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Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy
A “next generation” textbook for online writing and design, Internet Invention supplements existing print and web primers on HTML and graphics production with a program that puts these tools and techniques to work with a purpose. Designed as a passage from the more familiar rhetoric of the page to the less familiar one of the screen, this text is a hybrid workbook-reader-theory with chapters divided into the following Studio, Remakes, Lectures, The Ulmer File, and Office. These sections offer a sequence of interconnected Web writing assignments, rhetorical meditations, scholarly discussions, case studies, and pedagogical metacommentary, which together combine to form a truly unique contribution to the body of rhetorical theory and practice in the age of the digital text. Ulmer uses the invention of literacy by the Ancient Greeks as a model for the invention of “electracy” (which is to digital media what literacy is to print). Internet Invention brings the students into the process of invention, in every sense of the word. The book takes students through a series of Web assignments and exercises designed to organize their creative imagination, using a virtual consulting agency – “The EmerAgency” – as a vehicle for students to discover the potential for the Web to act as a setting for community problem solving.
352 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 4, 2019
Gregory Ulmer takes readers from literacy to electracy and from the self to a singularity. The question is how this will influence our impact on the world. He introduces a new frame for understanding ourselves and offers a mode of discovery and invention.
Read more: https://bookoblivion.com/2018/10/19/g...
Read more: https://bookoblivion.com/2018/10/19/g...
February 20, 2023
While I agree with Ulmer that there is a strong need to teach image-based literacy (Electracy is Ulmer's neologism for internet/image literacy) the difficulty of this book is that students must first wade through the theory before they can begin working with the exercises and assignments. I understand this path-- you can't invent something that you do not understand--but the prose seems targeted more for an academic audience than students. How else does one explain sentences like this:
"The revival of choral space in electracy concerns a personal or private experience of the sacred rather than an official or collective version."
Or this:
"The analogy between the destroyed network of military command still able to function after suffering a first nuclear strike, and the ruined messages of dream work, scattered into nonsense by repression of received and understood in a way by the dreamer, is one of the operative 'packets' of choragraphy."
What?
(And I just picked to sentences at random, so there is far more tangled prose than these examples illustrate.)
I've worked to reinterpret Ulmer's prose for first year students and let me just say that it must have been a labor of love because not only is it an ongoing process, but I am now dealing with the problem that this prose problem kept hidden, which is working to get students to actually write about felt values and also use "conductive" logic. The problem is that the teacher needs to fully understand the point the text is making if they hope to have a productive class period.
It would be enough if these were the only theorists Ulmer brings in, but they are only two plates in the smorgasboard of ideas that compose the theoretical base for this project. There is also:
1. Bataille's Accursed Share;
2. Leiris' Personal Sacred;
3. Wittgenstein's Duck-rabbit;
4. Agamben's Whatever bodies;
5. Jameson's work on Allegory;
5. Barthes' Myth;
6. Greimas' Narrative Structure;
7. Lacan's Sinthome (and Bar!!);
8.Benjamin's Dialectical Image;
9. The role of Stimmung (so Heidegger and others who focus more on phenomenological aspects of ontology)
10. and others to include repeat theorists like Jameson's Prison house of Language.
Yes, (or rather NO) this is the necessary theory for undergrad students to swallow before they can understand the mystory project that will require them to write with felt values and imagination (metaphor, analogy, conductive reasoning via punctum) as their primary mode of communication.
Ulmer's idea for all of this comes through Hayden's White's musing about what History as a discipline would look like if it was invented after our post-modern turn rather than during the Enlightenment. So, what would English look like if invention rather than interpretation was the focus? And what would it look like if Continental theory was its foundation?
It's an interesting thought experiment, but to turn it into reality? Academics are not amused; but I must admit that I was and to some extent, still am.
To be fair, Ulmer isn't asking students to become familiar with these theories, but if you are teaching the mystory, well, you may have some boning up to do! What Ulmer expects is that students mostly use these theoretical lenses in some metaphorical fashion, which is damned hard to do if they've left your brain looking like a rats' nest in the process.
On top of this Ulmer also provides a truncated history lesson of the Greeks' movement from an oral culture to a written one. He also provides a brief overview of colonialism and for help he brings in the work of various artists and writers, which means that the students have to have some understanding on their focus in order to see how they can apply those methods in their own way. Of course, Ulmer is not looking for the students to reproduce a method, only to use it as a "relay" so try to explain that difference to a first year student.
(I am not even going to talk about the wabi-sabi/haiku aspect of the mystory, nor the Heideggerian aspect of stimmung, so count yourselves fortunate!)
It seems to me that most of my class is spent trying to explain what it is I am asking my students to do and why is should be understood to be an important task. The next step is filling them in on how the process is supposed to work--it is entirely possible to make Ulmer's "Mystory" project and walk away still completely in the dark about it (your Mystory will not actually be a Mystory in Ulmer's view, but since you never understood Ulmer's view there's no loss, is there?)
I do see the value for electracy and I certainly do appreciate the lengths that Ulmer goes to to make sure that those reading his book finally see the bigger picture, but did it have to be so damned complicated?
P.S. I did construct my own mystory and experienced the epiphany that Ulmer sees the mystory producing--one of the main aspects of the mystory is that if it is done properly you will be able to see your own interpellation as a subject in a late-capitalist society (yeah, Ulmer is also using Althusser too) and for me that actually happened, or at least I think that it happened. Regardless, I did walk away a little wiser about myself and the levers that drive me; I just don't know if this is a task that first year students, fresh from the stultification factory that is secondary education, can handle well.
EDIT 2/19/2023
It's been over two years now of teaching the mystory process while rereading my way through Ulmer's books and I've fortunately had a couple of minor epiphanies. First, the earlier review is written when I was very frustrated by the process even while I was very much committed to it and it took me a while to see this bias clearly-- I've since made some really good strides with understanding what Ulmer is trying to do and so my classes have had better success because I finally have a good idea about what I'm trying to accomplish; yes, you teach to learn and you are gracious to those students who are helping you in this process and yes, if you teach you should always be in this process (imo).
You do not need to know the theory that Ulmer uses because everything in the mystory is Opposite Day/Upside Down World and so you are actually working to "literally" apply that theory as a child might try to apply a board game in real life (like trying to use the game, Candyland, as an actual map to locate said Candyland in the real world). My problem is that I did not feel comfortable playing dumb with my students when I was actually dumb and so it was my value system calling the shots and I learned that fact just when I was becoming competent with the theory, so it was an ironic epiphany, I guess.
Regarding that "opposite day" comment, the mystory process takes the known process and turns it upside down for a couple of reasons. The first, in my opinion is so that you feel the learning through epiphany (you need to learn to stay with the trouble of not knowing if you want to reap results).
The reason you want the students to apply the theory has a lot to do with countering (or using) the earlier Greek method for producing the rational world that followed after the invention of alphabetic writing; Ulmer is inventing a new way to do literate research with a new invention that has come into play: the internet. The internet is a kind of earlier throwback to Oral culture but with moving images so a lot of that earlier logic is in play. Those earlier logics have been rendered invisible/impotent by the literate culture, but as the little girl in Spielberg's Poltergeist says, "they're back!"
Regarding this upside-down process, the mystory process is meant to teach students how to have epiphanies because they are the matchbook for the fires of creativity; the backwards design is irrational to people living within a literate world, but you may not realize just how rational you are until you are confronted by the mystory process. In the same way, the intelligence gathering work of the mystory is also contrasted as you are collecting information for four different discourses that have helped to shape your identity as a subject of these discourses, so for example the information you collect for the family section may contrast with the information collected for the entertainment section, but when you marry these opposites together through an analogy-making process you begin to see your value system in a new light as it begins to show up in recognizable signs in these analogies you have invented.
The mystory demands stupidity from its practitioners because the idea is to generate so much nonsense (in a semantical sign kind of way) so that their value system stands in stark contrast, like Barthes' Symbolic Code. Or, the nonsense produces new signs that are recognizable to the practitioner and it is these signs that stand out against a backdrop of nonsense. It doesn't matter because what does matter is that the practitioner's value system is now visible and ready for interpretation.
The joy of this project is that the practitioner gets to wear two hats for the price of one; not only does the practitioner spend their time "inventing" their mystory popcyle, but later, when they have completed the four contrasting institutional "towers" (I'm looking at the four quadrants of the popcycle from a straight-on view rather than an overhead) and worked to create linkage between these contrasting discourses (aka: analogies), they should see a pattern emerge that shows them specific repeating "signs" that are now ready to be interpreted. So, the practitioner plays the role of the inventor and the critic/interpreter of the work!
I very much appreciate the work that Greg Ulmer has done through his publications and I also appreciate the video library of his speeches that exists on the internet.
While Ulmer's task is to show the reader how the internet can be used within an academic discourse, in this new day of Chat GPT, it feels like we are in an interregnum of sorts and that very soon there will be a massive change that no one has really had the foresight to envision (Web 3.0). I think that Ulmer's ideas will be very helpful for such a time because the mystory process helps to make for a more flexible thinker.
"The revival of choral space in electracy concerns a personal or private experience of the sacred rather than an official or collective version."
Or this:
"The analogy between the destroyed network of military command still able to function after suffering a first nuclear strike, and the ruined messages of dream work, scattered into nonsense by repression of received and understood in a way by the dreamer, is one of the operative 'packets' of choragraphy."
What?
(And I just picked to sentences at random, so there is far more tangled prose than these examples illustrate.)
I've worked to reinterpret Ulmer's prose for first year students and let me just say that it must have been a labor of love because not only is it an ongoing process, but I am now dealing with the problem that this prose problem kept hidden, which is working to get students to actually write about felt values and also use "conductive" logic. The problem is that the teacher needs to fully understand the point the text is making if they hope to have a productive class period.
It would be enough if these were the only theorists Ulmer brings in, but they are only two plates in the smorgasboard of ideas that compose the theoretical base for this project. There is also:
1. Bataille's Accursed Share;
2. Leiris' Personal Sacred;
3. Wittgenstein's Duck-rabbit;
4. Agamben's Whatever bodies;
5. Jameson's work on Allegory;
5. Barthes' Myth;
6. Greimas' Narrative Structure;
7. Lacan's Sinthome (and Bar!!);
8.Benjamin's Dialectical Image;
9. The role of Stimmung (so Heidegger and others who focus more on phenomenological aspects of ontology)
10. and others to include repeat theorists like Jameson's Prison house of Language.
Yes, (or rather NO) this is the necessary theory for undergrad students to swallow before they can understand the mystory project that will require them to write with felt values and imagination (metaphor, analogy, conductive reasoning via punctum) as their primary mode of communication.
Ulmer's idea for all of this comes through Hayden's White's musing about what History as a discipline would look like if it was invented after our post-modern turn rather than during the Enlightenment. So, what would English look like if invention rather than interpretation was the focus? And what would it look like if Continental theory was its foundation?
It's an interesting thought experiment, but to turn it into reality? Academics are not amused; but I must admit that I was and to some extent, still am.
To be fair, Ulmer isn't asking students to become familiar with these theories, but if you are teaching the mystory, well, you may have some boning up to do! What Ulmer expects is that students mostly use these theoretical lenses in some metaphorical fashion, which is damned hard to do if they've left your brain looking like a rats' nest in the process.
On top of this Ulmer also provides a truncated history lesson of the Greeks' movement from an oral culture to a written one. He also provides a brief overview of colonialism and for help he brings in the work of various artists and writers, which means that the students have to have some understanding on their focus in order to see how they can apply those methods in their own way. Of course, Ulmer is not looking for the students to reproduce a method, only to use it as a "relay" so try to explain that difference to a first year student.
(I am not even going to talk about the wabi-sabi/haiku aspect of the mystory, nor the Heideggerian aspect of stimmung, so count yourselves fortunate!)
It seems to me that most of my class is spent trying to explain what it is I am asking my students to do and why is should be understood to be an important task. The next step is filling them in on how the process is supposed to work--it is entirely possible to make Ulmer's "Mystory" project and walk away still completely in the dark about it (your Mystory will not actually be a Mystory in Ulmer's view, but since you never understood Ulmer's view there's no loss, is there?)
I do see the value for electracy and I certainly do appreciate the lengths that Ulmer goes to to make sure that those reading his book finally see the bigger picture, but did it have to be so damned complicated?
P.S. I did construct my own mystory and experienced the epiphany that Ulmer sees the mystory producing--one of the main aspects of the mystory is that if it is done properly you will be able to see your own interpellation as a subject in a late-capitalist society (yeah, Ulmer is also using Althusser too) and for me that actually happened, or at least I think that it happened. Regardless, I did walk away a little wiser about myself and the levers that drive me; I just don't know if this is a task that first year students, fresh from the stultification factory that is secondary education, can handle well.
EDIT 2/19/2023
It's been over two years now of teaching the mystory process while rereading my way through Ulmer's books and I've fortunately had a couple of minor epiphanies. First, the earlier review is written when I was very frustrated by the process even while I was very much committed to it and it took me a while to see this bias clearly-- I've since made some really good strides with understanding what Ulmer is trying to do and so my classes have had better success because I finally have a good idea about what I'm trying to accomplish; yes, you teach to learn and you are gracious to those students who are helping you in this process and yes, if you teach you should always be in this process (imo).
You do not need to know the theory that Ulmer uses because everything in the mystory is Opposite Day/Upside Down World and so you are actually working to "literally" apply that theory as a child might try to apply a board game in real life (like trying to use the game, Candyland, as an actual map to locate said Candyland in the real world). My problem is that I did not feel comfortable playing dumb with my students when I was actually dumb and so it was my value system calling the shots and I learned that fact just when I was becoming competent with the theory, so it was an ironic epiphany, I guess.
Regarding that "opposite day" comment, the mystory process takes the known process and turns it upside down for a couple of reasons. The first, in my opinion is so that you feel the learning through epiphany (you need to learn to stay with the trouble of not knowing if you want to reap results).
The reason you want the students to apply the theory has a lot to do with countering (or using) the earlier Greek method for producing the rational world that followed after the invention of alphabetic writing; Ulmer is inventing a new way to do literate research with a new invention that has come into play: the internet. The internet is a kind of earlier throwback to Oral culture but with moving images so a lot of that earlier logic is in play. Those earlier logics have been rendered invisible/impotent by the literate culture, but as the little girl in Spielberg's Poltergeist says, "they're back!"
Regarding this upside-down process, the mystory process is meant to teach students how to have epiphanies because they are the matchbook for the fires of creativity; the backwards design is irrational to people living within a literate world, but you may not realize just how rational you are until you are confronted by the mystory process. In the same way, the intelligence gathering work of the mystory is also contrasted as you are collecting information for four different discourses that have helped to shape your identity as a subject of these discourses, so for example the information you collect for the family section may contrast with the information collected for the entertainment section, but when you marry these opposites together through an analogy-making process you begin to see your value system in a new light as it begins to show up in recognizable signs in these analogies you have invented.
The mystory demands stupidity from its practitioners because the idea is to generate so much nonsense (in a semantical sign kind of way) so that their value system stands in stark contrast, like Barthes' Symbolic Code. Or, the nonsense produces new signs that are recognizable to the practitioner and it is these signs that stand out against a backdrop of nonsense. It doesn't matter because what does matter is that the practitioner's value system is now visible and ready for interpretation.
The joy of this project is that the practitioner gets to wear two hats for the price of one; not only does the practitioner spend their time "inventing" their mystory popcyle, but later, when they have completed the four contrasting institutional "towers" (I'm looking at the four quadrants of the popcycle from a straight-on view rather than an overhead) and worked to create linkage between these contrasting discourses (aka: analogies), they should see a pattern emerge that shows them specific repeating "signs" that are now ready to be interpreted. So, the practitioner plays the role of the inventor and the critic/interpreter of the work!
I very much appreciate the work that Greg Ulmer has done through his publications and I also appreciate the video library of his speeches that exists on the internet.
While Ulmer's task is to show the reader how the internet can be used within an academic discourse, in this new day of Chat GPT, it feels like we are in an interregnum of sorts and that very soon there will be a massive change that no one has really had the foresight to envision (Web 3.0). I think that Ulmer's ideas will be very helpful for such a time because the mystory process helps to make for a more flexible thinker.
September 12, 2022
Ulmer's work is the kind of thinking that teachers and lovers of reading have needed, whether or not they realize it. In the midst (formation? onslaught? flood? initial overtures?) of a dramatic cultural and cognitive shift from the static written word to the dynamic and complex digital space, we are perhaps seeing a change no less (and perhaps more) significant than that from oral to written culture. Ulmer has been the first I've encountered to address this with something more than general pronouncements, defining what it must mean to engage the image.
This does not mean that he succeeds completely. He is in very new territory (even though this work in now almost 20 years old). Ulmer creates dozens of specialty terms for concepts and processes he sees both at work upon us and what we might/must use as readers. This makes the reading experience (apart from its already hybrid form as described in the book summary above) at times convoluted, dislocating, even suffocating: one desires too-infrequent waypoints, direct exposition, and the like. Even so, I find it hard to imagine a better approach for such a profound reorientation to reading the digital.
The exercises in the book are therefore essential components, I think, to appreciating what Ulmer here pioneers. I recommend not skipping over them but engaging them fully. (I was fortunate to read this in a group which largely participated in just this way.) The creation of the mystory which Ulmer challenges readers to undergo is revealing, but not merely of one's self but of one's purpose in reading and meaning-making. Electracy for Ulmer is not a neutral task or merely reading for objective meaning--indeed, such ideas are farcical. Engaging the image necessarily means--in an evolution of the more powerful post-structural theorists--discovering how structural and technological, even corporate, narratives are already working upon us, and to engage these in transparent acts of subjective recognition and even interference. The act of Electracy, then, is a new and necessary way of acting meaningfully upon, to, with, and about the world.
This does not mean that he succeeds completely. He is in very new territory (even though this work in now almost 20 years old). Ulmer creates dozens of specialty terms for concepts and processes he sees both at work upon us and what we might/must use as readers. This makes the reading experience (apart from its already hybrid form as described in the book summary above) at times convoluted, dislocating, even suffocating: one desires too-infrequent waypoints, direct exposition, and the like. Even so, I find it hard to imagine a better approach for such a profound reorientation to reading the digital.
The exercises in the book are therefore essential components, I think, to appreciating what Ulmer here pioneers. I recommend not skipping over them but engaging them fully. (I was fortunate to read this in a group which largely participated in just this way.) The creation of the mystory which Ulmer challenges readers to undergo is revealing, but not merely of one's self but of one's purpose in reading and meaning-making. Electracy for Ulmer is not a neutral task or merely reading for objective meaning--indeed, such ideas are farcical. Engaging the image necessarily means--in an evolution of the more powerful post-structural theorists--discovering how structural and technological, even corporate, narratives are already working upon us, and to engage these in transparent acts of subjective recognition and even interference. The act of Electracy, then, is a new and necessary way of acting meaningfully upon, to, with, and about the world.
January 3, 2011
Ulmer offers a pedagogical take on reading and writing practices in a digital age through a detailed description and analysis of his Mystory website assignment. Filled with new vocabulary and approaches to teaching electronic composition, the book makes an important contribution to rhetoric and composition. Because Ulmer’s ideas come in a dense and theory-rich package, readers may find the companion website helpful for further explanation and examples.
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