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.

Video

When I mention a video in class about digital technologies yielding the potential for new types of expression, I am referring to this video.

Onion Article

It's not just academics who use the word discourse. Take a look here.

Video Resume

You can see the video resume we talked about here.

This class is serious business.

So is this.

Word Clouds

After you finish your literacy narrative, you may get a kick out of feeding the text into a wordcloud generator. It takes about a minute, and all you do is cut and paste text into wordle.

Bookmarking

Data, data, data. If you visit a number of websites frequently, one thing you can do is use networked tagging software to organize your information. One of the easier ones to use is delicious.

Link Link Link

I encourage you to link to the blogs of your classmates. There are all sorts of nifty features you can add, and you can see how long it has been since they were last active. Snap.

Blog posts are easy

Simple text is the easiest way to write in your blog. You can also learn how to embed links.

If you want to get tricky, you can learn to embed images and video too.

We are going to watch a short clip about blogs. It is called Blogs in Plain English.

As you can see, blogs can be used for a number of different things. You can use them for linking, social networking, and journaling. You can use them to organize information or maintain a cheap and easy web presence.


The Knobel and Lankshear article gave you a typology of some different blogs. There were blogs that contained links to other sites with commentary, such as slashdot or the drudge report.


There are also personal blogs that serve as journals. These are becoming more common as a way for corporations or celebrities to keep fans in the loop. An example would be by an academic or a corporate entity.


Some blogs just pick up steam and become sensations. An example is the blog of Kyle Macdonald, who created his blog to document his quest to barter a paper clip into a house.



How you use your blog is up to you. I will occasionally ask that you do certain things with them, such as respond to an online text or a reading, sort of like an academic journal.

But other than the occasional request, all you need to do is actively use yours and turn it into something. You can use it to organize your lists and tags, you can provide commentary on what other people are finding on the web, and you can use it to network with your classmates.