public discourse?
I'm doing a cursory search through my books right now on the words "public" and "social." Ironically (or not), this search is prompted not by diss work particularly, but instead by a dire need to revise my statement of teaching philosophy. Every time I sit to revise the statement, the same three ideas swirl in my head, but without much purchase:
writing is/as social
writing is/as public
writing as a mode of learning and exploring, as well as a mode of communication--both of which are public/social
So I'm looking for an epigraph of sorts, or some insight, and what I'm finding is that for composition studies, "public" doesn't necessarily mean shared or social in the ways I often find myself meaning it. Instead, public means civic. It means "for the greater public good." Public means democratic. Public means consensus.
For Paula Mathieu in _Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition_, the trope is "taking it [writing] to the streets."
“At the heart of this call to the streets is a desire for writing to enter civic debates; for street life to enter classrooms through a focus on local, social issues; for students to hit the streets by performing service, and for teachers and scholars to conduct activist or community-grounded research” (1-2).
Christian Weisser in _Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere_ talks about how the public is a thing outside the classroom, something that we can use as a model for the classroom, and as a place that our students can "compose more meaningful significant work" (23), but the classroom itself isn't a public space.
_Public Works: Student Writing as Public Text_ (eds Isaacs and Jackson) catalog ethical and logistic issues contingent with taking student writing out of the classroom and making it "public."
What I'm getting from this cursory search is that either I don't really know what public means, or that I'll have to work to think more carefully through the dichotomy of "public/private" in order to talk about public writing and the work that network writing does. I (probably erroneously) think of the terms private and personal as similar enough that public works as an opposite for both.
And maybe "public" isn't really what I mean. I mean shared; I mean not hidden; I mean outside one person's head and into the air, onto the page, onto the screen, into the ether. I don't (really) mean toward action, or for a greater good, or for social change. Instead, I see (networked) writers themselves as the end point, as the object of change--that in the making of public one's experiences and ideas, the transformation happens in the writer as well as the network/public.
Maybe the opposite of personal IS NETWORK. Maybe.