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Mick Doherty C&W 12 | Logan, Utah | June 1996
"Community" is at best a difficult and multifaceted concept, at worst perhaps utterly indefinable; earlier, Elizabeth posited that the process of naming plays a powerful role in our perceptions of the communities to which we belong, and I could not agree more with that assertion. I would like to take that argument to a specific community — one to which most of us in this room claim to belong. The community of technorhetoricians; of netoricians; of teachers of writing in electronic environments. Whatever we may call ourselves. And that may be the point; whatever we may call ourselves affects the way we are perceived, by each other, by our students, and by the skeptical administrators who may wonder just what a "syllaweb" is, anyway. The naming issue exists at various levels of importance for communities, cultures, and subcultures; patterns may develop showing us those levels and helping us to think about what we are doing as neologistic cleverness threatens to overwhelm our pedagogy. The issue of naming, of course, plays an incalculably important role in current Feminist literature, in Afro-American studies, in Latino/Chicano society, and in the long history of Hebraic/Talmudic culture. But the patterns I have noticed our technorhetorical subculture following — and I freely admit I see them because I have been looking for them! — are those developed in the 20th century phenomenon known as "Hackerism." For while naming is a key tool for many cultures, the Hackers of the computer revolution and the technorhetoricians of today share a similar goal — the integration of technology into a larger culture. For the Hackers, it was the introduction of the computer itself into an everyday society of fearful computerphobes imagining the gross science fiction of Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke. For the technorhetoricians, it is the integration of interactive online pedagogies to a traditionalist academy rooted in ivory towers and imagining the gross expenditures of a classroom filled with PowerMacs. In his popular 1984 bestseller Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy writes, "The precepts of the revolutionary Hacker Ethic were not so much debated and discussed as silently agreed upon. No manifestos were issued. No missionaries tried to gather converts. The computer did the converting." Levy's is a history of coders, of software engineers and of hardware junkies. It begins in the 1950's at MIT and ends, really, though Levy argues otherwise, in the early 1970's with a manifesto written by a young college student named Bill Gates. The "Hacker Ethic" drove this tiny culture of wireheads until the day the culture's tools and ideas were aimed away from internal collaboration, and pointed toward a larger audience, toward the eye of a skeptical public. What precisely is "the Hacker Ethic"? There were no written rules in the labs at MIT and Stanford; even Ted Nelson's vainglorious attempts to codify Hackerism in Computer Lib were widely rejected by the hackers themselves as too politically motivated. But with three decades of retrospective, Levy is able to re-construct for us just how this "Hacker Ethic" was, always implicitly (if never explicitly) defining and guiding the actions of those involved in that early technological revolution: Access to computers — and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works — should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! All information should be free. Mistrust authority — promote Decentralization. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better. Access to computers — and anything which might teach us something about the way communication through the written word works — should be available to all students and teachers of writing. Always yield to the Hands-On Experience! The writing process should be collaborative and free of graded constraints. Mistrust traditional teacher-centered pedagogies — promote Decentralization. Teachers should be judged by their teaching, not bogus criteria such as research, publications, departmental service, and other tenure-track idols, while student writers should be judged by their writing, not bogus criteria like mechanics, usage, grammar, spelling or ability to conform to a pre-determined model of correctness. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change the writing classroom for the better. The earliest coders named themselves "Hackers" — the term has since been popularized and corrupted to suggest negative connotations — and worked at MIT in what they called the Kludge Room, a place to experiment and play with improbable combinations and impossible ideas. They named their machines playfully, one called the Minskytron after Hacker Guru Marvin Minsky, and formed ironic societies like SHAFT, the Society to Help Abolish Fortran Teaching. They had a jargon of their own, including coded words like Greenblattful; in California, they formed the Homebrew Computer Club. The current generation of technorhetoricians — last year in El Paso, Fred Kemp called us "the second generation," though in computer terms that is impossibly young — works in MOOspace in a place called the Netoric Cafe, a place to experiment and play with improbable combinations and impossible ideas. We name our projects playfully, with terms like webfolio and syllaweb, and understand perfectly what it means to say a message has been cross-posted in "Crumpean" proportions. We have a jargon of our own, just like the Hackers of MIT and Cal Tech did. Just as many subcultures do. The term I have adopted — and adapted — to describe the naming we're doing is "kludging." Here are just a few of the many kludged words which have been posted to the Interactive Historiography Project in the Eric Crump's CyberJournal RhetNet:
The rejection of meritocracy in the academy, as represented primarily by the grizzled tenure/promotion/review process and by the traditional A-to-F grading scale, is a common theme in discussions among technorhetoricians on lists like ACW-L, RhetNet, and Community-D, home to the CWTA. It is the heart of what perhaps we might call the Technorhetorician's Ethic — as it once was central to the Hacker Ethic. But at some point, we must admit, we step away from the Ethic because we're practical enough to want credit for what we're doing within the system of which we are a part. Formation of a group like the CWTA, publication of a peer-reviewed journal like Kairos and other current technorhetorical projects all have as secondary motives the instantiation of recognition for the community of technorhetorical scholars. It is precisely then that the self-conscious act of naming becomes most important, because that naming is done to describe the actions of the community not simply for itself but for an outside audience. Once it must convey a certain (and important to be understood) meaning to an "unfriendly" audience, then the linguistic kludging is less playful and ironic and more intentional and pointed. It happened to the community of Hackers; it is a lesson from which we might learn about ourselves. As Howard Rheingold has described in his book Virtual Communities, "Among the original hackers at MIT, the ones who helped invent time-sharing, the hacker ethic was that computer tools ought to be free. The first personal-computer makers were outraged when William Gates, now the richest man in America, started selling BASIC, which PC hobbyists had always passed around for free." Gates' now-legendary manifesto — recall, the Ethic was always implicit, without a specific statement or manifesto — was printed in The Altair User's Newsletter entitled "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" — note he avoids using the self-styled term Hackers — and states with open sarcasm, As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? ... Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?" At least this shift to friendlier naming led, finally, to the development of user-friendly interfaces, notably the revolutionary Macintosh desktop metaphor recently re-invented by Microsoft's Windows '95. It is heartening to see that Gates has returned to the roots of the Hacker Ethic and decided that, indeed, it is not necessary to pay for the use of an interface developed elsewhere. We all want to work within the Hacker ethic — but we're practical, too. We want credit — and our scope moves from other pedagogical hackers (each other) to a much wider audience. Or more appropriately, audiences. In developing technorhetorical pedagogies, we face a painfully bifurcated audience — on the one hand, our students; and on the other, the administrators of our departments. The audiences we address (students) are, ironically, probably far more diverse than the audiences we must at times invoke (the administrators), for their demands are much more individual and varied. Students at RPI and Georgia Tech, for instance, may share a great many educational demographics but almost no similarities in cultural background. Students at RPI and SUNY-Albany may come from similar cultural and geographical (though not economic) demographics but share little in the way of educational interests. We must encounter and consider these things in our daily pedagogy — and even then, to speak of "classroom demographics" is to dismiss the needs of the individual student in a disturbingly administrative generality. Yet administrators at RPI, at Texas Tech, at Ball State do have a great deal in common with each other, even as students at those universities might not. They all need to speak in terms of generalities, of demographics, of writing requirements and composition tracks. "How will this class fit the university's (or department's) writing (or humanities) requirement?" is a question that is as likely to be asked of a technorhetorician in Troy, New York as Lubbock, Texas as Muncie, Indiana as — fill in the name of your university community here. Consider the term "syllaweb," one which has been quickly adopted, utilized, and more recently denigrated by members of the community of technorhetoricians. What exactly does the term mean? Why do we use it? At a recent Netoric Cafe, an exchange among Eric Crump, Traci Gardner, Greg Siering and I illustrated the many possibilities at hand: GregS says, "We *want* to get students thinking in new ways, so what better way to do that than with new words made out of old ones? If we say 'syllabus,' we allow them to conceptualize in old ways; if we say 'syllaweb,' we encourage new concepts, images, perceptions, and expectations." Eric says, "I hope the use of 'syllaweb' *influences* people when they set about to make a syllabus on the web. The latter is nothing but a print document delivered electronically. The former is, or can become, something new & perhaps better" traci [to Eric]: i'd prefer that the choice of the name was informed by changes in the way we act and interact with others ... not the name itself. if it is the naming which is important, then choosing namby-pamby one or the other don't matter. it's not the name, but why it is chosen Mick says, "Right, Eric — but if a syllaweb is NOT just a webbed syllabus, does using the similar-sounding term *mis*lead our students?" Eric [to traci]: but isn't it the case that syllaweb, to stick with the current example, *is* a result, to some degree, of new practices that have emerged as people began putting syllabi on the web? Eric [to traci]: they started out just putting syllabi on the web, that is, but soon began to find that new possibilities were irresistible & the syllabus function begins to take new shape Mick says, "The syllaweb — sorry, traci — at RPI, mostly Chris Boese and I — has become not only a description of the course but a potential model for the kind of writing space available AND a collaborative writng space for the class to work in!" We spoke rather heatedly about the way the term informed our approach as teachers; about how it might make our students re-think the possibilities involved. And yet, nowhere do we mention the specter of the administration. The most telling experience I have had with the concept "syllaweb" came in a discussion with our department's administrative assistant to the chair. After finally convincing her to grant me permission to teach a class in which students were not given papertext syllabi, partially on the grounds that it would save the department copier costs, I started to leave her office. She stopped me with the question, "So when will I have a printout of that for my files?" I wonder if the kludge fooled her. My point — that the syllaweb was not like a syllabus, and thus could not be printed out — may have been obscured by the similarity in the naming. A hardware hacker will tell you that a kludge is elegant only to the individual who can look at it and understand it intuitively. The same may be true of these linguistic kludges — Greg and Traci and Eric saw "syllaweb" and immediately started to examine the implications, discussing the (in)elegance of the concept. The administrative assistant heard it and simply said "print it out for me." The intuitive understanding of the possibilities implied do not come with the word when the audience shifts. Nor should we ever expect them to. Similarly, I wonder how the label "technorhetorician" may be perceived by these audiences. My students still call me an "English teacher" and probably role their eyes at technorhetorician as some sort of politically correct equivalent in the vein of "sanitary engineer" for "garbage collector." My department chair surely still thinks of my role as "teaching assistant" in the Writing Intensive program; I don't expect any time soon that she will introduce me to anyone as one of the department's young netorical scholars. Yet, we call ourselves by this kludged name, "technorhetoricians," just as we call our projects by other kludges and neologisms. And there are reasons. Why do we call ourselves "netoricians?" So why do we call ourselves netoricians? Call our course outlines "syllawebs" and our student assignments "webfolios" and "intermoos"? At a recent Netoric Cafe meeting devoted to this very topic, the answers flew fast and furious. Janet Cross Heilke: "Naming is owning ... and if we don't make up new words, our language is owned by the past!" Greg Siering: "Coming up with a new term is a way of creating our own spaces and identitites, very important concerns for most of us in this developing field." Michael Day: "The sense of play inherent in kludging gives us a chance to look like fun people. Just folks, but sometimes the new names add new meaning in a sort of synergistic process ... " Greg Siering: "At the same time, though, we find a need to connect to a larger audience, perhaps, by using old words, at least in part." Elizabeth Pass: "Naming seems to be a natural process of entering a strange/new/unfamiliar "place." Eric Crump: "Some of this is just convenience, too. It's *klunky* to say rhetor-who-happens-to-study-the-rhetorical-features-of-technological-environments when you could say "technorhetorician." Michael Day: "Yes. The fun. The expansiveness in that we don't HAVE to take ourselves quite as seriously as some of our colleagues. The notion that dweebish nerdism can be fun and exciting! ... the kludge has a fun element to it, perhaps a disarming one." Greg Siering: "So by naming ourselves technorhets, we are claiming more ownership of our field, our specialties, and our interests." Again, not unlike the early Hackers. The name itself, wrested from them and made into a disgusting pop-culture caricature of its early MIT roots, has been abandoned by those who still claim to adhere to the Hacker Ethic. Now they call themselves Phrackers, Phreaks, Cyberpunks, Cypherunks, Coders and a hundred other names. The Hacker Culture spawned dozens of subcultures; so too, I would posit, will technorhetoric. And naming, it should come as no surprise, will play an important role in that process as well. It already is; consider Traci Gardner's point about that now-common pedagogical kludge, "syllaweb" ... Syllabi suggest calendarical plans for a course, so by choosing to have a syllaweb, I'm indicating that I'm still organizing things, and by choosing to forefront the word web rather than some other technology bit, I'm indicating that my pedagogy revolves around web pages. If I were working on a MOO and my class plans and ideas were laid out in a series of interconnected rooms, I might not choose to use either part of that term. Or if I have a webbed series of ideas and asked students to construct their own plan for the course and their work, the use of the sylla- part would be wrong. Our audience is split; so too is our medium. Mike will shortly be talking to you about the shifting demands of writing to a community via "print digital" and/or "print classic." This duality is no less important than the duality of audience that exists in our invention of ourselves as technorhetoricians before our students and to the administrators in our departments. Mike has claimed elsewhere, in that same Cafe meeting in fact, that an important next step in the integration process is the development of "intellectual ambassadors" — something to establish the "act of moving beyond the discourse community." My final argument would be that those ambassadors already exist, in part, in the words we have chosen to use in describing ourselves and our work. But like the political ambassadors of our world governments, they may not be perceived or interpreted by other cultures, other disciplines, other audiences, in quite the same way we nodded and winked at them in the first place. As we continue to name what we do, and to unselfconsciously seek credit for it on the academy's current terms, that is something always worth thinking about.
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