Networked (Re)publics

In the Feb 2007 CCC, W. Michelle Simmons and Jeffrey T. Grabill evaluate community informatics websites and describe today's spaces of "public deliberation" as "institutionally, technologically, and scientifically complex," and argue that a "civic rhetoric would also address helping users understand complex information technologies, both in terms of creating and using them" (423, 431). Therefore, in my interactions with students, I try when appropriate to direct attention to the limits and potentials of campus technology by exploring themes from open source and do-it-yourself (diy) culture with students. Linux culture and 'zine culture, in similar ways, provide space for students to discover "baby steps" towards forms of civic engagement; simple steps, like how to cite a community webforum, or how to search a community database. Civic rhetorical performances arise to meet problems born out of complex beaureacratic and technological terms/interfaces. In response, we need to model commons-based peer-to-peer production by first meeting students where they are, and then writing with them.

Ours is not the polis of Athens, and we are charged with preparing students to write with technologies always about to be invented. Indeed, the descriptions and analyses of technical writing in the workplace in our discipline recognize and document the complexities of the support economy or control society (cf Spinuzzi et al in Technical Communication Quarterly). Rhetorical education resonant with the ancient Greek traditions has understandably emphasized linkages between rhetoric and the “demos” of democracy – humans engaged in communicative rationalities of deliberation, argument and response. ­However, distributivity underscores the way in which the “demos” involves another, perhaps archaic etymology: the demos as commons. Linked to Lawrence Lessig's concept of an open source commons and French rhetorician Michel Maffesoli's understanding of the Dionysian aspect of human nature, the “will to live” where the very boundaries between individuals begin to fluctuate and even liquify, rhetorical practice necessarily involves techniques of interconnection and disconnection that puts the usual contours of a self into dissarray. To be effective, civic rhetoric and community-based literacies entail ethical and rhetorical performance in new media, where all of the fluctuation is laid bare. Therefore, we must learn to how to effectively inhabit and teach new media forms, software, hardware, and networks. The open source community provides a forum for hands-on civic rhetoric. This involves a lot of work, work that crowds out the work required to relect on the lessons learned in our practice, so as to recast (share) them in peer-reviewed forums. In the future scholarship (and it's measure) will need to reflect, be transparent to, or facilitate distributed performances of engagement.

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