Networky

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Introduction: Rhizome

Bruno Latour: Networks, Societies, Spheres

I was going to write about the two articles for which I’m not leading the discussion tonight, but after reading them, I’ve decided to focus on the two that were least comprehensible to me.  I hope that by framing them in terms of something else I’m reading, I’ll begin to make some sense out of them.

For the last two weeks I’ve been reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and, perhaps because it’s very fresh in my mind,  both Latour and Deleuze/Guattari brought up concepts that made me think of the story of Henrietta Lacks. In 1951, she died of cancer and her cancerous cells, called HeLa, were harvested and proved to be intensely valuable to cell culturists and other researchers. The book includes a narrative about Henrietta and her family, woven together with science and ethics and deception and profit.

I can’t pretend I understood much of what Deleuze and Guattari were writing about. I do, however, understand rhizomes to a certain extent. Kudzu comes to mind or, more positively (in the U.S. South anyway), iris and ginger. Plants whose reproductive structure travels and spreads and can be divided to create new plants. Some, like kudzu, become invasive because there is no single reproductive organ and, as D & G note, “a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (9). While a root system can be traced, a rhizomic system splits and grows and travels.

The HeLa cells did just that. Most cells split a finite number of times and die off, but HeLa cells, being cancerous, became immortal and were divided into test tubes and shipped all over the world for research purposes. Over time, they changed or were altered but continued to grow. They also were particularly agile and managed to contaminate other cell cultures. This particular system was not linear but multiplicitous. While there is a particular entry point, an original cell culture, it has long since been subsumed into a mass of growth and divergent research.

Similarly, Latour discusses the meanings of networks and the idea that nothing is self-contained, that something “looks contained within itself with well-delineated edges and limits; then something happens, a strike, an accident, a catastrophe, and suddenly you discover swarms of entities that seem to have been there all along but were not visible before and that appear in retrospect necessary for its sustenance” (797). Latour views a network as, in part, “the unexpected beings necessary for any entity to exist” (799).

Skloot recognized that HeLa consisted of many “unexpected beings,” and brought all of them together in a single narrative. She details the activity system of the cells and their ability to reproduce endlessly which allows them to interact with the system of biological science which contains numerous systems of research and discourse. Peripherally, but not unimportantly, there is Henrietta Lacks the person and the family she left behind when her body died. Since her cancer cells remained alive, however, the family eventually found out about their existence and began to interact unhappily with the science community again. With the story, the actor-network becomes apparent. Henrietta Lacks was first reduced to her parts/cells/attributes, then, as information became known about her and her family and her doctors, she began to grow again until she (the person) was part of an entire network of research, family and discourse. All of the parts are interdependent and, with information, the voids between all of the seemingly disparate parts are starting to shrink.

Shoulda Coulda Woulda

Catherine Schryer and Philippa Spoel: “Genre Theory, Health-Care Discourse, and Professional Identity Formation”

Schryer and Spoel introduce the terms ‘regulated’ and ‘regularized’ to our lexicon. Since regulated resources are the ones that are explicitly learned, recognized and/or required, I’ve been thinking of them as the formal, traditional genres, the ones that are defined so that they fit into categories. The regularized resources seem more closely related to Rhetorical Genre Studies because they are learned in context (situated cognition) and arise from tacit understanding rather than explicit direction. What I thought was particularly interesting is that Schryer and Spoel use these terms to refer to different uses of the same resource.

Like Carol Berkenkotter, they discuss the influence certain genres have on the formation of a professional identity. Berkenkotter focuses more on the way a manual influences the diagnostic vocabulary of a profession by serving almost as a translation tool. Schryer and Spoel look at two different resources and examine the influence they have on the professional behavior of doctors and midwives.

The case presentations Schryer discusses are formal tools medical students use to relate case histories to their faculty mentors. The structure and order of a case presentation is specific, but during the course of their presentations, students are guided in their use of language and even in the emphasis given to certain aspects of the presentation. Over time, students learn a professional language and move from seeing “any form of uncertainty as a personal deficit” to using “modal auxiliaries, such as can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would and adverbs, such as perhaps, maybe, and likely [that] ‘safely introduce levels of assuredness into the case presentation’” (264).

When I worked for a whitewater rafting company, part of what I learned and later taught was how to use degrees of promise. The absolutes came with definite language and had to do with the ordering of events: first you’ll do this, then this, than that. Anything that was possible, however unlikely, had to be tempered with an allowance for risk and usually had to do with assuaging fear or discussing the possibility of injury or death.  The words “you won’t get hurt” coming from anyone’s mouth was an invitation for every senior employee within earshot to descend and perform damage control. While the use of language was explicit in some manuals and in the release forms, the comfortable use of it came with time and indoctrination.

Spoel’s research had more to do with the ways the emerging healthcare community of midwives used the regulated genre of a policy binder to establish their position within the established medical profession. The midwives’ practice of informed choice is a communicative means of placing the decision-making power in the hands of the patient. However, the policy binder “stresses the midwife’s responsibility to other health professionals (not to the woman) so that they can together ‘plan’ the woman’s care”. 

Furthermore, since informed choice “appears within the [College of Midwives of Ontario]’s regulations as a diverse and inconsistently articulated practice”, there are challenges to knowing how to interpret the policies. Because some of the regulated policy is open to interpretation, midwives have an opportunity to regularize the genre of the policy manual through discussion of “the definition of information and decision making and the place of advice and explicit influence in the caregiving relationship” (269).

Momentum of Form

Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff: Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy, Chapter 9

Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd: “Questions for genre theory from the blogosphere”

Soon after the first day of this class, before I was considering almost everything in terms of genre, some coworkers and I went on a field trip to The Greenville News, to find out how they’re adapting to the digital world. Just last week, the newspaper in my former hometown announced that it would cease daily print publication. I have never had a daily newspaper subscription, though my parents always have and I still flip straight to the (ever shrinking) funny pages if I’m at their house for breakfast.

Both of today’s readings take care to mention the differences between genre and media. The news article is the genre, the newspaper is the medium. Like many people, I’m interested in the news and I tend to get it in bits and pieces online or on the radio. I honestly don’t care how I hear about world events, as long as I’m not completely in the dark. I am interested in the content, not the format. Given that news format has changed over human history and that the daily newspaper is a relatively recent innovation, it’s not surprising that online news is edging the paper version out.

Miller and Shepherd offer several compelling arguments in favor of the public affairs blog, my favorite of which is that electronic media “reprise several qualities of oral cultures, including simultaneity of action and reaction, widespread access, and emphasis on feeling over analysis, and a weakening of centralized authority” (282). Bawarshi and Reiff say something similar when they write that researchers are interested in “how digital contexts for communication alter access to genres, reconfigure constraints (including time constraints), and bring about new forms of collaboration” (161). Put that way, it’s almost surprising that any print publication dependent on timeliness still survives.

Politics and disasters helped foment public affairs blogs, as did “dissatisfaction with the mainstream media” (M&S 275). While readers of The Times Picayune are bemoaning the impending loss of their daily print paper, I can’t help but think that it was that same paper’s ability to blog that helped earn it a Pulitzer for its Hurricane Katrina coverage. I was only one of the many who practically lived on that blog during the time when no other news media could get in or out of the city. The Greenville News isn’t ceasing the daily print run yet, but it’s shrinking and they are focusing their reporting resources on unique, local news. Everything else comes from USA Today.

It seems that the genres aren’t changing as quickly as the media, but that, as Bawarshi and Reiff write, “new media may be triggering the modification of existing genres” (167). While we didn’t read Miller and Shepherd’s blog study, Bawarshi and Reiff mention their claim that “the blog is a complex rhetorical hybrid with genetic imprints from prior genres” (164). Miller and Shepherd also remark that “genre change problematizes precisely what makes genre generic” (264). In other words, if genre is recurrent, typified and relatively stable (or “stabilized-enough” or “stabilized-for-now”), how does that reconcile with seemingly rapid change? The antecedents seem to be part of the answer, though I suspect that the proliferation of technology also helps. When something hits quickly and spreads like wildfire, it doesn’t have to have a long shelf life to have an impact.

P.S. I haven't forgotten Schryer and Spoel - they'll be addressed in the next day or so. Hopefully tomorrow.

Power and Status

Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff: Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy, Chapter 6

Not for the first time in this class, I’m reminded of the cultural analysis we did in Workplace. Stories, language, documents, organizational structure, adaptation and change - it all fits in with genre and activity theory. Cultural analysis was why I thought we should ask Dr. R. for stories and organizational background as part of our information gathering. All Bawarshi and Reiff had to do to drive the similarities home was drop in a little Bourdieu and some cultural capital.

I had never thought of genres carrying any cultural capital, but of course they do. In a multiple-person activity system, the person who creates a spreadsheet and a workflow is probably of a different status than the person who enters provided data into the spreadsheet. But the data entry clerk may modify the workflow, if not the actual spreadsheet, in order to conform it to their personal needs.

Bawarshi and Reiff refer to status several times throughout this chapter so I’ve decided to focus on that. First, there is a discussion of Catherine Schryer’s research on differences between two veterinary school genres which notes that “these differences... are associated with status and power within the discipline, and as such they position their users [researchers or clinicians] at different levels of hierarchy within veterinary medicine” (81). The division of labor in an activity system also contributes to hierarchy/status (97). Finally, though it might be a bit of a stretch, Bawarshi and Reiff refer to Thomas Edison’s ultimate marketing job of using newspapers to establish himself as a celebrity, demonstrate the need for electric light, and lend credence to his work. If Edison and his colleagues hadn’t “made incandescent light and central power... a social and discursive reality” (101), in part by establishing their expert status through text, then the outcome might have been very different or at least less dramatic.

To continue on the theme of status and cultural capital, Bawarshi and Reiff note that “meta-genres [the guidebooks, manuals and/or discourse that explain the rules and language of a discipline] help teach and stabilize uptakes, and knowledge of meta-genres can signal insider and outsider status” (94). Again, not something I would have thought of when thinking of genre, but a meta-genre, or at least the knowledge contained in a meta-genre, would demarcate between those-who-know and those-who-don’t. Power and status can come from this kind of insider knowledge and also, as they say, serve as a signal to others.

In conclusion, the authors write that “genres are part of how individuals participate in complex relations with one another in order to get things done, and how newcomers learn to construct themselves and participate effectively within activity systems” (104). It follows that part of the “effective participation” involves figuring out their status within the system as well as identifying the status of others within the system.

Small Change

Malcolm Gladwell: "Small Change"
  
I wanted to talk to my mother before I commented on this article. After a bit of cell phone cat-and-mouse, I got in touch with her on Monday. I wanted to know when she went to Biloxi as a college student, who she went with and how she found out about the program she joined. Before I spoke to her, I was reasonably certain she wasn’t part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, since I’d never heard of it before reading Gladwell’s essay.

Mom graduated from Elmhurst College in Illinois in 1963 and went to Biloxi on a mission trip that summer. She credits both the college and the trip with changing her worldview, which was that of a fairly sheltered young woman from a blue-collar family in St. Louis. She chose the trip not because her close friends were going, but because “she wanted to serve” and because Biloxi was close to New Orleans and she was going to be in a wedding there in August. Basically, she was young and idealistic and had a ride as far as New Orleans and $50. She mostly tutored the children of poor white shrimpers, though she went once a week with the church to work with black children.

The mission director was an integrationist, sometimes to the point of forgetting his “real” mission with the shrimpers. He was willing to take chances and sometimes bricks were thrown at the mission. Through him, my mom met a black physician who was involved with the NAACP and went on bus trip to the Gulfport beach with a group of black children; they were met by the police and had to return home, even though they had sought permission beforehand. The Biloxi beach was, of course, whites only.

I wanted to know if my mom had strong ties to the civil rights movement and if she considered herself a risk-taker. The answer was no on both counts, but she came away from the experience with a different point of view and a better understanding of people. She said she wouldn’t have left the mission, even if she was uncomfortable sometimes, because she felt strongly that she was doing good and also that she “didn’t know enough to be scared.” The church was her tie; she heard about the trip through her college which was part of the United Church of Christ network.

As much as I agree with Gladwell on many of his points (I very much share his opinion of the Shirky example which I thought was appalling when I read it the first time), I don’t agree that social media defines activism any more than I think risk-taking defines activism. People have different comfort levels, different breaking points, and different relationships to various movements. I suppose part of what Gladwell objects to is the credit given to social media, the idea that “without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy.”

He also criticizes campaigns that are considered successful because they don’t ask too much of participants. It’s true that there are a lot of them and that some are a bit ridiculous. But I also think that knowledge and awareness lend a lot of strength to a movement; the more people know and understand the less likely they are to criticize and maybe, just maybe some of those people will join in a more meaningful way. Social networks can communicate over distance and to a large number of people and do it quickly. If risk-taking isn’t necessary to convey a point, do the means matter? Small change is still change.

Only Girls Wear Princess Costumes

Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff: Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy, Chapters 1 and 5

Time to add more terminology to the mix. First, though, Bawarshi and Reiff provide a clear overview of genre and genre theory, noting that, in information-based economies, genre “helps us understand and prepare students for the increasingly specialized communicative needs of disciplines, professions, and everyday life” (5). As one of those students, I am beginning to agree, as I am paying much more attention to the various communication methods in my life, from the hardware to the message format. 

Many of my choices aren’t really choices at all, but are dictated by what’s expected in a particular situation, from brief text messages proposing a meeting time to polite emails that don’t lay any blame but suggest that someone wasn’t paying attention when they dumped armloads of plastic wrap in the paper recycling and would they please rectify the situation? In the case of the latter, I would have been less polite if I had been the supervisor and more direct if I had any idea who had been careless or lazy. Also, I might have gotten results. At any rate, Bawarshi and Reiff phrase it well when they say that the developing view of genre “recognizes genres as both organizing and generating kinds of texts and social actions, in complex, dynamic relation to one another” (4).

In chapter 5, Bawarshi and Reiff examine the background of the Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) approach to genre, the sociological approach we have been thrashing through with the help of Bazerman, Berkenkotter, Devitt, et al. Our other readings have referenced Carolyn Miller and, to a lesser extent, Kenneth Burke and Lloyd Bitzer; Bawarshi and Reiff explain why.

From Burke we get the ‘new’ rhetoric, which is much more dynamic and collaborative than the ‘old’ rhetoric with its stress upon deliberate design and persuasive speech. Bitzer brings the rhetorical situation/context into the foreground by defining it as the “distinguishing characteristic of rhetorical discourse” (63) and by his acknowledgement of recurring situations the induce recurrent responses. Bawarshi and Reiff notes that “recurring situations give rise to rhetorical forms (such as genres)… [which can] come to have a power of their own in shaping how individuals recognize and respond to like situations” (64).

Ten years later, Campbell and Jamieson begin exploring genre as something reactive, a “’fusion’ or ‘constellation’ of substantive and stylistic forms that emerge in response to [emphasis mine] a recurring situation” (65). Carolyn Miller takes all of this and adds in sociologist Alfred Schutz’s ideas of typifications, or “modes of how ‘someone’ traditionally behaves or is expected to behave in certain situations” (68), in order to come up with the “understanding of genres as socially derived, intersubjective, rhetorical typifications that help us recognize and act within recurrent situations” (69).

Bawarshi and Reiff also bring the early 20^th century of phenomenology into the mix. Since I have trouble separating the word ‘phenomenon’ from things like phosphorescence and the Aurora borealis, I had to visit Wikipedia for a reminder that there are social phenomena as well as atmospheric phenomena. In this case, phenomenology has to do with intentionality, “an act of making something available to our consciousness” (66). In RGS, “genres bring texts and situations to our consciousness”. How we perceive things has to do with how we “make sense of our lives and social activities within the life-world” (67), i.e. our everyday world. Our social knowledge, contends Miller (followed by Bazerman and Devitt), is what makes it possible to recognize a situation and adapt our generic responses accordingly.   

Documentation Analysis and Social Tagging

Dorothy Winsor: “Genre and Activity Systems: The Role of Documentation…”

By examining the genre of written documentation in the context of engineering firm activity systems, Winsor explores issues of documentary reality and related issues of power and agency. The four men she followed “were in positions where they had to represent multiple and sometimes conflicting interest to one another and keep those interests connected into a smoothly functioning system” (211). As a result, the documentation they maintained served two primary purposes: protecting themselves and prompting others to take action.

As entry-level employees, the study participants occasionally documented their actions as a way to “shape others’ perceptions of their own actions” (210). According to Winsor, they “used documentation to exercise agency in shaping the activity systems in which they participated” (208), or to show that they are responsible contributors to the network of which they are a part.

The employees were more likely to use documentation to “shape the actions of others” (210), which sounds rather sinister at first. However, Winsor explains that because these are entry-level employees, they are low on the totem pole. Collaborative documentation serves to regulate “future actions by mutual consent, giving that mutual consent a more durable and, hence, stronger form” (212), while memos describing discussions and proposed actions help to shift some of the burden of responsibility, again by providing a durable record of individual responsibilities. Memos, too, could be copied to supervisors as a means of strengthening their messages.

The documentation used by an activity system tends to conform to certain conventions which are determined either explicitly or tacitly by the system: politeness, the elimination of specific details that are not considered relevant or appropriate to the end result, a predefined format (or even a form to be filled in), and more. These attendant conventions ensure that a particular type of reality/documentation is produced. This action “carries with it the potential for both modifying and maintaining activity systems” (204).

Since we now have started interviewing and collecting texts for our activity system project, I find it interesting to note how many documents are shared and the particular purposes they serve. Much of our activity system is textual, consisting of manuscripts, galleys, readers’ reports, emails and spreadsheets. However, documentation of the type described by Winsor is minimal and introspective; participants in the system seem to document for themselves rather than for others.

Stefanie Panke and Birgit Gaiser: “With My Head Up in the Clouds”

My impressions of this article are fragmented.

1. Panke and Gaiser cite a study by K. Lee that found that “social presence enhances cooperative user behavior in a social tagging environment” (328). Several archives have experimented with social tagging as a way to collect metadata, especially on materials about which little is known and I recently read an article (perhaps if I’d tagged it in Delicious, I could cite it properly now) postulating that the reason tagging initiatives at individual institutions often don’t result in usable metadata is because the user range for most libraries and archives simply isn’t wide enough. The Lee study would seem to reinforce that idea.
2. “…Compartmentalized thinking in knowledge organization is neither necessary nor desirable” (321). Paper data demands compartmentalization, though indexes and cross-references attempt to drill tiny holes through some of the barriers. The explosion of digital data offers a lot of opportunity for access. I had never thought of tags as dynamic links, but the concept makes a lot of sense. Whether the reality makes sense is another thing, but I suspect we’re getting there.
3. Social taggers “developed personal rules for assigning tags to keep track of their vocabulary” (340). It’s possible that every time I see the word “rules” from here on out, I will think of Engestrom’s activity theory triangle.
4. Tags are not updated and tagged content is frequently not accessed after it is tagged indicating that tagging serves a particular purpose at a particular time (345). Every so often, I click on a previously forgotten tag in my Delicious list to find out what the heck I thought was so interesting. I am frequently disappointed. This makes me wonder if the ease of tagging is actually one of its flaws.