Remixing the Lost Book of Rhythm

Author:

Conner, III, Herschel C.

Graduate Program:

English

Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

Document Type:

Dissertation

Date of Defense:

June 16, 2006

Committee Members:

Richard Doyle, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Robert Anderson Yarber Jr., Committee Member
Paul Youngquist, Committee Member
Jennifer Edbauer, Committee Member

Keywords:

wiki
rhythm
noise
resonance
composition pedagogy
composition theory
the Commons
writing-by-linking

Abstract:

Writers today increasingly deploy digital and "musical" techniques such as sampling and mixing to share and transform information and ideas, and I look to diverse rhetorical traditions for clues to a digital pedagogy. I select from primary and secondary source materials—Ancient Greek musical practice, Indian Tala, disciplines of Yoga, global polyrhythmic traditions—as I seek to formulate a theory and pedagogy of "wiki" space. My archive suggests rhetorical practices of "rhythm," a long neglected rhetorical effect, are crucial to techniques for navigating the assemblages of technology and community that articulate our classrooms and workplaces today. Part I tells the story of the "filesharing subjects" that populate our writing classrooms today, and position peer-to-peer culture, where computers cluster and ambient networks compose themselves, as a topos and model for writing instruction. Penn State's licensing agreement with Napster provides the atmosphere, and I forecast the segments that make up the rest of The Lost Book of Rhythm. In Part II, I take readers back to Ancient Greece, and outline a Greek treatment of rhythm. This chapter begins with a sample from Athens' rhythmic theorist, Aristoxenus, and builds into a vertiginous wall of sound—a swarm of cicadas singing unto Socrates—before it applies a magnifying glass to the terminology and concepts that seem to haunt rhythm and give it so much promise. Part III investigates the resonant aspects of rhythm in communication ecologies, based on an experiment mixing social bookmarking with wiki. The rest of the chapter is a bottom-up grapple with the phenomenology of delay and the stochastic dimensions of wiki—and other rhythmizable media—from the perspective of musicians, students, scientists, teachers, and rhetoricians. In Part IV, I evaluate the rhythmic principles of minimalism and their technologies for their interactive potential, and extract recipes and principles for teaching with technology. Part V, an experiment in “lossy compression,” seeks to transduce wiki's effects on teaching to the page.