenstine A48).[6] Much more recently, in 1956—when some of us in this room were in or entering school—educator Gerald Thorsen complained that students at that time were lost “to a world of mass media: tv, radio, motion pictures, newspapers, and comic books.” As a result, he said, “the cultural uses of language have been excluded. We have forgotten about books” (Crowley 105).[7]
What is true of new technologies of communication is equally true of such online developments as citizen reviews, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, all of which depend on what is sometimes termed social media software. Some contemporary commentators agree with Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, that the texts generated through this software—Gillmor’s particular focus is on blogs—holds the utopian potential of overturning big media and bringing something resembling democracy to culture and communication.[8] Others fear that blogs, citizen reviews, and pod casts will weaken already threatened standards for knowledge, culture, and taste. They wonder, as well, if customer reviews on Amazon.com and other commercial Web sites represent not a laudable resistance to cultural hegemony but rather the ability of capitalism to coopt and commodify individual acts of self-expression and communication. (There’s a reason, after all, why Amazon.com calls its reviewers customer reviewers.) Those who hold this view are quick to point out the key role that customer reviews play in Amazon.com’s business model and the speed with which Big Media, business, and industry have attempted to capitalize on the blogging phenomenon by establishing their own blogs.
A few moments ago I indicated that online citizen reviews hold the potential to challenge cultural hegemony, and I’d like to take a moment to provide some historical context for this statement. To do so, I need to invoke the literary ferment that existed in Great Britain in the wake of the collapse of patronage. As Frank Donaghue notes in The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers, “literary production in [Great Britain in] the eighteenth century existed in a kind of limbo, between an age of substantial aristocratic support and the fully developed literary market of the nineteenth century” (1). As a result, during this period “authorship became increasingly defined in popular criticism. . .[so that] from 1750 onward, literary careers were chiefly described, and indeed made possible, by reviewers” who published their reviews in such periodicals as the Monthly Review (founded in 1749) and the Critical Review (founded in 1756).[9]
Since that time, this system of expert reviewing has spread throughout much of the West. In the United States, reviews published in such established venues as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, The Atlantic, and so on have played a key role in demarking the boundaries between high and popular culture. While many ordinary citizens demonstrate their indifference to these distinctions by choosing not to read these and similar publications, those who wish to be (or to appear to be) educated consult them regularly. And even if they don’t read these publications as often as they feel they should—even if they subscribe to The New Yorker as much for the cartoons as for its reviews and commentary—their sense of the different values accorded to “serious” literature versus such genres as romance, mystery, and fantasy novels reflects the power that reviews written by those credited with cultural authority have to shape and inform taste.
The mere fact that the publicity director of Knopf currently sends Harriet Klausner every fiction title his house publishes simply because she is the top reviewer at Amazon.com suggests that this balance of power may be shifting. It is certainly the case that with the rise of the Internet and of social media software ordinary citizens are asserting their right to produce, as well as to consume, content. A 2004 Pew/Internet study of “Content Creation Online” reported that, based on a national phone survey between March 12 and May 30, 2003, more than “53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files, and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online” (2). Many more persons have joined this group, of course, in the years since. A later report published in October, 2004 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that “Twenty-six percent of adult Internet users in the U.S. have rated a product, service, or person using an online rating system.” As examples of Internet sites that use online review, rating, reputation, or feedback systems the report cites Amazon.com, EBay.com, Epinions.com, Google.com, RateMyTeachers and RateMyProfs.com, and Imbd.com (or the Internet Movie Data Base).
As these examples suggest, just about anything can be—and probably is being—reviewed online. In my research and in my talk today, however, I am focusing primarily on online citizen book reviews. I do so because book reviews play a particularly powerful role in the academy, and in the transmission of literary and intellectual norms in the general culture. As such, book reviews make it particularly clear how much might be at stake when ordinary citizens claim the right to critique books—particularly when these citizens attract the attention of a diverse and substantial audience.
This is the moment, I think, when I should be sure that we’re all on the same page in terms of our understanding of just what online citizen book reviews are. Citizen reviews are reviews written by unpaid volunteers that are published on the Web. Reviews can be of any length, though you will probably not be surprised when I say that most online citizen reviews are briefer and less analytical than reviews featured in such venues as The New York Times Book Review. Perhaps the best known online citizen book review site is Amazon.com—but there are many, many others, including AllReaders.com (where citizen reviewers fill in a seven page form organized according to genre)[10], DearReader.com, BookReporter.Com, and Blether.com.
Many individuals also host personal book review web sites—some of which have garnered considerable public attention. When I was writing the proposal for my Humanities Center project, for instance, I typed the words “book review” into Google. The first five sites that Google presented included online sites for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Booklist, Bookwire—and a site titled “Danny Yee’s Book Reviews.” On his home page, Yee identifies himself as a Eurasian living in Sydney, Australia who supports his book-reviewing habit by working 20 hours a week as a computer systems manager for the Department of Anatomy and Histology at the University of Sydney. His personal Web site includes reviews for over 800 books. According to Yee’s humorously titled “Infrequently Asked Questions” web pages, in 2002 alone Yee’s site had “2.4 million page views by perhaps 900,000 people, [excluding, Yee assures readers] robots and other automated accesses as far as is possible.” Yee also maintains two mailing lists with 1500 subscribers who regularly read his reviews.
Yee is hardly the only ordinary citizen to host a personal book review Web site. There are literally hundreds, if not more, of these sites on the Web. Some sites, such as Steven Wu’s Book Reviews, Kristen Voskuil’s Book Reviews, and Steph’s Book Reviews are straightforward book review sites. Others, such as Bob Corbett’s Book Reviews, Virtual Marginalia, and the Brothers Judd are mixed sites that include reviews as well as other kinds of texts.
Given the phenomenal growth of blogs, it’s hardly surprising to learn that there are an increasing number of blogs that include citizen book reviews. Some of these blogs are a mix of reviews, personal updates, and pretty much anything the blogger wants to post. Examples include Moorishgirl.com, The Elegant Variation, and Bookslut. A particularly interesting blog is The Litblog Co-op. This is a cooperative of literary bloggers who come together four times a year to choose a book to review, which they review both on the co-op’s blog and on their own blogs. This is definitely an effort to influence opinion and sales, especially since the members of the co-op intend to “pick a book from obscurity, an overlooked literary gem” to review.
If you’re like me, you may be feeling a bit exhausted—if not stunned—by all this writing. Talk about self-sponsored acts of literacy: the Internet is full of them! But why do ordinary people choose to write and read reviews of books and other products on the Web or send their thoughts out into the blogosphere via personal blogs, vlogs, and podcasts? And what are the consequences of their decision to do so?
There are several ways to address the first question. One is to look at a report published in spring 2005 under the title “Trust `MEdia’: How Real People Are Finally Being Heard” and was characterized by its authors as being “The 1.0 Guide to the Blogosphere for Marketers & Company Stakeholders.” According to this report, “peoples’ trust has shifted from authority to figures to `average people like you.’ “In fact, 56% of Americans trust only the opinions of physicians and academicians more than they trust the opinions of people like themselves” (2).[11]
The trend documented in his survey may help to explain why so many people consult online reviews when they are deciding whether to read or purchase a book or some other product.[12] But why would so many people be willing to spend so much time writing unpaid citizen reviews—particularly when many others have already reviewed a work? (Several weeks ago I checked Amazon.com to see how many reviews of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—a title I chose at random—appear on that site. The number at that time was 1297.) A quick answer might call attention to the role that personal gratification and social approval play in this process. (Those who write fan fiction sometimes refer to this as “egoboo” or egoboost [Rheingold120].)[13] As you are probably already aware, “egoboo” is merely shorthand for a much more complex and situated phenomenon—one that sociologists and psychologists might find intriguing to study.
But given the enormity and intentional redundancy of the Web, how might scholars who wish to study online citizen book reviews—or online reviews of any kind—begin? Amazon.com strikes me as a particularly promising site to undertake such analysis. I don’t know how many of you have noticed how rich this site is—how hard it works to create a space where a community of like-minded citizens can flourish. I know that I didn’t until I began my study. Since I want to leave time for questions, my comments about Amazon.com will be brief, but I want to point out that it’s hard to overestimate the richness of this site for scholarly work. Since Amazon.com is always changing, it’s also important to acknowledge the potential frustrations and difficulties that scholarly study might entail.
The first thing to note about citizen reviews on Amazon.com is that they are part of Amazon’s evolving business plan. As James Marcus describes in Amazonia: Five Years at the the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut, when Amazon opened, Jeff Bezos hired credentialed writers and journalists to write reviews of books they sold.[14] As part of Bezos’ plan to, in his words, “monetize” customers’ “eyeballs,” Bezos eventually substituted customer reviews for expert reviews (130). Initially reviewers were required to be anonymous; Amazon now encourages what the site refers to as a “Real Name” policy. For some time now, Amazon has made it possible for readers to rank reviews, and it publishes the rank of every single reviewer on its site.[15] If you find a reviewer whose writing and “take” on books you like—Henry Raddick, perhaps, the British reviewer whose witty commentaries have earned him a fair amount of celebrity—Amazon.com makes it easy for you to find and read all his reviews. If that reviewer has also contributed “Listmania” lists or “So you’d like to….guides” to Amazon.com you can easily locate these as well. (In case you’ve not noticed, these lists and guides generally appear in the left and right hand sides of web pages on Amazon.)
The next time you go to Amazon.com, you might want to take some time to look around, if you haven’t already, and do so with an eye toward its community-building features. If you’ve visited Amazon recently, you’ve probably noticed that it’s collecting post-Katrina and post-Rita collections for the American Red Cross, just as it collected political contributions during the last presidential election. In February, 2005 Amazon announced a new award for innovative nonprofit organizations. As the announcement for the award states, Amazon customers can participate in the competition for the award by “vot[ing] with their pocketbooks” (“Amazon.com Announces New Award).[16] In these and other ways, Amazon endeavors to create a profoundly personalized yet also multi-layered, multi-purposed community that embeds its primary mission—selling products and making money—in a rich social context. Central to this community is the ability for customers to contribute content freely and directly to Amazon.com. (Have you noticed, in that regard, that as of about six months ago customers can not only write reviews but also post images on Amazon.com?)
I’ve really just begun to scratch the surface of the riches that exist on Amazon.com’s site.[17] And this is just one site on the Web—though admittedly a large and complex one—where online citizen reviews are posted. It is the major burden of my talk today to argue that online citizen review sites represent a powerful and thought-provoking opportunity for scholars in a variety of disciplines in the humanities. A significant advantage they offer to scholars is their dependence on written text: we’re talking serious data here.
As far as I have been able to ascertain, scholars have largely thus far failed to take advantage of the rich opportunity for scholarly work that online citizen reviews provide. After a year of study, I have been able to locate only two research projects on online citizen reviews. The first was undertaken—prepare to be surprised—by a group of physicists. These physicists were interested in the physical movement of complex systems and thought they might learn something about this movement by studying the sales histories and reception of various books, as recorded at Amazon. I don’t fully understand the complexities of their research, which was reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, but I can say a bit more about it during the question and answer period if anyone is interested.[18]
The second research project of which I am aware is grounded in the humanities. Mikhail Gronas, the scholar who has undertaken this project, is a Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth. Gronas is engaged in an ambitious effort—one that is still very much in progress—to develop a quantitative measure of literary taste of ordinary readers. To do so he is analyzing the number of stars assigned by readers to books on Amazon.com. He is also analyzing the personal commentary provided by readers who post reviews on this site. Gronas characterizes his research as an effort to develop “a palpable, probabilistic approach to literary criticism” (Dartmouth College Press Release)l
As you have undoubtedly already noted, the two projects I have just described are grounded in quantitative studies of the data on Amazon.com—though both studies do attend to qualitative or interpretative issues as well. In the time remaining, I’d like to suggest some ways that scholars whose primary methodology involves textual interpretation might engage the corpus of citizen reviews that exist on the Web. One line of research is, I hope, fairly obvious, for online citizen reviews should be of intrinsic interest to scholars in cultural and Internet studies. I can easily imagine a study of citizen reviewers that would follow in the tradition of Henry Jenkins Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, a thought-provoking account of the culture of television fan culture and fan fictions, or Rosa Eberly’s Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres.
Eberle is a scholar of rhetoric and communication. In her study she looked at letters to the editor generated by the publication of such controversial novels as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Easten Ellis’s American Psycho. Eberle’s work engages research on publics and public spheres—something I’ll talk more about in a few moments—but it is also grounded in the longstanding tradition of rhetorical analysis. Her methodology could easily be extended to online citizen book reviews. As I have read these reviews, I have been intrigued by the various and often innovative ways that those writing citizen reviews deploy ethos, pathos, and logos in their writing. As anyone who has perused the more than 2800 reviews of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry knows, those who contribute reviews to Amazon.com and other sites are also hardly wary of controversy. This is potentially significant since, according to Eberly, one difference between readers of Joyce’s work and of such later works as American Psycho is that significantly fewer contemporary readers chose to write letters to the editor about controversial works than in the past. This is most certainly not the case on Amazon.com.
Another potential area of research is reception studies, a field that ranges from Heidi Brayman Hackel’s research on the reading practices of early modern women readers to Janice Radway’s ethnographic research on female readers of romances. Online citizen book reviews represent an exciting opportunity for those interested in studying the reading practices and responses of ordinary citizens. Given the huge number and diverse nature of online citizen book reviews, the challenge for this kind of research will be to develop methodologies and data sets that allow scholars to approach and limit their research is realistic ways.
I mentioned earlier in my talk that online citizen reviews represent the first major challenge to the traditional system of print reviews since this system appeared in the 18th century. As such, these reviews—and the persons who write them—should be of interest to those studying the history and current development of the history of the book, authorship, and publishing. What does it mean that so many ordinary citizens are claiming the authority—and I hope you hear the “author” in authority—needed to publish their work on the Web? How are online citizen reviews influencing the marketplace of ideas? What new topoi—to echo an issue that Rosa Eberly discusses at some length in Citizen Critics—might scholars discover if we undertook extensive analyses of reviews posted on Amazon.com and other sites?
Those engaged with the work of Jurgen Habermas and related projects might also find that online citizen reviews provide a thought-provoking object of study. In his study of the formation of the development of “a polite and informed public in the early modern period,” Habermas makes special note of the role that “coffee-houses, private salons, newspapers, journals, book clubs” etc. played in this process (Bermingham 9). According to Ann Bermingham, co-editor of The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800, Habermas viewed literary reviews and institutionalized art criticism as “typical inventions of the day” (10). Online citizen reviews, and the sites that sponsor them, are similarly “typical inventions” of the 21st century. What kind of publics are being formed, for instance, among the community of readers who write, consult, and rank reviews at Amazon.com? And what can we learn about the consumption and production of culture by studying the reviews that appear at this site?
Online citizen reviews could also provide compelling data for those who, like Pierre Bourdieu, are interested in those activities and “systems of classification which structure perception of the social world and designate the objects of aesthetic enjoyment” (Bourdieu xiii-xiv). In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu attempts to inquire into the “economy of cultural goods” (1) via a materially grounded analysis of what he terms the “conditions of existence, habitus, and life-style” (170). [19]
There are other ways in which ongoing scholarly projects might intersect with and draw upon online citizen reviews. The issues raised by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life—where de Certau argues for a shift of scholarly attention from the producer and the product to the consumer—is one such site. But for now I hope that I have demonstrated that online citizen book reviews pose a rich resource for scholars in the humanities. Like blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, online citizen reviews are providing new opportunities for ordinary people to share their views with others. We may not always like what we read when we read, hear, or view what our neighbor—or someone halfway around the world—has to say. But the opportunity to do so is unprecedented. I hope that scholars in the humanities will take advantage of these new opportunities to listen to the world.

[1] I use the term “citizen book reviews” to distinguish reviews written by ordinary citizens from professionally written reviews. I also do so to acknowledge the important role that Rosa Eberly’s Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres played in my research and analysis.
[2] Currently I know of at least one television show that relies heavily on vlogs submitted by ordinary citizens. It is titled “Zed” and airs on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

[3] Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” is an example of a podcast that has gained a wide readership. Curry developed the first podcast software, which he then released into the open source community, which further refined it.

[4] Another obvious example of such a challenge is the Wickipedia, which advertises itself as “the free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” As of June 28, 2005, Wickipedia—which was started in 2001—had 612,301 active articles.
[5] Organizations like Our Media and Creative Commons are attempting to resist Big Media’s effort to discipline and commodify these grassroots efforts—but the extent to which they will be able to do so is open to debate.
[6] A t roughly the same period, “a German treatise on public health warned that excessive reading induced `a susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, asthma, apoplexy,’ and a host of other disorders, indluding ‘hypochondria and melancholy.’ Fresh air, frequent walks, and washing one’s face periodically in cole water were prescribed for solitary readers” (Rudenstine A48).

[7] For an extended discussion of a utopian narrative see Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet.
[8] I do not mean to suggest that Gillmor is naïve about the dangers that those he refers to as “citizen journalists” face (xvi). Moreover, Gillmor “walked the talk” of his book in two ways. He and his publisher limited copyright from the current term (the life of the author plus 75 years) to 14 years. They also published his book Web and made it available for free downloading.
[9] In The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb argue that just as literary culture was transformed during this period so too was there “a consumer revolution in eighteenth-century England” (1).
[10] Reviewers on AllReaders.com can earn some money for their reviews. This appears to be determined by how useful others rate their review. I couldn’t determine how much money one might possibly earn by reviewing.
[11] This report was sponsored by Edelman, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing firms, and Intelliseek, a company that specializes in “consumer-generated media.”
[12] It also jibes with common sense. People have always turned to friends, neighbors, and family when making important purchases. “How has your Chevy held up?,” they might ask. Or “Was that new Grishom mystery a good read? I’m been thinking of reading it myself.”

[13] Ranking reviews and reviewers is one obvious stimulus to “egoboo.” Recently, Amazon.com added another, spotlight reviews. Customer reviews on Amazon are usually posted in reverse chronological order, with the most recent reviews appearing first. But these are often preceded by what the site terms spotlight reviews, reviews that have been identified as exemplary in one or another way. (It is not clear how these reviews are selected.) Amazon.com now also includes badges that appear next to the name of highly ranked reviewers. Such badges include the following: # 1 reviewer, top 10 reviewer, top reviewer.
[14] At what Marcus refers to as “The Golden Age of Content at Amazon” (117) the company had a staff of twenty-fire editors. Marcus makes it clear that the shift from a paid editorial staff to customer reviewers was not the result of an effort to cut salary costs. Rather, it reflected Bezos’ understanding that , as Adrian Chan, an analyst for the marketing firm Gravity 7 observes, Amazon.com customer reviews “work by creating the mirror world of social value: reputations, desires, comparisons, and other kinds of associations reflected on the surface of social relations” (Chan)

[15] How many persons have written reviews for Amazon.com? Like many other trade secrets of the company, it is difficult to impossible to know. For one thing, multiple reviewers regularly share the same rank. (Amazon.com has not shared the method it employs to determine rankings.) On December 6, 2004 I spend several hours scrolling through Amazon.com’s rankings. On that day, the last ranking level that I found was the rank of 1,449,043. Thirteen reviewers shared this rank.

[16] According to the article that appeared online on February 15, 2004, “Beginning July 19, 2005, the 10 nonprofit finalist organizations will be profiled on the Amazon.com site, where customers and visitors will be able to make direct online contributions to their favorite organization or organizations. Donations will be accepted through September 30, 2005. The organization that receives the largest total contributions from Amazon customers will be awarded the 2005 Amazon.com Nonprofit Innovation Award, along with a matching grant from Amazon.com. The 2005 honoree will be announced in October 2005” (“Amazon.com Announces New Award”).

[17]In spring of 2005, for instance, Amazon joined with the Tribeca Film Festival (which is dedicated to the revitalization of lower Manhattan after 9-11-2001) announced the debut of the Tribeca Screening Room on Amazon.com. This enabled millions of Amazon.com customers to view and rate as many short films as they would like using the Amazon.com star rating system. The announcement stated that Amazon undertook this project because it “seeks to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company” (“Amazon.com and the Tribeca Film Festival”).
[18] These physicists became interested in this topic when one of their books made a sudden leap in sales rankings on Amazon.com. This raised the more general question of the ways in which various books achieve success. What they discovered is that “top sellers tend to reach their sales peak in one of two ways. . .[M]any get there because of. . .exogenous shocks: a major media announcement, a celebrity endorsement, a dignitary’s death.” In these cases, the instant rise in sales is followed by a fairly quick decline. Other books, such as Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, inch their way to the top over many months, helped by tiny “endogenous shocks,” such as a friend’s recommendation.
[19] Bourdieu observes that the habitus is “internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions” (170). The habitus is the reason why academics as a whole prefer high culture—with the occasional popular culture passion thrown in—and why waitresses and truck drivers generally do not.

A quick greeting to any ENG 495/595 students who stop by my blog

2005-09-27T14:58:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day of a new course that I'm teaching, ENG 495/595 Language, Culture, and Literacy. I'm very excited to be teaching this class. It feels risky--but risky in a good way--because while I have a good deal of scholarly (and also popular culture) knowledge about our topic, I am the complete opposite of a technerd. Thanks to Blogger, I was able to set up this blog easily, but I very easily get intimidated and frustrated when I try to do anything more techy.

At any rate, I gave my students the URL for The Writing Way and encouraged them--you!--to stop by. So I thought I'd post a special greeting in case that happens. So hi there, and welcome!

I also thought I'd write a few comments about the experience of writing for my blog. Keeping a blog has been a very interesting experience for me. Writing my first post to my blog was one of the most difficult and challenging writing tasks I've ever faced. As an academic, I'm used to writing with specific audiences/venues in mind. I had no idea who might find their way to my blog, so I didn't know how to address/invoke my audience.

Someday I hope to do a rhetorical analysis of my posts to this blog. I can see that I developed certain strategies over time. Sometimes when I write about research projects, for instance, I make a little fun of academic jargon--even as I keep it in the body of a conference talk that I might be posting.

I must say that I've been very moved by the generosity exhibited in people's responses. My mother died suddenly last January, and I didn't post to my blog for almost a month. When I returned, I wrote a very brief post on why I'd been away--and I was very moved by the comments I got. Some comments were from people I know, but many were from folks completely unknown to me. I'll never know how they found my blog or why they read my post--or why they took the time to respond so generously and thoughtfully.

On a less serious note, last February when my husband was away--he's usually the one who takes out dog out in the morning--our dog Bachelor was sprayed by a skunk. Since Greg wasn't there, I couldn't say that YOUR dog has been sprayed by a skunk and leave the mess to him, so I had to deal with it. To alleviate some of the awfulness of the situation, I wrote several semi-humorous posts to my blog. I haven't counted, but I think these got more comments than possibly any other posts. I even got a comment from an elderly woman in Corvallis who I often see downtown trying to trap feral cats. (Look for her by the main library late in the day.)

Hmmm. I just realize that I have somewhat lost my train of thought. But this is a post to my personal blog, right? So I don't have to place myself under the same kind of constraints I hold myself to for academic writing.

Again, thanks for stopping by! And if you have a blog, please do send me the URL and as soon as I can I'll take a look.

Lisa

A new course I'm teaching on Language, Technology, and Culture

2005-09-18T10:50:00.000-07:00

Hi there,
Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. It's been a busy summer. I thought I'd write now to let interested readers--are you out there?--know that I'm teaching a new course this coming fall term. It's called Language, Culture, and Technology, and I'm quite excited about it. There are three texts for the course:

Manguel's A History of Reading

Selfe's Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention

Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning.

We're going to be experimenting with a class blog for this class; in fact, with the help of colleagues at OSU I'll be creating a blog especially for the class.

If anyone out there would like to know more, let me know.

Lisa

My conversation with Paul Bausch

2005-08-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

Hi there,
Yesterday (August 16th) I had lunch with Paul Bausch. Paul is one of the original co-developers of Blogger and has a number of very cool projects underway. He's published one O'Reilly Hacks books and just finished another. Paul has a cool site (www.onfocus.com) and also has a wonderful public service project, ORBlogs. ORBlogs is a directory of blogs published in Oregon.

I learned about Paul by accident last year, when someone at Powell's asked me to be on a panel about blogs with him. This surprised and amused me since especially at that time I knew next to nothing about blogs--and am still very much a neophyte. (It turns out that the person who asked me knew that I had reviewed Laura Gurak et al's Into the Blogosphere and assumed that I knew more than I did.)

At any rate, this serendipitous accident had the great benefit of letting me know that Paul lives in Corvallis. Last summer and throughout the year, Paul has been extremely generous in sharing his time and responding to my (often naive and uninformed) questions. I will always be grateful for his patience and for his support.

Yesterday Paul took the time to respond to one of the questions that I asked in my ISHR paper (previously posted on this site). The question was this: What motivates someone to write the 1283rd review of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.

I thought that Paul's response was both thoughtful and thought-provoking, so I was pleased when he posted it on his blog. To read Paul's response to my question, go to:

http://www.onfocus.com/2005/08/3725

You'll really enjoy reading Paul's thoughtful analysis.

Apologies for not posting--and my ISHR talk

2005-07-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

It's now been two months since I've last written anything here. Sorry about that! My husband and I were on vacation visiting a friend in California. Once we got back there were all sorts of things to do. Then I went to a long-ish conference in Los Angeles. And then my father had a health crisis that was worrisome and absorbing.

The upshot of all this is that I've not been engaged with my blog, and I regret that. I was especially pleased to see that Clanchy Ratcliff responded to my most recent post. Thanks, Clanchy!

In case anyone's interested, I thought I'd paste in the talk I gave at the conference in LA. The conference was the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. My panel--other presenters were Anita Helle and Laura Gurak (who ended up not making it)--was the only panel on digital literacy at the conference.

So here's the talk....

Lisa Ede
ISHR Conference 2005
July 16, 2005
Los Angeles, CA

Online Citizen Book Reviews and the Circulation of Cultural Power

Perhaps the most efficient way into my talk today is for me to contextualize my project—which focuses on online citizen book reviewers (reviewers who contribute unpaid reviews to such sites as Amazon.com)—vis-à-vis three points of entry. The first point of entry is through cultural studies, which by now has a well-established tradition of studying popular culture. In this regard, you might think of my research on online citizen reviewers as following in the tradition of Henry Jenkins Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participating Culture, a thought-provoking account of television fan culture and of fan fiction.
Another point of entry, one admirably demonstrated by Laura Gurak’s talk today, is via internet studies. This growing interdisciplinary field is at the cutting edge of efforts to consider the social, cultural, political, and economic consequences of developing online technologies. Laura and her colleagues’ inquiry into the blogosphere demonstrates the valuable insights that can be gained when scholars use their understanding not only of technology but also of human communication and of culture to better understand such emerging forms as blogs, vlogs, and podcasts.
It will not surprise anyone attending this conference when I say that my third, and most important, point of entry is via the rhetorical tradition and rhetorical theory. (Indeed, my use of the term “citizen reviewers” is modeled after Rosa Eberly’s use of the term “citizen critics” in her study Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres.) One of the hallmarks of a rhetorical approach to communication is focus on the situatedness of all discourse. I quickly realized that in the case of online citizen reviews this situatedness includes not only contemporary practices but also past traditions and experiences. One of the most cogent facts about online citizen reviews, for instance, is the challenge that they represent to the traditional system of print reviewing—a system that was developed with remarkable speed with the collapse of the patronage system in 18th century Great Britain.
I will have more to say about the relationship between online citizen book reviews and the system of print reviewing later in my talk. For now, though, I want to articulate the primary goals of my presentation today. These are, first of all, to describe online citizen reviews and to situate them (however briefly) in the context of such related online forms as blogs, vlogs, and podcasts. My second goal is to delineate some of the opportunities for research that online citizen book reviews represent. Rhetoricians should care about online citizen reviews, I argue, because these reviews provide new opportunities for citizens who lack the cultural cachet of, say, a reviewer for The New Yorker or The New York Times to disseminate their ideas to a potentially broad audience. As such, they represent a powerful challenge to cultural hegemony. They also represent a potentially rich data set for scholars interested in rhetorical analysis; popular culture; literacy; reception studies; the consumption of culture; the history of authorship, publishing, and the book; and the sociology, psychology, and economics of taste and of consumer behavior.
So what are online citizen book reviews? Online citizen book reviews are reviews written by unpaid volunteers that are published on the Web. Perhaps the best known online citizen book review site is Amazon.com—but there are many, many others, including AllReaders.com[1], DearReader.com, BookReporter.Com, Complete-review.com, and Blether.com. Online citizen book reviews also appear on many personal web sites and, increasingly, on blogs.
Given my time limits today, I can’t spend the time I would like describing these various sites. I do have a handout, however, that includes a number of major sites you can explore. For now, I would simply like to point out that a small but, I would argue, significant number of ordinary individuals have gained considerable cultural authority via unpaid online book reviews. Some of you may recognize the name of Harriet Klausner, currently the top-ranked reviewer at Amazon.com. Klausner, who has posted more than 9000 reviews at Amazon, has been featured in articles in The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among others. Knopf publicity director Nicholas Latimer currently sends Ms. Klausner every fiction title his house publishes because he “likes her to weigh in” (Kaufman 2). Latimer does this despite the fact that Klausner’s sole claim to fame is her top-ranked reviewer status at Amazon.com.
It’s no accident that Klausner’s reviews, and those of other citizen reviewers, are appearing online, for they are participating in changes in communication technologies, forms, and practices that I am tempted to characterize as revolutionary. Consider the rise of weblogs or blogs. As of June 10, 2005 Technorati, an online site that describes itself as “the authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs,” noted that its real-time search engine was watching 11,154,000 blogs and tracking 1,198,696,864 links (“What’s happening on the Web right now”). Two years earlier, it notes in its “About Technorati” pages, it was watching only 100,000 weblogs.
From 100,000 blogs to 11,154,000 blogs in two years: that’s quite a jump. But there are other developments in online communication that are equally significant. In the last year or so, for instance, vlogs (video weblogs) have gained in popularity. Indeed, when the well-known blogger Glenn Harlan Reynolds reported on the spring 2005 BlogNashville blogger conference, he predicted that “within a year or so we’ll see videobloggers beginning to compete with television news operations—especially local television news operations—in quite a few places.”[2] And then there’s podcasting. In a nutshell, podcasting software—developed only within the last year—enables ordinary individuals to, in effect, host their own radio shows. As is the case with blogs and vlogs, getting your ideas out and having readers, viewers, and listeners are two different things. Already, however, some podcasts have as many as 10,000 subscribers.[3] Just last spring, San Francisco’s KYCY-AM became the first radio station to convert to an all-podcast format (Evangelista)
I’ve digressed a bit from my specific topic of online citizen book reviews, but I hope the logic of this digression is apparent: online citizen reviews are part of a much larger phenomenon, one that is making it possible for ordinary citizens to not only share their views with anyone who has a computer but also to challenge the norms of high culture and the authority of conventional expertise.[4] For just as online citizen reviews represent a challenge to the conventional system of reviewing, so too do blogs, vlogs, and podcasts represent significant challenges to the traditional Big Media, who are (hardly coincidentally) rushing to incorporate and commodify them.[5]
Before we exclaim “O Brave New World” and formulate utopian and dystopian visions of the future, it might be good to spend a moment gaining some historical perspective. While I am clearly arguing that online citizen book reviews represent a new development in contemporary communication and thus are significant and worthy of study, it is important to recognize that for centuries tensions between high and popular culture, between those who claim authority and expertise as artists and intellectuals and ordinary people, have existed—just as gossip, satire, and parody have existed. Think of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s disdain for the “scribbling women” writers of his time or of Matthew Arnold’s lament for the decline of art and taste in Culture and Anarchy.
Not surprisingly, ordinary readers have often responded to this disdain by declaring the concerns of reviewers and critics irrelevant and have happily read—and written—texts that they find interesting. Consider, in this regard, the world of online fanfiction. If you’ve never explored this world, you might be surprised by what you find there. When I visited Fanfiction.com a few weeks ago, I discovered that there are 189,582 parodies or spin-offs of the Harry Potter series on this site. Though online citizen book reviews differ in intent and nature from fan fiction, they participate in and continue this tradition of resistant reading and writing—if only by asserting that ordinary people are perfectly well qualified to summarize and evaluate the books that they read.
So how can we best understand and evaluate the nature and consequences of online citizen reviews and related forms of communication? As I noted earlier, many who attempt to address this question are drawn to either utopian or dystopian narratives. (Remember how suspicious of writing Plato is in The Phaedrus?) Some of those who study the new media agree with Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, that the texts that appear on blogs, citizen book review sites, and other new forms of online communication hold the utopian potential of overturning big media and bringing something resembling democracy to culture and communication.[6] Others fear that citizen book reviews, blogs, and pod casts threaten to weaken already challenged or limited standards for knowledge, culture, and taste. They wonder, as well, if customer reviews on Amazon.com and other commercial Web sites represent not a laudable resistance to cultural hegemony but rather the ability of capitalism to coopt and commodify individual acts of self-expression and communication. Those who hold this view are quick to point out the key role that customer reviews play in Amazon.com’s business model and the speed with which Big Media, business, and industry have attempted to capitalize on the blogging phenomenon by establishing their own blogs.
A few moments ago I indicated that online citizen reviews hold the potential to challenge cultural hegemony, and I’d like to take a moment to provide some historical context for this statement. To do so, I need to invoke the literary ferment that existed in Great Britain in the wake of the collapse of patronage. As Frank Donaghue notes in The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers, “literary production in [Great Britain in] the eighteenth century existed in a kind of limbo, between an age of substantial aristocratic support and the fully developed literary market of the nineteenth century” (1). As a result, during this period “authorship became increasingly defined in popular criticism. . .[so that] from 1750 onward, literary careers were chiefly described, and indeed made possible, by reviewers” who published their reviews in such periodicals as the Monthly Review (founded in 1749) and the Critical Review (founded in 1756).[7]
Since that time, this system of expert reviewing has spread throughout much of the West. In the United States, reviews published in such established venues as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, The Atlantic, and so on have played a key role in demarking the boundaries between high and popular culture. While many ordinary citizens demonstrate their indifference to these distinctions by choosing not to read these and similar publications, reviews written by those credited with cultural authority have traditionally had a great deal of power to shape and inform educated or elite taste.
The mere fact that the publicity director of Knopf currently sends Harriet Klausner every fiction title his house publishes simply because she is the top reviewer at Amazon.com suggests that this balance of power may be shifting. It is certainly the case that with the rise of the internet and of social media software ordinary citizens are with increasing frequency asserting their right to produce, as well as to consume, content.[8] The texts that these citizens produce ought to be, I would argue, of great interest to rhetoricians.
One particularly rich site for analysis is Amazon.com, for Amazon provides multiple opportunities for ordinary citizens to post content—from reviews of book and other products to lists, guides, and images—on its site.[9] The first thing to note about citizen reviews on Amazon.com is, as I indicated earlier, that they are part of Amazon’s evolving business plan. As James Marcus describes in Amazonia: Five Years at the the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut, when Amazon opened, Jeff Bezos hired credentialed writers and journalists to write reviews of books they sold.[10] As part of Bezos’ plan to, in his words, “monetize” customers’ “eyeballs,” Amazon eventually substituted customer reviews for expert reviews (130). For some time now, Amazon has made it possible for readers to rank reviews, and it publishes the ranking of every single reviewer on its site.[11] If you find a reviewer whose writing and “take” on books you like—Henry Raddick, perhaps, the British reviewer whose witty commentaries have earned him a fair amount of celebrity—Amazon.com makes it easy for you to find and read all his reviews. If that reviewer has also contributed “Listmania” lists or “So you’d like to….guides” to Amazon.com you can easily locate these as well. (In case you’ve not noticed, these lists and guides generally appear in the left and right hand sides of web pages on Amazon.)
In these and other ways—including such ventures as developing a new award for innovative non-profit foundations and encouraging Amazon’s customers to participate in the competition for the award by “vot[ing] with their pocketbooks”)—Amazon.com endeavors to create a profoundly personalized yet also multi-layered, multi-purposed community, one that embeds its primary mission of selling products and making money in a rich social context. Central to this community is the ability for customers to contribute content freely and directly to Amazon.com.
How can one best understand the role that customer reviews play on a site like Amazon.com? What motivates ordinary people to post reviews on this site, especially when a book has already been reviewed many times? (Last week I checked Amazon to see how many reviews of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—a title I chose at random—appear on that site. The current number is 1281.) What might analysis of these reviews teach scholars about the rhetorical practices of ordinary readers and writers?
As I hope this final question suggests, I believe that rhetorically grounded scholars might find much of value if we studied sites like Amazon.com in particular, and online citizen book reviews in general. Citizen book reviews represent not only a rich data set but also a largely unexplored one. After a year of researching this topic, I have discovered only two studies of online citizen book reviews. The first study was undertaken by a group of physicists, who used the customer review data available on Amazon.com to study the physical movement of complex systems.[12] The second study, this time undertaken by a Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth, relies primarily upon quantitative analysis of Amazon.com customer reviews. Its goal is to develop a quantitative measure of the literary taste of ordinary readers.[13]
As you have undoubtedly already noted, the two projects I have just described are grounded in quantitative studies of citizen book reviews on Amazon.com. In the time remaining, I’d like to suggest some ways that scholars whose primary methodology involves rhetorical and textual interpretation might engage the corpus of citizen reviews that exist on the Web. Perhaps the most obvious line of research involves rhetorical analysis. As I have read online citizen book reviews, I have been intrigued by the various and often innovative ways that those writing these reviews deploy ethos, pathos, and logos in their writing.[14] When such research is inflected through the theoretical lens of such scholars as Foucault and Habermas, the resulting analysis is particularly rich and thought-provoking, as Rosa Eberly’s study of citizen critics admirably demonstrates.[15]
I mentioned earlier in my talk that online citizen reviews represent the first major challenge to the traditional system of print reviews since this system appeared in the 18th century. As such, online citizen reviews—and the persons who write them—should be of interest to scholars who are endeavoring to expand the rhetorical canon and to explore changing conditions of authorship and of writing. The traditional rhetorical canon largely studies public documents. Efforts by such scholars as Cheryl Glenn and Susan Jarratt have challenged this norm—but as Glenn’s most recent study, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, suggests, many rhetorical assumptions and practices have yet to be exposed and examined. What might studies of online citizen book reviews tell us about the writing and reading practices of ordinary citizens? What motivates someone to submit the 1282nd review of The Poisonwood Bible to Amazon.com? What kind of conversation do a series of linked online book reviews represent? What kind of a public is created on a site like Amazon.com? To what extent to traditional rhetorical assumptions and strategies apply in such a site? What new assumptions and strategies might online citizen reviewers be developing?
I do not have answers to any of these questions. I hope that I have helped you to see, however, that questions such as these merit scholarly attention. I hope as well that I have demonstrated that online citizen book reviews pose a rich resource for scholars in rhetoric and writing. Like blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, online citizen reviews are providing new opportunities for ordinary people to share their views with others. We may not always like what we see when we read, hear, or view what our neighbor—or someone halfway around the world—has to say. But the opportunity to do so is unprecedented. I hope that scholars in our field will take advantage of these new opportunities to listen to the world.

[1] Reviewers on AllReaders.com fill in a seven-page form organized according to genre. Reviewers who contribute to this site can earn some money for their reviews. This appears to be determined by how useful others rate their review. I couldn’t determine how much money one might possibly earn by reviewing.
[2] Currently I know of at least one television show that relies heavily on vlogs submitted by ordinary citizens. It is titled “Zed” and airs on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

[3] Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” is an example of a podcast that has gained a wide listership.

[4] Another obvious example of such a challenge is the Wickipedia, which advertises itself as “the free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” As of June 28, 2005, Wickipedia—which was started in 2001—had 612,301 active articles.
[5] Organizations like Our Media and Creative Commons are attempting to resist Big Media’s effort to discipline and commodify these grassroots efforts—but the extent to which they will be able to do so is open to debate.
[6] I do not mean to suggest that Gillmor is naïve about the dangers that those he refers to as “citizen journalists” face (xvi). Moreover, Gillmor “walked the talk” of his book in two ways. He and his publisher limited copyright from the current term (the life of the author plus 75 years) to 14 years. They also published his book Web and made it available for free downloading.
[7] In The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb argue that just as literary culture was transformed during this period so too was there “a consumer revolution in eighteenth-century England” (1).
[8]A 2004 Pew/Internet study of “Content Creation Online” reported that, based on a national phone survey between March 12 and May 30, 2003, more than “53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files, and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online” (2). Many more persons have joined this group, of course, in the years since. A later report published in October, 2004 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that “Twenty-six percent of adult internet users in the U.S. have rated a product, service, or person using an online rating system.” As examples of Internet sites that use online review, rating, reputation, or feedback systems the report cites Amazon.com, EBay.com, Epinions.com, Google.com, RateMyTeachers and RateMyProfs.com, and Imbd.com (or the Internet Movie Data Base).

[9] I would be remiss if I didn’t add that, like most online sites, Amazon also offers a number of challenges for scholars. Since Amazon.com is always changing, it’s also hard to overestimate the potential frustrations and difficulties that scholarly study might entail. How would you like to try to study a data set that is, thanks to collaborative filtering software (which, by the way, represents yet another challenge to the traditional system of reviewing), personalized only for you—so that what you see on the site is not what your colleague in the office next door sees? Add to this the fact that Amazon.com is constantly adding new features to and removing old features from the site, and you’ve got a scholar’s nightmare as well as dream.

[10] At what Marcus refers to as “The Golden Age of Content at Amazon” (117) the company had a staff of twenty-fire editors. Marcus makes it clear that the shift from a paid editorial staff to customer reviewers was not the result of an effort to cut salary costs. Rather, it reflected Bezos’ understanding that , as Adrian Chan, an analyst for the marketing firm Gravity 7 observes, Amazon.com customer reviews “work by creating the mirror world of social value: reputations, desires, comparisons, and other kinds of associations reflected on the surface of social relations” (Chan)

[11] How many persons have written reviews for Amazon.com? Like many other trade secrets of the company, it is difficult to impossible to know. For one thing, multiple reviewers regularly share the same rank. (Amazon.com has not shared the method it employs to determine rankings.) On December 6, 2004 I spend several hours scrolling through Amazon.com’s rankings. On that day, the last ranking level that I found was the rank of 1,449,043. Thirteen reviewers shared this rank.

[12] These physicists became interested in this topic when one of their books made a sudden leap in sales rankings on Amazon.com. This raised the more general question of the ways in which various books achieve success. What they discovered is that “top sellers tend to reach their sales peak in one of two ways. . .[M]any get there because of. . .exogenous shocks: a major media announcement, a celebrity endorsement, a dignitary’s death.” In these cases, the instant rise in sales is followed by a fairly quick decline. Other books, such as Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, inch their way to the top over many months, helped by tiny “endogenous shocks,” such as a friend’s recommendation. Their analysis was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

[13]Professor Mikhail Gronas, the scholar undertaking this project, is using a complex mathematical formula to analyze the number of stars assigned by readers to books on Amazon.com. He is also analyzing the personal commentary provided by readers who post reviews on this site. It is not clear, however, what role this analysis will play in his research, which is still in progress and has not yet been published. Gronas characterizes his research as an effort to develop “a palpable, probabilistic approach to literary Criticism” (Dartmouth College Press Release).
[14] Also of interest are the related texts, such as FAQs, that appear on personal book review web sites.

[15] As part of his study of the development of the public in the early modern period, Habermas makes special note of the role that coffee houses, salons, newspapers, etc. played in this process. According to Ann Bermingham, co-editor of The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800, Habermas reviewed literary reviews and institutionalized art criticism as “typical inventions of the day” (10). Online citizen reviews, and the sites that sponsor them, are similarly “typical inventions” of the 21st century. What kind of publics are being formed, for instance, among the community of readers who write, consult, and rank reviews at Amazon.com? Online citizen book reviews are also relevant to the work of Bourdieu, whose Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste attempts to inquire into the “economy of cultural goods” (1). It is relevant as well to de Certau’s argument in The Practice of Everyday Life that scholars should shift their attention from the producer and the product to the consumer.

Lisa's excellent adventure--or, why I've been away from my blog

2005-05-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

Hi there,
It's been a while since I've written in my blog. First I was getting caught up from my trip to Ohio to visit my father. I came back with a bad cold that knocked me out; fortunately, I didn't give it to dad, which is the important thing.

But my excellent adventure was something else: an emergency appendectomy that took place just two weeks ago. I am now an expert on appendicitis symptoms, so I'm going to mention them quickly here. I want to do so because it's REALLY important to have surgery for appendicitis before your appendix bursts or ruptures. If you catch it in time, all you're in for is laproscopic surgery which takes a week or two to recover from. If you don't, and your appendix bursts, you could be in for two to three weeks in the hospital (and lots of pain and antibiotics).

I was really, really lucky; my appendicitis was caught it time.

I've now learned more about appendicitis and know that my symptoms were quite typical. They began with pain in my lower abdomin--central to left. I had a very slight fever, but that was it. Eventually, the pain shifted to the right side of my body, to a place called McIerney's point, which is where most people with appendicitis feel pain. Then I developed a higher fever, started throwing up, etc.

It wasn't fun, but I was grateful for the excellent care I got at Corvallis's Good Samaritan Hospital. Friends, especially Hope, were also wonderfully generous and supportive. This weekend I went swimming for the first time since the surgery, and I also took my longest walk yet, so I think I can declare myself fully recovered.

Remember: if you experience any symptoms that could be appendicitis, get yourself to your doctor, immediate care clinic, or emergency room.

Report from the BlogNashville Blogger conference

2005-05-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

No, I didn't attend. Wish I could have. I was actually home in Ohio visiting with my father, who is now in a nursing home. If you want a portrait of sweetness, patience, and courage that's my dad. I was really glad that I could see and be with him.

Since returning to Corvallis and Oregon State University, I've read some articles on the conference. I thought I'd share one here. This is by Glenn Harlan Reynolds and is titled "Are Blogs Busting Loose?"

Are Blogs Busting Loose?
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Published
05/09/2005
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Last weekend I attended the BlogNashville blogger conference, held at Belmont University in Nashville. It was the third conference of that sort I had attended, and it underscored the way blogs, and blogging, are changing.
In 2002, I went to Yale's Revenge of the Blog conference. In 2003, I attended Harvard's Bloggercon I. The atmosphere at this one was different.

At those earlier conferences, everyone was still focused on the newness of blogs, and on the amateur spirit, and political emphasis, that marked blogging at that point. Now blogs aren't quite as new, and though there's still plenty of politics and amateurism, people are now talking about making money.

In fact, the two recurring themes of this latest conference were making money, and video.

Making money is now not impossible. Some bloggers are doing fairly well; many others are at least making enough to turn blogging from a time-sink into a lucrative hobby. Much of that is thanks to Henry Copeland's BlogAds, which has brought paying advertisers like Audi and Levi's to the blogosphere, though donations (a major source of income for bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall) and referral fees from online merchants like Amazon have also played a part. And there are other ventures in the works that may increase both the amount of money, and the amount of attention, available to the blogosphere.

Combining two themes in one photo: A videoblogger records a session in which Henry Copeland of Blogads talks about making money.

At the local level, there's a lot happening too. Check out this site, a web-based newspaper, community forum, and classified advertising site that also hosts TV commercials for an idea of what the future might hold. With a bit of tweaking, this could be a local-paper killer.

On the blogging side, at least, you can make too much of this: During a panel on blogs and journalism, J.D. Lasica turned to me and asked if I were planning to quit my dayjob for blogging. "No," was my rather emphatic answer. But things have reached the point at which it's now possible to earn as much by blogging as one can earn in many entry-level journalism jobs, and it makes an excellent marketing tool for free-lance writers as well.

The feel has certainly changed. A couple of years ago, many people seemed vaguely embarrassed at the idea of making money from their blogs. There was much, much less of that this time around.

The other new emphasis was video. There are a lot of videobloggers now, and this conference featured a lot more video being shown, and taken. There was a crew of documentary filmmakers making a movie on blogging, but they were outnumbered several-to-one by amateurs capturing video for live streams or for posting. Many, many bloggers are incorporating video interviews and reporting into their work, and I think that within a year or so we'll see videobloggers beginning to compete with television news operations -- especially local television news operations -- in quite a few places.

I've pointed that out before, but we definitely seem to be at a tipping point. To illustrate how close we are, I did some interviews of my own, using the video function of my Sony digital still camera.
(640x480, 30 fps). It's not television-news quality, but it was done on the fly with a camera that cost $300 and fits easily in a pocket.
Tools like this are the future. If I ran a newspaper, I'd give one to each of my reporters, and encourage them -- in the most meaningful way possible, with bonuses -- to conduct video interviews and reports that could run on the paper's website, the better to fend off the kind of challengers I link above.

For a look at the conference participants, and their attitudes about what's going on with blogging, as well as a look at the kind of video interview I'm talking about, follow the links below. I've been saying for a while that blogs have a multimedia future, and I think that future is almost here.

WMV, medium-sized:

instapundit.com/vids/blognashvillemed.wmv

WMV, dialup:

http://instapundit.com/vids/blognashvillesm2.wmv

QT, medium-sized:

http://instapundit.com/vids/blognash.mov

You can download directly from these URLS.

If you are a producer or reporter who is interested in receiving more information about this article or the author, please email your request to interview@techcentralstation.com.
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Final skunk-dog interaction report

2005-04-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been two months and two days since our dog Bachelor got sprayed by a skunk. This happened at about 5 AM when Bachelor insisted that I take him outside. It was dark, and I didn't see the skunk--but Bachelor certainly did!

Those who read earlier posts on this subject may recall that over the course of a week or so my husband and I tried all sorts of remedies--from the traditional tomato juice bath to regular shampoo to special formulations I found on the web.

They all helped a bit, especially cumulatively. But the fact is that two months later Bachelor STILL is not completely free of skunk odor. Evidently, the skunk sprayed him most strongly in the face and in the ruff (sp?) of his neck--and that's where the smell remains. It's not terribly strong; you can only really detect it when you get down and hug Bachelor. Since this is something I do often--what else are dogs for?--I'm regularly reminded of his earlier encounter with a skunk.

May it be his first--and last--such encounter!

Weblogs by average daily traffic

2005-04-21T09:39:00.000-07:00

I just learned that there's a web site that tracks daily average traffic on quite a number of blogs. It's The Truth Laid Bear (www.truthlaidbear.com/TrafficRanking.php). I have no idea how they determine traffic rankings, or whether the rankings are accurate.

Have any of you heard of this site?

Personal update and information about a blogger who is transforming her blog into a book

2005-04-18T18:03:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from four days in Seattle. The main reason for going was to attend the Pacific Northwest Writing Centers conference--but my husband and I also got to visit both my sister and her family and our nephew and his partner. We got to hear my sister's bluegrass band (Looking Glass) rehearse, visit the new Tacoma Glass Museum and Tacoma Art Museum, and tour the fabulous new Seattle Central Public Library. Thanks to our nephew Michael and his partner Kyle, we also saw an amazing performance of contemporary American ballet at the Pacific Northwest Ballet. It was a wonderful time!

Even so, it's good to be back in small town Corvallis. Since it's been a while since I've posted to my blog, I thought I'd share an informational item. I recently learned that Julie Powell, who hosted the Julie/Julia Project blog for a year--has been able to turn her blog into a full-time, money-making career. Since a significant portion of my readership (that would be you, Hope) is interested in making money through blogging, I thought I'd pass this along.

Powell is a secretary who decided to cook her way through every recipe--yes, every recipe--in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She wrote about this is a blog. Her blog became wildly popular among the gourmet cooking set and eventually led to the opportunity to publish in journals like Bon Appetit, The New York Times, and Health. Powell quit her secretarial job and is now revising her blog into traditional book format. Her book will be released next January.

This just shows that it is possible to turn blogging into a money- and career-making venture.

Something of interest to folks who hope to make money blogging

2005-04-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

This news item just showed up in a goggle alert I received today. I thought I'd paste it in since it offers hope for making money through blogging.

This story was printed from ZDNet News, located at http://news.zdnet.com --------------------------------------------------------------
By Alorie GilbertURL: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5660604.html

Most people who write blogs just do it for kicks--as a way to vent, be creative and connect to a community.

But profit motive may soon be added to the mix. GetLocalNews.com, a nationwide network of 6,000 local news sites, is planning to share its advertising revenue with thousands of volunteer writers.

The idea is to reward and motivate contributors whose stories and photos generate the most traffic, which in turn fuels ad revenue, said Edgar Canon, chief executive of the San Francisco company. He hopes the quality of contributions improves, too.
But it's also the principle of the matter. "I think the writing-for-free thing is kind of demeaning to content producers," Canon said.

It's a smart move, and a concept that may catch on among more commercial blogs, said Steve Outing, a senior editor at the Poynter Institute journalism school. About.com, recently acquired by The New York Times, also pays volunteer writers, he said. But he expects noncash compensation, such as T-shirts, mugs or free classified listings, will be more common.

"You've got to figure out a way to entice people to contribute," Outing said.
It may also further blur the line between professional journalists and amateur scribes--a line already made fuzzy by the rise of blogging.

For the time being, however, most people will likely find it difficult to eke out a living as a "citizen journalist"--a fact that may never change, Outing said.
At GetLocalNews, which started in 1999, it helps to be established. In its earlier years, the company had little left over from its start-up costs to pay writers.
Now the company will pay writers half the net ad sales their stories garner, Canon said. That figure is based on each story's "page views," or the number of times visitors view its Web page. Canon expects it to work out to about $2 to $5 per 1,000 page views. The company will send checks quarterly to all writers that rack up $25 or more in payments, he said.
GetLocalNews posted a further explanation, including how it will deter cheaters who try artificially boost their payments, on its Web site.

The company publishes up to 4,000 stories on a good day, nearly all of which are submitted by amateurs from across the country. Its most frequently visited site, BeniciaNews.com, covers the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Benicia, Calif., and gets as many as 5,000 page views per month, Canon said.

An Introduction to Literary Blogs

2005-04-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

Two posts in one day? I guess this shows that I've got the blogging bug, especially since my readership (or should I say reader) is so limited.

But I've just been doing research on literary blogs, so I thought I'd post some information here.

Readers already know that there are blogs about just about everything, so it's hardly surprising that the genre of literary blogs exists. Literary blogs tend to be a mix of publishing industry and book talk, reviews, personal musings, and whatever else the blogger wants to write about that day.

Some well-known literary blogs are BookSlut (www.bookslut.com), Slightly Foxed (www.foxedquarterly.com), and The Elegant Variation (marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/).

BookSlut and The Elegant Variation are well enough known that they were discussed on an NPR report on how blogging is influencing the publishing industry.

I'm writing from the northwest--Corvallis, OR to be specific--so I thought I'd mention a northwest site: MoorishGirl, which comes out of Portland Oregon (moorishgirl.com). It has many helpful links, including a list of literary blogs.

The author of MoorishGirl participates in another new literary blog site, The Litblog co-op (lbc.typepad.com/blog/. This coop includes members who have their own literary blogs. The group has agreed to "meet" four times a year to select "a book from obscurity, an overlooked literary gem" that they would bring to the public's attention, both on their own blogs and on the co-op blog.

There's certainly lots going on out there! Surely this can only help the future of literature and of publishing.

A brief summary of the Edelman/Intelliseek report

2005-04-08T11:38:00.000-07:00

Here's a brief summary of "Trust `MEdia': How Real People Are finally Being Heard. I'm posting this because my one faithful reader was unable to pull up the report. Also, trying to summarize the report will help it become clearer to me.

Before I continue, I do encourage readers to access the report yourselves. Even if the URL in my earlier post doesn't work, I expect that if you google the title the report will come up. The version I have is printed from the online report.

And now for the summary:

The first thing readers need to know is that the report markets itself on the first page as "The 1.0 Guide to the Blogosphere for Marketers and Company Stakeholders." This gives a good sense of the report's agenda, which is to help stakeholders better understand what the report terms "New communications and word-of-mouth marketing."

The executive summary of the report states that an Edelman 2005 Trust Survey found that "peoples' trust has shifted from authority figures to `average people like you.' In fact, 56% of Americans trust only the opinions of physicians and academicians more than they trust the opinions of people like themselves" (2). The summary goes on to note that blogs are both driving and benefiting from this shift.

[A side comment: if folks surveyed knew more academics, they might not have included them with physicians as authorities they still trust!]

The report provides basic info on blogs--information that I'm sure anyone reading The Writing Way already knows. One of the most interesting sections to me was the one on "The Impact of Blogs: Challenges, Opportunities and Changes." Here the report discusses:

--How blogs can serve as new sources of market research.

--How tracking blogs can benefit companies.

--About the development of adverblogs, such as Nike's Art of Speed adverblog.

--How blogs can serve as early warnings systems for companies. (An example of a company that failed to take advantage of this is the bike lock maker Kryptonite, which failed to respond quickly enough to a video posted on a blog that showed how to use a cheap pen to pick these expensive bike locks)

--How mass marketing is shifting to targeted, relationship, and word-of-mouth marketing.

--How blogs in the future are likely to be less text-heavy and more multi-media oriented.

Other sections of the report give what it terms "the new rules of engagement for the blogosphere" and raises "key questions for marketers and communications professionals."

The general conclusion of the report is that blogs are here to stay--and that business, industry, and the professions should take note.

News Bulletin: Edelman and Intelliseek have co-published a first-of-kind report on the impact of blogs

2005-04-04T18:08:00.000-07:00

I just received a Google alert about a new report on blogging that looks to be interesting.

(In case you don't know, google alerts is a free service of google. You indicate terms you'd like Google to send you information on, and it provides daily on weekly depending on how you set it up. I have Google alerts for "blogs" and "customer reviewers."

Here is the URL to the press release about the report:

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050404/nym225.html?.v=3

Embedded in the press release in the URL for the full report, minus a few sections that are reserved only for clients of Edelman, which is according to the press release the world's largest independent public relations form. (Intelliseek is a marketing intelligence firm.) I wanted to include the URL for the full report in this post, but for some reason the cut and paste function wouldn't remember its address.

The Report is titled "Trust `MEdia': How Real People Are Finally Being Heard."

Some examples of online citizen review sites (book reviews)

2005-04-04T13:46:00.000-07:00

As some readers of The Writing Way may remember, I set this blog up both to gain experience in blogging and also to support a current research project, which is to study what I'm calling online citizen reviewers. As a quick reminder, these are folks who publish reviews on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com or on personal web sites.

Lately, I've been trying to get a sense of just how many online citizen book review sites there are. I've now got the answer.

A LOT.

Definitely more than I could ever hope to visit or catalogue.

But I can try to give some sense of the range of sites.

There are the obvious sites that I just mentioned: Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, etc.

Other large sites that include book reviews by (generally unpaid) citizen reviewers include:
AllReaders.com (This site uses a 7 page form that reviewers fill out.)
AllExperts.com
Readerville.com (This is more on an online forum than review site)
DearReader.com
BookReporter.com
Complete-Review.com

The Complete Review is a very valuable resource not so much for its reviews--though it does have them--as for its links. It has links to print and web-based book review sites, literary weblog lites, international literary sites, and publishers' sites.

The Complete Review helped me to identify some personal book review websites. The following are just a few examples; there are many more:
Steph's Book Reviews (www.stephsbookreviews.com)
Blether (www.blether.com)
Kristen's Book Reviews (www.kristenvoskuil.com)

I'd be very interested to know if readers know of other online book review sites that depend on unpaid citizen/customer reviews for content.

I'm also interested in review sites for products other than books that depend on citizen/customer reviews. Craig's list (www.craigslist.com) is a good example of such a site.

Are there online book review sites that you regularly visit that I have not listed here? Please send them my way. Are there other sites that depend either on citizen reviewers or on reputation-building (I'm thinking here of sites like EBay and Epinion, where those who use the site rate those who sell things or provide opinions about them) that you like? Again, please send them my way.

A Post-Conference Update & info about a cool community-based writing center

2005-03-28T17:03:00.000-08:00

I'm back from the professional conference I attended over spring break. It's the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and is the largest and most important conference in the US for college and university teachers of writing and rhetoric. It's a large conference; I don't know the exact number of attendees at this year's conference, but I expect it was over 3500 people.

What kind of topics are talked about at a conference like this? Just about everything that scholars and teachers of rhetoric and writing might be interested--from obscure historical research on Greek and Latin rhetoricians to writing centers and writing-across-the-curriculum programs to theories and practices of teaching writing to writing and technology to assessment to community literacy, etc. There's definitely something there for everyone (at least everyone who's interested in writing and rhetoric).

One of the coolest talks that I heard was about a community literacyproject. It was a talk about a project called 826 Valencia. This is a community-based writing center. The writer Dave Eggars, author of the truly wonderful memoir _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_ used some of his earnings from this best-selling book to establish a writing center in the Mission District of San Francisco. This is a non-profit center that is not associated with either the public schools or with a college or university. Their mission is to provide community based support for students in the neighborhood. They also provide programs for the public schools in San Francisco--but in their talk the speakers emphasized that they are independent of the schools' bureaucracy (which in my view is good).

It was really inspiring to hear about how 826 Valencia developed from a very small storefront to a center with 600+ volunteers, some of them well-known writers like Dave Eggars. According to the presenters, 826 Valencia centers (named for the address of the original center) have been developed in Brooklyn and Seattle, and are being established other places.

Here's one more bit of info about 826 Valencia. After Eggars and his colleagues found the storefront they wanted, the owner wouldn't lease it to them unless they had some sort of retail operation. The owner didn't expect the writing center to make it and thought he could more easily lease it again if it had some retail component. So what did Eggars et al do? They decided that they would sell pirate gear! (If you've not read Eggars' memoir, you might not know that he is one witty guy--even as he writes about the heartbreaking death of his parents and his decision to become the legal guardian for his younger brother.)

Now all 826 Valencia writing centers sell something; they incorporate what they sell into the general look and feel of the writing center. The Boston 826 Valencia, for instance, sells superhero gear.

For more information about this exciting project, check out www.826valencia.org

Some thoughts on blogging, continued

2005-03-15T07:56:00.000-08:00

I leave in about an hour to drive to the Portland airport--and then fly to my conference in San Francisco--but I couldn't head out of town without checking my blog, and boy am I glad that I did! Thanks to Kim, Hillary r, Alan C, Just rambling, Emily, Hope, Tavosmom, and Rosa G for a great conversation about blogging. This conversation alone seems to me to be a clear indication of how valuable blogging can be.

I look forward to checking out the reportsfromconsumers.com website when I get back (thanksk just-rambling!). I just speed read the article by Daniel Drezner and found it quite fascinating--and also helpful for my research. I'll also follow up on it when I get back.

In the meantime, thanks to all for such a stimulating conversation.

On a more personal note, last Sunday my husband I planted two forsythias in my mother's memory. I grew up in Ohio, and my mother lived there just about all of her life. Since she had twelve children, mom didn't have a lot of time to pay attention to flowers and nature--but every spring she would exclaim over the forsythias when they bloomed. (They're the first sign of spring after a long and dreary Ohio winter.)

It will take a long time for me to deal with my mother's death. Friends who have lost parents tell me that in an important way you never get over this loss. But planting the forsythias helped. After we planted them Greg read the Mary Oliver poem "In Blackwater Woods." It's a very beautiful poem about nature, life, and death. I would love to be able to paste it into this post, but the university web software doesn't have an edit (copy and paste) function.

Don't get me started on that.

If you're not familiar with the poem, you can read it simply by googling "In Blackwater Woods" Mary Oliver. Several different versions will appear.

Hmmm. I wonder what it is about blogging that somehow makes it feel natural to go from a somewhat academic discussion of blogging to a personal comment about a parent's death.

Take care, everyone.

Some thoughts about blogging

2005-03-04T09:29:00.000-08:00

I just spent about an hour responding to new comments on my blog, and that got me reflecting on the pluses and minuses of blogging. One obvious plus is the richness of the conversation that has evolved on this blog. Thank you readers! I've been given helpful hints on everything from skunk/dog interactions to my current scholarly study of online citizen reviewers. Several of you have also raised issues and asked questions that will really forward this research project .

It's been a fascinating experience for me as a writer and writing teacher to write my way into the blogosphere. As I noted in my first entry on January 11th, 2005 I found the thought of posting to my blog quite intimidating. I'm used to writing in quite specific rhetorical contexts: I typically know who my audience is (even if it's a general scholarly audience) and what the governing conventions are. I didn't have a good sense of this at all when I first began posting to my blog, and I'm still not sure I do. I am aware of having tried to tone down scholarly jargon and to mix the personal and the professional in a way that I hope readers will appreciate--but only readers can tell me if this has been effective.

Another plus--one I didn't expect--is the human empathy and support that readers expressed when I wrote about my mother's death. This was very moving to me.

And now the negatives: the big one of course is time, time, time. I don't know if I could possibly maintain my blog if I weren't having the luxury of a residency at my university's Center for the Humanities.

There's another unexpected negative: I find I'm spending more time on my blog and less on email. This leads to some interesting consequences. Hope (of Humor Hangout) and I have a long history of email conversations. But now that Hope is an active reader of my blog I find that I'm more likely to respond to her blog comments first rather than to her emails to me--even though the emails are arguably more personal. I'm not sure why I do this. I suspect it's because I'm aware that blog etiquette requires posting regularly to your blog, responding to comments, etc. And since my blog is public I may feel more pressure to do that.

I'd be interested in readers' comments about the blog/email relationship.

A final possible negative--I'm not sure about this--is the tendency for blogging to take over for/substitute for real life (whatever real life is). I just read that several well known bloggers have publicly announced that they're no longer maintaining their blogs. (Sorry, but the stories about them are at the Humanities Center, and I'm at home, so I can't say who they are.) I wonder how long I will be able to--and want to--maintain my blog. I guess only time will tell.

Hmmm. Perhaps this is the moment for me to say that I will probably post less frequently in the next two to three weeks or so. I'm just getting ready to embark on two big projects: writing a talk for the major national conference in my field and doing my husband's and my taxes. I've also got the typical slew of end-of-term letters of recommendation to write.

Once I accomplish these tasks, I'll head off to my conference, which over spring break, and then enjoy a brief post-conference vacation with my friend and coauthor Andrea Lunsford.

So don't be surprised in my presence in the blogosphere isn't as strong or frequent as it has been lately. I promise to check in now and then and to respond to comments--which I look forward to reading. I'm just not sure how many new posts I'll write.

A brief comment on the scope of my project

2005-03-02T13:16:00.000-08:00

Hi there. Since I posted my Humanities Center proposal I thought I'd add a comment or two about the scope of my project. I'm not trying to do a definitive study of online citizen reviewers or to make highly generalized arguments about them. I'm definitely not trying to write a book on them! (I completed three books in the last two years, so books are a no no.)

Instead, I see my study as exploratory. Until I learned about the research that Professor Gronas is doing at Princeton, I hadn't been able to find any other scholars focusing on this emerging genre. So I'm hoping partly to describe what's already happening on the web and partly to raise questions about online citizen reviews. I'm also hoping that my research--which I hope I will ultimately present in an article--will encourage other scholars to investigate online citizen reviews.

Improved title for my project?

2005-03-01T14:59:00.000-08:00

Hi again,
This afternoon I was fiddling around with revisions of the title of my project. I realized that there's nothing in the current title to indicate that the reviews are online. The title certainly wouldn't cause readers to think about Amazon.com customer reviews--at least I don't think so.

I also wanted to give a sense of the historical context of my project, so I thought of the following title: From The Monthly Review to Amazon.Com Book Reviews: Online Citizen Reviews and the Circulation of Cultural Power.

For those of you who don't know (which is probably just about everyone, since I didn't know it either until I read it), the Monthly Review was the first literary book review journal in Great Britain. It began publishing in 1749. There's a reference to it in the proposal that appears in the preceding post.

The proposal for my current research project

2005-03-01T14:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a copy ofo the proposal I wrote last year when applying for a residency at my university, Oregon State University in Corvallis OR. It explains why I'm interested in what I'm calling online citizen reviewers--like reviewers on Amazon.com.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions, please send them my way.

Lisa

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Citizen Reviewers
Popular Culture, Technology, and the Circulation of Cultural Power
Lisa Ede

Introduction. For some time now scholars in a number of areas in the humanities have been investigating the nature and consequences of popular culture. Central to these investigations are questions such as the following: To what extent might various forms of popular culture represent either active or covert resistance to cultural hegemony? What can scholars learn about capitalism’s ability to co-opt and commodify such potential resistance by studying diverse forms of popular culture, from films, television, and music to online fanzines (where, for instance, some fans write new story lines for the TV series Star Trek that feature homosexual relations between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock)?

The project for which I seek support, a study of “Citizen Reviewers: Popular Culture, Technology, and the Circulation of Cultural Power,” contributes to this line of research. Most centrally, my project identifies and investigates an as-yet-unstudied site of potential resistance to cultural hegemony: the online reviews “published” by what I am calling citizen reviewers, individuals who compose and disseminate reviews of all sorts of cultural productions (books, films, and music being among the most important) outside of traditional review venues. I will provide several examples of these sites later in this proposal; for now I will simply note that with the development of the World Wide Web, citizen reviewers are increasingly making their presence felt online. Indeed, as I will argue later in this proposal, online technologies are enabling ordinary individuals to claim new forms of cultural power and are challenging ideologically grounded assumptions about who can—and cannot—produce knowledge.

A simple Google search reveals a good deal about the extent to which citizen reviewer Web sites have begun to compete with online sites for more established cultural institutions. When I typed the words “book reviews” into Google on January 3, 2004, for instance, the first five sites that Google presented included sites for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, the American Library Association’s Booklist, Bookwire—and a site titled “Book Reviews by Danny Yee.”[1] This personal Web site includes reviews for over 700 books; in 2002 alone Yee’s site had “2.4 million page views by perhaps 900,000 people (excluding robots and other automated accesses as far as is possible” (Yee, “Infrequently Asked Questions”). As this example suggests, thanks to the Web it is possible for ordinary individuals such as Danny Yee to compete for cultural power with such culturally sanctioned institutions as The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. While such competition is limited to the Web, its significance should not be undervalued, for increasingly students and those raised in an online world turn to the Web before consulting traditional print sources.
Danny Yee’s Web site is a personal site; it is one of a number of such sites on the World Wide Web where citizen reviewers make their opinions about books, movies, films, and other cultural products known. A second major online venue for citizen reviewers is Amazon.com. Many academics purchase books from Amazon.com, so readers may be aware of the customer reviews that accompany what Amazon.com refers to as editorial reviews for most books.[2] Amazon.com’s decision to include customer reviews of books, music, and other products on its Web site offers unique and powerful opportunities for ordinary people to claim the expertise usually accorded to traditionally sanctioned reviewers, for the site’s sponsorship of citizen reviewers gives them access to an enormous and diverse readership. The only way in which Amazon.com privileges editorial over customer reviews is via these links’ placement on the page: the link to customer reviews appears below the link to editorial reviews. Recently, Amazon has encouraged customer reviewers to link personal Web sites to Amazon.com; many reviewers also create lists, guides, and other texts that appear as links on this site. As a result, these individuals can create a significant personal presence on Amazon.com, a Web site that is visited by millions of consumers daily.

As an example, consider the reviewer who identifies himself on Amazon.com as Bob NothingElse. I encountered Bob NothingElse when I logged on to Amazon.com to purchase Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. As of December 20, 2003, Bob NothingElse was one of 1179 persons who have posted reviews of Kingsolver’s novel on Amazon.com. Bob NothingElse has additional texts on this site. Links to one of these texts, “See What Bob NothingElse Has Read…Part II” appeared next to the title of Kingsolver’s title on the day that I accessed Amazon.com. Curious, I clicked on it and quickly found myself linking to the following additional sites: “Items from Bob NothingElse’s Wishlist,” “A Recent Review by Bob NothingElse” with a link to all of his reviews on Amazon.com; and “Bob NothingElse’s So You’d Like to Inadvertently Become Known as a Wry Intellectual Guide.”[3]
As this example suggests, Bob NothingElse has quite a presence on Amazon.com’s web site—and Bob is not among the top ten reviewers who were recently selected via a popular vote by Amazon.com customers. (Amazon.com did not list criteria for ranking reviewers but simply asked readers to submit the names of their favorite reviewers.) The top-ranked reviewer, Harriet Klausner, has published 6113 reviews on Amazon.com; the second-ranked reviewer, Lawrance M. Bernabo, has published 6872 reviews; and the third-ranked reviewer, Don Mitchell, has published 2109 reviews (Amazon.com, “Top Reviewers”).

Description of Project. As these examples suggest, thanks to the development of online technologies, citizen reviewers are challenging conventional distinctions between high and popular culture and between those who are granted the authority of “expert” reviewers and ordinary readers and writers. For my Humanities Center project, I propose to study citizen reviews on the World Wide Web and to write a substantial article on this phenomenon that I plan to submit to College Composition and Communication. Most generally, this article would investigate citizen reviews as sites of rhetorical performance and identify lines of research that other scholars interested in this growing phenomenon might wish to explore.

Despite my interest in the current practices of citizen reviewers, one aspect of my inquiry would be historical, for I believe it is important to situate citizen reviews and reviewers in the context of studies of the history of authorship, intellectual property, and the various professions associated with the production, sale, and consumption of culture. Because my discipline is English studies—and because the history of authorship and of the book are particularly well documented in this field—the historical component of my study will situate citizen reviewers primarily, though not solely, in the context of literary production in eighteenth century Great Britain. As readers may be aware, this was a time of enormous change for authors, booksellers, and readers. Thanks to the decline of the patronage system, in the early eighteenth century authors could no longer define themselves or be defined via aristocratic sponsorship—but neither authors nor their readers had developed a stable set of criteria for or public means of categorizing and, most importantly, evaluating and ranking both books and their authors. The rapid development of a vigorous periodical culture in the mid-eighteenth century played a key role in addressing this problem. As Frank Donoghue argues in The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers, in the emergent literary marketplace of the eighteenth century “authorship became increasingly defined in popular criticism. . . [so that] from 1750 onward, literary careers were chiefly described, and indeed made possible, by reviewers,” who published their reviews in such periodicals as the Monthly Review (founded in 1749) and the Critical Review (founded in 1756) (3).

Several centuries later, thanks to the development of the World Wide Web and other online technologies, authors and others involved with the production, distribution, and marketing of culture in all its various forms are find themselves again in a time of transition. The issues at hand are different from those facing eighteenth century authors, readers, and booksellers, but once again reviewers—in this case citizen reviewers—are playing a role in this transition. For these reviewers are challenging the very forms of cultural power that were developed in the eighteenth century to authorize, disseminate, and evaluate cultural production.
As this brief historical excursion suggests, citizen reviewers are participating in much larger technologically driven cultural, political, and economic changes that are challenging conventional assumptions about the nature of the subject, of the author, and of high versus popular culture. (Think, for instance, of the extraordinary growth of Weblogs in the last few years.) As such, they represent a potentially rich site for ideologically and materially grounded critique.

Research on citizen reviewers builds upon—and could contribute to—such diverse scholarly projects as Pierre Bourdieu’s investigation of the “economy of cultural goods” in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1) and Thomas McLaughlin’s exploration of what he terms “vernacular theory”—theory as enacted by the creators of zines and of Star Trek fanzines--in Street Smarts and Critical Theory: Listening to the Vernacular (6). Citizen reviews and reviewers should also be of interest to scholars in reception studies, such as Janice Radway, author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature and of A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire, as well as to scholars inquiring into the possibility of new publics and public spheres, such as Rosa Eberly, whose Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres explores “the public arguments of literally hundreds of actual readers of four controversial novels in this country during this century” (xii).
If citizen reviews on the Web represent an important site for cultural and ideological critique, they also are of inherent interest as online sites of rhetorical performance. How, for instance, have citizen reviewers and the sites that disseminate these reviews established new means of claiming authority (ethos) and of supporting and documenting the judgments that citizen reviewers make (logos)? [4] And how do they employ the resources of the Web to draw upon appeals to pathos (to emotions and beliefs)? Is it possible to identify a stable repertoire of rhetorical practices used by citizen reviewers, or are citizen reviews developing too quickly—and quirkily—for this to be possible?

As I hope is by now clear, scholars diversely situated in such projects as rhetorical and critical theory and cultural and reception studies should find citizen reviews a productive site for research. Despite this potential, to date I have not been able to identify any mention—much less sustained study—of citizen reviewers in scholarly work in the humanities. As a result, one goal of my project will be descriptive, for it will be necessary to conduct additional research to insure that I have identified the most important forms of and venues for citizen reviews on the Web.[5] Having accomplished this, I will then move to the more significant questions that motivate my study; these questions involve the nature and consequences of citizen reviews and the related online texts that are often linked to these reviews. Do these reviews represent an active resistance to cultural, political, and economic hegemony? Might they represent a potential public sphere, such as Habermas called for in such early works as Communication and the Evolution of Society? Or do they represent yet another example of capitalism’s ability to co-opt and commodify individual efforts to resist the ideological forces of hegemony? While I do not expect to develop a singular response to questions such as these—citizen reviews are simply too varied to accommodate such a reading—I do believe that my study will demonstrate that citizen reviews on the Web are a protentially rich object of study for scholars in the humanities.

Previous Humanities Center Grants. In 1995-96 I was awarded a Center for the Humanities residency to study the history of composition’s development as a discipline and the consequences of professionalization for both theorists and practitioners in the field. Two book projects resulted from the research undertaken while at the Center. In 1999 I edited On Writing Research: The Braddock Award Essays, 1975-1999. My lengthy introduction to this collection details composition’s professionalization and raises questions about its nature and consequences. A second book project, Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location, is forthcoming in fall, 2004 from Southern Illinois University Press.
[1] On his home page, Yee identifies himself as a Eurasian living in Sydney Australia who supports his book-reviewing habit by working 20 hours a week as a computer systems manager for the Department of Anatomy and Histology at the University of Sydney.

[2] These reviews most often are excerpts of print reviews published in such print venues as The New York Times Book Review, Choice, Booklist, etc.

[3] According to Amazon.com, by December 20, 2003 Bob NothingElse’s guide had been read 2,107 times. Amazon.com has been quite ingenious in finding ways to produce cultural value via customer reviews. The first review of Kingsolver’s novel that appears on the site is prefaced with the statement that “31 of 33 people found the following review helpful” and is awarded a 4 out of a possible 5 stars.

[4] Amazon.com’s recent invitation to customers to identify that site’s top ten reviewers and the related use of a star ranking system for reviews represent two efforts to claim cultural value for citizen reviewers and their reviews. Citizen reviewers such as Danny Yee often cite the number of “hits” their site has received over a specific period of time as implicit evidence of the value of their reviews.

[5] I am aware that print citizen reviews undoubtedly exist. A mother who writes and distributes an informal newsletter for members of her La Leche group might well include reviews of new books on breast-feeding and infant and child care—and these would constitute citizen reviews. I focus on citizen reviews on the Web because of their greater accessibility. As Danny Yee’s website and the Amazon.com customer reviews indicate, citizen reviews on the Web also have the potential to reach a broad and significant audience.

on skunks and travels

2005-02-27T10:35:00.000-08:00

I'm back from Middle Tennessee State University, where the dynamic duo of Allison Smith and Trixie Smith are running a great writing program and writing center and working with a stellar group of graduate students. Before my trip, I was unaware that middle Tennessee is a distinct region in Tennessee. Now I know better! I also know that MTSU is the largest public undergraduate university in the state of Tennessee. There's a lot of exciting research and teaching in the English department at MTSU.

Now that I'm back I'm dealing again with the consequences of the skunk/dog interaction happened 9 days ago. The skunk odor in the house is diminished, thanks to professional carpet spraying and cleaning--but it's not entirely gone. I guess this will just take time. And despite multiple baths and sprays with smell-be-gone, our beloved Bachelor (a 96 pound black lab) still emanates a faint but potent skunk odor.

I finally did some research on the web and discovered that most people feel that tomato juice doesn't really work to kill skunk odor. It basically masks it somewhat. Several sites recommended the following mixture:

1 bottle hydrogen peroxide
1/2 bottle water
1/4 cup bakins soda (not baking powder)
1 tsp. dog shampoo

A number of testimonials said this works, so we're going to give it a try.

This has been quite an education! If Bachelor ever gets sprayed by a skunk again in the future--let's hope he doesn't--I'll definitely know what to do (and not do).

apologies for formatting problems with the previous post

2005-02-23T13:49:00.000-08:00

Hi there,
I'm sorry that when I posted my talk (see the entry below this) some of the formatting (especially paragraphing) was lost. It had looked okay when I imported the document into my post.

I guess I can take comfort knowing that few people would want to read such a long post anyway!

PS MTSU is Middle Tennessee State University outside of Nashville, TN.

Text of a talk I'm giving at MTSU

2005-02-23T13:43:00.000-08:00

From Script to Print and Online Technologies:
A Rhetorical Perspective on Communication
What does it mean to be a writer–and to teach writing–in the twenty-first century? Given what many of us have experienced as monumental changes not only in the technologies of literacy but in our cultural, social, economic, and political lives as well, this is indeed a significant question. But perhaps it can be rendered less overwhelming if I break it down into a series of constituent questions.
How can teachers of English fulfill our traditional responsibilities to students and to society while also enabling students to develop new literacies for a technological age?
How can we best understand and engage the new technologies that are changing what it means to be literate in contemporary America? And what should we make of genres that are developing as a result of these technologies, such as blogs and wikis. (Stop to be sure they know what these are.) As anyone with even a passing familiarity with the popular press knows, the Internet and World Wide Web have been hailed by some as a utopian brave new world offering multiple opportunities for communication and learning, while others have characterized cyberspace as a mind-numbing, repressive dystopia that will lead to a loss of individual freedom and to the expansion of capitalist and consumerist ideologies. Do we need to take sides in these debates? Is there any alternative to the utopia/dystopia binary that frames so many discussions of online technologies?
How much hands-on knowledge is needed for teachers and students to make the most productive use of the technologies to which we have access? And what if our university doesn’t have up-to-date hardware and software?
Finally, how can teachers integrate our efforts to help students learn new literacies within the context of other important pedagogical goals, such as increasing students’ sensitivity to multicultural differences and to the power of language, whether communicated via a handwritten, hand-decorated zine, a print essay, or a web log (or blog)?

Technologies of Literacy and Their Implications for Teachers of Writing
Clearly, it would be foolhardy to attempt to provide definitive answers to such questions in the time I have today. But I do hope to present a perspective on the new technologies of literacy that will enable you to not only address questions such as these, but also questions that we’ve hardly begun to imagine (such as the consequences for the teaching of writing of voice-activated word-processing programs). Interestingly, the perspective that I will present today–a rhetorical perspective–originated at a time when the members of a quite different and earlier culture were (as we are today) experiencing a major revolution in the technology of literacy. In this instance, however, the revolution involved the transition from oral to written communication.
I am referring of course to 5th century BC Greece at the time of Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and other philosopher-rhetoricians, a time when written communication was still very much a recent development–one that Plato, for instance, viewed with a good deal of suspicion. In the Phaedrus Plato charges that people who learn to write will, in Plato’s terms, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources. . . .And as for wisdom, [they]. . .will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part ignorant” (96).[i]
Plato almost sounds like an English teacher bewailing students’ increasing reliance on the Web instead of the traditional print sources of information typically housed in libraries, doesn’t he? Interestingly, at every critical juncture in the development of literate technologies in the west similar concerns have been raised. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the French scholar Diderot, alarmed by the rapid increase in the number of printed books, feared that “the world of learning will drown in books.” At roughly the same time period, “a German treatise on public health warned that excessive reading induced `a susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, asthma, apoplexy,’ and a host of other disorders, including `hypochondria and melancholy.’ Fresh air, frequent walks, and washing one’s face periodically in cold water were prescribed for solitary readers.”[ii] More recently, in 1956 educator Gerald Thorsen, in a statement strikingly reminiscent of Diderot’s, complained that students at that time were lost “to a world of mass media: tv, radio, motion pictures, newspapers, and comic books.” As a result, he said, “the cultural uses of language have been excluded. We have forgotten about books” (105).[iii]
These comments written at times when the technologies of literacy were in significant ways provide a helpful perspective on contemporary debates about the consequences of online communications. My own view is that extreme positions on either side probably oversimplify what is a complex and deeply situated phenomenon, one that can be used by humans in extraordinarily diverse ways. I don’t mean this stance to imply an anything goes, happy-go-lucky approach to online communication. Rather, I hope to call attention to the diverse uses to which all forms of communication–from speech to print texts to online writing–can be put. After all, the culture of the book has brought us both the great works of literature and Mein Kampf. So I personally do not agree with critics of the Internet such as Gertrude Himmelfarb, who in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet” worries that “young people constantly exposed to `multimedia’ and `hypermedia’ replete with sound and images often become unable to concentrate on mere `texts’. . .which have only words and ideas to commend them.”[iv]
This is not to say that shifts from one technology of literacy to another are without impact or consequence. Over the past few years I have given a good deal of thought (and much reading time) to this question, which I might phrase as follows: From script to print and online technologies, what difference does it make to writers how and under what conditions they compose and reproduce their texts? To begin to address this question, consider two messages to parents written by students living away from home. The first was written with a quill pen on parchment in twelfth century France; the second was composed online several years ago in the United States.
Here is the letter written in twelfth century France as translated and reprinted in a scholarly study of medieval rhetoric:
To their very dear and respected parents M. Martre, knight, and Mme. his wife, M. and N., their sons, send greetings and filial obedience. This is to inform you that, by divine mercy, we are living in good health in the city of Orle'ans and are devoting ourselves wholly to study, mindful of the words of Cato, "To know anything is praiseworthy," etc. We occupy a good and comely dwelling, next door but one to the schools and market-place, so that we can go to school every day without wetting our feet. We have also good companions in the house with us, well advanced in their studies and of excellent habits--an advantage which we as well appreciate, for as the Psalmist says, "with an upright man thou wilt show thyself upright," etc. Wherefore lest production cease from lack of material, we beg your paternity to send us by the bearer, B., money for buying parchment, ink, a desk, and the other things we need, in sufficient amount that we may suffer no want on your account (God forbid!) but finish our studies and return home with honor. The bearer will also take charge of the shoes and stockings which you have to send us, and any news as well.
And here’s the email message which the son of a colleague sent to his mother a few years ago:
>Yo mom! Rushed frm class to say thanks so much for the check, which arrived in today's snail mail. Just in time, sure would have been bleak-city :-( without it. I'm still wrestling with that psyc paper–WILL IT NEVER END?!--trying to make myself believe it's important when all I really want to do is get to my engineering project. Oh, yes, and have a minute to relax :-) . IMHO students shouldn't be hit with all these *#@%#*! requirements. Like, heh, aren't we supposed to be adults? Oh well, just 3 weeks to go. Can't wait to be home.
Although these messages share some features--both include greetings to parents, for instance, and both attempt to give them some sense of the students' daily life away from home--they differ in striking ways. The letter written in twelfth century France uses formal diction and sentence structure. The brothers' frequent citation of ancient authorities, like their deferential salutation, reflects the textual conventions of their time, conventions that reflect that culture's veneration of authority. In contrast, the contemporary student's email message is quite informal. It uses shortened spellings (frm instead of from), email jargon (snail mail for print mail), abbreviations (IMHO, for in my humble opinion), and emoticons (symbols such as :-) used to express emotion) to convey the writer's meaning. Its tone is chatty and relaxed--almost as if the writer were speaking to his mother over the phone.
Obviously, some of the differences between these two messages reflect broad cultural shifts that have occurred over the centuries. Today's familial and social structures are much less hierarchical than those of medieval times, and this change has certainly influenced the ways in which modern writers address readers: thus the contemporary student's "yo mom!" But what role might differences in the written medium have played in the evolution of these textual conventions? What significance might such factors as the ease or difficulty, and financial cost, of composing and reproducing texts hold for writers?
Consider the situation of the brothers in Orle'ans. In order to write their parents, they had to purchase parchment and ink--expensive luxuries that the small percentage of the population who could read and write used only for important messages. When they did put pen to paper, medieval writers worked slowly and carefully, fearful of making an error and ruining their materials. Making even a single copy of an important document was time-consuming and costly. Since there was no regular postal service in medieval Europe, letter writers either had to convey letters themselves or pay a courier to do so; conveying a letter from sender to receiver could take as long as several months. The decision to compose and send a letter was thus not made lightly; once received, letters were considered important documents, and were often retained indefinitely.
The student sending the email message is writing, as we know, at a time when reading and writing are common practices. Like many who have access to computers, this student has found email to be a particularly user-friendly means of written communication. Thanks to his school Internet account and the availability of computer labs on his campus, the student pays no fee to use email, as he would with a long-distance phone call. He can email friends or family whenever a lab is open, and he knows that barring a system failure the message will be delivered almost immediately. Best of all, his email correspondents don't seem to expect him to write the kind of formal prose he associates with school assignments and conventional personal letters. After all, once read most messages are deleted immediately. Had I not been in a friend's office when she received this message from her son, his greeting would have vanished with the touch of a finger.
As this example indicates, the medium writers use to communicate their ideas can make a difference in how they approach and experience the act of writing. Because of the high cost of materials, the labor involved with handwriting, and the difficulty of transporting their letter once written, the brothers writing in twelfth century France took the act of writing a letter to their parents very seriously indeed. The nature of the written medium thus reinforced their culture's preference for elaborate and formal written communications. Because so many of our social and textual conventions have changed over the centuries, even if the contemporary student were handwriting a letter to his mother it would surely have been much less formal than that of the brothers. But email's immediacy and ease--as well as the repertoire of abbreviations and symbols that those emailing and instant messaging have developed--encouraged a particularly chatty and informal message.

A Rhetorical Perspective on Online Writing
As I hope this example indicates, the medium writers use to communicate their ideas does, I believe, matter. Over time the development of new communication technologies can and undoubtedly will influence not only the conventions of written English–the development and proliferations of emoticons and the astonishing increase in the number of persons who are hosting blogs are a good example of this–but other aspects of our culture as well. In this sense, new technologies of literacy are indeed agents of change (to evoke Elizabeth Eisenstein’s influential study of the impact of the printing press) in our culture. As a consequence, the more experience teachers have with these technologies, the more we can offer students ways not only of understanding but also of resisting and reshaping them.
This most definitely does not mean, however, that teachers must become techno nerds and Internet and Web wizards to prepare our students for the demands of literacy in the twenty-first century. Nor should we imagine that there is an utterly unbridgeable gap between the demands of print and online literacies, Rather, as teachers and as writers we can and should draw upon the knowledge of communication that we already have as we reflect upon and teach in a world of new technologies. As I have already suggested, insights gained from the rhetorical tradition can play a critical role in that process.
This is the moment to recognize, of course, that the rhetorical tradition is constructed: I would hardly argue that all rhetorical texts and practices–or all moments and movements in the rhetorical tradition–are equally relevant to contemporary concerns. As I noted earlier, however, the theory and practice of rhetoric originated in a time of great change in the technologies of literacy. It adapted to the revolution catalyzed by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, and to such later mini-revolutions as the development of the telegraph, typewriter, dictation equipment and telephone.
It’s interesting to look at these technologies in their historical context; doing so can certainly provide a few surprises. In “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies,” Dennis Baron reminds readers that when telephones were first made available people literally could not imagine a use for them (78)! (This seems particularly ironic in our current culture of near-constant cell-phone communication.) If it is easy to underestimate how useless and strange a technology such as the telephone might seem when it first appeared, it’s equally easy to underestimate how revolutionary now-taken-for-granted technologies were. In The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage narrates the fascinating story of the telegraph, which in the nineteenth century,
revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by the skeptics. Governments and regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes toward everything from news gathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile, out on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself (vii)
As Standage asks, “Does all this sound familiar?”
I hope that this brief historical excursion has provided a helpful context for my discussion today of technology and its implications for writers and teachers of writing. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that both teachers and writers can draw upon the rhetorical tradition as we respond both to new technological innovations and to the genres that emerge from them. In this regard, perhaps the most useful understanding about rhetoric is the concept of rhetorical sensitivity. What do I mean by rhetorical sensitivity? A very down-to-earth example will, I hope, clarify this term’s significance. Imagine that you are preparing to interview for a job. In deciding what to wear, how to act, and what to say during the interview, you will make a number of decisions that reflect your rhetorical sensitivity. Much of your attention will focus on how you can present yourself best, but you will also recognize the importance of being well prepared and of interacting effectively with your interviewers. If you’re smart, you will consider the specific situation for which you are applying. Someone applying for a position in a bank might well dress and act differently than someone applying for a job as a swim coach. Successful applicants know that all that they do—the way they dress, present themselves, respond to questions, and interact with interviewers—is an attempt to communicate their strengths and persuade their audience to employ them.
When you think rhetorically, you consider the ways in which words and images are used to engage—and sometimes to persuade—others. When writers demonstrate rhetorical sensitivity they apply their understanding of human communication in general, and of written texts in particular, to the decisions that will enable effective communication within specific writer-reader situations. Rhetorically sensitive writers, then, are flexible, adaptive writers. Rather than having a one-size-fits-all or formulaic approach to writing—this is an English class, so I guess what I need to do is to write a five paragraph theme—rhetorically sensitive writers think in sophisticated (yet in an important sense also commonsensical) ways about their writing. When they enter new discourse communities or when they want, or are required, to master new stylistic challenges (as our students are regularly asked to do), they draw on previous experiences and ask strategic questions that enable them to adapt to new discursive demands.
Rhetoric involves four key elements: a writer, one or more readers, a test that makes communication between writer and reader possible, and a specific and highly situated context. When individuals are adjusting to new rhetorical situations, they often analyze and adapt to it—at least if they’re productive, successful writers. A number of years ago, for instance, Andrea Lunsford and I interviewed several new engineers in an engineering consulting firm. These engineers were not familiar with the rhetorical tradition, but as they talked about how they were learning to meet their on-the-job writing demands they touched on all the elements of rhetoric. They told us, for instance that they spent a good deal of time reading examples of previous writing done by engineers in their company and talking with colleagues about why various documents were written as they were. These discussions were particularly important, the engineers told us, for they couldn’t just mimic the texts that they read; they had to understand why these texts were written as they were, and for that they needed an insider’s perspective. In meeting their new responsibilities, these engineers drew upon as many sources of information as possible. They drew upon the knowledge of engineering and of engineering writing that they brought with them to the company, read internal and public texts written by those working at this company, asked questions, learned about their company and the general world of consulting engineering, experimented with their own writing, got response to their writing, and talked with and learned from experienced mentors in the company.
That’s a lot of effort, isn’t it? Yet as often happens when people think commonsensically about communication tasks of importance to them, the engineers we interviewed characterized the process of learning and of being mentored as natural and only partly conscious. This is a helpful reminder that a good deal of what scholars and teachers would characterize as rhetorical analysis occurs quite naturally and unselfconsciously when we communicate. This doesn’t mean, of course, that direct instruction doesn’t play an important role in increasing writers’ rhetorical sensitivity. But it does mean that direct instruction should both build upon and enhance students’ common sense understanding of effective communication.
As I make a turn toward the conclusion of my talk today, I’d like to share an example of rhetorical sensitivity in action. This example occurred in a discussion on WCENTER, an email discussion group for those who work at or are interested in writing centers. Several years ago, a writer to WCENTER raised the question of why subscribers sometimes become irritated by “off-task” messages such as jokes, yet respond patiently when a new subscriber–generally a new writing center director–asks for the hundredth time how others keep writing-center records. Such a question might well prompt impatient or even angry responses, given the high volume of email messages that many subscribers to this list receive and the existence of a number of readily available print and online sources that address this and related questions. One subscriber, Carol Haviland, speculated that subscribers’ differing responses had to do in part with the nature of WCENTER’s email forum: “Email is virtually a different kind of text than either speech or book/journal print, but we tend to write it like the former and treat [or read] it like the latter.” Here is the response of another email discussion group subscriber, Sara Kimball, who further developed Carol Haviland’s ideas. (What follows is an extended excerpt from her posting to WCENTER.)
I agree, it’s a medium in between speech and writing, and we sometimes write online like speech but react to it like writing–and this can cause problems. Take, for example, the disputes we’ve occasionally had on this list when some people get a little playful and others get annoyed at “off-topic” threads. Quite a bit of f2f [face-to-face] conversation is . . .[talk] that establishes or maintains human relationships rather than conveying information. . . .Think of how much workplace talk is. . .chit-chat, joking, ritual greetings. For example, I’m currently in the midst of serving a two-year sentence on the English Department’s Executive Committee. Most of the meetings begin with a few minutes of joking around and teasing each other. I’ve known playful speech to work wonders in bringing together people who are otherwise at odds with each other, at least to the point where we can work together. Mostly we’re not aware of . . .[this kind of talk] until it’s gone on for awhile, because it’s ephemeral. I think one of the reasons this list works so well, normally, is that we do establish relationships with each other and with the list. Jokes about Harleys or crawfish and rounds of congratulations on births, promotions, new jobs, etc. are some of the ties that bind. *But*. . . .What might be play if it were speech becomes work if it’s writing, something that might get tiresome to deal with if you’re tired, distracted, or have a low message quota.
Neither Carol Haviland nor Sara Kimball referred to their analysis of online writing in general and exchanges on WCENTER in particular as rhetorical–and yet I would argue that these are fine examples of rhetorical sensitivity in action, sensitivity that enables writers to make appropriate decisions about how best to communicate with others in a specific situation.
How can such a perspective help us to work with student writers who are experiencing, as we are, the dizzying developments of online writing—including, most recently, the astonishing proliferation of blogs? It can remind us, first of all, that we already have a repertoire of rhetorically based questions that we can encourage students to ask themselves when they write, whether on- or off-line. In my textbook Work in Progress: A Guide to Academic Writing and Revising, for instance, I encourage writers to ask themselves a series of questions about their purpose in writing, about their reader or readers, about their texts, and about the contexts that influence these texts. Here are just a few of these questions:

What role does your rhetorical situation invite you to play? Is your role relatively fixed (as it is when you write an essay exam)? Or is it flexible to some or a considerable extent?

What role do you intend for readers to adopt as they read your writing? What kinds of cues will you use to signal this role to readers?

How much freedom and authority do you as a writer have? If you are writing in response to an assignment, for instance, to what degree does the assignment specify or restrict the form and content of your text?
I developed these questions in the early 1980s, when I wrote the first edition of my textbook and was just beginning to learn how to word process texts. (I knew nothing, of course, about the Internet and Web.) Yet I believe that these questions are as relevant for on-line writers as they are for those writing off-line.
Again, this is not to say that the material conditions of online writing don’t matter. For the 4th edition of Work in Progress (which is now, incredibly ehough, in its 6th edition), I wrote an entirely new chapter on online writing, including guidelines for those writing and reading online. These guidelines acknowledge the differences between reading text onscreen or in print. Because of the constraints of reading online, those composing online texts do well to consider such matters as the length and structure of their message, the placement of important points, and the use of headings. But even though online writers need to attend to the constraints of online reading, they should also bring their understanding of rhetoric to that task. If I’m writing an administrative email–to my dean, let’s say, or to a colleague–on a professional or administrative subject, I do try to be as concise as possible, to number items and use headings when I can, to write brief paragraphs and to limit my overall message to a single screen in length. And I do not use shortened spellings, emoticons, or email jargon. This makes sense given my rhetorical situation, which is a professional one where my dean is (needless to say) more empowered than I am. When I’m posting a message to WCENTER, I write quite differently. Those on WCENTER like to think of themselves as forming an online community where status matters little. Readers are as likely to take seriously a posting from an undergraduate tutor as from an authority in the field. Perhaps because those posting to the list are English teachers still very much allied intellectually and emotionally to print communications, emails are often quite lengthy, both in terms of paragraph length and overall length. I can recall very few instances where those posting to the list take the kind of care with subject headings, numbered items, etc. that are often presented as a requirement in online communication. The strongest priority on WCENTER is to developing one’s ideas as fully as possible–and perhaps the next priorities are for demonstrating collegiality and good humor. So my email to WCENTER might be quite lengthy, yet also chatty, and might use abbreviations like IMHO or emoticons. For it’s this kind of email message that is most likely to elicit responses from others on the list–and the desire for response is the reason why I’m taking the trouble to write in the first place.
There’s certainly more that I could say about a rhetorically informed approach to online communication. (If you’re interested, for instance, we could take a look at the excerpt from a student’s Instant Message conversation that appears on the back of your handout. This is an excerpt from 76 pages of IM writing that the student gave me when he collected all of his academic and non-academic writing for a week. I could also share some of what I’ve experienced in my very recent venture into the blogosphere.) But I hope I’ve made it clear that although changes in the technologies of literacy certainly are significant, writers (and teachers of writing) don’t need to (and indeed shouldn’t) turn off the rhetorical understandings that we have achieved through extensive oral and print communications when we turn on our computers.

[i] Plato. Phaedrus and The Seventh and Eighth letters. Walter Hamilton, Trans. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.
[ii] Neil R. Rudenstine. “The Internet and Education: A Close Fit.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/21/97, p. A 48.
[iii] Sharon Crowley. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

[iv] Gertrude Himmelfarb. “A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/1/96, p. A56.

A brief scientific update on dog/skunk interactions

2005-02-23T10:32:00.000-08:00

Hello again,
It's an hour or so after my earlier post, and I am writing to make two brief scientific updates on dog/skunk interactions.

Update # 1:
Even a vigorous washing with tomatoe juice apparently can not completely get rid of a skunk's scent if a dog gets well sprayed, as ours apparently did. My husband gave Bachelor a vigorous washing, and he left the tomato juice on for about ten minutes, and we still catch whiffs of skunk of Bachelor now and then.

Update # 2:
When the weather is warm, as it is today, the heat somehow intensifies whatever skunk smell your dog, carpets, and furniture have.

Some readers may have already noticed that I am making these observations as I prepare to head out for a professional trip, leaving all clean up responsibilities to my husband. Unfair?

I would simply like to point out that if he had been here when Bachelor was sprayed I could have pointed out to him that "YOUR dog was just sprayed by a skunk!"--whenever there's a problem with Bachelor he suddenly becomes my husband's (rather than my husband's and my) dog--and he could have taken care of it right then!

skunk update and travels

2005-02-23T09:23:00.000-08:00

I could never hope to write a witty posting on skunks, as Hope of Humor Hangout might, but I thought I would update interested readers with what I have learned about skunk/dog interactions, and what to do and not do when they take place. Probably most of you know this already, but just in case someone else awakes from a deep sleep to take a dog out at 5AM and his/her dog is sprayed with a skunk, here goes.

When our black lab Bachelor (for Mt. Bachelor and in honor of his condition in life) was sprayed, the scent on him wasn't nearly as strong as I thought it would be, so in my sleepy condition I assumed that he's just been sprayed a very little bit, let him into the house, thought I would deal with this later, and went back to bed. When I woke up I bathed him twice--didn't have tomato juice and thought bathing with soap should do it--and cleaned the carpet in the places where I knew he'd been.

What I now realize is that Bachelor probably did get fully sprayed, and that while the odor wasn't as bad as I expected the staying power of the scent is much, much worse. Over the weekend when I was working at home, I got somewhat used to the odor in the house and on Bachelor. But when I went to work, came home, and opened the door I realized that it was there--and it was powerful.

Boy did I feel dumb, dumber, and dumbest.

What I should have done was to put Bachelor in the basement or better yet in a basement room that open only from the outside, driven straight to Winco for tomato juice, and bathed Bachelor as soon as it was light/warm enough. Hope has already emphasized the craziness of letting him into the house, and all I can say was that: a) I was half asleep and wasn't thinking clearly and b) the smell was so much less strong than I expected that I didn't realize how fully Bachelor was sprayed and even more importantly how just a tough of contact with Bachelor would get the skunk's scent deeply into the carpet.

My husband is now home from a trip to his family's to celebrate his mother's 90th birthday. As I write this, he is washing Bachelor in tomato juice--because even with my multiple baths he still smells like skunk. Later today he'll rent a carpet cleaner, buy extra anti-odor stuff, and clean our carpets.

And you thought academics wrote only stuffy entries on the history of authorship, blogging, and citizen reviewers?

Oh, yes, I leave tomorrow for Middle Tennessee State University, where I'm giving a talk and facilitating three workshops. Later today I hope to post my talk, which is about 12 pages long, as a blog entry. It has some stuff on the history of technologies of writing and publishing that, based on comments to earlier posts, might be interesting to some (but by no means all) readers.

On dogs, skunks, and technology

2005-02-19T14:53:00.000-08:00

Earlier today I wrote a completely nonacademic post about my dog Bachelor's encounter with a skunk yesterday morning and the consequences of that encounter for my day. If I say so myself, it was an interesting description not only of what it takes to clean up a skunked dog and carpets the skunked dog has rolled on (yes, I know I never should have let him into the house) but also of my family's history with Bachelor--who, by the way, is named after Mt. Bachelor and also after his condition in life.

Unfortunately, I accidentally published this post twice, and when I tried to remove one of the posts I inadvertently removed them both. Hence the inclusion of technology in my title.

I thought I'd include this shortened version just to show that academics do think about things other than their research.

The history of authorship and blogging

2005-02-18T14:56:00.000-08:00

Hi there,
I was going to try to clarify Professor Gronas's project on Amazon.com customer reviewers (since Hope asked about that), but I discovered that I left my copy of his talk at my office--so that will be another post. For now I want to share something that I just learned that seems relevant to blogging.

A friend and former student, Kim Sharp, shared an essay that she wrote on 17th century coterie poets (such as John Donne, author of "Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty"). Kim got an MFA at Oregon State, where I teach, and she developed an interest in the coterie poets' collaborative practices when she took a class on 17th century literature.

The coterie poets were writing in a time of transition. The printing press had been developed, so publishing their work in print form was possible, but many preferred to circulate manuscripts within a small circle of friends. According to Kim, Donne was particularly notable for his refusal to publish/print his poems. (As a Ph.D student I focused primarily on 19th and 20th century authors, so I'll have to take Kim's word for it.)

As Kim points out, "coetrie authors intended for their work to be read by a very specific, select group." While bloggers are happy if they have a large readership, many are content with a similarly limited group of readers, especially readers who are at least partly known to them via their comments. According to a scholar who Kim cites, the coterie poets felt as though they belonged to "a social as well as intellectual elite."

The coterie poets were also intensely collaborative. They not only circulated manuscripts but often reshaped the work itself to accord with their own interests and tastes. Kim says that "This act, it seems, was not done as a means to `correct' the original author's work, but to more fully engage in the process, to continue a thought, to bring that sense of community to the writing." This reminds me of the intensely collaborative nature of much blogging, where readers' comments are as central to the blog as the "author's" comments. In fact, the author/reader distinction is challenged by both the coterie poets and by contemporary bloggers.

Kim has a very interesting discussion of the critical reception of Donne's work. I have always thought of him as a great canonical author, but according to Kim some critics have attempted to devalue his work as "occasional writing." This is because he doesn't fit the contemporary model of the author, who claims originality and sole propriety over his or her work.

One implication of Kim's study are potential connections between manuscript cultures and internet/blogging cultures. I don't know enough to say anything much more specific beyond the statement that authors writing before printing was established as the privileged medium for circulating writing and before intellectual property and copyright have pre-modern notions of authorship, notions that emphasize collaboration and the circulation of texts among like-minded friends and colleagues.

I'm going to follow up with some of the sources Kim cited in her study, and if I learn more of interest I'll pass it on. In the meantime, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Kim Sharp again for sharing her interesting and informative study with me. (Kim, if you read this blog entry and have any corrections to make or comments to add, please chime in!)

Away from my blog for a few days

2005-02-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick post to say that thanks to some very generous friends--you wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you Hope?--my husband and I are heading to the coast for a weekend away. It will be good to have some time to process everything that's happened in the last few weeks.

I see that their are some very interesting comments since I last checked my blog, but rather than trying to respond quickly I'm going to wait until I return.

In the meantime, happy blogging!

Article by Dartmouth Professor on Amazon.com reviews

2005-02-09T16:07:00.000-08:00

Here is a recent article on a study of Amazon.com reviews by Dartmouth professor Mikhail Gronas. The article describes the reasons why Professor Gronas is studying Amazon.com reviews--he thinks they provide interesting insights into how taste is formed (at least I think that's the general idea)--and provides some of his preliminary findings.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050110112001.htm

Just What Am I Looking For as I Study Blogs?

2005-02-06T11:02:00.000-08:00

Hi again,
This is a question that just-ramblin asked in response to an earlier posting. It's a good question.

It's tempting to wimp out and say that I don't know since blogs are such a new phenomenon--but that would be wimping out. So I'll try to share a few thoughts without lapsing into scholarly jargon.

First I should note, though, that when I began my research project (which is supported by Oregon State University's Humanities Center) my focus wasn't on bloggers but rather on what I'm calling citizen reviewers, such as the foks who write reviews on Amazon.com or Blogcritics.org. I got interested in citizen reviewers because of the challenge they represent to traditional forms of expertise and authorship that have informed the publishing/literary world for several centuries.

Here's what I mean. (What follows is a gross overgeneralization.) During the Middle Ages and Renaissance authors were supported primarily through the church and the patronage system, where aristocrats would commission literary works from writers. The reading public was quite limited, so the question of who was an author (much less a good author) was determined by a small elite of clergy and aristocrats.

With the rise of the middle class and the collapse of the patronage system, the whole system for deciding who was an author and evaluating that author's work collapsed. Lots more people were claiming authorship, and the reading public expanded significantly. This was when the system of book reviewing was developed--and it developed with great speed and intensity. (The development of the printing press played a key role in these changes, just as the development of the web is fueling the blogosphere.)

Suddenly aristocratic elites no longer determined who deserved to be called a real author (versus a hack writer). Instead, cultural elites--writers publishing reviews in well known journals--were.

This system has existed from the 18th century or so until the present time. As journalism developed, similar kinds of expertise also developed--hence the prestige of The New York Times versus that of my local paper, the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

Bloggers and citizen reviewers represent a significant challenge to these forms of authority and expertise. That's why I'm interested in them.

Do these new forms of communication represent a utopian or near-utopian alternative to traditional forms of media and communication control?

Or are they if not dystopian then problematic in one or another way? What about the standards (aesthetic and journalistic) that have been part of the traditional literary scene and media? What are we to make of all the bad writing that appears in blogs? How should we (or should we?) evaluate blogs and citizen reviews?

Why do people write blogs and citizen reviews, especially when their readership is limited?

How do people writing blogs and citizen reviews establish their credibility? (This is key to traditional forms of communication.)

But enuf said. Ask a professor a question, and I'm afraid you're likely to get a very long answer.......

On my absence from my blog

2005-02-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

This is a hard post for me to write, but I feel that I need to explain why it's been so long since I've posted anything to The Writing Way. On Jan 17th my mother had what the doctors were sure was a minor heart attack. All the test results seemed good, so mom went home the following Friday. On Sunday, January 23rd she had a massive heart attack and died instantly.

I am from a huge family--I'm the second oldest of twelve children--which really helps at a time like this. Still the loss is immense, as others who have lost a parent know. This is especially true for my father, who lost his wife of 62 years and his independence all at once. Mom had been his primary caregiver, and he is now moving into assisted living.

In the context of my mother's death, my research project on citizen reviewers, bloggers, and seems pretty darn inconsequential. Still, I hope to return to it and to add some relevant posts in the coming days.

The Writing Way and ORBlogs

2005-01-17T10:49:00.000-08:00

I just visited ORBlogs, the public site hosted by Paul Bausch, and was thrilled to see my blog listed in its directory. As early readers of this blog know, I began it with a good deal of trepidation--and maybe also a bit of skepticism. After all, I write all the time, and to multiple audiences. Why do I need a blog?

But since I'm studying blogs and other online forms of communication as a scholarly project, I realized that I should at least try hosting my own blog. So far, I've found that the more engaged I am with it--and the more comments my blog gets--the more interested I am. One sign of this is my desire to personalize my blogs more. Blogger is a wonderful software tool, and I never would have created a blog if it hadn't been as easy as it is, but now I'm hoping I can add some distinguishing features.

For an example of a blog that does that, take a look at culturecat.net. This is a blog by Clancy Ratliff, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota. Clancy is one of the co-editors of the blog-published Into the Blogosphere collection that I've mentioned before. I think her site looks very interesting--but then it's clearly addressed primarily to academics. Which is what (for better or worse) I am.

I wonder what others think of Clancy's site......

A visit from Paul Bausch!

2005-01-16T13:22:00.000-08:00

Well today is a red-letter day for my new blog for sure!

(Interested in the origin of red-letter in its current use? According to an historian at OSU who specializes in Russian history--I heard this at a talk he gave--the origin of this term dates back to the practice of illuminating feast days for peasants in red in the Catholic liturgical calendar. On feast days, which were days honoring this or that saint, the peasants didn't have to work. This is why a "red-letter" day is a good day. I don't recall whether this practice was limited to Russia or was broadly practiced across Europe.)

But back to Paul Bausch. For those of you who don't know, Paul Bausch is one of the co-developers of the Blogger software. I've already mentioned the sites he maintains, but he's also written the books We Blog and Amazon Hacks. Paul lives in Corvallis, Oregon, as I do, and he's been tremendously helpful to me as I attempt to find my way around the blogosphere.

It was a real boost to have Paul visit my site. This will encourage me to make some changes this coming week. I'm hoping to add some links and to personalize the template for The Writing Way.

I'm taking baby steps, but I'm taking them.

Some sites of interest to academic bloggers

2005-01-13T14:51:00.000-08:00

Hi again,
I just learned about a special issue of Lore: An E-Journal for teachers of writing that focuses on blogs. Here's the URL: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/lore/

Also, last year the first online book on blogs was published by Laura Gurak et al in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota. It's called Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. The URL is: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/

Laura Gurak emailed me a few weeks ago to say that this site has had over 36,000 hits since it was published online.

Some sites of interest to bloggers (especially Oregon bloggers)

2005-01-13T11:32:00.000-08:00

Hi there,
I do not intend to--and can't--post to my blog every day. I'm an academic, as I noted in an earlier post, so I've got lots of other writing to do. But today I thought I would post links to two sites of interest to bloggers, especially Oregon bloggers.

The first site is http://www.onfocus.com/ This site is maintained by Paul Bausch, one of the original co-developers of the Blogger software. There's lots of good stuff here.

The second site is http://www.orblogs.com/. This site is also maintained by Paul Bausch and is a directory of public blogs in Oregon.

Both are quite interesting, so check them out if you've got time.

Thanks to early readers--and why I started this blog

2005-01-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

First of all, thanks to those who read and responded to my blog yesterday. Special thanks go to Hope of Humor Hangout for sending readers of her blog my way.

Unfortunately, I am a serious and earnest person rather than a witty and humorous one, so if you're expecting witty posts--like Hope's recent post on driving (which I thought was great) you'll have to go--well, you'll have to go to Humor Hangout.

I thought I would follow up my first post by explaining why I started The Writing Way. It may be helpful for readers to know that I'm a professor at Oregon State University. My area is rhetoric and writing studies. This means basically that I study writing and the rhetorical tradition and also teach future teachers of writing.

I've got lots of research interests, from the rhetorical tradition (think Aristotle, Plato and Quintillian as early founders of this tradition) to contemporary feminist and critical theory (did I just lose all my readers here?) to collaborative writing. Recently, I've become fascinated with the changes that online technologies like blogging are bringing to contemporary communication. Do blogs and Amazon.com customer reviews (for instance) represent a utopian overturning of what we academics refer to as cultural and political hegemony? (Basically this means the old guard who control things and determine who's an expert and thus gets to publish his/her writing and who isn't.) Or do they represent a dystopian vision of the future?

In this regard, I'm fascinated by Amazon.com reviewers. They represent a powerful challenge to a tradition of expert reviewers that's held sway for several centuries. In that sense, they seem exciting and vital--democratizing. But you could also view them as being in effect coopted by Amazon's business structure and existing primarily to further its profitmaking.

Hmmm. I've written enough--probably for a blog too much. If anyone reads this and wants to post a comment, here are some questions I'd love to have your thoughts on:

--Why do you blog?
--Why do you read others' blogs?
--What do you think of Amazon.com customer reviews? How much credibility to you give them?

That's it for now. Again, thanks to those hardy souls who visited my blog yesterday.

Hello Blogosphere!

2005-01-11T10:45:00.000-08:00

Hello Blogosphere! This is my first post to my first and only blog, "The Writing Way."

Though I'm a writing teacher and am in the process of studying blogs and other online forms of communication, I feel quite intimidated writing this first post. Will I have anything interesting to say? (After all, I mainly write for other scholars and for students.) Will anyone read my blog? What will they think?

In other words, this form of communication feels very public to me--which is perhaps ironic since few people may find their way to it. Well, here goes..........

Lisa Ede
Oregon State University