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......

Big Brother is watching...

well, not me, but definitely someone...

Visit
William Gibson's blog.

Quote of the Day

As we discussed Blogging at the Village Coffee House, a young man pulled up a chair, and whispered to the only other male in our group:

"Is this a real class?"

Nope, we're all faking it.

Boing this!

We were playing on Boingboing, and I found this, and was thus distracted for quite awhile, until I heard the word "censorship."
Censor this!



Yep, it's a hairdryer shaped like a gun. For those who want to symbolically "kill the principle" without writing Paradise Lost.

Link to the original Japanese site

Note that the packaging says "Western" on it. A commentary?

And while we're on weird Internet findings, check out this bibliography on "Amish Science Fiction" .
Prepare to be wigged, or offended.

Amy's 632 Paper: Writing Amy style

Topic: Utopian impulse and the Communitas/Scapegoating drive

Intro: Cheesy intro here. Thesis: While "Communitas" is a helpful concept, it may help us to include the idea of scapegoating when talking about ideal online communities.

Bridge: Girard's scapegoating and desire in "primitive" communities: Definition and justification

Main points:
1. Utopian impulse: The history of the Well/connection to counterculture
2. Connection of Utopia to Communitas (def of communitas, defs of Utopia)
3. Communitas and Scapegoating--Burke on textual scapegoating and symbolic action.

Meta-blog

Yep, it's a blog on blogging. From our COM 632 class, my discussion for this week:

Definition of blogging
The definition of "blogging" emerging from our readings this week seems pretty broad. Just as we found the idea of "community" to be too broad last week, and had some trouble sussing out what counted as "communal" in organizations, I think "blogging" will pose similar problems for us. Perhaps we should spend some time identifying what we, as a class, consider "blogging" to be, and suggest some names to help us keep the kinds of blogging straight, so we don't end up talking over each other? "The Business of Blogging" uses the phrase "stand-alone blogging" to refer to the diary-like texts produced by individuals and seen by only a few; I like this, but I think we need, at least for this class, to add some more differentiations. (Is that even a word?)

amylea 14:05, 24 September 2007 (CDT)

Blogging as interaction?
The authors of "The Business of Blogging" are partially concerned whether blogging can "generate meaningful revenues" (36)--and while I understand that their purpose is quite different from our own, meaningful revenues are less important to me than meaningful dialogues. Is online interaction through blogs really "interaction"? The model of communication for blogging seems to be very similar to the top-down, manipulative rhetoric version that the blogging ideal seems to eschew. How much "interaction" is there really in blogs, at least the political blogs that generate a lot of money (since that was the article's focus)? How does that interaction affect revenues (meaningful or otherwise)?

Retrieved from Mindmeld COM 632

Who owns this blog?

The writers of Wired's article on "The Business of Blogging" have a legitimate concern when talking about who "owns" the "content" of corporate blogs. Of course, my Burkeian hyper-quotation in that sentence shows that I am concerned that their terms are indeed de-termining the scope of discussion terministically. We return to the Platonic problem: What is writing? What does a writer do? What is the writer producing? Is writing poesis and to what extent can "we" own thought-made-text? What is the "value" of thought/word/logos both within and without the capitalistic system?

Does Blogger.com (owned by Google) now own my words? Or just the machines on which they are stored and disseminated? In order for my blog to make any money, according to the Wired article, it must get at least one million hits per month. After Kari and Lou, and occasionally my father (when he remembers), maybe Dana and Kate, who reads my blog? No one, I assume, and that's just peachy with me. But fandom sites get thousands of hits from lurkers like me--and make LiveJournal and friends quite a bit of dough.

Who owns fandom, then? Strikethrough07 (see Mizbean's site) was an attempt to remind the bourgoisie that the big-wigs may own the means of production, but we still own our thoughts. The problem is that ownership is tied too much to monetary value (in the Marxist sense) for us to theorize owning thought.

The Dystopian Impulse in Blogging?
In Dan Gillmor's We the Media, he writes

Also possible, though I hope equally unlikely, is a world of information lockdown. The forces of central con­trol are not sitting quietly in the face of challenges to their authority.
In this scenario, we could witness an unholy alliance between the entertainment industry—what I call the “copyright cartel”—and government. Governments are very uneasy about the free flow of information, and allow it only to a point.

A good example of this is, of course, Strikethrough07 (see the fandomcounts page). While I would hardly want to promote pedophilia, I do want to promote free speech and a free internet. Of course, LiveJournal is a private company, driven by revenue, and can do whatever they want in order to please their customer base...but the groups that have begun and supported censorship in fandom aren't interested in just removing it from LiveJournal--they want to censor fandom as a whole. And they want to do it to promote "innocence" or "morality." And while I won't argue that the fics that got censored were particularly moral or amoral (because "smutfest" is just what it sounds like), most fans are respectful and clearly mark their work with appropriate warnings (which some of us then search by), this move by innocence_jihad is an attempt to control the flow of information. Let me introduce a logical fallacy for effect's sake: If they take down porn, they take down democracy.

Because most fans' LiveJournals aren't just smutfests; they're journals, they're blogs, they're information-sharing platforms. Orwell was the first to imply that language control, journalism control, is the beginning of totalitarianism, the beginning of U/dystopia. And the fact that we even recognize censorship as a problem is a sign that there is a dystopian consciousness in the zeitgeist. The blogging question again brings questions usually placed in the background to the fore.

So I'm doing my part to increase the volume, move toward a tipping point of common knowledge and Weltanschauung. I'm avoiding dystopia by blogging about blogging as dystopian consciousness.

Squee!

The Republic, oh dear

Led astray by poetry—even good men will be led astray by the fantastic, by the horrific, led to emulate the characters, cry in public, sleep with their mothers, be violent toward kin groups.

Professor quote of the day

"And they were there, hobnobbing with all those...nobs." Sorin Matei, COM 632

Online Interaction

Click the title to go to the online interaction interactiony page--where this semester's class notes can be found.

We have a hard time with the concept of “cyberspace” without imagining or superimposing a metaphor of “real” physical space. We call it “the pub” “thegetaway”, we write on TheWall, we have a faceBOOK. It is a topoi—a place from which to speak set with conventions and expectations. In Burke's terms, we need a ground.

Quote, etc

Because no blog is complete without silly quotes and stuff.

Fun with the Internet Anagram Server reminds me that Iced Venti Almond Latte is also

1. Even tall addiction met. (Because my addiction is difficult to sate?)
   
2. Tall vice? Antidote met! (A latte a day keeps the crazy away)
   
3. Talented manic loved it. (What I want on my headstone, with a picture of a steaming mug o' java)
   
4. Toil even, mental addict. (Advice to prelim-ers)
   
5. Vice-mandated nite toll. (Coffee after 9p.m. equals all night fanfic-a-thon)

Quotes of the day (Get out your French dictionaries...)

From Asano's Hands of Time (Doctor Who fanfic):
“I have hope. It’s not the same as belief, but it’ll do me for now.”

From Burke's quotation of De Gourmont
«L’intelligence est un accident; le génie est une catastrophe. » (Intelligence is an accident, but genius is a catastrophe)
« Le christianisme évangélique est essentiellement oppose à toute représentation de la beauté sensible, soit d’après le corps humain, soit d’après le reste de la nature » (Evangelical Christianity is essentially opposed to all representations of sensual [both senses of the term] beauty, being from after [logically] the human body, being after the rest of nature.)

Blogging my way through Counter-Statement

As part of the Prelude to Prelims Summer, I will be rereading the Burkeian corpus--as much as I can, anyway. We begin, as always, with Counter-Statement

Burke's Preface sets up an opposition between "pamphleteering" ("Leaning") and inquiry, but "He may not be wholly satisfied by the thought of doing exclusively either." (vii)
Burke on composition: "Once he has pamphleteered, however, dare he not in revision try, even at the risk of cancelling himself, to transform the contentious into the reflective?" (viii)
On what art does: "Art's very accumulation (its discordant voices arising out of many systems) serves to undermine any one rigid scheme of living--and herein lies 'wickedness' enough" (viii). If LeGuin is right, and that dystopia is stagnation and rigidness, then art really is the answer.

3 key words: Perhaps, Norm, and Form. “The quest of the ‘norm’ led to a study of the varied ways in which men seek by symbolic means to make themselves at home in social tensions.” (xi). And of course it’s a quest, an adventure that’s usually fruitless undertaken by only the heroic few. And of course he’s worried about the symbolic already, and the comfort it provides. “At home” is an interesting phrase, since the home itself can be a social tension.
Two ways to see art and society: The “censorship” principle and the “lightening rod” principle (xii). Burke quickly connects the censorship principle to Plato’s Republic, where as Aristotle’s Poetics gets put in opposition as the lightening rod. Of course, we know the two men had differing opinions about mimesis in art (“‘Censorship’ implies a one-to-one ratio between art and society” xii), about “real” versus “ideal” and that, I think is why Burke divides them here. However, I wonder if it is wise to always look for Plato’s [Socrates’] opposite in Aristotle, as though the two were the polar ends of some continuum. They are far more similar than they are different, but it looks like I’ll have to go back to the Poetics to rediscover the nuances I seem to have forgotten.
Burke, unsurprisingly, links the Platonic fear of mimesis to totalitarianism, which he contrasts with “the ‘liberal’ point of view” (xii). Art is a type of purification, a release valve for tension in society (drawing the energy away from harm, like a lightening rod). To me, this scheme seems much more totalitarian: Art is used to quell our rebellious instincts, to calm the would-be revolutionaries. Let them mosh at punk concerts, and they won’t cause a real revolution. “…society is protected in the long run only by the more liberal principle” (xii). But protection just might be the problem, if we are protecting or conserving a culture that is unhealthy or just plain immoral (cough, Iraq war, cough). After all, he says he does not mean that there is “any hope in mass hysterias engineered by demagogues who are in turn assisted by efficient controls over the channels of information and communication” (i.e. The Current Administration and Fox News). And yet if we use Burke’s “liberal” art to quell the masses, then such demagogues are never removed from power. Dystopias work not because they comfort us as art, but because they enflame us, make us afraid. While Burke’s Rhetoric of Motives seems to promote the Liberal view (art as comfort, as a symbolic means of working out present tensions), dystopian fiction utilizes the emotions such an attitude allows (for the censorship mode wouldn’t even allow dystopian fiction to be written) to disquiet its readers into action. It’s not mimesis, but the desire to avoid mimesis that drives the rhetorical mechanisms of dystopian fiction.
“The sort of fear I had in mind, for example, concerned the attitude toward the ‘promises’ of applied science. More and more people, in recent years, are coming to realize that technology can be as ominous as it is promising. Such fear, if properly rationalized, is but the kind of discretion a society should have with regard to all new powers” (xiii) Burke’s dystopianism appears here. His dependency on “rationalization” however, is as problematic as the rationalization promoted by the dystopian novels of the era he was writing in (40s-60s). Later dystopias dismiss rationality and rationalization as a means of power itself (a la Foucault).
More dystopian Burke appears in his mention of his reaction to Capeks’ R.U.R. which he found frightening because it imagined not an extraterrestrial force, but an “invader already here, from within” causing the destruction of humanity. He decides that “the high development fo modern technology might change the rules somewhat; accordingly, conditions that are ‘normal’ to our society would probably have been fatal to societies in which there was a much smaller percentage of technology” (x). The phraseology here catches me every time; I’ve got it all marked up in my book. First, he decides that technology isn’t all bad, that it has “changed the rules” but only ‘somewhat.” What rules those are, he is not clear. Rules of relationships between people? Of art? Of rhetoric? What does technology normalize today that would have been fatal to, say, medieval people? (Stargate tries to answer this, I think). What does it mean, also, to have a society classified by its “percentage” of technology? What “percentage” are we now, I ask, as I sit in Starbucks, listening to a CD, while typing on a laptop onto a one gig thumbdrive smaller than my actual thumb as baristas use security TVs to watch cars approach the drive through? Percentages are ratios, X to Y. So a percentage of technology would be the ratio of technology to…what? People? Humanity? Culture? Nature? What is the whole from which he is taking a part? What opposition is he setting up when he makes this division? What happens when we hit 100%?

Chapter 1. Three Adepts of ‘Pure’ Literature
This chapter concerns three writers who have some relationship to Realism or Realist literature. Burke examines each writer (Flaubert, Pater and DeGourmont) for what they can tell us about literature’s relationship to audiences, to society, and to constructedness of sentences how “unornamented” or “arhetorical” (well, seemingly arhetorical) the prose seems to be.
Someone should compare Burke’s comments on Flaubert with Derrida’s. Not me.
Flaubert was looking for a “pure” art, uncontaminated by social ties, one that seemed to lack “method” or mechanics. Burke is especially interested that Flaubert chose to use the form of “novel” to attempt this purification, because it is the genre “in which glitter is most an obstacle, the genre wherein one can be rhetorically brilliant only by subterfuge, or by endangering the purity of one’s effect” (7). Or, more clearly, “The novel makes of literature the verbalization of experience, the conversion of life into diction” (7). If Flaubert really wanted to do a verbal art without social implications, a Non Realist art for art’s sake, he should have chosen a different genre!
“An author who lives most of his live in his head must perform his transgressions on paper” (24). Or, a blog?

Summer of Insanity, 2007

I was telling Kate about the Summer of Insanity 2004, and she noted that this summer could be a repeat--the intense reading schedule, the lack of teaching or course work, the long hours spent with fanfic. Of course, last time around, I was alone, in an apartment in downtown Boston, just me and my laptop going crazy together. This time, I've got People and a Cat.
While I haven't finished grading yet (sigh), I feel like I'm already on break. Tonight I'm going to read Doctor Who fics--my god i havent read these in weeks i'm so far behind so many chapters so little moonlight--until my eyes burn, then sleep with the Kit until guilt washes over me and I eventually grade.
To kick off the summer, I went through this blog and tagged ("Labeled," but we all know that Blogger stole the idea for this particular ability from LiveJournal's "Tags" function) everything. So now, if you only want to read my stuff about Burke or rhetoric or (geez, why?) my poetry, just find one of the posts that has that tag, click on the tag name, and you'll be taken to a page full of what you want to read. On Demand Journal Reading.
I'm rereading Burke. We'll be starting with Counter-Statement and working our way through to the Symbolic (ordering it on Amazon). Look for flashes of insight here all summer long.

Insight flashes are not guaranteed by author.
Book List, working
Burke:
Motives Trio
Counter-Statement
LSA
PLF
ATH
P&C
Essay on 'HellHaven'
KB in the 20th C
Addressing PoMo (Biesecker)
Plato's Republic
Peter Brooks Reading for the Plot
V Propp: Book Story elements/Dramatis Personae
Girard: Deceit, Desire, the Novel
Watt: The Rise of the Novel
Nancy Armstrong: Desire and Domestic blah and The New One that's not any different
M Keith Booker's Field Guide to Dystopian FIction (overview of the Marxist, Foucauldian and PoMo theory that informs dystopian fiction)
Levi-Strauss on Structure of folkstories and myth
Derrida: "La Loi Du Genre"

Still need recommendations for:
[Desire for end/death of narrative]--zizec, lacan? teleology/entellechy
Epic Structure-- The Hero(ine), Causality, connection to rhetoric? Blanchot?
Apocalyptic tradition
AGENCY in/through literature
Connection to Tragedy?

Quote of the day

Found while researching Doctor Who OT3:

"I have pain meds, but I would like to augment them by mainlining some really good fanfic."

It's better with three, when Jack Harkness is your third....

AMST paper or, A Rant Against Constitutional Documents on Websites

Encountering Diversity Online: The University and Affirmative Action

As one of those lucky enough to be born into the digital age, I was among the first wave of students to conduct my college search entirely online in the summer of 1998. I admit: I would not have chosen or even considered the small, Mennonite college I ended up at had it not been for their webpages detailing the school’s service and social justice mission. Since that time, universities have been more fully utilizing the web’s various tools as recruitment aids; almost all university homepages are heavily skewed toward “Future” or “Prospective” students, with large sections dedicated to providing the most basic information about the university’s programs, student activities, and scholarships.

I start with the assumption that university websites, as visual rhetoric, primarily work to persuade incoming students to join the university’s community. Secondarily, the sites provide information for current students, faculty, and staff who are already embedded in the university’s culture and ideologies. Some documents, however, are for both incoming students and current community members; these documents tend to be online versions of university policy and procedures. While not the “official” policy and procedure documents, these web documents certainly are powerful rhetorical constructions that help constitute the public image of the given university.

In this essay, I will analyze the online version of Affirmative Action plans of four universities in the Midwest. As a publicly contentious idea, Affirmative Action plans prove to be rich grounds for rhetorical and ideological analysis, particularly when they must also work within the university web pages’ recruitment goals. In these texts, two genres—“legal document” and “recruitment tool”—blend, resulting constructions of “race” and “diversity” that some might find objectionable.

I have selected four state-funded universities in the Midwest as representative texts. As state schools, these universities must meet federal requirements of employment. Purdue University (IN) states on its “Reaffirmation of University Policy on Equal Employment Opportunity” page that “As a federal contractor, each campus within the Purdue University system is required to develop and maintain a written affirmative action program which is a set of specific results-oriented actions and procedures to which the University commits itself.” The universities are not required to post these on their websites, but most choose to do so, since these policies are supposed to be available for review by the public. In addition to Purdue University, I have selected the Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa for this analysis.

The Liberal Tradition

Why focus on universities? As institutes of higher education, “the” university tends to represent not only sophistication and culture, but the cutting edge of the arts and sciences. Traditionally, universities have been considered part of the political “left,” having some stake in that agenda. When the University of Michigan tried to remove part of its Affirmative Action clause from its admissions policy, many argued that, as a university, the institution must uphold the clause; it was the university’s duty as a representative of higher education. Additionally, universities are often connect to what Critical Race Theorists refer to as “white liberalism”—that set of ideologies connected to “color-blindness,” Enlightenment logic, and affirming “diversity,” which the editors of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement refer to as “a value which in the liberal vision is independent of, perhaps even at odds with, equality of opportunity or meritocracy” (xv). They go on to condemn “the poverty of the liberal imagination,” which tries to simply erase race instead of actually confronting it as a real ideological force (xv). In the liberal tradition, the question of “race” often transforms into a question of “diversity”, a multiculturalism in which all races are treated as equally important and the addition of people of different races to a group is considered inherently valuable. Throughout these webpages we see the liberal tradition in the near absence of the word “race” and the use of the word “diversity” as a floating signifier, representing both “race” and “multiculturalism.” In what follows, I give an overview of the genre by detailing the accessibility, the rhetorical construction, and the resulting ideologies that are formed in these websites. Screen captures of the main pages are available in the attached appendix.

Access

Most university homepages feature information for incoming students. Finding information about policies and procedures requires either first hand knowledge about the departments and offices of the university, or a well-termed Google search. Simply searching for “diversity” will yield several different sites per university, all located in different offices. For this case study, I have limited my search specifically to employment, but have still found difficulty navigating the pages even of my own school, Purdue. In Purdue’s “employment” pages, for example, users can select either “human relations” or “human resources”; it is not immediately obvious which of these pages will hold Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity information, and neither page is accessible directly from Purdue’s homepage. The University of Michigan and the University of Iowa have similar structures, however on these pages, Affirmative Action is the main focus of the human resources page—no further searching is required.

At Ohio State’s employment page, Affirmative Action appears under the tab labeled “Policies;” and is available only as a PDF document. The document seemed a little thin to me, so I Googled “diversity and Ohio State.” In this search, I found OSU’s “Diversity” pages—a large batch of pages dealing with race, gender, religion, ability, age, etc. Included in this set of pages is further information about Affirmative Action, although it is separated under each heading (i.e. Affirmative Action and race, Affirmative Action and Ability, etc). Here the issue is not that the information is buried, but that it is prolific: finding the exact policy one is searching for is difficult in this mass of diversity-related resources.

Once the correct page is found, for most of these universities, the policy must be downloaded. While this is less a problem in the age of high speed internet than it was a few years ago, some may have difficulty downloading PDF files. Others may not know which files apply to a given case: while Ohio State only has one Affirmative Action PDF, Purdue, Michigan, and Iowa all offer several documents about current policy, past policy, and grievance procedures. There are also policy-like statements available; under the page titled “Vice President for Human Relations Initiatives” on Purdue’s page, a document titled “Strategic Directions” seems similar in content to the VPHR Initiatives page—only those familiar with Purdue bureaucracy and departmental organization would recognize why the two are separate entities. Iowa lists five policies on “human rights” and two on “equal opportunity,” the titles of which sound similar: For human rights: “Nondiscrimination Statement--Using the Statement on Printed Materials, Policy on Human Rights (link to Operations Manual), Statement on Diversity, Accessibility Statement--Using the Statement on Printed Materials, Policy on Violence (link to Operations Manual); and for Equal Opportunity: Disability Protection Policy, Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Statement of Policy and Purpose (“Policy index”). The difference between a “statement” and a “policy” is unclear.

The difficulty with navigating these pages could be simply a sign of problems in web design in general; however, many of these pages have been posted for several years. That “diversity” is not a key component of a university’s homepage—that these pages are difficult to find within the hierarchy of sites—is most likely a symptom of the genre: Affirmative Action in employment is for those who are not prospective students, but prospective employees. Because the homepage must appeal to eighteen year old high school students, we can expect Affirmative Action policies to be placed deep within the structure of the site, under a more general category of “employment.” Although the lack of diversity on the homepages is probably unintentional, the buried pages do imply what the university values. Only the University of Michigan, with its very public Affirmative Action lawsuit has placed a “diversity” link on its homepage. Other sites imply a colorblind policy for admissions; students of color may appear in images on the homepages, but their presence is not commented upon. Racial difference, these sites imply, is outside of the concerns of most viewers; those who want information must search for it.

Visual Design

In general, the websites keep to the colors, organization, and themes of the university’s homepage. Purdue, the University of Iowa, and Michigan use their respective school colors as the basis of design. Perhaps the most interesting, visually, of the four sites is Michigan’s page on “Human Resources and Affirmative Action.” The blue background matches the school’s colors, but the designers (listed as the Human Resources Department) have also used that blue in the image of a clouded sky in the page’s header (see Fig. 2). While this has nothing to do with diversity or Affirmative Action as far as I can see, the colors are peaceful, natural, and soothing. Unlike Purdue’s harsh black and gold Arial font on a plain tan background (Fig. 1), the Michigan site is visually inviting. The sky image is complemented by a flower which changes as the user clicks through various policy pages, and the main human resources page includes a clipart that asks us to “Think Spring!” The text in the center of the main page instructs users how to use the navigation bars, and includes links to the most often used pages. The navigation and titles are easy to use and understand, and various outside links are colored to match information on similar “levels” in the hierarchy. The “spring” theme, I assume, changes with the seasons, making the site seem up-to-date and relevant. More importantly, the use of natural images differs significantly from other sites, and draws attention away from the logical, legal, and professional ramifications of the information included on these pages.

The other sites follow a general template I have seen not only in these pages, but at other sites for universities around the country. These pages general include the school’s logo at the top of the page, with a link to the university homepage somewhere nearby or in the image itself. A primary navigation bar conducts users through the “employment” pages, while a secondary bar on the left guides users through the specifically Affirmative Action-related pages (see Iowa, Fig. 3). Near the top we see a picture of (presumably) employees hard at work. As these are the Affirmative Action pages, the images show a wide range of peoples: women, people of color, the disabled, etc. These people are, of course, smiling, and not looking at the camera, a denial of knowledge of the user-viewer’s gaze. Instead of meeting our gaze as equals, the subjects continue on as workers, not individuals. The missing gaze toward the camera also implies a “candid” shot; we are to assume that these image reflect reality, both in their happiness to be at work and in the racially-appropriate composition of the workforce. Most of the workers shown appear as professionals—professors or administrative staff. I have yet to find an image of janitorial staff or other maintenance workers, despite the large custodial workforce these universities employ.

Ohio State University’s “Diversity” page (Fig. 5) features no images of people at all. Instead, the site uses design elements to imply a connection to human diversity. The open white space at the top holds the most recent and relevant links, for ease of navigation. Below, however, the designers have divided the issue of “diversity” into seven different areas in this order: disability, nationality, race/ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, veterans affairs, women/gender. Each link is a different earth-tone color, from slate gray to burnt orange. The word “Diversity” crosses all seven links as a shadow, unifying all seven elements under one heading. The titles of the links are left uncapitalized, as though to emphasize the equality of all of the categories. The design emphasizes simplicity and equality while drawing focus away from the real people involved in the issues at hand. “Difference” and “diversity” are implied through words instead of being shown, but without the images, that difference isn’t felt as acutely.

Assumptions, Values, and Ideologies

In the above descriptions, I have begun to tease out some of the underlying assumptions, values, and ideologies that these pages construct. We have already seen that there is a general denial of presence in the accessibility of these pages from the universities’ homepage. By erasing race and other signifiers of difference from the homepages, the universities construct themselves as homogenous. Any interest in racial, gender, or religious difference is deferred to pages that are most accessible by those in-the-know about the structure of the university. Difference is figured as an “extra”—an extra-curricular activity (in the form of cultural centers, clubs, and fraternities and sororities), or extra information added to an employment application.

When and where difference is represented and acknowledged, there is, not surprisingly, a liberal attitude apparent within the text and design. For example, in the University of Michigan’s page on “Services,” a vision statement includes “Respecting the inherent worth of all individuals evidenced through inclusiveness and diversity” and “Seeking quality/excellence of services which meet the needs of the organization as a whole and of the diverse groups which comprise the University” (“Mission and Vision”). In these statements, we see first, the emphasis on respect for all individuals—deemphasizing the group identity of that individual—whose worth is “inherent” and not connected to any one identity except that of “human”—as in “human” resources. The University of Iowa has a similar sentiment in its “Mission Statement,” which explains the purpose of the Office of Equal Opportunity as “foster[ing] a welcoming and collaborative university climate where individual ideas, contributions, and goals are acknowledged, respected, and valued” (“Office”). Again, the emphasis is on the individual and his or her abilities, not his or her identity as part of a racial or ethnic group.

Also important in these statements is the emphasis on merit. In the liberal tradition, merit or ability is the true measure by which we should judge others; in Affirmative Action, merit is ability minus racial impediments (or disease impediments, or class impediments). The ideal of a colorblind workforce is hiding in these statements; the first statement wants to remove race as a factor of judgment while the second statement wishes to better the workforce as a whole by adding in “diverse” peoples whose very presence as different will improve the work environment.

The constant use of the word “diverse” and “diversity” throughout all four websites points to a gap in the language available to discuss race in a way that appeals to both the liberal tradition and college-seeking high school students. “Diversity” can stand for “multiculturalism” which is non-threatening to whites, who may feel that discussions of race implicate them as racist. On Ohio State’s webpage, itself titled “Diversity,” race is only one of seven categories, and is paired with ethnicity by a slash, as though the two were nearly synonymous (the same is done with “women” and “gender,” which makes the transgendered category somehow less strange). Purdue University’s seventy-nine page Affirmative Action plan (oddly titled “genderplan_000.pdf”) uses the word “race” only in conjunction with “color” and only in a list of other markers of difference.

The University of Iowa’s statement is very clear about what diversity means:

The University of Iowa values diversity among students, faculty, and staff, and regards Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action as tools to achieve diversity. The University believes that a rich diversity of people and the many points of view they bring serve to enhance the quality of the educational experience at The University of Iowa. (“Statement on Diversity”).

Here, diversity is an end goal to be achieved by adding in diverse students, faculty, and staff. Diversity can be “rich”—I assume this means “from a variety of cultures”—and is important because it will benefit the educational experience. Diversity is a tool for education; other values of inclusion are not considered in this statement or in others that I have found. The emphasis on recruitment is obvious: diversity serves the university, not the other way around.

What counts as “diverse” varies little in these documents. The list of race, ethnicity, disability, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, etc appears in some for in all of the documents. However, the visual design of most of the sites—the University of Michigan excluded—seems to focus on race and color. Even the Ohio State University’s people-less site emphasizes color in its earth-toned rainbow of links. The University of Iowa’s collection of sites has several pictures, all of which feature nonwhites: despite its statement about a more general diversity, no people with (visible) disabilities appear, and sexual orientation is difficult to spot visually. Women do appear, and appear quite often, perhaps even more than men of color. In these sites and in others I have examined, the most common image for a diversity webpage is an African-American woman; few show those of Hispanic heritage, and hardly any show Asian Americans. “Diversity,” according to these images, refers to race, and seems to especially refer to African-Americans, although such racial difference is not directly addressed.

Conclusions

I have given a very broad overview of these sites; certainly each could be examined separately in more depth than I have given here. My goal, however, is to show how these pages construct an attitude toward “race” and “diversity” for the universities they serve. Ideally, these pages would be a direct representation of how the university operates, and ideally, we would see appropriate weight and consideration given to the pages dealing with Affirmative Action and diversity in general. Instead, we have to assume that these pages are a part of the university’s recruitment strategy and will most likely reflect in their hierarchy and content the concerns of high school students and their parents. While this mixing of genres—official document and recruitment tool—can help explain some of the constructions we see in these pages, persuasion to admission is not the only idea informing the design. These four pages invoke the liberal tradition’s commitment to colorblindness without actually referring to that concept; instead, individual merit and “diversity” is emphasized as being good for the educational environment. The past segregation and the social conditions that have denied many “diverse” people entry into higher education are never mentioned; only the future of the university matters.

Clearly I have not addressed all of the issues that emerge in this genre: the location of the school in question (urban/suburban/rural or Midwest/East Coast/West Coast), the type of school (public/private and community/traditional), the designers of the page (students/professionals/staff members), and the history of the school (as with the University of Michigan’s legal struggles) all play a role in the finished product. I have given this analysis not to condemn these schools or their page designers, but to point to an area that has not yet, to my knowledge, been examined for its potential effect on the attitude-formation of the university as a whole. The genre may be mundane, but the values, assumptions and ideologies it helps to build are anything but.


Works Cited
Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. Eds. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas. New York: The New Press, 1995.

“Diversity.” Ohio State University website. 2007. 27 April 2007. http://www.osu.edu/diversity/

“Human Relations: Affirmative Action Office.” Purdue University website. 2007. 27 April 2007. http://www.purdue.edu/humanrel/aao/

“Human Resources and Affirmative Action.” University of Michigan website. 27 April 2007. http://www.umich.edu/~hraa/

“Human Resources: Policies.” Ohio State University website. 2006. 27 April 2007. http://hr.osu.edu/policy/index.aspx

“Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity.” University of Iowa website. 2004. 27 April 2007. http://www.uiowa.edu/~eod/

In the Lab

I've been sitting here since before 9 a.m. It's now 1:19, and I've been typing almost constantly. At least I'm not alone.
To my left sits Tony and some Literature Masters Student whose name I never remember. She's been here since 10, and now has a giant block of text that rivals my own Giant Block of Text of Doom.
Of Doom.
Jaci sits on my right, also furiously typing, despite the fact that she has four days instead of four hours to finish her project. Her book pile keeps growing as she runs to the Library. Right now she's working on a block quote that will doubtlessly help her reach the page minumum.
The Nerdy Trio of Jeremy Tirrell, Ryan Weber, and Nathaniel Rivers (accompanied by their fourth, Paul Lynch) have arrived and have taken over the left side of the lab with their masculine presence and PoMo jokes about Aristotle's enthymeme which are funny to perhaps 100 people in the entire nation. I'm one of them.
Tony's got a Works Cited List that looks longer than my list for my prelims.
And I'm on page seven, a little more than 2/3 through my paper due at 5. It's 1:27, and I'm hoping to finish before 4:30, hop on the bus, cook dinner, and enjoy 3 hours of SciFi Friday in peace.
Before doing it all again tomorrow with Morgan. In this same lab.
Damn.

Homesick

I made the fatal error of watching the first Sox-Yanks game of the year Friday night. Down 6-3 in the 8th, I was swearing so much the cat hid (again--she had just recovered from Dana's diatribe against Mr Peanut). When Coco Crisp hit a beautiful line drive, and Tek hit a nice easy ball to center, and the game was tied. And they pushed another run in, and I screamed in happiness. And Hideki took out the Unholy Trinity of the Yank's lineup with barely a concerned blink.
But last night, I was sick and missed, apparently, the baseball equivalent of (the battle of) Armaggedeon.

But there it was Sunday night, in all its splendor and fallen and heroic characters, right down to the inevitable ultimate showdown between Jonathan Papelbon and Alex Rodriguez.

Good and Evil. Assign those qualities as you wish, depending on whose side you are on. Pap retired A-Rod on 287 mph-worth of three fastballs, the last bounced into a force, to nail down Boston's first Fenway Park sweep of the Yankees since 1990 with the 7-6 victory--redsox.com reporter Tom Singer

Epic!

Permanent

We resurrect each other
fliging our works
into the white volcano.
Like a juggler in his rhythm,
we must figure how to end this
without appearing clumsy.
The east holds in its tension
a hand at the forehead,
that germ gathered in the country
in the city, behind a wall of voices.