[-empyre-] WIKI Historigraphy

[Gregory Ulmer]

Green Jo-Anne wrote:
>
> Furthermore, all of the chapter authors were given a choice between a 
> wiki and WP blog. Patrick is the only author who chose a wiki. I'm 
> curious to know why everyone else chose the blog? 
>
My essay on pedagogy ("The Learning Screen") is not an account that 
lends itself to revision but a perspective based on personal 
experience.  It is collaborative in the sense of inviting others to 
discuss their experience and ideas about how they teach networked arts 
and letters.  The comments feature is augmented in these blogs, but 
perhaps not enough to allow the fuller reporting that I imagined.

The more controversial part of my essay is its framing argument, the 
description of digital technologies as an apparatus (social machine), 
dubbed electracy.  This theory would lend itself to group elaboration, 
but only in the sense of an "ensemble" of cooperating partners (a Jazz 
combo).  Beyond that, it also could be debated in a forum venue, between 
blog and wiki.  For example, there already is a comment on one of my 
charts, comparing inventories of epochal features among electracy, 
literacy, orality.  The post expressed dissatisfaction with the 
descriptors assigned to electracy, which names "entertainment" as being 
to the digital apparatus what "science" is to literacy or "religion" to 
orality.  Here is where we encounter the question about specialization.  
A full explanation of "apparatus" in general and the designation of 
entertainment specifically as the site of emergence is possible but 
book-length.  The terms in the chart are an ecology, or a system, and 
have to be addressed at the level of the theory as a whole.  Perhaps 
empyre is the place to discuss these framing themes, and then the 
archives are a resource for a history of the question.

I have more to say about Networkedbook as a project, about why I find it 
so attractive and why I am pleased to be a part of it, but I will wait 
for my turn later this month.

all best
Greg Ulmer

-- 
*Gregory L. Ulmer*
http://www.english.ufl.edu/~glue
http://heuretics.wordpress.com
 University of Florida