Cris Crissman's List: New Literacies

• Clay Shirky, tech thinker and N.Y.U. professor, gave a talk on Sunday at the convention center that the supposed “theft” of content was really more about a jailbreak than lawbreakers.

   

  “In the Napster era, some attributed the ascent of pirated digital music to a supposedly criminal-minded nature among American youth. That argument didn’t work,” he said, because, “it coincided with the largest fall in the rate of crime in recorded history.”

   

  He said the much of mainstream media will continue to be crippled by Web-enabled sharing of digital media because content is everywhere.

   

  Sharing, not the “unicorn and rainbows sharing, but jackhammer sharing” that destroys the things around it, can’t be stopped, he said. “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.”

• I would add to Jarratt’s point the intimate connection between technology and practice. In the case of the sophists, their use of writing and their views on technology were intimately tied to their intellectual program and to their reception by aristocrats such as Plato. The platonic system not only separates practice off from theory, it separates technology off from theory.{13} Plato did not merely attack the sophistic emphasis on teaching and social involvement; he also attacked the technological innovation of writing. Writing, in the time of Plato, was the Greek equivalent of distance education, and Plato viewed it as haughtily as many academics view distance education today.{14} I would argue, in fact, that the “democratic political content” of the sophistic program, and the need to re-examine the relationship between theory and practice, are inextricably tied to technology. Technology, I will argue, cannot be separated from theory or politics any more than teaching can. One reason that a reconsideration of Greek thought in the 5th century is relevant is that their society was under the influence of a radical new technology, writing, in a manner comparable to the influence of the computer on our own society. In this context, Dewey’s critique of Plato is revealing because it analyzes how theory, practice, technology and politics played out in the time of Plato.
• For Dewey, then, technology is not different in kind from theory. The two are inextricably linked, and both have as their goals the resolution of practical problems. Dewey claims that the long tradition of dualism with respect to both body/mind, theory/technology and theory/practice can be traced to this mislocation of technology by ancient Greek philosophers. As Hickman notes, from a pragmatist perspective knowing, knowledge, theories, and metaphysical systems are themselves technological artifacts or tools, and much of pragmatism is an attempt to replace such traditional theories of knowledge with theories of inquiry. One can see, then, how much the traditionally-divided histories of thought and theory, on the one hand, and practice and technology, on the other hand, would be collapsed, for on the pragmatist view such things as theories, practices, and printing presses are all of a kind (Hickman, Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology 18-19).
• But Dewey’s point also resonates in the more specific assumptions and attitudes within the field of composition. The more obvious examples are the bias against visuals and tools, but the effect runs very deep, into areas less obvious. Consider the issue of grammar. The March 2004 Council Chronicle has a front page story that begins: “Grammar is the skunk in the garden party of the liberal arts, declare members of the NCTE Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar.”{20} Recent books attempt to make grammar prominent again in the teaching of writing.{21} Plato, of course, didn’t advocate grammar, because literacy at that time was too nascent for an explicit development of linguistics. The sophists, however, were attempting to build a set of written guidelines for speaking. Nevertheless, the general sophistic stance was that speaking and persuasion are context-specific and not reducible to any universal, foundational sets of rules. But if Plato had had grammar, perhaps he would have embraced writing. Consider rereading the above quotation from Dewey about Greek attitudes toward techne, but with a few minor modifications:
• For Dewey, it is precisely this interanimation between means and ends, or practice and theory, that is the proper goal of a society. His educational theory, for instance, foregrounds the need to connect academic curriculum to social exigency.

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