the final prospectus
Madeline Yonker
Dissertation Prospectus
Tentative title: Network Literacy: The Shifting Roles of Writers
Purpose and Rationale
The phrase “network literacy” as referring to particular social writing practices may have been first used by Jill Walker, author of the weblog jill/txt and professor in the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen. In 2003, she defined network literacy as “writing in a distributed, collaborative environment” (Walker). The purpose of this project will be to describe the discrete practices of network literacy in order construct a rich definition; such a definition will help us understand the shifting roles of writers and our conventional notions of authorship.
Stuart Selber offers the major framework for this study, defining digital literacy, critical literacy, and rhetorical literacy in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. By studying a blogging community's uses of these literacies, we can observe a network in its entirety, which Jeff Rice characterizes as "spaces...of connectivity" (128) that create opportunities for "information, people, [and] places" to intersect in ways that print and conventional methods of connection and communication cannot support. What are those opportunities? In the environment of Web 2.0, they are opportunities for network actors to be both reader and writer simultaneously. In order to observe the practices of writers who negotiate networked writing, I will study “mom bloggers.” I’ve chosen this community for a number of reasons but primarily because their network is both self-identified and shares a specific discourse. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how mom bloggers build and use social capital as network rhetors, and how network literacy is defined by these practices. The information gained in this analysis can then be turned back to the classroom, back to rhetorical instruction.
Mom bloggers gained the attention of the mainstream media in late 2005, with an article printed in The New York Times by David Hochman. This article, titled “Mommy (and Me),” served as the catalyst for a firestorm of discussion about what it means for moms (and dads) to write and share publicly their parenting experiences. Essentially, the Times article characterized writers of these blogs as self-absorbed, obscenely narcissistic, and “hand-wringing” (Hochman). Responses to the article were indignant, many of them appearing on the very blogs of those writers Hochman interviewed for his piece. As a rejoinder, Jen Lawrence of MUBAR (Mothered Up Beyond All Recognition) wondered how writing about one’s children might be considered more self-absorbed than the other topics bloggers discuss, such as “one’s trip to the North Pole by dogsled” (Lawrence). Further, she argues that the act of writing, in itself, is an act of both self-absorption and exhibition, regardless of the issues taken up.
Not only is writing an act of exhibition, but it is one of connected exhibition. The advent of Web 2.0 (in which users are no longer either producers of media content or consumers of content but instead simultaneously both) makes this connected exhibition explicit. That is, the blog as an application renders the interactivity of writing materially obvious through specific affordances, such as reader-published comments and trackbacks. The blog itself becomes a point of entry for answering questions such as: How do explicitly networked writers negotiate the balance between the representation of self and the construction of meaning as it is taken up by their readers? How do the connections among these writers inform that balance? How does the network itself, the associations connecting the writers, work to shape writers’ rhetorical choices? I hope to find that the writing that occurs in/among well-connected blogs is a function of the ways in which the new media of Web 2.0 constructs users’ roles as continuously shifting and dichotomous. That is, blogging is not only writing but also is equally reading. The act of “blogging” does not only include producing posts for one’s own site, but also encompasses the visiting, reading of, commenting on, and linking to others’ writing.
That writing is a social act is not a new argument; however, there are several modes in which we still tend to treat it as though it were not. Current debates on intellectual property, the event-model of the writing classroom, and many pedagogical approaches to plagiarism all indicate systematic cultural tendencies to preserve conventional notions of individual, autonomous authority. With this examination of bloggers, I hope to establish a working definition of network theory as it applies specifically to writers that draws on the simultaneous consume/produce model of Web 2.0. Further, a theory of network literacy will prove that networked writing cannot be considered in the same ways we consider print writing, which still is able to veil the sociality of writing and knowledge-creation. In defining network literacy, I propose to first examine current scholarship on digital and new literacies to ground my approach. Then, I will examine research on network theory. I imagine that where the discussions of digital literacy and network theory overlap, I will find an initial conceptual framework to describe those rhetorical moves that bloggers make in networked writing.
Influential Existing Work
This project will draw on texts that involve research in network studies, which emerges from disciplines ranging from anthropology, social science, and information science. Scholars such as Steven Strogatz, David Weinberger, Duncan Watts, Steven Johnson, and Albert-László Barabási examine the ways in which individuals order themselves and the systems (cognitive, biological, technological) that support the emergence of order from chaos. A significant portion of my hypothesis concerning network literacy draws on the connections between writers, the ways these connections are forged, and the ways these connections affect writers’ and readers’ rhetorical strategies.
Also, I’ll draw heavily from the field of rhetoric and technology, specifically those scholars and texts that deal with technology and literacy. Stuart Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age carves literacy into three constructive segments: functional literacy (users can operate computers as tools), critical literacy (users understand computers and software as artifactual and therefore subject to critique), and rhetorical literacy (users understand how the tools shape and inform meaning and are able to both manipulate meaning and reflect on their manipulation) (Selber 25). For Selber, digital literacy is not a “technical subject” but instead, like Jeff Rice argues, something that English departments should consider an organic component in that it comprises “values, interpretation, contingency, persuasion, communication [and] deliberation” (235). To Selber’s list I would add issues of genre, audience, and reading-writing interactivity. The advent of Web 2.0 has required that we reexamine how particular digital environments invite (or mandate) that users be aware of their ever-shifting role as both reader and writer.
Possibly best described by Tim O’Reilly (whose company O’Reilly Media also appears to have been instrumental in coining the term) the idea of Web 2.0 began as a discussion in response to the dot com break down in 2001, when many of Internet(-based) businesses suddenly found themselves bankrupt. Even as start-ups and investors saw money and dreams suddenly up in smoke, the World Wide Web still appeared to be burgeoning, teeming with activity. And, they (O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International, the co-founders of the annual Web 2.0 Conference) observed, that activity was notably different from many of what had become the conventional notions of what it looked like to use the Internet. In other words, some of what the Internet had initially been used for had shifted, or was shifting, into something subtly, but markedly different. Essentially, Web 2.0 “harnesses collective intelligence” and acknowledges users of applications as “co-developers.” Web 2.0 makes the beta version king; monolithic releases are eschewed for periodic updates that take into close consideration user experience. The traditional producer/consumer (or writer/reader) dichotomy is conflated; questions of audience and genre (in addition to Selber’s list of considerations for digital literacy) are further complicated; writers/readers must revise their conventional rhetorical approaches based on their new, dual-direction role.
This dual-direction role of writer/reader, and the role of the individual in the network, will find basis in both literary theory and social network theory. Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, names social capital as one of the primary connectors in transforming individuals into groups. Social capital works as a kind of currency to be shared in reciprocal fashion: “I’ll do for you if you do for me” (20). Putnam offers two levels of social capital: bonding social capital, which creates exclusivity; and bridging social capital, which connects outward or creates inclusivity (22). Bonding social capital is created by “homogenous groups” such as ethnic fraternities or country clubs (22). Bridging connections “are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages” like the civil rights movement (22). Putnam argues, “[t]o build bridging social capital requires that we transcend our social and political and professional identities to connect with people unlike ourselves” (411). This transcendence is already arguably a component of electronic networks: “No sector of American society will have more influence on the future state of our social capital than the electronic mass media and especially the Internet…Let us foster new forms of electronic entertainment and communication that reinforce community rather than forestalling it” (410). Putnam’s concern is that “virtual community” is not as good as “real” or “face-to-face” community. His call is for us as a nation to return to making the civic connections of yesteryear, finding ways that Internet technology can support the rebuilding of conventional communities (“place-based, face-to-face, enduring social networks” [411]) rather than replace them. Putnam would be pleased to find that blogging has already fostered these sorts of conventional networks. For instance BlogHer, an annual f2f conference on blogging, emerged from simple connections made between women on their own, individual blogs. BlogHer has evolved into a sizeable community of women writers. The BlogHer conference is as much about seminars on feminism and workshops on using Photoshop as it is about reinforcing the virtual into the place-based. Another example of blog networks evolving (or succumbing?) to physical meetings is that of the Chicago RBFers. The RBF (or “Running Blog Family”) is supported by completerunning.com, a site dedicated to issues of running and racing. Any blogger can join request his blog be added to the list (which numbers 1023 at the time of this writing). In the summer of 2006, a group of RBFers based in Chicago began periodical, informal meet-ups at local eateries. The social capital that emerges from “virtual” connections is as “real” as those that involve closely shared geography. Therefore, there are important implications for studying network literacies that extend beyond blogging and other Web 2.0 applications. That is, I expect that my research will uncover that network literacy and related practices don’t only exist in electronic genres—I expect network literacy to open a discussion concerning the anticipated rhetorical paradigm shift that many composition and rhetoric scholars argue is happening now.
From literary theory, the discussion concerning the roles of authors and audiences is ongoing. In his essay “The Death of the Author,” Barthes argued that authors as we defined them (and still, for the most part, as they are defined currently), are merely “scriptors” that do not exist before the text itself is written. Barthes argued that authorship and literature are a function of capitalist ideology (143). Ongoing discussion of intellectual property illustrate that things like money and competition still motivate definitions of authorship; however, if we consider the Creative Commons (CC) licenses that some bloggers post to characterize their approach to intellectual property, we see one way in which this conventional definition and its supporting ideological structure is shifting. The CC offers a non-commercial share-and-share-alike license, which essentially allows “consumers” of information (text, image, etc) to re-use, re-publish, mash-up and mix the original content, as long as the new content is licensed under a similar agreement: it can’t be sold, and must be shared. Barthes’ early insight that “text is not a line of words releasing a single…meaning…but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146) is more radical than the mission of Creative Commons, which works to create a more “flexible” layer of copyright law so that intellectual property can be reasonably shared and re-mixed. In other words, CC does not completely espouse the “anarchic freedom” of “nothing’s original”; however, its licenses appear to be conceptually linked to much of what Barthes posits. For instance, three of the four licenses allow specifically for sharing and remixing (or clashing and blending) of content.
Methodology
Social Network Theory and Small-world Networks
In order to develop a theory of network literacy that allows us to describe networked writers and to think about how writers behave in highly connected environments, my initial work will be to narrow my subject-pool from the dangerously nebulous (and innumerable) “mommy-bloggers” into a field more approachable. In order to do so, I will be borrowing from social network theory and its data collection tools, as well as the small-world network model as described by Duncan Watts in Six Degrees. Each of these systems provides me with vocabulary to position mom blogs in relation to one another, and allow me to ground my subject pool selection on substantial network models rather than random searches.
My study corpus will comprise a small-world model. Popularly known as “six degrees of separation,” this model explains the ways in which networks manifest redundancy or clustering, and that in spite of this clustering, networks still are able to connect individual nodes that are seemingly disconnected. Duncan Watts explains, “[t]he claim of the small-world phenomenon…states that I can get a message to anyone, even if they have absolutely nothing in common with me at all” (41). As sociologist Granovetter found in the 70s, it is often the connections made across clusters that are the most useful: “Paradoxically,…it is not your close friends who are of most use to you. Because they know many of the same people you do, and may often be exposed to similar information, they are rarely the ones who can help you leap into a new environment…it tends to be the casual acquaintances who are the useful ones because they can give you information you would never otherwise have received” (Watts 49). The connections across clusters are called weak ties (Granovetter). As I explain below, it is these weak ties that connect the blogs that comprise the study corpus.
Social network theory assumes that “small scale interaction becomes translated into large scale patterns” (Granovetter 1360), and provides a theoretical model, or a guiding vocabulary of terms, that I can use to narrow the subject pool. For instance, “strong [interpersonal] ties” can be measured by “a…combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and…reciprocal services” (1361). Further, “mutual choice” can also be an indicator of a “strong tie” (1364). These quasi-quantifiable terms like intimacy and reciprocal services are visible components in a network of bloggers. And the nature of the blog as a computer-mediated communication tool allows writers to develop these strong ties as Granovetter describes them; however, in trying to compile a useable collection of texts to study, to begin the kind of close textual analysis necessary to, for instance, determine whether “mutual confiding” exists would be prohibitively time-consuming. Therefore, I plan to initially use only two of Granovetter’s strong tie gauges; this will preserve the integrity of the assembly by assuring those blogs that remain in the subject pool are indeed highly connected to one another. This connectivity assures me that the study corpus is indeed networked in the sense that the writers’ and readers’ roles are shared and constantly shifting within that community.
The two components from social network theory I’ll apply in assembling the collection of blogs are “reciprocal services” and “mutual choices.” One function of blogs is that writers are able to, and often do, link in two directions. Writers can post outward links to other writers; that is, in a blog entry or on the main index (front page) of the site, the blogger can create a direct path to another blogger that readers can easily follow by “clicking through.” Most often these outbound links appear in a semi-static “blogroll” or list of bloggers the writer endorses or reads regularly. In addition, some blog applications afford the added dimension of “trackbacks” or incoming links, where a blogger can essentially post a link to her own blog on someone else’s site. Bloggers often do this when they want to respond (on their own site) to what another writer has posted, and the trackback provides a link to that response.
These linking practices provide a map for me to trace the ways in which bloggers self-select in connecting to one another. That is, bloggers sometimes will construct and maintain their blogrolls based on who is linking to them. In other words, a link can be seen as a gesture of appreciation: “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” At the same time, however, links also operate in a more conventional manner, where many bloggers link to the same popular writers, who often do not use blogrolls or post many outbound links. Through Technorati (technorati.com), a service that tracks the links between blogs, I can search for blogs that self-describe using tags like “motherhood” or “parenting” and then rank them based on their “authority” or number of incoming links.
Once I construct a list of most popular mom blogs, I’ll begin to work through them to find the highest ranking of the group that also publishes a blogroll (outward links to other bloggers), and this blog will serve as the starting point for the compilation of my pool. I will not begin with the most-linked blog (the search consistently returns Heather Armstrong’s dooce.com) because it has no semi-static list of outbound links. Therefore, while dooce certainly exhibits a “mutual choice” that other bloggers make, Armstrong does not offer the “reciprocal services” in terms of linking back to her readers. I cannot begin with her blog and follow her links to describe a small-world network; beginning with dooce would not produce a network with a significant “clustering coefficient” (Watts 77). In other words, while Armstrong’s blog might be heavily connected, those connections are, for the most part, only running in one direction: towards her. Though dooce is a hub with over 5,000 other bloggers providing links in, it doesn’t provide those readers with ways of connecting with or between one another.
Development of the Project:
Once I assemble the study corpus, I’ll apply content analysis, in which I read each text carefully, working to identify the rhetorical stance and strategies of the writers and to determine which exhibit certain characteristics of connectivity such as longevity, connected discussion, reliable readership, and consistency. Possible coding features will include those of both fine granularity, where I notice and track moves such as the purposeful use of hyperbole for shock value, as well as more macro-rhetorical moves that occur over time (and textual spaces), such as the treatment of a “misstep” where the writer works to remedy a firestorm of negative comments in response to a controversial post.
I hypothesize that close examination of the study corpus will reveal practices of network literacy that I will then be able to describe. I’ll approach the blogs-as-texts by drawing heavily from Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT) as a driving theoretical methodology and by relying on content analysis for the systematic material coding of the blog posts. ANT requires that I approach my texts as performative traces of action—action which is the result of a network of people, objects, and ideas informing (or constitutes) a particular actor (here, a particular blogger); the blogger not only acts within the network but also as a product of the network (Latour 46). I anticipate that a theory of network literacy will acknowledge a similar concept in which the writer is both creator of and created by the network in which she writes (similar to Barthes’ theory concerning the death of the author). Careful examination of the texts will include not only the textual components for rhetorical analysis but also the tools the writers use in the construction of their texts, to include such features as an external photo and image hosting service (like PhotoBucket or Flickr), visitor or stat counters, tag clouds, embedded video, merchandising, blogads, etc. The construction of these three major data components (which writers exhibit connectivity, the data gathered from content analysis, and the overview of which writers use which external tools) will allow me to, through juxtaposition, identify whether any of the components are correlative. For instance, I extrapolate that those writers who embed video might also have a fairly high comment count per post. Also, my experience indicates that those writers who offer merchandise sometimes use hyperbole and/or shock (both in their writing AND as part of the merchandise itself).
Applications
Why should we consider important the ways in which these writers perform, construct their identities, and connect with other writers? What insight can we gain? The writing classroom has something to take away from these writers who write near-daily; who write as part of an explicit larger discussion; who write to make sense of the world around them; who write in sometimes “unsafe” topical territory; who explore, examine, experiment with their writing and the composition of visual texts; who write without apparent external compulsion. I hope to make some preliminary comments not necessarily on how blogging should be used in the classroom, but how we can learn about the act of writing itself as an inarguably social act from the ways that bloggers conduct/construct themselves and their texts. That is, the application of this study is not in an argument to implement blogs as a panacea for the writing classroom; instead, the argument, as I see, will emerge as further evidence for existing theories concerning authorship, intellectual property, collaborative writing, mash-ups, and the march of the discipline of composition and rhetoric into the next cultural paradigm shift.
Tentative Schedule of Chapters:
The following is a tentative breakdown of the chapters which outline briefly how the sections will work as a unified project:
Introduction: The first portion of the project will argue that an examination of networked writers and a definition of network literacy can enrich our understanding of writing as a social act, and must be treated as such in all contexts, from professional to student writing.
Chapter 1: “Preliminary Definitions of the Network” will introduce the project by examining current scholarship on networked writing and the ways this research fits into discussions of literacy, especially as it pertains to issues of authorship and the construction of identity. This chapter will draw specifically from the work of Gregory Ulmer and his theory of electracy as well as Stuart Selber’s tripartite definition of computer literacy. The attendant survey of scholarship will center on theories developed by Jill Walker, Collin Brooke, Marcel O’Gorman, Duncan Watts, David Weinberger, and Deborah Brandt.
Chapter 2: “The Writers that Won’t Be Still: Constructing a Method to Examine Networked Writers” will forge a multiple methodology as a basis for the study, drawing from sociology scholars such as Bruno Latour and Mark Granovetter, network studies research like that of Strogatz and Watts, and traditional analytical methods from composition and rhetoric such as content analysis in the style of Thomas Huckin. This chapter will also consider Ulmer’s method of heuretics and methodologies constructed for recent scholarship on weblogs, such as that of Clancy Ratliff, Susan Herring, and Clay Shirky.
Chapter 3: “Following the Traces, Naming the Trends.” This chapter will narrate the course of the data collection as I examine and analyze the weblogs. I’ll discuss the emergence of codes and initial patterns, including examples of each, and offer the preliminary findings of the project.
Chapter 4: “What is Network Literacy?” will speak to the findings of the study, (re)situating the patterns of findings within the discussion of network studies and Stuart Selber’s framework for understanding digital literacies. This chapter will offer implications for roles of the author/reader and attempt to define network literacy as it applies to writer/participants in Web 2.0.
Chapter 5: “Network Literacy and the Writing Classroom” will address the context of the writing classroom. The theory of network literacy developed in this dissertation seeks to complicate and clarify prior scholarship of digital and visual literacies as defined by scholars such as Anne Wysocki, Cynthia Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Richard Selfe, Cynthia Haynes, Eric Crump, and Richard Lanham. The dissertation will end with speculation about how the classroom might be re-imagined in light of network literacy as this project defines it.
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