WRT: Writer Response Theory

[This post comes as the first of several provocations to spur a reexamination of the electronic literature scene. Unlike our usual mild posts, these posts Will Raise Temperatures on elit.]
With the first arguments for electronic writing as an artistic medium, as in literary hypertext, came the attendant claims at its democratic nature. In George […]

The world of chatbots still thrives today because of its user-creators. Whether made by kids who dream of making their computer talk even in print statements or adults who enjoy playing with programming toys, the chatbot is a means of evoking a conversation with your computer. Consequently, there may always be a market […]

After a semester of testing out the all-computer writing classroom, during the somewhat-contested reign of Web 2.0, I append the following update to my earlier post on Computers and Composition. Soon, I will add a version of this page to the Pedagogy and Games subpages.

The question of the day is how is the composition class a social or 2.0 experience? To any of us who have taught comp, who know write away that writing is a tremendously social activity. What many of the tools below emphasize is the ways in which research is also a fundamentally social activity. We not only stand on the shoulders of giants, but we follow their RSS feeds, we enjoy their bookmarks, and we share their PowerPoint presentations.

The second set of tools has to do with building a browser that is a research engine, something that can act as a notebook (literally, in the case of Google). From Diigo to Zotero, student writers can build custom browser that can enhance their research experience, while often linking them to other scholars or at least allowing them to share information easily.
For last, I save the novelties.

PowerPoint has been an artistic medium perhaps since David Byrne’s IEEE, but as more students grow up on PowerPoint, its place in our culture is becoming more and more dubious. Recently, several artists used PowerPoint to create PowerPoint Valentines, which parody the pervasive medium, by imagining lovers whispering sweet nothings with fly-on effects or delivering dear john letters on custom “bad news” templates. These stand-alone pieces raise the question: what is a slideshow without a presenter?

Much has been made of the viral outbreak of Michael Wesch’s “Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us” (first noticed on Frank Gruber’s Somewhat Frank) Some of the reactions, including my initial one, have suggested that the piece is overly optimistic. However, we should not let the pulsing soundtrack, speed, and magically moving text and images distract us to miss his playfulness with these ideas, a montage of reactions to the notion of Web 2.0 more than a manifesto for it. Matt Kirschenbaum has commented on one of these moments, the use of the WayBack Machine. Below is a further analysis (or annotation) of the first 26 seconds or so of the film: