Notes on D. Walls' dissertation, The 'Human' Network

16 February 2013

(p. ii) “I update the definition of access as enacted to ask two important questions: what does access mean today and can we locate access as it happens?”

What follows are some rough notes on Douglas Walls’ dissertation that re-theorizes access.

Access is not a trait to designate a person or group of people “in reference to specific technologies but instead as moments of accessing enacted by people, tools, and cultures in professional and personal lifespaces” (p. ii).

“access-as-enacted”

He claims his research methods “trace the professional and personal/cultural lifesphere issues that are coordinated around and through writing technologies not by defining acces but rather by locating when and where access occurs” (p. iii).

Begins his intro by framing it through Cisco Systems’ marketing campaign that seeks to locate itself in “the human network” that, as Cisco attempts to persuade us, “enact and coordinate all the while trying to remain as invisible as possible” (p. 2). Accordingly, Walls desires to locate access as it happens, but make it visible through an updated theory of access and methodology to accomplish such ends.

The Old Way: Access as material and ideological

material access

Material access and material wealth were at the forefront in the literature throughout the 1990s. Selfe (1999) and Moran (1999), during the 1990s, made evident the material-technological constraints to access. Selfe indicates the increased financial burden to build such an infrastructure, and Moran built on this thread by indicating scholarship that either ignored it or accepted it and looked the other way. What Walls doesn’t highlight is the rise of proprietary software throughout the 1990s, which, in retrospect, fueld the desire to always need to update computer labs with the next best thing.

Into the early 2000s, Walls reports that materiality and access moved from “an argument about trying to provide an environment to students who had not been provided material technology to one where instructors were seemingly scrambling to provide environments that matched the pace of technological development and access that students brought to their classrooms” (p. 20). As Walls argues, “the divide came between the pedagogy and the technologies students already had used” (p. 21).

From 2007-2011, Walls claims that the discourse in our field suggested that “classrooms were no longer sites where the problem of technological material divides were solved” (p. 21-22). Instead, the discourse held the idea that students where typically more adept at technology than their teachers, or as Stephanie Vie (2008) called it, the “Digital Divide 2.0” (qtd. in Walls, p. 22). Yet, the problem of access and the digital divide is far more complex than this, argues Walls. Material access changes in definition in different discourses, but the dominant discourse in higher education that attempts to both alleviate and understand this problem “keep[s] looking in the same old places” (p. 24). Walls still sees materialities as a vital actor in this assemblage of access, and he suggests that it is important “when trying to locate moments of access as it becomes enacted and as it organizes and coordiates peoples [sic] lives” (p. 24).

Essentially, as material access developed, it enveloped newer and newer technologies into the purview of what constitutes as the digital divide. Walls notes scholarship such as Hart-Davidson and Krause () that suggest this is not the means by which to produce positive ends. Instead, of a binary of have and have-nots, Walls suggests a methodology that sees material access “that is ‘possessed’ by students into realms that are not always visible like network and mobile technologies” (p. 25).

ideological access as use

Selfe’s (1999) work has also influenced scholarship on access as ideological with a critical approach that examines the intersections between technology, literacy, and culture. Blackmon and Brandt (2001) recapitulate the deficit model and scholarship that re-enacts the race and have/have-not binary, but does so through “ethnic group uses and practices” (p. 26).

Adam Banks (2006), as Walls summarizes, argues that ideology produces and recategorizes use and power hieararchies that exist in American culture. To resist these systems at work, Banks argues genres should be seen as technologies, enabling us to articulate better the materials and composing processes indicative of the situated culture; hence, building culture through such habits, materials, and people.

Important takeaways: material and ideological access changes quickly over time and space.

(p. 32) “We continue to rely on locating people from certain ethnic or gendered groups as rhetorical practitioners existing in ideology rather than as rhetorical theorists, meaning that practices are what we see on a screen that are negotiated with ideologies”

(p. 33) “Finding out what practices, as well as who or what has practices are negotiated with, is a key component of understanding access as ideological positioning. If we shifted our orientation of practices to include listening for the processes like thinking, experiencing, or theorizing that must come before and after texts, we might do a better job of building a history of experience that locates individuals in their own particular experiences as gendered and raced bodies. We might also do better at understanding what those terms mean to them in their lives and how they decide to conduct themselves at home and at work. What is important is that we start paying attention to practices that enact access rather than the results of practices, i.e. content.”

(p. 36) “Moving beyond the classroom means, however, that the world becomes much more complicated in terms of ideology and technology. The classroom and the idea of “literacy” has helped to coordinate access. Understanding access as enacted use and practices means that these uses and practices can happen anywhere and, more importantly, at any time making them very difficult to see in terms of actual ideologies, not just the effects of ideology, and actual technologies.”

Researchers shouldn’t clean up their messes

Walls first provides 3 intentions driving his goals toward a messy methodologies to research access:

1. “both my experience and my belief is that people who exist in repressive and oppressive social subjectivities of race, class, and gender do not need my research or me” (p. 139).
2. “material technology has made literacy and rhetoric “messy” with no help from me.”
3. “I am mistrustful of “clean” research where predetermined categories of social subjectivities are either essentialized or shattered into meaningless postmodern rejections of collective experience” (p. 140).

(p. 141) “My interest then is to create a methodology that, for a brief instant, captures as many actors directly influencing a moment of access as possible but doesn’t seek to determine that those actors are always present in every moment of access. In short, I want a snapshot of an ecology at a particular moment, then I want to build those moments into a larger picture.”

(p. 144) “If we move past the use of ecology as a “metaphor” and into the idea of an ecology being a complex location of interactions, looking at ecology means more than looking at an organism traveling through that ecology. We lose a great deal of “messiness” of interaction because the individual must remain “clean” and “coherent” in terms of research evidence i.e. a single narrative. These accounts of people must be, above all else, good evidence for larger claims about culture.”

Walls seeks to capture the messiness and complexity of ecologies without losing the advantages of narrative accounts from research participants. Narratives, claims Walls, “can remain productive and be messy at the same time because it makes reference to experiences and ideas outside the text itself, usually histories and experiences in the path of the reader” (p. 145).

(p. 163-164) “Rather than attempt to lineup materiality and ideology, to force them into a single view that reduces the world into neat but hardly overlapping packages of thought, I have attempted to go in the other direction with my empirical design. That is to say, I want to view networks as networks and people as people to see how each enact moments of accessing rather than have them compete for which is more accurate or “real” by asking each the same questions. When do moments of access enacted happen?”

The New Way: Access as a happening

Access as “located in moments distributed between people, ideas, technologies, cultures, and careers, specifically where these elements align and form bonds with each other and where those moments are shaped to come together” (p. 10).

3 part heuristic: 1) space and places, 2) experience and identity, and 3) the rhetorical construction of bodies.

He looks to build an empirical methodology that accounts for these characteristics of access.

(p. 134) One cannot understand the influence of “work” in “nonwork” spheres without understanding the rhetorical technology like always connected mobile devices such as smart phones or the relationship smart phone owners have with their coworkers as well as what coordinates those relationships. One cannot truly understand how experiences is transformed to solve rhetorical problems without understanding when stories about self and others become important and how we are reminded of them. Nor can we understand when or how rhetorical bodies become translated into meaningful markers both online and offline without understanding what associations are made between those constructions.

Summarizes the social turn in access in literacy scholarship:

• D. Brandt’s (2001) “literacy sponsorship” embodied the methodology, which “supported looking at an individual’s social location and literacy activity as combined unit for analysis” and made evident how “external forces encourage certain kinds of literacy acquisition while discouraging other” (p. 134).

• Walls describes this methodology as the “explanatory model,” where “the social subjectivities she uses are convenient” (p. 134).

• research participants, says Wall, become “social epochs” (p. 135).

• (p. 136) Walls’ summary of Brandt’s cases: “Lopez, as a Latina and the child of Mexican immigrants, stands in for unrewarded language and literacy practices everywhere. She becomes all latino/as. Branch, a white male who now works in the technology industry as a programmer, shows how in the “information economy” home computer skills will be valuable. He becomes all white males. While using an interview and narrative case study analysis to move away from totalizing empirical number work on literacy, Brandt ends up re-inscribing the same type of claim.”

We can’t simply maintain the line of logic that suggests access to material technology determines literate activities and profession.

(p. 137) “People deal pragmatically, far more pragmatically than myself, with issues of oppressive cultural values. Their ways of understanding those values, work, home and technology are not pondered any more than one ponders a steep hill when walking. They are there, you get over them or you don’t.”

Does Sugar Labs remove the mess of real life, so as to not become an effective strategy for culture-building?

(p. 137) “Dora certainly does not need Brandt to tell her that speaking Spanish and English is not as valuable a skill as being a computer programmer economically but then again Dora couldn’t have kept relationships up with her extended family in Mexico with BASIC or Pascal.”

At SL, we tried to make our initiative a globally connected one. Working with a diverse, new american population, we wanted to connect some of the students with OLPC deployments in their family’s original countries. Essentially, we wanted to not just be another material access initiative, but also build a smarter and more connected computing culture through both human-to-human, but also human-to-computer relationships.

(p. 161) “access [i]s a process of activities enacted by people, technologies, and cultural ways of knowing the world. That is to say, access is not a trait but is enacted. Access happens when technologies, careers, identities, spaces, cultures and ideas interact and influence each other. Something, a rhetoric, must make them coordinate. Access then, is a type of rhetoric rather than a trait that rhetoric is a part of.”

Access, according to Walls, is not possessable. Both the material and ideological approaches and theories of access find access “as something possessed,” (p. 161), but Walls claims that these perspectives “obfuscate access from being knowable” (p. 161-162).

Not interested in looking at BIG data and large trends, b/c it does nothing to see access in its context: time and space. Instead, Walls is interested in network reactions to information and new content. He claims that “The more this shifting stabilizes and the more actors are involved; the more the object creates stronger spaces of access” (p. 166). Building on these ideas, Walls writes “Access is not an obtained trait; we can see and listen to moments of access as they happen every day. What is more surprising is when particular moments shape and form into experiences” (p. 180).

(p. 180) “Access is enacted in both places as a constructed moment and as a reality beyond the people involved, across technologies and social experiences. These “experiences” stand out to people. They become examples of things gone right or things gone wrong with personal lives and with careers for the people who have had them and thus generate theories about how the world works and how to shape future rhetorical behavior within that world.”

(p. 181) “If people, networks, technologies, and careers all must come together to create moments of access, some organizing force must assemble that moment. An experience is just such a force. An experience is rooted in an identity, refers to an actual moment in time, but also contains the epistemological sense that that particular moment generates for a person. That is to say, an experience is important. The moment is given meaning because the person shapes current thoughts and actions in and about the world. The moment then, located in a lived social sense of identity and shaped by epistemological meaning becomes a rhetorical theory.”

One finding from his interviews showed how the technolgies and texts we use and produce not only for stabilized objects, but also act as reflexive access points to the human as well. My published works will become points of access to me. Walls begins to build a theory of how such links enable others to “see” our “projected bod[ies]” (p. 188).

Methods

research participants: followed 5 facebook or twitter users; each user a woman of color from various ethnic and racial backgrounds. Also, participants were a mix of non-native and native English speakers.

Followed an account for 1 week period, except for two cases, where the women did not post over 10 posts in that period, the time was extended. He examined and coded 681 moments of activity that connected with 137 different people other than the participants.

Conclusion & egregious quoting

Insights into access:

• “access is enacted in multiple ways across multiple actors.” (p. 188)
• “access is coordinated and organized by something, usually multiple things”
• “access is something that transcends classrooms”

(p. 190) “Access is enacted. Access is not a trait to be owned by a thing or a person. Rather, access is something that we can see and listen for in the interactions between things like spaces and places, between experiences and social subjectivities, between rhetorics and bodies, and between people and things if we consider the personal, the cultural and the professional rather than to let any single one dominate over our conversations.”

“Access does not just happen. Even where we perceive nothing to be happening, a great many agents are persuaded to make it seem like nothing is happening, to make accessing effortless and invisible.”

“Access is a coordinated activity where the relationships between people and things, between spaces and places, between experiences and moments and between rhetoric and bodies all work to enable or deny access.”

“Access is an act of coordination that recruits uses, technologies, and people, grouped in various ways, to its causes. That coordination, that enacting, doesn’t mean unity in form or practice. All agents do not need to be recruited in all instances. Only enough need to be recruited to make sense across contexts.”

“Access is not unity nor is it fragmented. Accessing, in essence, is that act of recruiting where assets (either technological, cultural, professional, linguistic, and/or embodied) are leveraged to gain or deny.”

“Accessing is, in other words, a type of rhetoric.”