Questions for 10/17 Class Discussion

I’m particularly interested in the way Collin Brooke suggests meaning making is changing because of internet practices. He references Scott Lloyd DeWitt’s concept of reading as an “Impulsive Model” which reflects the fast-paced surfing internet users might do. Brooke further links this to Dewitt’s idea of “cognitive fabric” which is the weaving together various texts of information to create a pattern. Brooke relates it to memory, or his term persistence, and argues that these patterns are a way to outline or shape a set of texts: “Persistence as a memory practice is the ability to build and maintain patterns, although those patterns may be tentative and ultimately fade into the background” (157).

Could this be a new way to learn? Should we incorporate this kind of meaning-making and the retaining of information through patterns into the writing classroom? If so, how do we incorporate this new type of learning?  (I think about 102 more since it has a greater amount of texts that must be read for research purposes.)

Another concept found in Brooke’s text is “containerism” (93-7). Brooke suggsts we should break free from the sequentiality of traditional texts. He quotes David Kolb who suggests forms to do this (tangles, sieves, split/joints…whatever those are) that are “patterns that demonstrate a variety of rhetorical effects that are possible if we think beyond the container model” (96). My concern is how we would go about teaching these patterns if we were assigning a multimodal project. At what point does pattern (arrangement) become less about logic and more about design? How can we make that distinction?

Unrelated to Brooke, I am lost as to what constitutes a network according to Galloway and Thacker (who never seem to define it?). I don’t understand how a network is different/similar to community.

Baym frames community with five parts: space, practice, shared resources and support, shared identities, and interpersonal relationships (74-90). She then discusses networked individualism, “in which each person sits at the center of his or her own personal community” (90). How can her concepts be compared and contrasted with Galloway and Thacker?