{"id":621,"date":"2008-08-01T08:37:32","date_gmt":"2008-08-01T13:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=621"},"modified":"2008-08-01T08:37:32","modified_gmt":"2008-08-01T13:37:32","slug":"context-collapse-face-work-michael-wesch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/context-collapse-face-work-michael-wesch\/","title":{"rendered":"Context collapse, face-work, Michael Wesch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inspired (nudged, prompted) by a recent e-mail from Janet<\/a>, I’m trying to catch up with that builder and curator of a cabinet of wonders who calls himself Michael Wesch. Watching him and his work is like watching a time-lapse photograph of the Empire State Building going up. Every morning a new story appears. Amazing.<\/p>\n

So this morning I got onto his blog entry about “Context Collapse,”<\/a> actually an excerpt from a paper he’s submitted to a journal, and by the time I realized what was going on I’d composed a rather longish comment<\/a>. I then wrestled with whether I should leave the comment there, or just post my thoughts here and link to the post. Tired of wrestling, I decided to do both.<\/p>\n

This isn’t the blog post I’d planned to write–I need to do a follow-on to the one on blogging, where the comments have been truly mind-blowing and have added immeasurably to my thinking (as well as filling my heart). But I post it here in the hopes that some account of my response to Michael’s post will perhaps add a little to the conversation and, if nothing else, encourage a few more folks to go take a look at what Michael has written and the comments that have followed. And add their own.<\/p>\n

Michael,<\/p>\n

Fascinating stuff here. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m eager to read your article and grateful you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve shared part of it with us here.<\/p>\n

Three things come to mind immediately:<\/p>\n

1. The idea of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153face-work\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (great phrase) jibes interestingly with the arguments in Goleman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Social Intelligence.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Far from being opaque to each other, in f2f contexts we are almost comically transparent as our brains work below awareness to stimulate complex physical signals that share our subjectivity with each other. The sharing induces synchrony: heart rate, brain rhythms, etc. Massive social benefits emerge from this kind of synchrony, which blurs the lines between physiology, affect, and consciousness. But of course lower-bandwidth connections (webcams, writing, etc.) make these kinds of synchrony more difficult\u00e2\u20ac\u201cthough also more interestingly concentrated at times, a true paradox. (Call it the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stick-figure\u00e2\u20ac\u009d paradox, in which a few bold suggestions of form can be more compelling than complexly realized CGI, perhaps because of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153uncanny valley\u00e2\u20ac\u009d effect?)<\/p>\n

2. In some respects, what I do when I teach students how to write more effectively is not so much to teach them a set of self-correcting techniques (I do that too, sure) as it is to teach them what it means to do \u00e2\u20ac\u0153face-work\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the medium of prose. Language is both highly supple and highly resistant in this regard, difficult to master but capable of intense synchronicities when writer and reader are well-practiced in the varieties of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153face-work\u00e2\u20ac\u009d available to prose. Sometimes the goal of this practice is called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153finding your voice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (necessary for the reader as well as for the writer, I think) which of course is also a kind of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153face-work,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d one even more intimately connected with the magic land between deliberate action and upwelling response. (Much to say here as well with regard to aesthetic arrest<\/a> and altruism.)<\/p>\n

3. It occurs to me that Mikhail Bakhtin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s seminal essay on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Speech Genres\u00e2\u20ac\u009d could be mapped onto webcams\/vlogging in interesting ways. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve always been haunted by his concept of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153addressivity,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which he defines as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the quality of turning to someone.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Imagining addressivity, combining it with what he calls \u00e2\u20ac\u0153internal dramatism\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in which one might say the notion of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153face-work\u00e2\u20ac\u009d becomes part of the very dynamics of self-presentation and self-expression, a canny nod to the reader that generates not irony so much as a shared awareness of the heroic joint effort in that moment to create a context that, however provisional, will not collapse (at least for now), offers some philosophical\/linguistic models that might prove useful.<\/p>\n

Thanks, as always, for the work you do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inspired (nudged, prompted) by a recent e-mail from Janet, I’m trying to catch up with that builder and curator of a cabinet of wonders who calls himself Michael Wesch. Watching him and his work is like watching a time-lapse photograph … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-a1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}