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10/10/2004 Archived Entry: "Danger Mouse"

Fade in….
I'm really interested when digital events invite DJs to attend and speak. Paul Miller lectures at the EGS and often does speaking engagements at campuses. Chuck D used to hit the college campuses. Danger Mouse is now attending Web 2.0. The connection? Digital writing emphasized in sampling.
You won't find Danger Mouse at CCCC or Computers and Writing, right? Or Miller or Madlib (the hall would quickly fill with the smell of weed) or Gilles Peterson, or anyone else from the DJ world. Not to fetishize the DJ here (it’s just one example of digital writing, ok?), but these examples (all large scale, of course, but easily replicated in the thousands across the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere in everyday computing and writing) identify that folks are writing with technology in ways composition studies cannot yet account for.
This is much of what The Rhetoric of Cool attempts to show. Why are we driven by print based methods and oblivious to the digital? When I watched said well known compositionists (see previous post) discuss gaming, I felt the same way. The lack of "attention" to media in action is quite revealing. It's one thing to post an assignment as "digital rhetoric" because it asks students to "analyze" a website or game (who is the audience? what's the purpose?). It's another thing entirely to produce digital work (and I don't mean websites for non-profits, usability testing, yadda yadda yadda).
I've been mocked for repeating this mantra too much, but man, it's right in our face. We can't imagine 1963 composition looking everywhere but at McLuhan (writing/technology? not enough studies have been done to show its effectiveness, Braddock et. al. write...oh jeez. Did they bother to pick up The Gutenberg Galaxy (or a year later Understanding Media)? Doubtful.
And we can't imagine comp getting with it still today. Discuss a website's purpose? Why? Who the hell cares? What do these blogs do rhetorically? Uh, teach, can I use a blog to do some networked writing here…
Comp needs a clue. Danger Mouse's quote from the first link above: mashing is so easy. The technical stuff is not beyond any 18 year old ability (contrary to what so many folks in the field profess). What to do with mashing, mixing, remixing, now that's another story. Da da da dum. A job for comp teacher. Up up and away.
Fade out….

Posted by joanna @ 10/13/2004 06:30 AM EST

Could be on a blog. Could be on a website. Could be elsewhere.
The mixing/remixing pedagogy asks writers to appropriate and refigure.

In my textbook there are a number of examples. You can get an exam copy from Longman (ablongman.com). The temporal assignment (mixing unrelatd moments and juxtaposing them from one year in order to generate a new idea - which can also be done with a student's course schedule for that semester)and the Dead Elvis assignment - are two such assignments. The connections/remixing come from found patterns in unrelated items.

Something else that comes to mind (but just now as I write this) for the weblog is the idea of the reblog (http://www.reblog.org/). They're talking about collecting feeds, but I can imagine an appropriation of a variety of other blog posts and recontextualizing them for new purposes.

Posted by jeff @ 10/12/2004 12:04 PM EST

As someone who began teaching back in the day when disks were large enough to serve food on, I'd like to ask you to give us a practical "for instance" of how you would develop an assignment around mixing and sampling. I'm not mocking you--I'm just thinking about how I could implement the idea in my class.
Would it begin with a blog, or would a blog be something different? I teach in a networked lab, so using the computer is central to what we do, and this year I want to move beyond using the net as an electronic library and filing cabinet. Look forward to hearing your ideas.

Posted by joanna @ 10/12/2004 10:34 AM EST