Cinnabar and Alabaster

keywords: community, consciousness, enactment, groupuscle, hive, hivemind, identity, multiple, networks, technologies, third mind, value

passages:
47. field-wide the emphasis on collaborative writing is so ubiquitous that most students have never been in a writing classroom where papers weren't traded & some projects jointly authored; "clearly, composition theory has moved away from the romantic image of the sequestered, solitary writer toward a sense of writing as a tribal practice--to an extent."
48. chaos isn't "the absence of logic" but is instead "the proliferation of multiple logics ever in flux and open to mutation"; we "unwittingly contain the social energies we claim to promote in our classes," in part by using new technologies only to "refine" our achievement of old goals.
49. too much of our work with new writing technologies focuses on "perserv[ing] old paradigms of rhetorical construction" rather than looking for truly new modes & purposes for reading & writing--"how might we reconceptualize collaboration not as co-labor but as the transformation of labor into heretofore unanticipated modes of communal ludic meditation?"
51. the problem w/solitary authorship (that's still present in most collaborative work where the solitary authors never lose awareness of their own isolation) is that "a painfully...self-reflective voice or stance remains engaged in an act of self-definition or self-question" ultimately devoted to the "self-promotion" of putting forth the self-on-page.
52. "groupuscle effect"--people were so able to let go of authorial concerns that they often couldn't identify on later read-throughs which portions of the text they'd written; rather than a "multilayered polylogue" what was created was more "synergistic arena from which a...feeling evolved...to which all contributed but none possessed"; parallels to what Burroughs & Gysin called the "third mind" created by collaborators so into their project that they find themselves writing things neither of them could otherwise have known.
55. products of the project were more like "textual clouds" than linear texts, and no, this doesn't do much for us in terms of "value" & "compensation"--can't grade or pay for the results of these events. but we don't do enough with technology to look at the ways it can do other things, the way it can connect people for the sake of connection rather than compensation.
57. our communication technologies make "good toys, but terrible addictions. finally we realize we cannot 'reach out and touch someone' who is not present in the flesh" (Hakim Bey)--goal is not to replace f2f but to find ways to connect, communicate, get closer to people & human-interactions that matter: "to reach inside new technologies and, aiming for the electrons, suddenly grab hold of someone's hand"

response: this is lovely but strikes me as idealistic & to some degree foofy... of course, i forget that when a lot of people say "writing" they're really thinking more of creative enterprises--and my claim that all writing is creative isn't what i mean by that. the people in this project were primarily poets & fiction-writers, & so what they found & why they cared is fascinating, but has little (at least immediate) bearing on what my students do & care about. grades & compensation are the point here--& as long as they're what's counted, finding purposes for this sort of thing outside of that isn't going to light a lot of fires among the pragmatic. then again, of course, if not an attempt to hold hands through the electrons, why do i spend as much time as i do on AIM & lj? (& how many of my students do the same, & do we do it for the same reasons? & how does *that* potentially tie in to the project i'm working towards?)