The Wiki Article

Your next mission, and you are forced to accept it, is to write a wiki article. You can participate on any wiki you so choose. You can write about any topic of your choice. You can also choose to improve upon an article that is already there. When you are finished, post a link to the article, and explain what you wrote or what you improved upon. I am sure some of you have home-grown knowledge of Wisconsin, so perhaps you want to help with this project.

Web Culture

As you do your digital ethnography, you are going to be running into digital culture in various manifestations. Some of the key terms to keep in mind are remix culture, participatory culture, and the presence of the vernacular. Web culture intersects most explicitly with writing studies through issues of authorship, copyright, and rhetorics, as well as simply by the sheer volume of text and writing produced in many web 2.0 environments. If according to the "stewards," of literacy,online literacy is of a lesser kind, then the steward of literacy just quoted has done an embarrassingly bad job thinking about the ways in which writing usurps or competes with reading in online environments.

While we are on the topic of we culture, here is some electronic literature that has been officially sanctioned by the powers that be. Such "high art" is in an environment competing with examples of fan culture, some of which are NSFW, like this one.


At any rate, the key terms and concepts to keep in mind as we move forward are:

1. Remix Culture

2. Participatory media

3. Social production

4. Copyright

5. Prosumers

Concepts

We are continuing to build on writing and writing studies to think about digital and networked writing. Here is a list of the concepts.

The Wealth of Networks

One of your next readings focuses on Benkler's work. You can see him here.

The collapse of context

In the anthropological introduction to YouTube, there was some talk about the collapse of context in a media-saturated world. Similar arguments circulated about the immediate reaction to Colbert's speech a few years ago. Some commentators suggested that Colbert understood he was speaking to the internet and not the immediate context.

The spreadsheet

As you will remember from the syllabus, the actual online writing you do is graded through a type of pass or fail system. You can see the way it is configured by consulting this document.

Alternate viewpoints

Here is an alternate viewpoint to some of things I have said in class. Take a look at it; we will discuss it next Tuesday.