Networks as Frames

I'm always thinking about writing as complex, network phenomena—to the point that I can hardly think of writing any other way. It doesn't seem to matter what level or scale I use to think about writing—the neuronal through the writing process of a single person to a book to the socio-historical movement of languages and genres—it's networks all the way down and up and across. Rhizomes, really. I do think Deleuze and Guattari have a most useful understanding of the structure of reality that they capture graphically in the term rhizome, but that term is a bit foreign to most, almost quirky, while network has a better exchange rate. Network, then, is for me one of those large concepts that frames and informs my other concepts.

And it seems useful to know how one is framing ones reality. Perhaps the biggest lesson, though, is to realize that one is, in fact, framing reality. Actually, that is not quite right. I am not framing reality, though I am absolutely necessary for reality's frames. Rather, I am part of the dialog that frames reality. This is an important aspect of rhizomatic thinking: any frame for reality emerges out of the interactions of nodes—the dialog of nodes—within that reality. Thus, the frame itself is an emergent, and temporary, part of the reality it frames. I see everything as networks because that kind of dialog and frame explains so many things to me. Things that were unclear are now clear. Things that were incoherent are now coherent.

Apparently, others find network structures useful for understanding their favorite slice of reality. In his book Networks of the Brain (2010), about which I have already written much in this blog, Olaf Sporns frames cognition and consciousness in terms of networks on multiple scales, from a chain of neurons, to the interactions of brain regions, and onward to the connections of brains to other brains and to human artifacts. As Sporns says plainly: "cognition is a network phenomenon" (181). In his book Interaction Ritual Chains (2005), Randall Collins frames microsociology in terms of networks at the micro and macro levels of human interaction. Collins says plainly that "the center of microsociological explanation is not the individual but the situation" (3). This situation is for Collins much like what I mean by networks: the interaction and retro-interactions of nodes within a system, across that system, and with other systems. Manuel Castells' book The Rise of the Network Society (2010), frames macrosociology in terms of networks, showing how the interactions of large social groups is a complex, network phenomenon.

Network ideas are certainly common in conversations about rhetoric and education. James Berlin says in his book Rhetoric and Reality that "Transactional rhetoric is based on an epistemology that sees truth as arising out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation: an interaction of subject and object or of subject and audience or even of all the elements—subject, object, audience, and language—operating simultaneously" (15). Other rhetoricians and academicians accept this way of structuring reality as a dynamic, complex network.

I find this idea that meaning, or reality, is an emergent property of communal dialog implicit and explicit in much that I've been reading about rhetoric, or the skillful use of language, especially in education. In his 1970 classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire refers to the "banking concept of education" that turns students "into containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor." This communal way of speaking about education, of course, frames what can be said and thought about education and what can be done in education. And the frame is so convincing that it feels as if Nature itself is structured this way. Of course students know next to nothing, and of course teachers know next to everything, and of course the teachers must deposit that knowledge into the students. What else could education be but this?

Freire spends much of his book poking holes in this language, but for me his salient point is that the reality of our educational system is an emergent property of the interactions among the constituent nodes within that system. Those interactions involve, of course, language and rhetoric as one, but not the only, type of meaning-creating interaction. Freire identifies the dominant language with the politically dominant group, and in this, I think he is mostly correct, and the heart of his message is that revolution depends in some part in over-turning this language. If we shift the meaning-creating interactions among ourselves and our artefacts, then we can shift our reality. This shift is accomplished partly, sometimes in large part, through a shift in language.

Like Freire, Nedra Reynolds also explores how community dialog can frame reality. In her 1998 essay Composition's Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace, she shows how something as apparently concrete as geography is itself a product of communal dialog, especially when that language is applied to a specific discipline such as English Composition. "Spatial metaphors have long dominated our written discourse in this field ('field' being one of the first spatial references we can name) because, first, writing itself is spatial, or we cannot very well conceive of writing in ways other than spatial." Again, for me, the salient point is that the reality of English Composition emerges in large part from the dialog of the community that discusses it, lives it, and interacts within it.

This view of meaning and reality as emergent properties of a dialogic community seems to me to be at the heart of a connectivist rhetoric. I think such a frame brings some amazing explanatory power and a pleasing, aesthetically beautiful coherence to a swelter of confusing aspects of today's reality. I could easily climb atop my soapbox and proclaim the Gospel of the Net. This iGospel or eGospel has a certain appeal to it, and many of its evangelists are growing rich and powerful from it, but I must keep in mind that network is but one way of framing reality, one way among other ways. Network has a temporary advantage perhaps—a heightened currency—but in the end, network, too, will be supplanted by other ways of viewing the world. Better ways perhaps, though I can't see it at the moment.

Knowledge Nonetheless

I take issue with how Castells defines knowledge in his book The Rise of the Network Society. To be fair to Castells, his book is not about epistemology, and he says up front that defining knowledge is problematic even for those who focus on the topic. Still, he gives a definition:

I have no compelling reason to improve on Daniel Bell's … own definition of knowledge: "Knowledge: a set of organized statements of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgment or an experimental result, which is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form. Thus, I distinguish knowledge from news and entertainment." (17)

If I'm reading Castells correctly, then for him, knowledge is based totally on a formal subset of language: a set of organized statements that is grounded in reason or experimental result and that is transmittable or communicable. As I said in my posts about James Berlin's book Rhetoric and Reality, I am uncomfortable with limiting knowledge to language, especially in Bell's case, to a mere subset of language. I think that all sentient beings can learn about their environments, and the things they learn are knowledge and the things they can learn are knowable, even if those knowledges are not expressed, or even not expressible, in language.

I'll give a quick example from my own experience. I have coached youth soccer teams for fifteen years, and I have tried to teach many children to kick a soccer ball. Very little of what I said—or transmitted to these players through a set of organized statements—about kicking a soccer ball did any good. Rather, I was most successful when I allowed them ample opportunity to kick the soccer ball. Through the trial and error of repeated attempts, most of them learned how to kick a soccer ball. I could say of a player that she knew how to kick a ball, or that he did not know how to kick a ball. This was real knowledge, but hardly communicated through a set of organized statements, hardly even expressible through a set of organized, reasoned statements—knowledge nonetheless.

Writing in the Network

I'm reading a new book: Manuel Castells' The Rise of the Network Society, second edition (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Originally published in 1996, this book makes a strong case for the monumental shift caused by the emergence of electronic networks. Though I'm just beginning the book, clearly Castells provides exhaustive, well-researched evidence that networks have changed every sphere of life: political, social, economic, religious, educational, criminal, and mental. I'm thinking, then, that he may provide a useful context for exploring how composition and rhetoric have changed.

In the Prologue, Castells introduces the general problem for anyone wanting to write in a networked world. In speaking of how global networks switch on and off individuals and groups according to their perceived relevance to the global network, Castells notes that:

There follows a fundamental split between abstract, universal instrumentalism, and historically rooted, particularistic identities. Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self. [Thus], in this condition of structural schizophrenia between function and meaning, patterns of social communication become increasingly under stress. … The information society, in its global manifestation, is also the world of Shinrikyo, of the American militia, of Islamic/Christian theocratic ambitions, and of Hutu/Tutsi reciprocal genocide. … Postmodern culture, and theory, indulge in celebrating the end of history, and, to some extent, the end of reason, giving up on our capacity to understand and make sense, even of nonsense. (3, 4)

As I understand him, then, Castells is saying that the complexity and irresistible momentum of the global networks is overwhelming individuals and groups who seek refuge in chauvinistic creeds and identities to provide the meaning and values that they need. As one might suspect from the sheer length of Castell's book and the amount of energy that has gone into writing it, Manuel Castells does not accept the end of history and reason. Rather, he affirms his faith that the world has pattern and that human reason can make sense of that pattern. His book is one attempt to discern and describe that pattern.

This is, perhaps, the heart of modern rhetoric: the use of reason (the regular and sharable heuristics of thought and communication) to explore and explain the world and to inform human activity in that world. But I wonder if Castell accepts an essentialist view of reason that posits one standard of reason applicable to all people, at all times, in all situations, or if he accepts a complex view of reason that posits a relative standard of reason negotiated by a group of people, at a given time, in a given situation. I suppose I will find out.

Whichever way he goes, he poses an interesting challenge for rhetoric: how do we communicate in a world that is polarized, on one hand, by global processes that can subsume and crush individuals and groups with an economic logic and, on the other hand, by the fragmentation of individuals and groups into discrete, antagonistic identities that not only resist communication with other groups, but deny that communication is possible? This is a tough challenge, if indeed, it is real.


P.S.— It happened that just an hour after writing this post, I came across a NYTimes article Does Your Language Shape How You Think? by Guy Deutscher. Mr. Deutscher argues that we have recovered enough from the excesses of Benjamin Whorf to look more clearly at the influence of language on the way we think, including the way we reason.

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

I accept that we do not all think the same. I think common experience tells us this is so, and I think research is beginning to confirm that it is so. The challenge of academic rhetoric for me, then, is to reason about the world and our activities in the world, while at the same time being conscious of the thought structures we are employing and being explicit about them. Finally, we must employ strategies of engagement with our audiences that allow for those who, through willfulness or ignorance, disregard our own impeccable and exemplary reason. I must think more about those strategies.

A Coin Toss and Epistemology

On the drive to work this morning, I was thinking about the World Cup Final and lamenting that it ended in a most unsatisfying penalty kick shootout—not unsatisfying because the US lost, though I did want them to win, but unsatisfying because the shootout seems so random, more like a coin toss than a competitive decision. And in my mind (I was driving alone), I said, "A shootout is like a toss of the coin, it's like a coin toss." Or that's what I meant to say. What I actually said in the safe confines of my own brain was: "A shootout is like a toss of the coin, it's like a toin coss."

Of course, I made a common speech error in which I swapped the initial phonemes of two words. Most everyone has done something like this at some time, and some of us do it more often than others, but usually we simply chuckle or blush, correct ourselves, and move on with the conversation. However, I was conversing with myself this morning, and when I noticed what I'd done in my mind, I was reminded of the conversation I've been having about epistemology these past few weeks with Dave Cormier, David Wiley, Stephen Downes, and others. The conversation started when Wiley posted some observations about the value of MOOCs, and then George Siemens, Cormier, Downes, and others responded to Wiley's observations. The conversation was for me a wonderful chance to clarify my own thinking about knowledge and learning, and some of the ideas from that conversation help me clarify my phonetic shuffle this morning.

Why did I say toin coss rather than coin toss? Where did the non-words toin coss come from? I have not learned these near-words, so it makes no sense to say that they were stored in my brain in either short-term or long-term memory waiting for the right occasion to present themselves for use. The point is, until I used them this morning, these phonetic structures didn't exist, at least not for me. However, they are clearly related to two authentic phonetic structures—coin and toss—that did exist for me. I had just used those real words in the preceding sentence. But then I wonder if the real-words coin and toss also existed prior to my using them this morning, and I think that this may be an important question.

I could say—and perhaps most people would say—that the real-words existed in my mind because I have learned them, used them before, and know them; thus, they must be stored somewhere in the brain's memory that my mind can access when it needs that word. The image of a filing cabinet or a computer hard drive seems like a good image for this way of thinking about the brain, but this fails to explain the near-words. They clearly weren't stored in my neural filing cabinet. I could explain the near-words by saying, "Well, my brain just misread the words the second go-round, as brains are wont to do, and produced the near-words." But I think there is a more satisfying explanation that relies much more on the notion of complex, dynamic networks.

Neither the real-words nor the near-words existed in my brain in some storage system before I used them this morning. Rather, my mind created all of them on-the-fly as it helped me find the meaning I was searching for. In the very instance that I sought to express an idea about the value of penalty kick shootouts, a network of neurons and clusters of neurons in different regions of my brain began firing, assembling almost instantaneously phonemes, words, word clusters, sentences, and clusters of sentences. The brain uses both inherited and learned sets of rules to structure this network of neurons and the mind uses mostly learned set of rules to structure the physical network into phonemes and words and sentences and they do it so quickly and, usually, so reliably that I don't notice it. I'm too busy thinking my thoughts to notice how those thoughts emerge—at least, until I make a mistake. Then I notice.

So what have I learned from my mistakes this morning? First, knowledge is not some static thing stored in the brain. Even something that we might commonly think of as irreducible and as stable as a word is assembled, on-the-fly, as a network structure. It's likely also that the brain does not store or preserve even that network structure representing any given word. Rather, each word dynamically emerges each time I use it from and within a network of sounds and other sounds and words and sentences using a different neuronal substrate, depending on the total state of my mind and body and social situation, so that how I say the word coin this time is slightly, perhaps greatly, different from the way I said it last time or the way I may say it in the future. The coin I type here just now is different from the coin I thought this morning in the car.

Of course, the two instances of coin are also the same. Or perhaps it's better to say that they are receptive to definition from the center out so that they possess a core that keeps them recognizable from instance to instance of use. This core is the definition that we might find in the dictionary, and it is absolutely necessary for the word coin to be useful to us humans, but the definition is also just about the least we can say about the word coin. A definition artificially isolates an entity from its environment. It reduces a coin to one thing totally separate and distinct from all other things. This is a useful fiction, and we can learn things about coin this way that we might not see any other way, but the real value of coin usually arises when we embed coin in a conversation, an ecosystem, and the meaning begins to resonate across, through, and within other network structures.

I also see that I have separated brain and mind. That wasn't my intention when I started this post; however, in trying to say one thing, I have inadvertently said another thing. That often happens to me, and it is what editing is for: to correct your mis-statements or un-intended statements. However, I'm going to let this one stand, mainly because I don't know how to correct it. I know that lots of people want to make mind and brain synonymous, to reduce mind to a physical function of neuronal structures and processes. I'm not ready to say that just yet. I do believe that mind absolutely depends upon brain, but I'm not at all certain that it doesn't also depend on the body, on society, on speech, writing, and television, or on the spirit as well. That's another post.

Appropriating Language

In his 1985 essay Inventing the University, Donald Bartholomae explores the struggles of students to join a scholarly community, in large part through appropriating the language of that community. Facility with a certain language is, of course, the ticket into most social communities, not just the English Department in your local college. If you want to run with your peeps, then you'd better learn to talk like your peeps and to talk about what they talk about. Language is a key social marker.

As Bartholomae notes, the problem for most first-year college students is that they have to use academic language long before they have mastered it. Indeed, the academy expects entering students to read, talk, and write like academicians before actually joining the academy. This is not an issue of mere correctness in grammar, punctuation, and spelling—though, correctness also counts—rather, it is an issue of relationships among members of an established community and those outside that community. Language is one of the boundaries—though not the only boundary—that separates those inside the community from those outside the community. Most entering college students are definitely outside, and those of us on the inside spend a lot of time talking about how poorly those on the outside talk. The political and power implications should be obvious.

I have no issues with the rhetorical assumptions underlying Bartholomae's essay: that we use language to create social groups such as English Departments, that we use language to determine who is included in or excluded from the group, and that language in large part determines the knowledge of the group. What bothers me just now about Bartholomae's essay is that he never questions the practice of testing students to determine who is worthy of admittance to the club and who is not.

This question, of course, has ethical implications, but it also has practical implications. We assume that students want to be in our group, so we test them and admit only those who measure up. It seems to me, however, that fewer and fewer students want to be in our group, and that is partly why they don't write and speak they way that we do and why they don't take our admissions tests seriously: they don't want to identify with us teachers. At best, they may want to jump through our hoops because they are still convinced that a college degree has some value (though I think this conviction is on the decline), but they don't care a fig for talking like us so that they can join our cocktail parties. Thus, they will pass our tests anyway they can, including cheating. After all, it's just a hoop.

Can they learn to talk and write as we do? Yes, most of them. Millions of college students have learned tweeting and txting, with their intricate and strange grammars, punctuations, and spellings, in a very short time and without formal training. Why? Because they wanted entry into the groups enabled by those languages. Also, they did it because they were free to create a new language to define their new groups with, and they didn't have to answer to us English teachers for it. Damn.

So on the one hand, millions of college students can learn to write in a peculiar way to join their beloved peeps in marvelous conversations about Lady Gaga or about inventing new online currencies; or on the other hand, they can take a demeaning test writing about some inane topic they would never talk about with anyone they respect all in the hopes of gaining entry to a group of people with whom they wouldn't want to be seen in public.

It's a tough call, but I think the votes are in.

Complexity and Connectivist Rhetoric

So I read Berlin's 1985 book and found the absence of any mention of the Net a glaring hole in the discussion. What if I read something current? As you might expect, I am rewarded … richly rewarded.

I read the first article in the current issue (June, 2011) of College Composition and Communication, an article by Lauren Marshall Bowen entitled Resisting Age Bias in Digital Literacy Research (586-607), in which Bowen explores the age-based bias against older people being regarded as digitally literate. According to Bowen, most scholars and the popular media have decided that when it comes to blogs, wikis, and Twitter, most older people just don't—perhaps can't—get it, certainly not the way young people do. As you might suspect, Bowen says that this bias is a mistake that blinds us to the literacies of older people, and she cites as evidence her case study of the digital literacies of Beverly, born 1927.

Of course, digital literacy is at the heart of Bowen's discussion, so I am in familiar territory; however, her rhetorical framework also appears to me to be informed by complexity and networking, core concepts in a Connectivist rhetoric. She says up front that she values "the Internet as a productive, participatory space, qualities sometimes credited to technologies and practices labeled 'Web 2.0'" (588). Literacy in this participatory space is "embedded within everyday contexts, … distributed across social domains, and … developed and evolved over time" (588). This situated approach to literacy means "examining not only the physiological and cognitive barriers to literacy but also the impact of affective experiences (such as feelings of desire or anxiety) in which literacy practices can thrive or become mired" (589). Finally, this literacy "can only be understood in relation to broader sociohistorical context, including nondigital literacies and technologies," and "we must look to the stories individuals tell about literacy and how those stories are embedded within evolving social, technologica, and cultural histories over time" (590).

Bowen's literacy, then, is not a cognitive skill belonging merely to an individual and measurable merely within that individual—a definition that might be common to traditional education and to both objective and subjective rhetorics—rather, literacy is the dynamic interaction of a unique individual (in this case, Beverly) with a unique ecosystem over the course of a unique lifetime. Literacy is not a thing but a web of connections that Beverly weaves out of her own body, heart, and mind and across her social, economic, intellectual, emotional, physical, and other domains. This is a very complex, rhizomatic view of literacy—a view made obvious by digital technology, though not dependent on digital technology. In this context, rhetoric is the skillful use of language to cultivate those connections among ourselves, our communities, and our ecosystems. That web of connections forms our respective realities, and that web is in part formed by and informed by rhetoric, or our use of language.

I don't see anything here that the 1985 version of James Berlin would disagree with. This rhizomatic, connectivist view of rhetoric would fit quite easily into his general view of transactional rhetoric. The only difference is that Bowen and I have the advantage of two decades use of Web 1.0 and almost a decade of Web 2.0. Berlin v.1985 just didn't have that advantage.

Changes in the Ecosystem

I've finished reading James Berlin's book Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985, and perhaps the thing that most impresses me about the book is how totally unaware it is of the Internet. Of course, Berlin was writing a decade before the advent of the World Wide Web, the sum total of the Internet for most people, so he could hardly have included the Internet without more prescience than most people possess. I am not making a critique of Berlin; rather, I am noting how informed my own thinking is with all things Internet – so much so that when I read an entire book on rhetoric and find no mention of blogs, wikis, Twitter, or even email, then I am somewhat taken aback. I feel that something is missing.

I was most acutely aware of this lack when Berlin was discussing his preferred flavor of rhetoric: the social-epistemic. Berlin situates social-epistemic rhetoric within the broader framework of transactional rhetoric, which is one of his three broad categories of Twentieth Century rhetoric, the other two being objective and subjective. Briefly, the three are distinguished by how they treat epistemology, or where they place meaning. Objective theories place meaning in the external world of things and objects or things written about, subjective theories place meaning in the inner world of subjects or the writer's own mind, and transactional theories place meaning in the interactions among the subject (writer), the object (the world), and the writer's discourse community. For the objective and subjective rhetorics, then, meaning has a particular place in either the external world or in the internal mind and it has a fixed and unique shape and identity. For the transactional rhetorics, meaning has no particular place or  fixed shape but exists in the dynamic interactions of writer, readers, and world. Berlin says it this way:

Transactional rhetoric is based on an epistemology that sees truth as arising out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation: an interaction of subject and object or of subject and audience or even of all the elements—subject, object, audience, and language—operating simultaneously. The three major forms of transactional rhetoric in the twentieth-century writing class have been the classical, the cognitive, and the epistemic. (15)

Berlin favors the social-epistemic rhetoric, which he distinguishes from classical and cognitive varieties in two ways:

1. "Epistemic rhetoric posits a transaction that involves all elements of the rhetorical situation: interlocutor, audience, material reality, and language" (16), and
2. this transaction always includes language, for "there is never a division between experience and language. … All experiences … are grounded in language, and language determines their content and structure. … Rhetoric thus becomes implicated in all human behavior" (16).

I find an easy fit in Berlin's notions that knowledge is a pattern that emerges from the interactions among an interlocutor, a discourse community, and reality (I do not believe that reality is limited to the material or that language is necessary for knowledge, but more of that later and elsewhere), but I'm bothered by the absence of any firm notion of networks and networking, chaos, uncertainty, ecosystems, complexity, and rhizomatic thinking in general. Of course, Berlin's ideas do not preclude those concepts, but they don't include them either. This suggests to me that much has changed in the twenty-five years since Berlin's book.  Well, then—we have some room to work in.