I’m also working (every so slowly) on my conference presentation for Feminisms and Rhetorics in October, on a co-authored paper with Stuart and Rebecca, and in the composition office. It’s all keeping me very busy, which I actually kind of love. Toward the end of the summer, I was kind of ready for the “break” to be over, because I needed more structured deadlines and felt exhausted from teaching everyday, so didn’t do as much research and writing as I would have liked. Now, I’m going to sit down with my delicious cup of coffee at Saints and read about Kenneth Burke and technology.

Final Reflective Commentary on Sony Reader

But here’s something different: The NCAA can’t keep up with online tools either. It’s against NCAA rules to attempt to persuade a recruit to choose a school, and so a Facebook group cheerleading a high school basketball player to go to NC State is against the rules (Sports Illustrated). But who’s culpable? And who can punish whom?

I just read Mary Kalantzisa and Bill Cope’s “On Globalisation and Diversity” (Computers and Composition 23.4 [2006]: 402-411). Kalantzis and Cope explain the narrative of three globalization phases: 1) the first globalization, which involved the diversification of languages and cultures and the spread across the globe; 2) the second globalization, which involved the development of writing and agriculture and the colonization of the world by Europe, resulting in homogenization; and 3) the emerging third globalization, which involves de-centralization of power, “new forms of subjectivity and new kinds of personality” (408), and a new proliferation of differences, including “a return to radical multilingualism” (409).

As I read, I was suspicious of the sweeping history of thousands and thousands of years of history, but after reading the article about Facebook, perhaps there is something to this third globalization, which is, as Kalantzisa and Cope speculate, just now beginning. I’m still suspicious of the sweeping narrative, and I’m wondering if these three globalizations (if this is even an accurate representation of history) might overlap more than Kalantzisa and Cope discuss. (It seems to me that the last few hundred years have been more of a mixture of homogenization and diversification and of centralization and de-centralization.)

And check out the newscasters’ enthusiasm! Wow!

“[T]he ‘art of public memory’ encompasses not just these memorials’ aesthetic contours, or their places in contemporary artistic discourse. It also includes the activity that brought them into being, the constant give and take between memorials and viewers, and finally the responses of viewers to their own world in light of a memorialized past—the consequences of memory” (ix).

Young argues that the term “collective memory” is inadequate and prefers the term “‘collective memory,’ the many discrete memories that are gathered into common memorial spaces and assigned common meaning. A society’s memory, in this context, might be regarded as an aggregate collection of its members’ many, often competing memories” (xi).

One of the most striking things to take away from Young’s book is his speculation that it is more useful for a society to constantly debate how to memorialize something than it is to actually build a monument. Memorials may in fact evade memory, and “it may also be true that the surest engagement with memory lies in its perpetual irresolution” (21). Young writes, “the best memorial to the fascist era and its victims in Germany may not be a single memorial at all—but only the never-to-be-resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to do it, in whose name, and to what end” (81). He asks us to imagine an endless competition, held annually, for proposed memorial designs that would be exhibited for publics to discuss and debate. “Instead of a fixed figure for memory, the debate itself—perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions—would be enshrined” (81).

He notes, “Memory-work becomes unnecessary as long as the material fragments of events continue to function as witness-memorial. Are we delegating to the archivist the memory-work that is ours alone? Do we allow memorials to relieve us of the memory-burden we should be carrying?” (127).

Another interesting discussion from Young’s book is about countermonument. A countermonument, he claims, “forces the memorial to disperse” (46). “It would remind us that the very notion of linear time assumes memory of a past moment: time as the perpetually measured distance between this moment and the next, between the instant and a past remembered. In this sense, the countermonument asks us to recognize that time and memory are interdependent, in dialectical flux” (47). That is, in my understanding, while a monument asks us to remember the past as a moment in the past, a countermonument asks us to consider the act of remembering as a current act. Countermonuments call attention to themselves in way that questions permanency, and “remarks also the inevitable—even essential—evolution of memory over time” (48).

I think we should call “new media texts” those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality: such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text—like its composers and readers—doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts. Such composers design texts that make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody. Considering new media texts in this way, I think and hope, helps us to see where openings for agency are within the new media texts we compose.

Under this definition, new media texts do not have to be digital; instead, any text that has been designed so that its materiality is not effaced can count as new media. (15)

Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2004.

In this video (which can’t be embedded), the “9-11-01″ dance team dances in the 2006 Showstopper American Dance Championships.

This 10-minute video is a bit more personal, in that it’s a single woman who knew people killed in the attacks. I find it interesting in that it’s her dancing in her living room with a pole, and she interspersed images evocative of the attacks, religion, and patriotism in her video.

Via The Poorhouse, here’s Rizwan Ahmed’s (MC Riz) music video for the “Post 9/11 Blues,” in which he sings, “everyone do the post 9/11 dance.” Ahmed’s take is quite the opposite of the previous three videos; instead of commemorating the dead explicitly, he critiques the ways in which 9/11 was used by Bush, Blaire, and others:

We might view Levinson’s work in Our Undemocratic Constitution as an attempt to both reaffirm and reimagine our civil religion in the United States. While Levinson wants to revision our civil religion so that it does not include a veneration of the Constitution, he does affirm that the Preamble, what he calls “the point of the Constitution,” as central to our civil religion, promoting it “as the equivalent of our creedal summary of America’s civil religion” (13, emphasis original).

Levinson’s belief and affirmation of a civil religion gives me pause to wonder what is and should be venerated in our society. Certainly, I agree with him that the Preamble sets lofty goals that should be valued, though perhaps I only agree with that because they are so vague and up for interpretation. (What is “Justice, [. . .] domestic tranquility, [. . .] general Welfare,” etc. [12-13]?) What should our civil religion “look” like, and how do we begin to engage in conversations about it?

Levinson, Sanford. Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It). 2006. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

—. Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998.