One interesting idea to emerge from Gitleman’s book is the idea that human subjectivity is complicated by machines. I had never really given phonographs much thought before reading this book, and I had certainly not given a lot of thought to the notion that phonographs did something--“reading aloud”--that only human beings had done before. What does the “colonization of the body by the machine” (p. 146) mean for human beings? By the same token, we could also begin to question, as Gitelman does, the idea of authorship—whether it can be located at all, or whether it is located in the machine or the person. (These issues are still with us. A couple of semesters ago, we read an interesting piece by Deborah Brandt about the phenomenon of ghostwriting—and how ghostwriting complicates issues of authorship and plagiarism.)
Anyway, this got me thinking about a conversation I had with a friend (of a friend) of mine who works on the staff of a congressman in Washington. I had always wondered what became of letters, emails, and other correspondence that people send to politicians—recognizing that most politicians never saw the correpsondence that their constituents were sending them. Not surprisingly, these letters/emails are read by staff and immediately classified by the issue that they are addressing. Then, almost always, staff members retrieve from a computer database a stock response letter which is sent back in reply. In fact, the response letters are usually composed by ghostwriters at the beginning of a politician’s term in office. So, the response that a concerned citizen gets from a politician 1) almost certainly was not written by that politician, 2) most likely will not directly address any specific concerns that the citizen wrote about in the original letter, and, in fact, 3) may have been written years before the citizen even thought to correspond.
Of course, sometimes a letter actually makes its way to a politician’s desk. If the letter is a very touching human interest piece, it may make it to the politician. More interesting to me, if you include a line like--“I realize that you are never going to read this, but I thought I’d send it anyway”—you have a better chance of your letter actually making it to a politician’s desk. You may even receive a hand-written letter back from your favorite congressman/congresswoman!
But beware: and this gets me back to Gitelman, any “handwritten” response you receive was more than likely written by a machine which imitates the politician’s handwriting patterns. And once again, the machine is merely spitting out a form letter from a database of stock responses. Politicians realize that we value the time it takes them to write back a handwritten response, so they have a machine write—and sign—such letters for them (and us).
What do these handwriting machines say about human subjectivity? What do they say about authorship? What do they say about democracy and civic participation?
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5 comments:
"(These issues are still with us. A couple of semesters ago, we read an interesting piece by Deborah Brandt about the phenomenon of ghostwriting—and how ghostwriting complicates issues of authorship and plagiarism.)"
Could you give me the title of this piece by Brandt? As someone who writes fiction (and poetry and...) as a secondary writing interest, I am more than angered by writing practices such as James Patterson's "novel mills" (where Patterson's publisher buys up novels by unknown novelists with little hope of publication, and publishes said novels under the James Patterson--and, much smaller, the original author of said novel--brand).
Elliot
Although I appreciated Bijeker for the theoretical grounding, I was relieved to get to this week’s readings on specific writing technologies. Reading Bejiker has helped me understand the idea of essentializing a technology by isolating and center as “the phonograph” or “the computer,” etc. Oddly enough, I am suffering from some essentialist thinking---I am working in Word, as if there is one “Word”—and oddly, my italics and boldface functions have disappeared…..
But in particular, this week I am thinking about “text messaging”—as if it were on thing, as if it means always in the same way. As I have been investigating Twitter as a social utility, I have realized that it is being appropriated and used as a political tool as well. Gitelman makes the point that textual devices, like Edison’s phonograph, “emerg[e] […] amid a cluster of mutually defining literary practices, texts, and technologies” (p. I). She identifies this nexus of practice as “an ambient climate of textual and other representational practices” (p.I) and stresses its reciprocal nature. I am particularly interested in her identification of inscription as an act of both writing and being written—and its connection human subjectivity vis a vis digital, virtual technologies. Gitelman makes the point that inscription is “a form of intervention,” something I have always suspected, but not been able to articulate. As we inscribe, we are also being inscribed by the discourse in which we participate—whether at a micro or macro level. At a microlevel, we are inscribed with the phonetic elements of the English language, its syntax, its logic. At a macrolevel, we are inscribed by ideological discourses—and also by assumption about the social practice of the medium in which we are participating. I will say more about the macrolevel, but want to interject something about the microlevel first.
I have about 20 years of experience tutoring children in an intensive phonics method of reading instruction called “The Writing Road to reading.” In this method the learner is taught the 72 phonographs of the English language—beginning with the individual letters and all their sounds. They go on to learn all the phonograms—diphthongs, etc, that make up our language. The way they learn the sounds is to simultaneously see them, say them, hear them and write them. In this way, the maximal amount of “learning gates” are involved: seeing, hearing, feeling. In a sense, the learner is being written, as the symbols are inscribed in the learner’s muscle memory and mind. After learning the phonograms, students f=g o on to learn the 1000 most frequently used words in the English language—along with their syllabication and accompanied by a recitation of specific spelling rules governing the phonetics of the words and any anomalies. The system is very efficient and corrects some “reading and writing deficits” by programming the learner at a very foundational level. After the hours and hours of instruction, we have a subject who has been written and can write/read with “correct, standard” pronunciation and spelling. In this way, the technology of writing becomes an agent of change for learners whose way of being with language has been other than the norm.
What I want to move on to is our understanding of text messaging—the SNS electronic inscription of short (140-160) character messages that are usually sent between two phones as a means of social interaction—much like subversive note-passing in class before cell phones. Twitter is a social utility using the same idea—short messages, whose intention was originally conceived as personal, mini-status updates published from either a Twitterer’s home page feed—or from their phone to a network of subscribers. The messages are published to a domain that allows individual to tap into and “follow” another user’s “tweets.” What is interesting to me about this is how the utility has been appropriated by political candidates—as well as members of the Congress, who, incidentally, ar4 forbidden by current by-laws from publishing to public networks othe than those approved or sponsored by the federal government. Interestingly, many members of Congress—Speaker Pelosi, Joe Biden, Hillary Cinton—and many, many others all “tweet.” They tweet about where they are speaking, what they are speaking about, what legislation is being considered, etc. And a movement is calling for Congress to allow members to engage citizens in unmediated public dialogue without congressional constraints. So, Tweeter has become a contested site of negotiation and appropriation. The tool has proven extremely effective in alerting/organizing followers. I am follwing Huffington Pot, Pelosi, Clinton, Biden, Obama (who is also following me…). I also have folks following me in response to posts I have made. Interesting....
I cant seem to figure out how I posted to the main blog last time, so I’m posted to John’s. However, it is my main post for the week. Nevertheless (so many transition words argh!), John’s mention of authorship was just what I was going to post about. One idea Gitelman raises that I find fascinating is the notion of authorship and writing the goes beyond the person who physically inscribes the message. She makes this point explicit when referring to court reports, which we would (or at least I would) typically think are “authored” by the person taking down the words, the stenographer. However, she disrupts this simple reading of the issue of authorship by explaining, “Defendants, reporters, and courts all authored proceedings in this era of court reporting. Authorship is scattered, a matter of simultaneous orality, inscription, and authority” (51). This point is also made as a way to debunk common notions of the “genius inventor,” just as was Bjiker’s project, by looking at ways disputes over patents and the ways in which labeling shape the product. In this way, we may consider the courts, specifically the disputants and the judge’s subsequent ruling, and consumers as co-authors / -inventors. In the “Paperwork and Performance” chapter she argues that labeling became part of considerations in the laboratory: she states there was a “simultaneity of labeling and production” (170) in which the inventor took into consideration how the product should be labeled as part of the invention process.
This reminds me of an article we read in the intro class a year and a half ago on distributed cognition. I cannot recall the exact definition, but the concept (if I’ve got it right) is that the thinking used to do a particular task is “distributed” (spread across) a number of individuals. In this way, there is no one single author. Each part of the system of distributed cognition is a co-creator in the project. Gitelman’s point differs in that it is concerned with the social and cultural influences (the agents of which are read as authors), whereas, I believe the cognitive distribution notion is constrained to a particular group of people in an effort toward efficiency. The difference seems to be the one between a social constructionist perspective and a more psychological perspective, though certainly social in that the cognition is distributed. I know this post is coming in really late, but I wonder if others see a connection here or if it just has been too long since I read the article to make any intelligent claims about it (sadly much of my previous schoolwork has been destroyed due to flooding in my parents’ basement. C’est la vie (sp?).
Twitter sites, especially as Twitter pertains to Congressional members and citizen access to information:
http://twitter.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080728-can-congress-tweet-and-should-bloggers-care.html
http://sunshineweek.blogs.com/my_weblog/2008/07/congress-a-twit.html
BP
Oh YAY for Twitter. I was never really a blogger, but I fell into Twittering fairly quickly. And then I really fell into Twitter when the American Student reporter was arrested in Egypt and twittered on his cell phone and his friends read his update and he was released. (And Obama is following me too!!)
Why can't you hyperlink in comments?
Cnn article: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/twitter.buck/
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