Composing Spaces

Last night my colleague, Tara Timberman, texted me, telling me to go to CNN and watch Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the NAACP. I’m glad I did. The speech is excellent—a multimodal text that yokes together cultural critique, linguistics, learning theory, music theory, and classification theory. (The coverage of the speech as it was re-aired on CNN was atrocious. CNN cut away to commercial, it seemed, at exactly the points in the speech where cohesion was an asset, where cutting and distraction took away from the overall effect and affect.  CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was horrific, doltish, a deer caught in headlights, clearly unsure of how to respond to the speech’s academic grounding, and pedantically labeling the speech at one point "entertaining" as he jumped over the text and language and ideas to tautological discussions of the effects on Obama’s campaign.)

Below in three parts is the speech, uploaded to YouTube by someone who was recording their TV via video camera. The part that most interests me about the speech is this:

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as somehow being deficient. Christians saw Jews as being deficient. Catholics saw Protestants as being deficient. Presbyterians saw Pentecostals as being deficient.

Folks who like to holler in worship saw folk who like to be quiet as deficient. And vice versa.

Whites saw black as being deficient. It was none other than Rudyard Kipling who saw the "White Man’s Burden" as a mandate to lift brown, black, yellow people up to the level of white people as if whites were the norm and black, brown and yellow people were abnormal subspecies on a lower level or deficient.

Europeans saw Africans as deficient. Lovers of George Friedrich Handel and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart saw lovers of B.B. King and Frankie Beverly and Maze as deficient. Lovers of Marian Anderson saw lovers of Lady Day and Anita Baker as deficient. Lovers of European cantatas—Comfort ye in the glory, the glory of the Lord—Lovers of European cantatas saw lovers of common meter—I love the Lord, He heard my cry — they saw them as deficient.

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We established arbitrary norms and then determined that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different. Over the past 50 years, thanks to the scholarship of dozens of expert in many different disciplines, we have come to see just how skewed, prejudiced and dangerous our miseducation has been.

Miseducation. Miseducation incidentally is not a Jeremiah Wright term. It’s a word coined by Dr. Carter G. Woodson over 80 years ago. Sounds like he talked a hate speech, doesn’t it? Now, analyze that. Two brilliant scholars and two beautiful sisters, both of whom hail from Detroit in the fields of education and linguistics, Dr. Janice Hale right here at Wayne State University, founder of the Institute for the study of the African-American child. and Dr. Geneva Smitherman formerly of Wayne State University now at Michigan State University in Lansing. Hail in education and Smitherman in linguistics. Both demonstrated 40 years ago that different does not mean deficient. Somebody is going to miss that.

Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different. In fact, Dr. Janice Hale was the first writer whom I read who used that phrase. Different does not mean deficient. Different is not synonymous with deficient. It was in Dr. Hale’s first book, "Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style." Is Dr. Hale here tonight? We owe her a debt of gratitude. Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks.

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin.

Here, Wright is touching on the the primary tenants of classification theory: that how we classify structures how we compose and act in the worlds around us. Bowker and Star (1999) in their important book, Sorting Things Out, define "classification is a spatial, temporal, or spacio-temporal segmentation of the world. A "classification system" is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work—bureaucratic or knowledge production" (p. 10). Wright’s list of perceived deficiencies of the Other and his discussion of US education pedagogy showcases real-world examples of how our perceptions of the Other shapes now only how we view them, but the policies we create. Labels such as EMH, and diseases such as ADD, are social constructs, boxes in which we locate those who do not conform to some pre-set standard that is often based on faulty, if not overtly racist, classist, ageist, and sexist assumptions.

In Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact Fleck (1939) points out that classification studies are studies in the history of ideas (facts are ideas). His unit of analysis is the concept of syphilis—a term for an illness that is essentially a socially constructed idea that has evolved over time. Similar studies have looked at the social construction of HIV/AIDS. The US is currently engaged in discussions of the concept of marriage. Wright’s attempt to redefine as "different" how we interact with those once perceived as "deficient" is significant because he is asking us to embrace each other by embracing our differences—and differences historically situated are not classifications.

Readers of this blog will recall posts from several months ago that touched upon Martin Kevorkian’s fascinating book, Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America. Jim Brown pointed me to it and I decided to add it to the syllabus of my graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities. We are reading it this week. The book is based on Kevorkian’s astute observation that black males have, since the mid-1980s, been cast in the role of the technician or computer systems analyst. Think Miles Theo in Die Hard (the guy who has to break into the vault) and Ving Rhames in the Mission Impossible series (and, though not mentioned, the same kind of role in Entrapment). One might also think of the entire Orc population of Lord of the Rings as fitting within this representation.

In chapter 2, "Lost Worlds" Kevorkian begins looking at the representations of black children in corporate and philanthropic advertisements and annual reports. He locates their images within the narrative of the digital divide which he see as "the desire for [the fusion of the young black body with new computer technology]" (p. 39). He observes that in

popular usage, the phrase "digital divide" tends to serve as a polite shorthand from which explicit reference to race has been omitted in describing the gap between technological have and have-nots. Of course, the degree of technological access does correlate to a range of categories, including geography, income, and ethnicity. But attempts to depict the access situation in its true complexity run up against the strength of established perception: when people hear "digital divide," they tend to think in terms of black and white.
    People think that way about the gap because that is, quite literally, how they see it. In image after published image, the face of that gap is black. (p. 39)

Kevorkian continues for several pages referencing advertisements and annual reports that showcase the black child with a computer. His examples include The Computers for Learning Project, IBM, EDS, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft. He argues that the "digital gap media campaigns suggest that the computer has been deployed in this fashion in part so as to cast the computer in a positive role. In these instances of tech-sector public relations, the affirmative action is technological: the placement of small colored people next to the machines forms as association for the advancement of computers" (p. 43). Reading that last phrase—"for the advancement of computers—I could not help but think of the One Laptop Per Child Give One Get One campaign and this image:

This image of a black child balancing a computer on her head is a recasting of the image of the black person balancing on her head a basket of food or crops or other essential item.  In it we see Kevorkian’s observations affirmed in a new setting. As well, the computer is now savior, providor of the new form of sustenance (propagated by all media in this country): information, knowledge, access. Information has become more necessary for survival than food.

Now, I must say that I am a tempered supporter of this program. I jumped at the opportunity to participate in the By One Give One campaign and am happy that a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda now has access to computing technologies. I am excited with how the program has progressed in certain countries, and I hope all nations embrace the open computing ideas upon which OLPC is founded. However, ever since reading Lila Abu-Lughod I am wary of asserting technologies on others.

Kevorkian’s text raises significant concerns about how the program is showcasing the computers in local environments on its web sites. The participation page of the OLPC Foundation illustrates the white-black rich-poor dyad of which Kevorkian suggests by having a photograph of Negroponte and another white male signing something and the three following images being of happy, dancing, healthy black children. The implication is, of course, cause and effect: the men signed the paper and the children became happy.

Other similar images abound. In all of them dark-skinned children are happily sitting at the computer, smiling the computer, staring intently at the computer. This is not just for geographic reasons. According to the web site, trial locations include non-African, Asian, and South American countries. Indeed, the United States is included as a trial country.

The OLPC program raises heated emotions on both sides of the issue: those that see it as the west thrusting its values on other cultures and those who is it as a benevolent attempt to bring technologies to children in countries that otherwise could never afford it. Indeed, a hotly contested and sometimes nasty discussion recently threaded on the techrhet list over this very issue. And though I support Negroponte’s goals, I have to wonder about the program overall when the web site is representing success in this way.

My graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities is currently working its way through Richard Landow’s tome, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. This is my first time making my way through the third edition (published in 2006). Though it is always nice to go back and visit Storyspace again, I pleased to see Landow discussing some newer, fascinating, and ultimately useful applications. The first of those applications is the TouchGraph Google Browser, which according to TouchGraph’s web site "reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites." In short, you enter a search string and, using a Java applet, the application maps related sites in clusters colored by site similarity. Here is the map of the string "Web 2.0":

You can learn about the web site represented by a particular sphere by clicking on it; information will appear in the upper-left box. Right click on a sphere to open the web site in a new tab.

One of the URLs I happened to open was to a wonderfully useful site I hadn’t heard of: Go2Web2.0. It is essentially as advertised: The Complete Web 2.0 Directory. Web 2.0 applications are listed by logo (which makes it a bit image heavy) and can be sorted according to preset tags. The range of applications is spectacular—and makes me wonder when we are going to reach the point of too much redundancy:

The March 2008 edition of Harper’s arrived today, and in it is a wonderful example of how internet technologies are not value neutral. Ginger Strand’s annotation "Keyword: Evil" (which Harper’s has made available for free online) spans two pages as she uses call-outs connected to an architectural schematic to dissect the energy-use implications of Google’s planned server farm site, The Dallas, which rests on the Columbia River in Oregon. Two screenshots of the article:

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I was reading the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine this morning and found an article called "Aerosol Art" which details a fascinating new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery called RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture (runs through October 26, 2008). The exhibit includes portraits and paintings of Hip Hop artists, film, poetry, and the one medium that really caught my attention: the graffiti art of taggers Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp. Jobyl Boone, the exhibit’s guest curator, argues that

graffiti tags function as self-portraits. "We want to present the notion that individuality and portraiture might not be someone’s face or body," she says. Conlon agrees: "Graffiti is based on choosing a name and making it as prolific as possible."

Two of Conlon and Hupp’s tags:

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Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, "Playing God in the Garden" (which I used to give to my first year writing students when I was at Rutgers and now give to my Engineering writing students here at Rowan), and others, talking about the ecological implications and benefits of considering nature from the point of view of the animals or plants being observed.

Particularly insightful about Pollen’s discussion is his observation that despite our acceptance of Darwinian evolution, when considering our relationship with nature,we are still Cartesians: it is either nature or us, not both together. Ironically, if we consider our relationship with corn from the corn’s point of view, our Cartesian approach to planting more and more corn (to fuel our cars and sweeten our beverages) benefits the corn more than any one of us: the more corn there is, the better it is for the corn (which, naturally, is in competition with other grasses and trees and humans for space).

His discussion of the important role of feces in symbiotic farming for the generation of excellent soil is illuminating when taken next to Frederick Kaufman’s discussion of the re-egineering of human waste in "Wasteland: A journey through the American cloaca" (subscription required) from the February 2008 issue of Harper’s. Kaufman goes to places where one never wants to bring their nose to show just how far removed we have positioned ourselves from our waste (and how large corporations are making billions off of it). The two—Pollan and Kaufman—present compelling arguments for taking a more ecological perspective to our observations of and work with nature.

Via Roy Tennant’s Current Cites, the latest edition of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology special section on folksonomies:

This special section of four articles plus a substantive introduction by the guest editor focus on user tagging and what has been called “folksonomies” — or user-created taxonomies. The articles are an interesting mix of simple explanations of why users tag, tag usage in Flickr, and others that seek to explain various tagging systems and how they may or may not be useful in retrieval.

We’ve been talking a bit about tagging and folksonomies in my Technologies and the Future of Writing module, and students have been slow to see the reason for tagging and the comprehending just what folksonomies are, and to be honest I have often found myself at a loss for explaining it to them. I’ve yet to read the articles included in this special edition, but I’m hoping that they—and especially the guest editors’ introduction—will help us gain a better understand the implications that folksonomies can have on classification systems and writing technologies.

Read/WriteWeb has a review of a new application by Radar Networks called Twine, which was announced on October 19, 2007 at the Web 2.09 Summit. The company describes Twine as “a revolutionary new service that helps you share, organize, and find information.” It is “a new service for sharing, organizing and finding information with people you trust. Use Twine to better leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your friends, colleagues, groups and teams. Twine ties it all together.”

Founder Nova Spivack tells Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb that “Twine will be ‘the first mainstream Semantic Web application.” MacManus praises Twine in his review (contains screen shots).

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Last weekend, after reflecting on the fact that I talk about it all the time with students regardless of what class I am teaching, I decided to take the plunge and get a Facebook account. According to the fascinating Wired article, “How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web’s Hottest Platform,” I was 1 of 1 million new users in the last week, and among the fastest growing user population:

As for those concerns that Facebook’s membership had peaked? Well, now
it’s signing up nearly 1 million new users a week. By the end of August
there were 36 million of them. And these aren’t just the tweens or
college kids you might suspect; the fastest-growing segment of Facebook
users is over 35, a group that represents 11 percent of all site users.
Total registrations have more than quadrupled over the previous year.
The number of employees has tripled, as has revenue. And venture
capitalists say that if Facebook were to go public today, investors
would value it at more than $5 billion — five times what Yahoo had been
prepared to pay.

To say that I have found Facebook intoxicating would be an understatement. I am addicted.

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The Nobel Foundation has awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in doing so have continued to refine the characteristics of peace. By locating efforts to fight global warming and climate change within the peace category (instead of, say, chemistry or economics), the Foundation is supporting Gore’s (and others) argument that fighting global warming is a moral issue, as well as a rhetorical issue and, I would argue, a spatial issue. The geographical spaces that are going to be most affected (or have been most affected) by climate change are going to become war zones, where people fight for scarce resources:

“It is a question of war and peace,” Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. “We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa.” He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

Yesterday, in another act of classifying, the House Foreign Relations Committee, in a non-binding resolution, voted to label the 1915 killings of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks as “genocide.” The Bush administration countered by calling the atrocities “historic mass killings.” (Update: Ira Schorr noted possible political reasons for the creation of the resolution.) As usual, The Daily Show offered the most meaningful assessment of the ironical and political ramifications of such a vote: