Dr. Matei quote of the day

Today, Dr. Matei compared online communities to sturgeons--because they're "cartiladginous." Like "trying to nail Jello to a wall."
This was only funny because Pam answered, "A fish? Online communities are like a fish?"
And that was only funny because earlier Dr. Matei said that "It's like a dog, sitting on a pile of hay. The goat can't get to it, and the dog won't eat it!"--in relation to "spare data sets that you'll never use." Sometimes his metaphors (meta-phor, substitution) are very Burkeian. After all, I talk about critical trouts....

COM632: Jenny Preece, Online Communities

Preece, Jenny. Online Communities. West Sussex, England: John Wiley and Sons, 2000.

Preece's text is a merger of four perspectives (sociology, technology, virtual worlds, E-commerce) that examines what makes a good online community--how it ticks. The mixed perspective allows her to move easily across disciplinary lines and address the multiple problems online interaction brings us. At times, it can feel like a how-to book (techne), at other times, an intro to online community theory, and still at other times, a discussion space for the discipline (particularly in methodology). Still, it is not a schizophrenic read--in fact, it is an easy read, and I'm afraid I'll miss something subtle. So, the pulled out quotes below will hopefully highlight what I think is important--that which is not already on Dr. Matei's lecture notes.

In many ways, this feels somewhat like a self-help book to me--many good, but abstract ideas, with little concrete information. Yes, good design is essential. Yes, we must find user-oriented design. But what does that mean? And how can she fill a whole book with lists and bullet points of what seems to be fairly obvious? Or am I just so embedded in design culture, in internet culture, in online communities in general, that these only seem obvious to me? Who, exactly is her audience, and what level of expertise do they have?

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"The collective purpose of a community, the goals and roles of the individuals in a community, and the policies generated to shape social interaction all influence social interaction in the community. Sociability is concerned with these issues" (Intro, p. 7)

"Each community is unique, and there is no guaranteed recipe for a successful community. However, developers can influence the way a community develops by carefully communicating its purpose and policies" (7)

Her definition of "online community" is interesting. Four parts: "People" interacting "socially"; a "shared purpose"; policies; and Computer systems. I think hers is the first to include the technology as part of the definition, rather than comparing online community to social scientific definitions of "real" community. This shows, a the outset, a different way of thinking. However, on p 11, she notes that there is still the problem of absent physical presence, and that good "sociable" design is what helps smooth it over.

See the list on p. 13 and the additional list on p. 14

A note against Utopianist thinking in online community theory discussions: "Yet physical communities do not always function well and to the advantage of all, or even the majority, of their members. So why assume that online communities will do any better? It's easy, but dangerous, to assume that all communities are good" (20).

Preece addresses the "threat" the nonphysical space of cyberspace poses to "real" relationships, to "social capital and society" (22). The "Carnegie Mellon study" seems to raise questions about antisocialism and the internet, about isolation. Preece simply says that we developers must be 'aware' (THERE'S THAT WORD AGAIN) of this potential, and should "raise awareness" (EURGH!) among participants of this tendency. Of course, awareness won't do any good, if you're sitting at home, on your computer 6 days a week, highly aware that you aren't doing any good in the "real" world, but quite happy about it.

Oooh, some PoMo!
"Most definitions treat community only as an entity; in fact, community is a process (Fernback, 1999). Communities develop and continuously evolve. Only the software that supports them is desgined. Thus, the role of a community developer is analogous to that of the mayor of a new town, who works with town planners to set up suitable housing, roads, public buildings, and parks, and with governors and lawyers to determine local policies" (26).

On Health Communities: Yep, I recognize the genre. And I HATE reading the fibro ones.

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Chapter 5: Research Speaks to Practice: Interpersonal Communication

Oh, it's social science.
"Social Presence Theory"--"addresses how successfully media convey a sense of the participants being physically present, using face-to-face communication as the standard for assessment [yeah, cause that always works]. Social presence depends not only on the words people speak but also on verbal and non verbal cues, body language, and context" (150). See readings from Oct 15 for more. See also: Media Richness Theory.

She assumes that "social presence fundamentally affects how participants sense emotion, intimacy, and immediacy" (151). I'm most interested in immediacy--to be without medium, without barriers between the I and Thou. How platonic these assumptions are! How we fill in social cues online is interesting--they assume we don't, but I'm fairly sure we do. See her notes on "self-disclosure" and self-disclosure reciprocity (154). "Psychologically, the more people discover that they are similar to each other, thus, the more they tend to like each other, thus the more they will disclose about themselves" (154).

"Filtering out social cues impedes normal impression development." NORMAL????? (153).

Oh, gender! And gender bending! She's only scratching the surface of Queering potential online, but I guess that has to do with her audience and purpose. Damn.

Common Ground (156-164).
This section interests me most, as a Burkeian and as a fangirl. The phrase we're going with is "Common Ground Theory" (oh, come on! Get creative!) and it "determines how two people or a small group validate that they understand each other. There must be common referents ("my" or "that" or "now")--synchronicity. Different media allow different ways to ground (invite consubstantiality)

1. Co-presence (physical)


2. Visibility (physical and video)


3. Audibility (physical and audio)


4. Cotemporality (immediacy)


5. Simulatneity (messages can be sent and received instantaneously--experiencing the same thing at the same time--like watching MTV together while chatting).
   Sequentiality (people take turns, establishing time)


6. Reviewability (go back and see what happened, dude! Or edit?)


7. Revisability (wikiality)

Grounding and Empathy
Empathy is most visible between people with similar experiences. "The more similar people are, the less they have to 'go outside themselves' to gather cues; hence the more readily the can respond naturally to their circumstances" (164). Oh? Naturally???????

"There is, however, no research on the relationship between common ground and empathy, though it seems likely that when socioemotional (HUH?) content is involved, establishing common ground is aided by empathy, or vice versa." 164. I go with the "vice versa".

To Bear Past The Light

how many ways will we find to pretend

before we learn to fly

from the heels of our boots

from the pit of our navels

from the throbbing of our foreheads

He almost expected this; it's why he called it impossible so many times. The years have shown him that all events eventually mirror if he turns away long enough to squint. It's fire now that hunts him in the valleys, fire that burns the same each year, fire that burns away the drowning blood of houses. He runs on the cusp where grass meets slippery mud, and knows he should have expected this. It's why he's finding her now, on the beach where he left her; it's why he prefers to leave things in flames. Yet he is unprepared for the impossible meeting; he thought it would be whiter. He thought he had seen it in the mirror of a dark window, noon-sun bright and cheerful, awfully cheerful.

Do the Papelbon

Sorry, my Ohioan friends. I can't resist: GO SOX!

Quote from Sorin Matei

"SlashCom.com is not a meritocracy--it's not anarchistic--it's not like Wikipedia, which is a do-it-yourself-ocracy."

Snarry: Strikethrough07

Click above link

Quote:
Dr. Matei: "What's hot now? What's the new thing?"
Class: "Ummm....We're grad students."

106 Project, courtesy Dr. Matei

Have students make an Amazon.com list of "things every student needs"--connect to their Facebook accounts, give comments, feedback, initial "PR" pitches.

Text-based interaction/Social science stuff

[Walther, J. B., & Parks, M. R. (2002). Cues filtered out, cues filtered in: Computer-mediated communication and relationships. In M. L. Knapp & J. A. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed., pp. 529-563). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.]

In "Cues in, Cues out" the authors argue that "for good or ill, the Internet is a profoundly social medium" (530). To this I respond: No kidding. The word "internet" itself refers to a linking, a sharing of information. How could it be anything BUT social?

They also choose to focus their attention on "text-based interaction" (532). By "text" they seem to assume "words"--chat, MUD, MOO, etc. However, it seems odd to separate the "word" part of online interaction from the visual--even the text is arranged in a visual way, arranged to promote a chronological reading. "Threads" on BBs and some MUDs show not only chronological relations, but developmental ones; topics split, have subtopics and replies. Replies are the heart of BBs, blogs, fan platforms, etc--and these, while mainly textual, have a visual component that encourages a "community" feel, encourages a particular reading of the community (one way or another, depending on the type of community). To call the icons, music, and visual arrangment in general "extraneous" by omitting it from your study is the same as omitting adverbs and adjectives from a study of a piece of literature. You'll get the plot, the structure, the basic point, but the subtle meanings will most certainly be lost. It's not about delivering a message or completing a "task."

Nonverbal cues "filtered out"--researchers assume, the authors say, that the low bandwidth of "text only" communication leads to self absorption and lower social interaction abilities because the social cues used in f2f conversation are not 'present' (visual, embodied). This is, of course, the point of disability studies that focus on the internet, the glory of the online utopianist movement. The noncorporeal means cues are filtered out--but that's good! Those cues restrain us! Contain us! Put us in a chair! Gibson's Idoru plays with this, and comes to few, if any conclusions (although the third part of the trilogy might answer some of those...)Is the body really needed? Are our social cues worth anything?

[Kiesler, S., Siegel, J., & McGuire. (1984). Social psychological aspects of computer mediated communication. American Psyschologist, 39(10), 1123-1134.]


Key idea: Depersonalization. When you go online, you "leave something behind" (Matei). This can create counter productive behaviors--or it can create positive behaviors.
"Is computer-mediated communication simply disorderly, perhaps because there is no constraint on interruptions and distracting remarks?" (1129)
"...in computer communication there is less influence and control of a dominant person, moderator, or leader" (1130).

Baym, N. (1998). The emergence of on-line community. In S. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety 2.0 (pp. 35-68). Thousand Oaks: Sage.

"Writers who position themselves as participants as well as observers often emphasize emotion in their use of 'community'" (36).
"The dominant concern underlying most criticism of online community is that in an increasingly fragmented off-line world, on-line groups substitute for 'real'(i.e. geographically local) community, falling short in several interwoven regards" (36).
On B Anderson: "I argue here that an on-line community's 'style' is shaped by a range of preexisting structures, including external contexts, temporal structure, system infrastructure, group purposes, and participant characteristics" (38).

First Draft, Short Review

Virtual Utopias and Online Interaction
Thomas More first coined the word “Utopia” for his didactic novel of the same name in 1515. The word’s translation means, literally, “No Place,” since More’s imagined edenic community did not actually exist. Today, our best chance at a perfect no-place seems to be in the non-space of cyberspace. In late 2007, it seems almost ridiculous to talk about whether online communities exist; the evidence of such communities on the internet is overwhelming. The question, however, was easily warranted in the early days of what would become “the internet.” Just twenty years ago, scholars were asking “Can communities exist online?” and “If so, how are they better (or worse) than ‘real’ communities?” What seems to unite these questions, and the driving force behind much of online-interaction research is a Utopianist rhetoric: A progress narrative that searches for the perfect community. This essay will examine both the early questions of the existence of community online, as well as the later, more explicit arguments for online community as Utopia.


Imagined Communities and Online Groups
Although the focus in past years has moved from one of ontology to one of axiology, even in the earliest conceptions of online communities, a definite Utopianist thread can be found fairly easily. I present these chronologically primarily to emphasize the conversation between writers and scholars, but also because technology’s tendency to grow exponentially means that the nature of “online” changes with each passing day—let alone month or year. I begin with descriptions of one of the first online communities—or at least the first to be written about extensively—the WELL. Many scholars begin here, possibly because of the WELL’s extensive archives and utopian reputation.

Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993), was the first to write extensively about his experiences at the WELL. Early in his introduction, Rheingold glorifies the internet as an egalitarian venture, he and continues to espouse that point of view throughout this first book: “The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost—intellectual leverage, social leverage, commercial leverage, and, most important, political leverage” (1993, p. xix). After an introduction that lays out Rheingold’s excitement for the potential of the internet, the remainder of the book blends theoretical considerations of what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities” with the a history of the WELL, and Rhengold’s own participation in it. For Rheingold, the WELL—and we might extrapolate to all online communities here—was “a full-scale subculture” (1993, p. xvi) and a “new kind of culture” where “Norms were established, challenged, changed, reestablished, rechallenged, in a kind of speeded up social evolution” (1993, p.xvi). Few argue with Rheingold that the WELL is, in fact, community; his evidence of interaction both online and in the Real World is extensive, from excerpts from discussions to narratives about his first experiences and later involvement. As an integral part of the WELL community, Rheingold offers a particular participant-observer perspective (“do-it-yourself anthropology,” he says in the introduction), but is also clearly biased.

The history of the WELL might be able to account for its Utopian echoes. As Rheingold, Seabrook, and Matei explain, the WELL was born as a project for the Whole Earth Catalog. Seabrook (1997)succinctly states “The basic idea was that by providing citizens with the technology to do more things for themselves…you could free people from their dependence on mass consumer products and corporate marketing” (p. 147). Utopian notions are built into the WELL, but whether or not the WELL is/was actually Utopia, however, is up for debate. John Seabrook, writing first for The New Yorker, then expanding to Deeper: My Two Year Odyssey in Cyberspace,” began his time at the WELL as a “lurker”—someone who watched the conversations in the postings, but did not participate. Not surprisingly, Seabrook begins his descriptions as an outsider, and thus has a very different viewpoint from the insider Rheingold; his outsider status makes him vulnerable to initiations and “flames” from the long-time users, and Seabrook includes these not-so-flattering comments in his text. Seabrook also does not hesitate to point out the disagreements and arguments that run rampant through the group: “Most of the time the WELL was peaceful and bucolic….But every now and then a thread would erupt into what was known on the WELL as a ‘thrash’” (152). In moving from “lurker” to “poster,” Seabrook experienced his own thrashings, emotional debates between angered community members, the text of which he reproduces and comments upon. However, Seabrook concludes that this insider/outsider divide, while not exactly Utopian, helps create a sense of community; internal disagreements and initiation rites are inherently part of any community, and they tend to help a community form its identity. It’s not surprising that Seabrook begins to echo Rheingold as his description of the WELL moves from insider to outsider status; he eventually states that “the WELL was the closest thing to a functional utopia of free speech of any place I encountered in my two years before the [computer] screen” (p. 185).

Some point out here that the WELL may be a special case; the community was active not just online, but it centered around a relatively small geographical area as well. Even Rheingold himself reminds us that “The WELL felt like an authentic community to me from the start because it was grounded in my every day physical world” (1993, p. xvi) For Rheingold, it was grounded in his physical world, but for others, online communities may be entirely ephemeral—users may never meet, may never even be in the same time zone. The lack of interaction outside the bulletin board, blog, or other online platform can easily lead to stresses that the early WELL easily resolved. In the revised edition of The Virtual Community, Rheingold addresses his critics in an additional chapter, titled “Rethinking Virtual Communities,” by helpfully outlining, and then answering a series of questions that emerged from his first book: “Is the use of the phrase virtual community a perversion of the notion of community? What do we mean by community, anyway? What should we know about the history of technological transformations of community?....Are virtual communities simulacra for authentic community, in an age where everything is commodified?....Most important, are hopes for a revitalization of the democratic public sphere dangerously naïve?” (p. 325). These questions continue to frame discussions of online community today, and Rheingold offers his own story of moving from naïve enthusiasm to knowledgeable critique as an example of how quickly the conversation about these issues can change. While this older Rheingold is far less naive, however, he is still equally enthusiastic, and he offers a thought experiment of ways to use internet-generated funds responsibly, “not…an unattainably ideal society expected to emerge magically from technology” (p. 391). The question of the quality of “community” in “virtual community,” he reminds us, is still up for debate among researchers.

By the late 1990s, however, scholars seem to agree that online communities are, in fact, communities; the term “community” itself undergoes some redefinition with the emergence of online groups, and online groups begin to see themselves as real, working communities. As the internet became more accessible to more people (with the evolution of the World Wide Web and America Online), scholars began to question not the existence of these groups, but their qualities, and their inherent potential to cause social change in the Real World. As Rheingold says “More than ever, we need to ask the right questions today about what kind of people, what kind of societies might emerge from social cyberspaces tomorrow” (p. 323). And for Rheingold and others, the potential for something approaching Utopia online seems vividly apparent.

Utopia, Communitas, and Agency

Rheingold first addresses the utopian tendencies of discussions of online communities in the introduction to the first edition of Virtual Communities. In the revised edition, however, Rheingold is far more explicit: He acknowledges that in his first book, he might have put a “rosier tint” on the WELL in order to emphasize the “realness” of it—to argue against the view that only “socially crippled adolescents would use the Internet to communicate with other people” (p. 324). He adds that “Perhaps prospects for online life were brighter then, seven years before the dotcom era” (p. 324). In Rheingold’s books and in the articles that follow below, a “bright” vision of the internet, what I am calling “Utopian,” is primarily egalitarian, “democratic,” and free from corporate intervention. The utopian online community mirrors, not surprisingly, the utopian commune experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.

Sorin Matei makes this connection explicit in his article “From Counter Culture to Cyberculture.” Matei gives a brief history of the WELL’s connection to the Whole Earth Catalog, analyzing WELL posts for their inherent counterculture assumptions and value, as well as for evidence of “community.” Matei concludes that the WELL, in imaging itself as a new type of commune experiment, superimposes a counterculture rhetoric over the already utopian language of technological progress.

New technologies have furthered the idea of cyberspace as utopia. Blogging and wiki functions have expanded the egalitarian language outside of just communities to other forms of online interaction; now, even encyclopedia writing is framed as a purely democratic and collaborative, if not utopian experience. What makes these shift from mere democratic language to utopian can be seen in Wikipedia’s own “neutral point of view” policy:

The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as "the truth", in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one. It should also not be asserted that the most popular view, or some sort of intermediate view among the different views, is the correct one to the extent that other views are mentioned only pejoratively. Readers should be allowed to form their own opinions. (“Neutral Point of View”)

The above policy posits an imagined space where bias can, in fact, be removed enough to allow each individual to make up his or her own mind. Neither popularity nor expertise will guide the user toward one reading or another—Wikipedia imagines intellectual freedom without gatekeepers.

Blogging, like wiki, is seen as a bottom-up movement; networks of writers report the news in non-legitimated forms, without the oversight of editors or corprorations. Communities form around some blogs, and users work together to create new knowledges. The grassroots language used to describe the blogosphere echoes the WELL’s vision of a non-hierarchical information exchange . David Weinberger’s(2002) Small Pieces Loosely Joined is equally optimistic about the potential of the World Wide Web: “The Web is about groups—people who, in one way or another, can look into one another’s eyes. Groups are the heart of the Web” (p. 105). These groups then go on to produce shared knowledge

Of course, these utopian visions of a perfect democracy fail to account for several factors. Wikipedia depends upon a somewhat naïve notion of collaboration; the belief that “Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy” (McHenry, 2007). And it is quite clear that Wikipedia’s knowledge-building strategies depend upon not only experts and hierarchies, but traditional higher education forms as well—citations are required, an encyclopedic language is recommended, and even the collaborative “talk” pages require a rhetorical savvy that more closely mirrors academic review than a conversation on the street.

Conclusions: Community and Desire

What these theories fail to account for is how online communities transmit, manage, and contain desire, and the division that comes with it. As these new technologies continue to emerge, scholars have turned to the more complex questions about online communities: What is the draw? How do these communities hang together? How can we predict success or failure? How might a utopia actually emerge? The concept of “Communitas” has been proposed as a working hypothesis of community maintenance and progress. According to the The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals, “Communitas… is a relational quality of full, unmediated communication, even communion, between people of definite and determinate identity, which arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups, situations, and circumstances” (p. 97). Communitas is essentially utopian, it “strains toward universalism and openness; it is richly charged with feeling, mainly pleasurable” (p. 98). The very idea of “Communitas” depends on the assumption that all communities are continually striving toward perfection, toward a harmonious balance between individuality and community.

However, “Communitas” itself is dependent upon an understanding of rite, ritual and myth. An addition of Rene Girard’s concept of “scapegoating” as community maintenance to the already important sociological concept of “communitas” seems prudent at this stage of theory-building. The remainder of this essay will give an overview of Girard’s theory and how it might contribute to the already well-developed ideas presented above.

In Girard’s Things Hidden, which is the culmination and condensation of several of his earlier works, Girard theorizes that desire and difference are dual (and inseparable) causes of the disintegration of communities. To counter and manage mimetic desire—which leads to the destruction of structured societies—a ritual (with an accompanying myth) is required, specifically, a ritual of sacrifice and victimage: “The death of the victim transforms relations within the community. The change from discord to harmony is not attributed to its actual cause, the unifying mimesis of collective violence, but to the victim itself” (p. 48). According to Girard, community maintenance depends upon this scapegoating of a pre-selected victim—a victim who is the Other, who represents difference within the community; a myth and narrative arises naturally from repeated scapegoating. Thus, myth becomes “the transfigured account of real violence” (p. 109), and the initial murder moves to the symbolic—the scapegoat is murdered “symbolically” through language.

Seabrook’s reproduction of some of the arguments on the WELL show a definite scapegoating mechanism at work in that community—one member even goes so far as to sarcastically note that s/he is the “System Scapegoat” whose “shortcomings…are the source of all problems on the WELL” (Stewart Brand, qtd in Seabrook, 1997, p. 158). It is unlikely that other scapegoats and scapegoaters are aware of their role—this would, in fact, deconstruct the scapegoat process and make the community vulnerable again. Finding scapegoats and the myths and rituals that surround them in online communities might be one way to approach theories of community maintenance. It also points us away from the naïve utopian rhetoric that seems to dominate much of our discussions of online communities: finding scapegoat mechanisms reminds us that online communities are just as vulnerable to difference and desire as physical communities, and that it a disembodied, non-corporeal topoi is not likely to resolve the basic problems of human interaction.

Works Cited
Girard, R (1978). Things hidden since the foundation of the world. Trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Standord U Press.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: homesteading on the electronic frontier (Revised ed.). New York, NY: HarperPerennial.
Seabrook, J. (1997). Deeper. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Rites of Communitas (2004). The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals. Ed. Frank A. Salamone. New York: Routledge, 97-101.
McHenry, R. The faith-based encyclopedia. Retrieved 15 Oct 2007 from http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html.
Weinberger, D. (2002). Small pieces loosely joined. Perseus.

A rant against (some) Org Comm assumptions

Org comm: Created to study communication--or lack thereof--in organizations (i.e. corporations). The goal is to create happier employees, “harmony” in the company, better relationships between managers and underlings. This of course, assumes that “work” should be harmonious, assumes we can make a job into an identity, and that we SHOULD invest so much of ourselves into our corporate lives. This is a palliative for the late capitalist condition of alienation of labor and reification of wage labor.
Org comm wants to create a participatory work environment, covering up the ‘real’ power relations at work, hiding the hierarchy. Consent is being manufactured, and we are helping! The very existence of Org comm reifies the current economic structure, instead of subversively deconstructing it; it is anti-Foucauldian at best.

Of course, I'm being broad here. But this is what I'm seeing in the literature, and it's scary. Marlene, our visiting "prof" from Brazil brought these to the fore for me; she's questioning the very basis of organizational communication, and that's good. Too bad there aren't more of her....

Missing Pieces

From Richard Lanham's book.

"Linear prose can only say one thing at a time" (83).
"Such figures [puns]--though to my knowledge, no one has ever thought to construe them this way--strive for greater productivity" (83).
"We need to use the human brain more efficiently. We need to find new shapes for traditional arguments and shapes for new kinds of arguments" (115).

While I won't disagree with anything Lanham says here--how could I?--I want to question his attitude toward this emerging change in text. Throughout these first three chapters, Lanham takes a fairly positive view, calling this transition to an information economy "progress" at one point in the introduction. His vision isn't necessarily utopian, but this text is celebratory: We are moving forward toward greater human (cognitive) achievement. Go us.

Even as we do so, as the above quotes show, we necessarily align ourselves with an ideology of productivity and personal gain. It may be the Anabaptist in me that shrinks back at this: as we rush toward some greater understanding and the mass of human knowledge reaches some critical point, are we really doing any good in the world? What is it we are striving for? What happens when we get there?
And what about all of those people who cannot react quickly enough, either from lack of physical ability, or lack of education? The flow of information is not as free and egalitarian as Lanham would like us to believe; the world of stuff permeates everything, including our access to the world of information (which in turn, limits our access to stuff...). While greater efficiency and large changes in attitude toward text might make sense and be a boon to educated middle class (and upward) people, the vast majority, the Masses, feel only information overload, not improved communication. And from what I've seen of information science in public schools, the utopian vision of a pure economy of attention is not only unreachable, but it ignores the day to day struggles of the lower classes and categorizes them as either nonexistant or unimportant to our sense of the "general" human condition.
Again, I find myself thinking of Levinas: How does the economics of attention allow us to afford any attention at all to the Other?


Giant Gerbil Ball (Reply from Morgan Reitmeyer)

What could an immersive book look like? Lanham has talked about the movement away from interactive texts and back towards traditional texts (only they’re on a computer screen). He also talks about the way that books, at least for those of us who really adore reading, are an immersive reality all to themselves. I have always shied from ebooks for many of the reasons that Lanham mentions: they are not mobile, there is nothing to touch and write on, I feel left out of the text and am interrupted by scrolling or button pushing. I just never found a love for them, and would rather read something that is on paper—yet I am able to spend hours online flipping back and forth through pages of information. How can this be? The way I read a novel or article is of course very different then the way I read online. Online I am generally skimming to the paragraph that feels like it hold some nugget of truth, or I am reading for brief information (recipe, factoid…). It seems that the texts online don’t quite take it far enough. How would it be different if I could be in the text? And how would it be if my actions actually changed the text? I was desperately looking for this wonderful thesis that one of the MFAs at Colorado State University made while I was just starting. She had a site where how you moved and selected text (which faded in and out and was hauntingly cool) changed the story that would appear and/or evolve. It was one of the most effective online creative texts that invited you into the process. Also, I am curious about the way it would be if, as we read/interacted with a book, we were in a virtual world of the text… I haven’t fleshed out what this would look like, and it might be part of my 3D library mind map of love, but this giant gerbil ball might be part of it.
Submitted by Morgan R. on Tue, 2007-02-20 10:06.

In the text, out of your apartment (reply from amylea)
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-02-20 10:56.
One of the romanticized notions of "reading" is the ability to escape to another world (perhaps a gerbil ball). Has anyone read the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde? The main character actually does go inside the text. There is a central Library of all books ever written, and all their permutations, and there is a policing body known as Jurisfiction that monitors all fictional worlds to make sure the plots are maintained. Excellent literary theory masquerading as novels.
But E-books (or, as the Next books posit, Book 2.0) don't even come close to this. Sad As an avid fanfic reader, I have been known to read online texts just as I read novels...but it is still very hard to do. My attention wanders to the advertisements, the links, the awards, the stylized fanart banners. One cannot curl up with a laptop, particularly when one must have it plugged in. Sad Maybe smaller will be better? I don't own a PalmPilot or BlackBerry...yet.

Can't wait till we can just download stories into our heads and watch them play out in a controlled hallucination. Fun! Cool

Later post:
VizRhet = design elements
I went flipping through our design book for fun--how bizzaro. I learned pagination by the sink or swim method. No textbook, no instructions; just Amylea, a jaded former Journalism professor, and an old Mac running Adobe PageMaker 4.0. I learned design organically, coming to realize (after the oscilating fan was thrown at me) that I needed to think about things like Grey Scale and Gutters as tools of manipulation, as audience control. In other words, the rhetoric of a newspaper is less in the copy than it is in the white space, hierarchy, serifs, and cropping. And in how I choose to arrange them. Editors-in-chief might look like they have the power, but people like me get to direct attention and give order. All thanks to a mouse and some well-placed shading.

Seeing these things explained so clearly in our book feels like someone explaining how to write the letter B again. I wonder if I would have done as well as a layout editor if someone had explained it to me, however. What I do now when faced with a blank Adobe page is more like a Blink moment: it's instinctive, pre-conscious, and wicked fun.
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-01-23 09:25.

How it began...
Fanvids, or why I'm in this class

I know we're supposed to be at an early stage here, but I've been working on this awhile...

Given the ease of video editing software and the proliferation of web-based forums on which to post amateur productions, it's not surprising that fanvids have become a favorite tool for fans of television and film to create new arguments about their reading of the original text. "Fanvids" have the potential to return control of the text to the reader by giving the creator the power of suture. By analyzing vids from two different fandoms, I hope to tease out what it is these amateur auteurs know about visual rhetoric and how they choose to either accept or ignore Hollywood film conventions in order to make their arguments. Specifically, I will look at the argument for a romantic relationship between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy (of Harry Potter) and the argument for a romantic relationship between Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson (Stargate: SG-1).

I plan on usnig Henry Jenkins' Textual Poaching and Laura Mulvey's work on suture as my starting points, but I'm open to just about any framework to help me sort through all this data.
Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:42.

Replies:
David Blakesley on Thu, 2007-02-01 06:32.

There are lots of interesting issues swirling around the topic of FanVids, so looking at them from the standpoint of visual rhetoric should prove very interesting.

Not too long ago, I did some work related to a sample essay in The Thomson Handbook on the subject of FanFic, so I have a few additional resources to suggest (in addition to the sources you've already mentioned--Jenkins, Mulvey--and particular FanVids). These focus on Tolkein FanFiction primarily, but they still might be helpful (I hope).

Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.
Chonin, Neva. "Love Between Men Is a Powerful Thing in Lord of the Rings." 15 Jan. 2002. SFGate.com. 11 Aug. 2002. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/01/15/neva...

FanFiction.net. 2006. .

Godawful Fan Fiction. 2006. 17 February 2006. http://www.godawful.net/mb/

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. See his website/blog: http://www.henryjenkins.org/ and this useful discussion: http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/09/how_to_watch_a_fanvid.html

Rice, Anne. “Important Message from Anne on ‘Fan Fiction.’" 2000. 17 February 2006. http://web.archive.org/web/20000511150950/www.annerice.com/scoop.htm

Schulz, Nancy. "The E-Files." Washington Post 29 Apr. 2001: G1.

Smol, Anna. “‘Oh . . . Oh . . . Frodo!’: Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of The Rings.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.4 (2004): 949-79.

Here's a Star Trek FanVid hosted at Salon:
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/misc/2006/09/13/kirk_spock/index.html

It would be interesting to do a FanVid on FanVids. . . .

Finally, check out Atom Films:
http://www.atomfilms.com/home.jsp

Fandom exploding
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-02-01 10:43.

I've read some of these (and quite a few others...); some of the Buffy studies have nice essays on feminism, female fans, and the gaze.

Recently a Buffy site added "BadFic" as a genre. The fics are chock full o' cliches, bad dialogue, and even worse plot elements. Fans seem fond of creating new "genres"--"angst" and "Revenge" are two that come to mind. But is "Bad" really a genre? Or maybe it is only a genre for fan based texts?

Fanvids
Reply: Submitted by Ryan on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:49.

Amy, aren't you going to explore the Kirk/Spock love affair? This sounds really interesting, as current technology has allowed amateurs to alter the narratives of their favorite stories. I am also interested in the point where technology comes far enough for amateurs to expand the stories of their favorite cultural products instead of just re-editing existing footage. I wonder if computers will ever allow the seamless reuse or expansion of special effects and filmmaking to let fans create footage beyond that which is poached. Just a thought - the project itself sounds very interesting.

Slashing the Captain
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:53.

Ryan,

The K/S slash has such a long history to it...and the fans are mostly adults who don't have time to edit fanvids. Sadly.
I think.


Later in the semester:

Desire and FanVids

After Eye and Brain we already knew that what we see is always already an interpretation--the gaps get filled in, past experience dictates our emotional responses, conventions give shape to the shapeless. But Elkins takes this one step further to argue that there is an element of desire that underpins all of these interpretive reactions. We desire to possess the things we see and, in turn, see the things we desire to possess (Elkins 31).

Which got me thinking about my project (mais oui!). Most fanvids create relationships that don't exist: Hermione/Snape (Harry/Snape...anyone/Snape), Daniel/Jack, Ed/Roy (of Fullmetal Alchemist)...Kirk/Spock. For these fans, simply writing a world in which these relationships exist is not enough--although fics usually accompany vids. They desire to make manifest a relationship and are now able to do so with photorealistic quality. No more cheesy fanarts or recreations in Paint--thanks to some strategic cuts, overuse of slo-mo, and the sometimes inappropriate fade, fans can make what they want to see appear to be real.
And this comes to be acceptable based on where thes vids appear: Like the film Elkins saw in two different locations, fanvids can appear rather cheesy if viewed next to the original video, or quite artistic when viewed from a fan's own webpage steeped in the fandom (ever see a Harry Potter themed fan site? Oh, the backgrounds!). Some would argue they're cheesy either way, but those comments usually come from those who have no desire to see that particular relationship played out. Or, The Few Non-Fans that exist. Somewhere.
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-02-27 10:54.

Reply: Submitted by Morgan R. on Tue, 2007-02-27 10:56.
Amy, could you post a few links to some of the Fan Vids... I admit that I have never experienced one....Mad Morgan Rackem (aka Morgan Reitmeyer)

Some Slash Vids...brace yourself
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-02-27 11:09.

Harry/Snape (aka "Snarry")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzkwx2D-tt0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3xDxDGucEk

Daniel/Jack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnF-_kLnQBg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrQrKbT7f0I
login to post comments

These videos kind of hurt me
Reply: Submitted by Morgan R. on Thu, 2007-03-01 10:48.
These videos kind of hurt me somehow... I don't know why. Harry and Snape most especially...Mad Morgan Rackem (aka Morgan Reitmeyer)

Fan Trauma
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-03-01 10:51.

There is a kind of trauma or violence I feel when I watch these that I don't feel in fanfic. It's not that I can feel the edited cuts so much as the perversion of images I know so well puts things off balance. I start to feel bad for the characters, because I see them being manipulated--although, they are no more manipulated by the fans than they are by the Hollywood producers/directors/editors who put them in the original composition.

Even Later in the semester:
Clarification: FanVids

While I can find quite a bit of information on fanfiction and fan communities in general, very little has been written about fanvids, apart from Machinema. Because I am not so much interested in the community-driven aspects of fanvids, however, these articles will not comprise the majority of my research.

I could also cite Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (and probably will), but again, authenticity and authority are not my main concern. Because I want to figure out what it is fans-auteurs know about visual rhetoric, what conventions they mainly rely on, and what genres they most heavily draw on, I will most likely have to rely on film theory.

What is complicating this project is the musical element: Fanvids don't just rely on Hollywood conventions, but on music video conventions. I'm not sure where to go looking for research on this, but I'll start with the cultural studies journals. I'm not sure yet whether there are different genres of fanvids based on genres of music videos (or genres of music), but the ones I've seen all seem to fit within the same romance-filled, teen-angst genre. This may be, however, because I am looking at arguments for "unconventional pairings" (Hermione/Snape and Daniel/Jack), which are based on unfulfilled desire. There are so few fanvids for "canon" or established relationships that I'm starting to think that "angst" just might be the key emotion of the genre.
Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-02-08 10:57.

Fascinating
Reply: Submitted by magnoliafan on Thu, 2007-03-01 10:48.

This sounds like a really fascinating project. I think that a good place to go would be popular culture conference programs, because the ones I've been to seem to be invested in the kinds of questions you're asking.
L-Train (Lars)

Visual Genres
Reply: Submitted by David Blakesley on Thu, 2007-03-01 09:31.

Amylea:

One possible trajectory would be to look at a variety of "prototypical" fanvids to see if there has emerged a visual style that amounts to a genre--a socialized response to a situation--using film and images. I think you're right that the genre will be influenced by music video, perhaps even the roving camera technique it initiated and that became a staple of shows like NYPD Blue and other TV shows.
To what extent to these (re)presentations violate traditional video genres like realism? What sort of mixing/mash-ups might they employ? Your goal could be to establish just what techniques do seem common and (even) what role technologies (and video editing software) have in determining them.

Some of Amy's replies to others:
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-01-23 10:58.

I'd like to put Levinas and Burke in a (parlor) room and let them hash this one out: Burke seems to suggest that rhetoric can be ethical, because it encourages us to identify with the Other. Levinas, as Mark says, considers any attempt to change the Other to be unethical. "Reading" the "Face" would be a violence for Levinas. But if we're all doing this unconsciously anyway, is it really unethical, since ethics involves choice?

Lovely Levinas
Reply: Submitted by mark p on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:40.

I don't really remember too much about what Levinas had to say about unconscious behaviors, but you do pose an excellent question concerning this. Yes, ethics always involves choice. But Levinas also refuses to work in clear good/evil, right/wrong dualities. Choosing to not be ethical is not evil or wrong, it is simply further away from the good. Therefore, I wonder if choosing to not explore the subconscious reactions to reading the face would not be a matter of unethical, just a slide further away from the ethical good. But then, if they're subconscious, how can you consciously choose to explore them? I wonder if that makes a difference? Maybe I just felt like typing the word "Levinasian." Yeah, that's probably it.

Unconscious Levinasian
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:51.

Isn't it "The Good"?
What I remember about Levinasian ethics is that we are to be in a perpetual state of putting the Other before ourselves. The only evil for Lev-baby is the "betrayal" that comes with self-interest. I don't think Levi would fault us for our unconscious behaviors, as long as we consciously acknowledged the humanity(Being) of the Other...which we do through encountering the suffering and the Face...which tends to be visual....whether or not it's rhetorical is another question, I suppose?

Ethics
Reply: Submitted by Ryan on Tue, 2007-01-23 10:51.

This is very interesting, because I don't know anything about Levinas and would like to. Therefore, please take my comments with a grain of salt. There are certainly ethical implications in the idea of reading faces, as the seven seconds in the Bronx chapter indicates. However, the work of Gladwell complicates the idea that we cannot play on emotions that others are not conscious of, because Blink suggests that emotions can be communicated without either party being conscious of them (using conscious in a loose sense meaning "aware.") You write "However, in a Levinasian sense, it would be unethical to read the face of someone else and use the emotional cues found there to persuade them before they have any conscious awareness of their own emotional state." However, if I am think slicing the face, I may also not have any consciousness of the emotion I just read, even though I am reacting to it. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that people may express emotions that they are not conscious of. This seems to complicate Levinas' ethical standards, though I do like them as an ideal.

Other blogging moments:
Barry and Persuading the Rhetorician

Let's assume for a moment that we all have normal amygdala.

Assuming that our first response has been channeled through the thalamo-amygdala system--a gut reaction, an "emotional" moment (I don't like the word emotion for this), then the most effective rhetoric is that which takes advantage of this system. If we could know what images/sensory input evoke which reactions, we could create a text working to persuade based just on those. No logos needed.

I've always wondered how it is that smart people--rhetoricians, for example--are still able to be persuaded, even when we know they're being persuaded, and can articulate rhetorical elements at work. And yet I still want to see Movie X, or I think that car is really sweet. What must be at work is this gut reaction, this emotional response that is stronger than logic.

Thoughts?
Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-01-25 11:13.

Does Pathos Come First?
Reply: Submitted by David Blakesley on Tue, 2007-02-06 07:17.

Good questions, Amylea. All things being equal, I think there is this tendency for pathos to outshine the other appeals. However, the rhetorical moment extends over time and space, so it's not the only appeal that gets through, and the "well-educated trout" knows how to differentiate types of interpretations because it can be dangerous to always give in to the first impression. That does happen often, though, that's for sure.

It's important not to discount it, as some people do, valuing instead the purely logical appeal. I think they always work in concert (or should) and that one without the other is a recipe for failure (from the rhetorician's side).

There's the likelihood also that the event itself "teaches" us to react to its eventfulness. We monitor our reactions as we read (or view) and those reactions in turn have affect in their own right. It's also interesting to think of how unrelated aspects of context change the effects of appeals. (One thing in one context might mean/affect quite differently in another.)

The missing semester

In August of 2007, in all their infinite wisdom, the administrators of the Drupal sites at Purdue decided to move to a new server. Now, those who contacted the administrator (Jeremy Tirrel) in time could have their sites archived on the new server--a simple copy and paste job. Those who did not, well...we always knew the internet was ephemeral.
But what surprised me was that Dave Blakesley, Drupal Man himself, advocate of Drupal-ness, Mr. Lets-just-hold-class-on-the-Drupal-site, the Champion of web archiving for future generations, did NOT request our Spring 07 Viz Rhet class be archived and moved. While he kept one page, with the calendar with our readings, all of the real meat of the class--the discussions that began with intellectual bravado and ended with "*Mark does the Buffy Dance*"--are unavailable, unless I'm incredibly stupid at using websites.
So, it is gone. Just gone.
Of course, nothing on the web is ever truly gone. Well, not text anyway, so I've spent all afternoon hunting down Google's cache of my old posts--because I had some good ideas in there, somewhere, some lovely sentences that should not be forgotten.
This missing semester problem is one reason for the Internet Archive project (archive.org). Some people find the project a bit frightening--particularly those people who posted embarrassing or potentially slanderous things on a website somewhere. And I admit, the very ephemeral nature of the Web is one reason I like it--the easy mutability is somewhat comforting. You can edit yourself into a public perfection. But the Archive project seeks to catalog the Web's changes, its various mutations. Each update, each minor edit.
If you go to Archive.org, and search for www.bluffton.edu/~bccleala you can find, minus images, my old website from undergrad. Along with nearly every major edit I made. You can also find the old Witmarsums (edu/~witmarsum), Gerald's old pages, etc.
So I'm off to archive myself, so that I can prove to myself that Spring 07 really happened. Because writing, as Walter Ong, Derrida, and others remind us, is Memory, immutable mobiles for us to stack up as visual proof of our own existence. And I'll be damned if I let a server change destroy 16 weeks of my memories.

Return of the Slugline

We get to use sluglines in Dr. Matei's blogsite (click title to view). I miss sluglines. I miss all the journalism terms.
like
put to bed
kill
cutline
crop
mug
pull out
etc, etc, etc

Random List for Class

Books with Literary Theory and Technological Dystopianism

Thursday Next series, Jasper Fforde
Feed, M T Anderson
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Native Tongue, Haden Suzette
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami
Distraction, Bruce Sterling
Virtual Light Trilogy, Gibson
House of Leaves

Conversation Amy and Lou had:

Unwiredmascot says:
beavers pick up tie
Unwiredmascot says:
sigh
Unwiredmascot says:
the header says This week in Beaver sports
Unwiredmascot says:
Beavers control match in 1-1 double overtime tie
Unwiredmascot says:
Nolan Phelps knocks in two goals for Beavers
Laura says:
Beavers black Taylor-Fr Wayne 10-0
Unwiredmascot says:
geez
Laura says:
blank
Unwiredmascot says:
lol
Unwiredmascot says:
oh geez
Unwiredmascot says:
Beavers open with 2-1 win over Lake Erie

*pause as Amy unloads dishwasher*

Unwiredmascot says:
Junior midfielder Nate Flath (Wadsworth/Wadsworth) opened the scoring for the Beavers
Laura says:
*has looming memory of peanut butter knives
Unwiredmascot says:
*closes eyes&
Unwiredmascot says:
exactly
Unwiredmascot says:
you can't just dump those in the dishwasher
Laura says:
right
Unwiredmascot says:
now i'm hearing an icecream truck
Unwiredmascot says:
dammit
Unwiredmascot says:
I've only ever heard an icecream truck like 4 times in my whole lif
Laura says:
that's too bad
Unwiredmascot says:
e
Unwiredmascot says:
what's too bad is that it's not real
Laura says:
yes, that's ever worse
Unwiredmascot says:
Transylvania dominated the Beavers for the entire contest in an 8-0 shutout of the Beavers.
Laura says:
I once heard an ice cream truck and thought I was going crazy, but it really was one
Unwiredmascot says:
lol
Unwiredmascot says:
I can see you doing that
Laura says:
the ones down here play really weird music
Laura says:
and I was trying to sleep
Unwiredmascot says:
aw
Unwiredmascot says:
so, yeah
Unwiredmascot says:
I can see how that'd be all dream logic-y
Unwiredmascot says:
Dude, I sound more and more like Buffy every day
Laura says:
right, I was having images of carosels (sp?)

Because the internet has made it easier to stay in contact with our friends, we can now have these deep, intimate connections between people, as demonstrated above.

And it's "carousels", according to Word2003, Lou.

Class notes (Smart things to say)

Quotes to consider:
McHenry. Techcentralstation.com

"Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy."
(later in same graf)
"Does someone actually believe this? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say. One possibility that occurs to me is this: The combination of prolificacy and inattention to accuracy that characterizes this process is highly suggestive of the modern pedagogic technique known as "journaling." "


Schiff, S. "Know it all." The New Yorker.

"Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night’s party or to next season’s iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site."

On pages 3 and 4, Schiff outlines some of the philosophical underpinnings of Wikipedia. And it's pretty damn Enlightenment. Which is always pretty damn utopian.

Businessweek's series on Wiki-ality in the economic sector. Some fear here: They promote the idea of master workers, those highly skilled individuals who are driven to succeed. With wiki and open sourcing, every company has access to those individuals--and can choose them over us mediocre folks each and every time. This is tied directly to the Puritan work ethic, the Bootsraps mentality, the American Dream--why we middle class folks work so hard for so little and don't complain. We blame ourselves for not being the master worker, then work ourselves into the ground (we become our work) to do so, guilt hanging over us like clouds of chemicals we know we shouldn't ask about.

Intro article on Businessweek:
"Conventional wisdom says companies innovate, differentiate, and compete by doing certain things right. They hire and retain the "best people" to generate new ideas, make new discoveries, compete, and expand their business lines. They "listen" to their customers and protect their intellectually property fiercely. They think globally but act locally, and they execute well (they have good management and controls."
Note the sarcasm toward convention here--is this typical of busnessweek? Why do it here, then?

Wikipedia Solves Neutrality Debate

So, we're talking about Wiki-ness in COM632 tonight, and of course, this leads us to the big question of "Neutrality." I am of the opinion that neutrality is a goal, but is not possible due to the specific rhetorical situation of the entity wikipedia.com. But you knew that already, so let's look at my specific qualms.

Wikipedia lists several "areas" where bias can occur. The first listed is "Class bias," defined as "favoring one social class and bias ignoring social or class divisions." I am impressed that they added the second half, about *ignoring*--but any good Foucauldian knows that these ignorances are built into our very language, our terministic screen (yay capitalism!). "Ignoring" isn't so much the phrase--more like...reification through omission. Wikipedia is always/already middle class, middle educated--particularly when it makes claims to and aspires to neutrality.

More specifically, Wikipedia is a) on the Internet (accessible to many in the US, but fewer in 3rd world countries), b) for the purpose of research and information-gathering (which is important mainly to people in an information economy, in late capitalism, who are both computer literate and textually literate) and c)written in a language style accessible mainly to the educated sectors (at least the English part is).

Later, the list continues to include "Linguistic" bias--favoring one language over another. Of course, because Wikipedia has set up different sectors for different languages, each entry will be biased toward the language it is written in; however, they are not considering the dialect bias that their policy itself instigates when it asks for sophisticated, educated, language.

Not that I have any problems with sophisticated, educated language.

Other biases include "Species" bias (because humans aren't any better than other animals, and the mice might get offended?), Geographical bias (No making fun of Canada), and race/gender/religion bias. No one mentions "ability" bias (The article on "Human" for example, is highly normative in that names how many fingers humans SHOULD have, how the human mind SHOULD work). But I was glad to see that under "Gender" they have included "heteronormativity" as a no-no.

Now if we could just work heteronormativity out of our daily language as easily as Wikipedia thinks it can eliminate it from our written......