Rainbows and Cancer

In the Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (about a planet with no gender), Ursula K. Le Guin writes,

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life. ... Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic. (first page of Intro)

I think Vinge did a credible job of extrapolation in Rainbows End (by the way, I love that Robert contemplates the lack of apostrophe in this name of the retirement community [152] and I assume this is the referent of the last chapter title, "The Missing Apostrophe"). The technology Vinge created seemed relatively feasible but not too obvious, given today's trends of digitality and innovation. But because of Le Guin's warning, and because I know all books need conflict, I was expecting some sort of global "network failure" -- some major meltdown in this brave new world of wearables and analysts-by-the-million. I was actually kind of surprised that the meltdown wasn't bigger than it turned out to be; in my more charitable moments, I might attribute that to the character development that enabled Vinge's novel to not hinge entirely on the tension created by the futuristic technology.

But back to Le Guin's quote: Is there any way to imagine the future of our digital world without the vision ending in metaphorical (and literal) cancer? From Anne's brief introduction on Thursday, it sounds like each book we read this semester will fall in different places on the pessimism-optimism continuum. I think Vinge is actually fairly optimistic: He doesn't seem to attribute the bad things that happen to digitality, but rather to the people (mostly Vaz and Mr. Rabbit) who misuse it for their own gain. ("Guns don't kill people; people kill people"?) I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe technology PR? Perhaps many people are afraid of the constant march of technology because whenever an author tries to extrapolate it out into the future, it feels scary and generally doesn't end well.

Regarding the place of writing in this world, I was intrigued by the concept of sming. When I described it to my husband, he said, "Sounds almost like telepathy." Pretty close, although of course it isn't mind-reading and it still requires some kind of physical movement, however slight. Luke read a book in graduate school called The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, which definitely seems to be the trend of most digitality (as evidenced by the presentations for Ms. Chumlig's class, with visual special effects that made Robert's stripped-down poetry recitation a boring anomaly). But the sming, like today's text-messaging but without the abbreviations, seems to have kept writing (in some form, at least) alive and well. Do the lines between orality and writing blur when it takes a few blinks or shoulder twitches to send a message? What are the implications of a message suddenly parading across one's field of vision? Ironically, this written "dialogue" presented a challenge for Vinge, who had to figure out how to represent it on the page. The result is workable, though it's clunky and doesn't at all represent the natural ease with which the actual sming took place. The more I think about it, the more I realize that writing-as-communication has been eclipsing oral communication for some time now: Like most people I know (esp. those in my generation and younger), I almost always opt for email over a phone call. So is writing safe and sound? Depends on how you define "writing."

By the way, stupid question: Am I supposed to know who Mr. Rabbit is? I kept expecting the big "reveal," and never got it. At different points throughout the book, I was convinced that he was just about every major and minor character, but now I think he really is the unknown chimera that he was for all the characters. If so, that's actually kind of cool. Scarier, too. But maybe I missed something? I'm not sure why the "carrot greens" were such a big deal at the end, so I guess I did miss something. Good thing this isn't a lit. class.

Imagine a world...

How often in a grad class have I been asked, "What sort of world do you want to live in?" One time, counting last night.

But I think this question underpins the work I do in most of my classes, the undergrad ones I teach as well as the grad ones I take. Or at least, I hope it does. I would like to make this question, and my ever-evolving answers, a more conscious part of both my academic and personal lives. (And yes, I would like to live in a world where I can write "life" at the end of that sentence.)

What do I want to remember from today's class? That both writing and digitality (hmmm, my digital spellchecker doesn't like that word) are factors in creating the world I want to live in. Of course, after the interconnectedness-of-everything lesson we learned last night, I suppose everything is related to producing the world I want--or don't want--to live in. But for now, it will be enough to spend the semester contemplating the role of writing and digitality in the world I live in and the world I want to live in.  If I'm going to be a good epistemic rhetorician, I need to point out here that my ideas of "the world I want to live in" are in large part shaped by writing and language. I cannot separate them or draw a linear model of what influences what--interconnectedness, remember?

I also want to remember not to sit in front of the projector because looking back at Anne, or whoever is speaking, through/towards the lamp gives me a headache. And considering I've flushed my expensive liver-destroying migraine meds down the toilet (on purpose), that's something I would like to avoid. Maybe in Second Life there are no migraines.... Now that's a world I want to live in!

Title?

My college roommate (a fellow English major) and I hated writing titles for our papers, and hated even more getting papers back from teachers with "title?" scrawled across the top. So when we read and commented on each other's papers, we always wrote "title?" at the top, just to be obnoxious.

Because I didn't have any other ideas, and because my husband insisted that simply titling my blog with my name was lame, I borrowed the phrase "standing under" from Krista Ratcliffe. In Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, she writes:

[U]nderstanding means listening to discourses not for intent but with intent--with the intent to understand not just the claims but the rhetorical negotiations of understanding as well. To clarify this process of understanding, rhetorical listeners might best invert the term understanding and define it as standing under, that is, consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others while consciously acknowledging all our particular--and very fluid--standpoints....

Standing under our own discourses means identifying the various discourses embodied within each of us and then listening to hear and imagine how these discourses might affect not only ourselves but others.... Standing under the discourses of others mean first, acknowledging the existence of these discourses; second, listening for (un)conscious presences, absences, unknowns; and third, consciously integrating this information into our world views and decision making. (28-29)

This may not be a perfect fit for what we are doing in this class, but it has been in my mind since reading Ratcliffe's book in FemRhet last semester and I think it is beginning to inform all the work I do.

The First Post

It's amazing that this is my first blog.  I was so excited about web-logs "back in the day" -- not so many days ago -- of their inception.  I thought this format was made just for me.  But then I panicked:  What would I write about?  Who would care?  And most of all, how would I have time to make every post live up to my standards of composition quality (and, you will come to learn, quantity)?  And so, I never started.

Do I read blogs?  Yes, although not nearly as many or as often as I would like.  Back to the overwhelming feelings:  So many good (and bad) blogs, and so little time!  I would like to say that I read scholarly blogs -- writers, teachers, political pundits -- and I do sometimes.  I have found blogs to be helpful when doing research; I don't generally cite them, but I find they often give me ideas or lead me to helpful resources.  The blogs I read most frequently, however, are those of friends and family, especially the ones with cute pictures and videos of their tiny tots.  I am grateful for this invaluable link to the lives of people I love but don't often see in person.

Setting up the blog was easy but time-consuming, mostly because I spent time exploring both Wordpress and Blogger -- even setting up blogs with each -- before deciding to go with Blogger.  I really wanted Wordpress to win out.  I like the open source thing and I wanted to be different from the minions on Blogger ("different," that is, like the minions on Wordpress).  But Wordpress had a lot of issues with Safari and I found the interface a little less intuitive and streamlined.  I still haven't deleted that blog yet:  Maybe it will be my "underlife" (see Erving Goffman and my FemRhet seminar paper, Fall 2007).

I chose this template because I like the sleek black look, and because I knew I wanted to use this great sunset picture, taken last April over the pond across the street from our rented townhome in Franklin.  I'm not tremendously gifted in the visual arts, so I like to keep my visually creative endeavors simple and classy.

The final question I have been asked to respond to sounds just like a question I might pose to my English 101, 105, or 102 students:  When you write in your blog, how is your thinking about your writing different (is it?) from writing in other contexts?  I don't know that I can answer this yet, in my first post; I imagine it is a question I will be thinking about throughout the semester.  But here are some early conjectures:

I am certainly thinking very differently about audience already.  While I recognize that this post will be read primarily by my professor and a few classmates, there is the possibility that it could be read by The Public (insert dramatic music here).  The tone of most of the blogs I read (even the more scholarly ones) is decidedly more informal than the typical academic paper I might otherwise be writing, so that (perceived) sense of genre is influencing my tone and composition decisions.

Interestingly, I find that I am writing faster and editing/rereading less than I usually do.  Perhaps I feel freed from (dramatic music again) Academic Writing Conventions.  In addition, the medium and material conditions of this writing are different: the look of the blog, the autosaving going on once a minute below this text, the knowledge that this will be available to the world the moment I "Publish Post" rather than when I print it out tomorrow and hand it to my professor.  This last quality creates both a sense of immediacy and of distance:  It will be "public" immediately but I will not (in some cases, will never) actually face my audience.  

The fact that I can edit this post any time in the future is also very intriguing:  I like the statement it makes about recursivity, that buzz word we toss around the first-year composition curriculum so much.  If our first-year comp students wrote all of their essays as blogs, would that help them see that writing is not a linear event but requires returning, rethinking, rereading, rewriting?  Or would the linear format of most blogs reinforce the idea that a writer starts at the beginning and keeps moving forward.  I guess that's true, too.  Time for me to move forward....