Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
280. spooner & yancey's essay is "one of those watershed essays," one that "evoke[s] in a single essay many of the most salient issues inovlved in technology and composition studies in a scholarly and innovative merging of form and content"; "the specter of 'genre' is a particularly vexing one, raising any number of issues, questions, and contexts--western and non-wester, traditional and alternative....to create a genre is an act of empowerment and potential disempowerment. when we read a sonnet, we measure it against basic criteria of this genre within a genre and against a particular view of the best of that genre. the criteria that make a particular genre itself enable readers to recognize a work when it fits...and to measure another by its standards when it fails to measure up"
281. "while Freedman affirms that we still need to know how to categorize...types of prose...we are less sure what to call and 'how to read the mixed-genre' prose of comtemporary feminists"; dh would "extend this quandary to the mixed-genre qualities of the discourses prevalent on the internet. do we need to name these discourses as much as we need to read them?" like the "literary mosaic" Freedman identifies for "feminist post-critics," dh suggests "that the internet offers a similar multilayered, multivalenced set of textualities" & "this blending offers the possibilities and difficulties of a type of genre bordercrossing, and the inevitable readerly as well as writerly conflicts stemming from the distance between what we all seem to want the internet to be (free, utopian) and our simultaneous certainty that it already replicates the hierarchies of its users (androcentric, judgmental, rule-governed)....if it is part of any genre, it is a 'baggy-monstered' cross-genre, and in being so once again replicates and to some extent subsumes the other genres enacted within it, crossing other types of socio-cultural concerns and borders in its wake: among them, access, privacy, and ownership, a certain simultaneity of judgment (sometimes made known to the writer, sometimes not), not to mention unsettling, techno-inducted reproductions of street-life hazards"
282. possible answers: "the critic-theorist's mode of knowledge is 'categorizing'"; "perhaps this, too, describes the need to validate or categorize the internet--to justify our time and contributions on various lists, perhaps, and to academically validate cyberspace as a forum for scholarly work and publication"
283. also, "one might argue that by virtue of being on-line, computer-based writing boasts far more distinctive features--i'd say problems, again, of access, publication, ownership, and so on--than simply being 'transmitted via computer'"; another important question: "what other invisible hierarchies--in addition to the ones we know and understand that relate to gender, power, and so on--will be formed to order us as we 'slouch towards cyberspace'?"
284. "a number of critics...assert that each new technology excludes women from its spheres of influence (and it is true that the vast majority of the people using the net [in 1996] are male)"; "what are the ways in which we seem to 'know' the gender of the person writing even when the writer masks his or her gender?; overall, then, spooner & yancey's essay "helps us see the net with a renewed, harsh glare towards the interface, highlighting to the profession the social, ideological, and power relationships replicated on new technologies and the ways in which we much acknowledge, confront and--is it even possible?--redefine those spaces"