Here's a passage from a conference paper I read in San Francisco last spring. A umber of you have touched on this in posts or in conference conversations, so I thought you might find it interesting to see how this stuff shows up in my scholarship. The paper opens with a discussion of the "skeumorph" and then jumps to my discussion of Spooky, if your just interested in Spooky, then jump down to the paragraph that begins "I find justification..."
Katherine Hayles refers to the skeuomorph, a concept she borrows from archeological anthropology, in the opening chapter of her work How We Became Posthuman. She writes that “a skeuomorph is a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time…” and that “it calls into play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the process of displacing.” She offers as an example the faux stitching molded into the dashboard of her Toyota Camry. This faux stitching aided in assuaging the acceptance of plastics and synthetics in automated automobile manufacture; the skeuomorph operates as a transitional lubricant easing the integration of a new technology into popular social practice. Hayles is careful to warn that this ease of transition or acceleration of cultural acceptance comes at a price; since the primal baptism of the new in terms of the old restricts our vision of the new’s possibilities. New dog, same old tricks.
Perhaps the logic of the skeuomorph is nowhere as present in our contemporary society as it is in electronic discourses, especially those discourses concerned with digital writing and the internet. “Web page.” “Bookmark.” “File.” “Folder.” “Header.” “Footer.” All define technological developments in familiar terms and thereby nod to what Hayles’ refers to as the skeuomorph’s psychodynamic by “testifying to the social or psychological necessity for innovation to be tempered by replication.” Those familiar with the work of Lawrence Lessig, our keynote speaker, or critic Paul D. Miller, who I will discuss the later in this paper, understand that it is imperative that we work to identify the ways in which skeuomorphs are limiting emerging technologies. (imagining Walter Ong, what will it be like in the will have been?) Today I would like to identify one limitation imposed upon digital textuality, to work through this limitation in light of an emerging digital aesthetic, and to share a digital assignment I have been developing over the last few years that in some way represents the new aesthetic (the aesthetic of the mix) and, I hope, opens access to new pedagogical possibilities for composition.
A large part of the impetus driving my presentation today developed as I was compiling an annotated bibliography focusing on the treatment of digital writing in popular contemporary first-year oriented composition textbooks. Even a cursory perusal of the chapters covering “electronic writing” or “document design” show the skeuomorphic limitations restricting our conception of digital textuality. Thus far the possibilities of digital textuality are framed in stylistic terms: students are often instructed to be aware of the wide range of choices available to them: font size and color, alignment of information, prominent placement of images and hyperlinks, and so on. Certainly, these are important considerations for any contemporary student (if you don’t think so, take a look at eBay sometime to get an idea of how much every student needs a fundamental awareness of basic visual rhetoric…). The problem with this stylistic approach, however, is that it preserves the sanctity of the process model for the analogue paper as a finished product—we might say that thus far our pedagogy maintains the old process models with an added step: “digitize” or “electronify.” The web is often framed as a place to publish, and thereby perish. The final step. The end. I am trying to identify two interrelated limitations here: first, we have yet to identify the ways in which digital textuality changes invention and the entire writing process; second, we have yet to identify the ways in which digital technologies will change invention by changing the possible lifespan of student work (and, in fact, all information); riffing off of the product/process binary, how digital technologies can hold student work open in a state of perpetual process. (Delivery)
Think of the life span of an average student paper. Two weeks? Six weeks? No matter how long its incubation or pubescence, we know when it will perish: the day it gets handed back. Perhaps it gets a stay of execution: the re-write. Or it might be held in a state of suspended animation for a few months in a portfolio. But what happens once the semester ends? Goner. If extremely lucky (if that’s the right word), then it might get exhumed once a semester as an example to be investigated, examined, autopsied like a corpse. Its creator gone, no longer present, it is dead. This is the life of the paper as product.
Besides making it easier to store and share student work as dead product, digital technologies make it possible for us to keep student work alive—to grant it existence as ever-in-process. This is especially pertinent when working with images. Those familiar with photo-imaging software such as Adobe’s Photoshop or Macromedia’s Fireworks know that these programs can track the development of an image. They keep the various components used in composition separate on different layers or frames. The example we truck out can not only be examined, but also engaged. Students can access the elements previous students used in the composing process, re-arranging, manipulating, and changing the original. It is my belief that allowing students to engage past students’ processes will help them better understand and improve their own compositional process by making them more cognizant of the rhetorical decisions all writers make as they compose.
I locate theoretical justification for this approach in the work of new media visionary Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that subliminal kid. Miller’s recent contribution to MIT’s Mediawork series, Rhythm Science, draws significantly on the experiences of one of his multiple alter-egos, DJ Spooky, a well respect techno DJ. Miller argues for rethinking aesthetics and creative processes in terms of the “sample” and the “re-mix.” Surrounded by the glut of information and access as we are, Miller stresses how selection is becoming synonymous with creation: writing that
All inclusive data networks transform individual creation into a kit of interchangeable parts, Lego building blocks of consciousness in a world that moves under the sign of continuous transformation and atomized perspectives. The machinery of culture acts out in the theater of the mind—how we navigate through the abstract systems we use to maintain meaning. As we say in the DJ world, it’s all in the mix. For the most part, creativity rests in how you recontextualize the previous expression of others, a place where there is no such thing as “an immaculate perception. (33)
Miller finds inspiration in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Quotation and Originality” where Emerson writes that “it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent”(68). It is in Miller’s writings that we find an attempt to imagine how digitality and the hip-hop aesthetic, the mix and the sample, is in the process of influencing invention [creation of persuasion] and epistemology [considerations of knowledge]. And as he draws inspiration from Emerson’s conclusion to face conservative opposition, so do I draw inspiration from his conclusion to an early essay “ideas in the mix: loops of perception” when he recalls Hayles and the skeuomorph. He warns against the lure of the skeuomorph:
The semantic web is an intangible sculputural body that exists only in the virtual space between you and the information you perceive. It’s all in continuous transformation, and to look for anything to really stay the same is to be caught in a time warp to another era, another place when things stood still and didn’t change so much. But if this essay has done one thing, then I hope it has been to move us to think as the objects move…
I would argue that a major part of this movement concerns realizing how the role of the creator, the “I am,” has changed. Rather than the classical mirror or the Romantic lamp, the contemporary creator is perhaps better symbolized as the forge—an assemblage of instruments of re-combination-- a shaping, violence that pounds the disparate together. What emerges is the new media creator as someone who works with (even as she is worked by), who works with/out, who works through, who works across.
