Notes for Gregory Ulmer Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy
Key concepts: mystory.
Related theorists: Gerald Holton, Nietzsche, Marcel O'Gorman.
Preface
Textbook for teaching with and about the internet based on mystory pedagogy.
(xii) This book is a textbook for teaching with and about the
internet, based on my experience with a pedagogy called mystory first
developed in the early 1980s.
(xiii) This book is organized around
a project based on the “image of wide scope” discovered by
historians of science to exist as a pattern in the careers of the
most productive people in our civilization.
INTRODUCTION: THE EMERAGENCY
HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD?
Image
Reason
Networked classroom supports writing with the whole page, text, picture, layout.
(2) The second feature that one immediately notices in a networked classroom is that the technology supports graphic imaging along with text: one writes with the whole page, so to speak – text, picture, layout.
The English Major
INTERNET INVENTION
Practices replacing specialized knowledge remain to be invented, predicting old administration will evaporate; compare to OGorman.
(5) While the entire administrative superstructure of literate specialized knowledge will be translated into cyberspace, once there much of it will evaporate. The practices that will replace specialized knowledge remain to be invented.
THE PROGRAM
Mystory pedagogical genre from Teletheory.
(5) “Mystory” is the name for a pedagogical genre I introduced in Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video.
The Motivating Hypotheses of the Project: Make a Mystory
Ulmer is providing a context, example space, for instruction in digital humanities that is of course intended to be of manageable complexity.
(6)
1. . . Students map or document their situations or relationship to
each of four institutions: Career field or major; Family;
Entertainment; community History. . . . Rather, the pattern forms at
the level of repeating signifiers – words and graphics – which is
why each discourse level of the mystory must be documented with
details that address the senses.
(7) 4. I do not provide here
discussion questions, instructions on HTML tags, graphics software,
Web search engines, and the link. The chief purpose of Internet
Invention is
to provide something to do with the internet either while working out
these fundamentals or after they are learned and ready to be applied.
Narrative Suspense
A substitute for creating new media with technology is creating media that reflects personal comportment (habitus) with technology.
(7-8) The theory predicts that identity behavior or subject formation is as much a part of an apparatus as are technology and institutions. . . . A habitus of reading to oneself caused the voice of thought to move from outside (spirit speaking through nature) to inside (the ghost in me – psyche). Now a habitus of imaging is spreading in which people see themselves on a screen, sometimes literally from the moment they emerged from the birth canal (in home movies) to the present. The subject is observed as “body,” surface, gesture, look.
Remakes and Improvisations
Chapter 1
Mystory
STUDIO
The Image of Wide Scope
From such Holton wide images and themata intellectual myths are made, from Socrates to Einstein; Nietzsche search for career point where the aphorism intersects anecdote of life.
Seek wide image and themata from history of computing, networking, and programming.
(18) The notions of the “wide image” and “themata” were developed by Gerald Holton in his studies of scientific creativity, for which the prototype is Albert Einstein. . . . The pattern that emerged from such case studies confirmed the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's observation that it is possible to find in a career that secret point at which the aphorism of thought intersects with the anecdote of life.
Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York: Longman, 2003. Print.