:: Deliberative Ecologies :: Technologies, Practices, Actants

:: Deliberative Ecologies :: Technologies, Practices, Actants

February 22, 2010, 1:00 pm
Filed under: research, rhetoric, technology | Tags: atomization, collaboration, deliberative ecologies, epistemology, technology

Last Monday, we (Brian McNely, Ball State University, and I) posted “On the Atomization of Rhetoric“–a collaboratively-written piece by myself and Brian–to his professional blog, 5000.

The aim of this paired, collaborative post, therefore, is to unpack some of what went into the act of assembling what ultimately landed over at 5000 as an argument about the ways we believe our field has failed to “centrally position and explicitly theorize the epistemic and ontological nature of rhetoric when investigating and articulating how various modes of representation afford knowledge-making.”

Last fall, a handful of us who primarily know one another through twitter convened over in Google Wave with the hope of using the platform’s collaborative affordances toward a co-authored blog post.

Early Google Wave Collaborations

Initially, we’d thought to center our discussion, and a resulting blog post, around Wave’s technological affordances–specifically, real-time in-blip replies, hyperlinking, and file-sharing.

Hyperlinking & In-Blip Replies :: Google Wave

We decided, however, to wait until after assembling an argument in Wave to engage in a meta-discussion about its affordances. We agreed that, given overlap in our individual professional experiences (departmental meetings, student interactions, etc.), our argument might center around the ways we felt certain practices and methodologies in our field limited the role of rhetoric in the collaborative construction of knowledge. Here we’re highlighting the ways that our argument was inspired and motivated by a whole host of external and internal factors.

Because it would require more than a simple blog post to extrapolate these various internal and external factors–what Faigley and Witte (1981) might call “situational variables“, or what Prior and Shipka (2002) might call “chronotopic laminations“–our motivation here is to (minimally) reflect on the ways that the very tools and technologies we relied upon as platforms for collaborative knowledge-making also helped to shape our argument.

Upon reflection, we observe that Wave’s push against linear thinking and conversational turn-taking and its championing of the immediacy of files, information, and replies are all contributing factors to our collaboration that ultimately yielded an argument about rhetoric’s atomization.

File and Image Sharing :: Google Wave

File and Image Sharing :: Google Wave

Upon further reflection, it’s evident that Wave also constrained collaboration in some ways. At one point, for instance, our wave became somewhat unwieldy–with over 8000 words and several hundred in-blip replies, it simply became hard to manage our collaboration in that particular space. One of Wave’s key collaborative features, “playback,” simply stopped working for us in this particular wave.

Moreover, we felt like we needed to move out of “in-blip” reply mode–a technological affordance that allowed for continual problematization regarding some of the nuances of our argument.

In-blip replies :: Google Wave

This is not to say that our continual problematization of the argument wasn’t or isn’t productive, but we were eager to vet some of our ideas in a space where others could weigh in.

We decided, therefore, to move over to Google Docs so that we could begin to refine our argument in a genre typical of blog posts.

Collaborative Writing :: Google Docs

What we ended up with in Google Docs was not what you finally see over on 5000, but a portion of what we composed. That is, while it’s commonplace to refer to the blog post at 5000 as a “final product,” we would argue (as we’ve alluded in that actual blog post) that there is nothing “final” about what was produced for 5000.

Presently, we’re reflecting on the ways that the shaping and further refinement of our argument continues abroad, far beyond the confines of Wave or Google Docs:

[ Ongoing Conversation :: Google Buzz ]

[ Ongoing Conversation :: Twitter ]

[ Ongoing Conversation :: Blogora ]

Beyond the influence of these various collaborative platforms are the many departmental meetings, backchannel conversations over Google Talk and email, conversations with colleagues, several kairotic tweets on twitter, our doctoral educations, ongoing disciplinary research and manuscript preparation, articles shared in Google Reader, and various other external and internal forces that, through the “process of interaction at a given moment” (Scott, 1967) helped to shape our collaboration and the prose that was–and continues to be–crafted during that collaboration.

“Cooperative, critical inquiry” (Scott, 1967) is messy business; actants are likewise complex. We hope that by briefly surfacing some of our collaborative practices and what we’re thinking of as “deliberative ecologies,” we’ve helped to challenge commonplace assumptions about writing work that champion linearity, individual genius, and the neutrality of writing technologies.

Of course, integral to knowledge-making are public acts of vetting ideas and propositions; we continue to invite your responses, criticisms, and questions, therefore, to “On the Atomization of Rhetoric.”

Christa Teston, Rowan University

Brian McNely, Ball State University

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