Electracy and Transmedia Studies

A motto guiding Gregory L. Ulmer's career is from the poet Basho: not to follow in the footsteps of the masters, but to seek what they sought. The responsibility of humanities disciplines today is to do for the digital apparatus (social machine) what the classical Greeks did for alphabetic writing. Ulmer frames online learning as a mode of invention (heuretics), beginning with the invention of konsult itself. Konsult: Theopraxesis describes the invention of a genre of learning that is to digital media what Plato's dialogue was to alphabetic writing. The Greeks invented the practices of writing (rhetoric and logic) native to the new institution of school (the Academy), fostering a new behavior of selfhood (Socrates). Ulmer adopts this historical precedent as a relay, an inventory for what must be invented again today: a genre of learning, an educational institution, identity behavior. The insight of electracy is that each apparatus augments and institutionalizes one of the primary faculties of human intelligence: theoria in literacy; praxis in orality; poiesis in electracy. Needed today are not practices of writing, but "theopraxesis" of media. The analytical information economy of literacy required separation and isolation (siloing) of institutionalized intelligence. The multimodality of electracy enables syncretism of faculties into holistic performance: thinking-doing-making; knowledge-purpose-affect. The interface metaphor of Plato's dialogue was an oral conversation during which the illiterate interlocutor is introduced to dialectical reason as Idea. The interface metaphor of konsult is scientific consulting during which anelectrate students encounter plasmatic desire as simulacrum. This new learning is organized around an updating of Justice native to electracy.

TRACING INVISIBLE LINES is a critical autoethnographic text built around Gregory Ulmer's concept of the "Mystory." Dedicated to the enhancement of imagination and innovation in a digital-media saturated society, Ulmer's Mystory is a creative research method that draws narratives from three domains of discourse (personal, professional, popular). Analysing these domains means generating fresh insight into the deep-seated emblems that drive the creative disposition, or "invariant principle," of the practice-led researcher. Here, the mystoriographical approach has mobilized an exploration of the interrelations between self and society, between memory and imagination, as well as between industry-driven design-arts education and experimental sound-art practice (prioritizing the sonic, the perambulatory, careering). As a result, the Mystory fosters critical awareness of the socio-cultural instruments of creative inspiration and perspiration. Reflexive in intent and experimental in approach, David Prescott-Steed's hybrid writing style moves freely between art historical, biographical and autobiographical, academic and speculative moods. This book's emphasis on an electronic, investigative sound-based practice finds it treading new ground between the sonic arts and the field of electracy, through its addition of sound and music to the genre, this book extends the scope of studies into Ulmer's work beyond English literature and the ocularcentric arts, offering a new handbook for sonic conceptual art practice.

In THE INTERNET AS A GAME, Jill Anne Morris proposes that by defining internet arguments as games, we can analyze ad hominem and ad baculum arguments coming from online mobs and trolls using procedural rhetoric. Building upon and extending Ian Bogost's definition of procedural rhetoric and Jesper Juul's definition of games, Morris extends the usage of the term into human systems and groups that have proceduralized their arguments online. By studying the development of online adhocracies such as 4Chan, Anonymous, and even Reddit during their early development (roughly 2006 to 2014), Morris shows how these groups have proceduralized rhetoric so that thousands of group members can ìspeakî with a single voice and singular name that they call "anonymous." Morris examines these techniques to reveal their function and purpose as rhetoric. Understanding how internet arguments work can also positively affect pedagogy, especially now as social media and memes have been used to influence national elections, our views of the news, and our views of each other. Can we continue to teach only traditional rhetoric in classrooms when students will face arhetorical tropes and logic in their personal and professional lives? THE INTERNET AS A GAME shows why the stakes are high and the answer to this question is "no."

The field of rhetoric and composition has, at last, received a long-lost message delivered in the form of Victor J. Vitanza's seminar on James A. Berlin. In this book that is an untext on Berlin's work and its impact on the field, Vitanza acquaints us with Berlin by virtue of many Berlins, in multiplicity, and via the figure of an "excluded third" that wants to deliver to us a new message that was undelivered from Berlin to us, and from Vitanza to Berlin, after Berlin's untimely death in 1994. A seminar on a seminar on the teaching of writing... it is teaching all the way down. They met at the historical NEH seminar at Carnegie Mellon in 1978. Their friendship and rhetorical dialogues spanned only sixteen years, but Vitanza continues the conversation through the seminar, through this book (rife with reflections and, yes, homework for his readers), and through our reception of it. It is up to us now to carry it forward. As Vitanza writes, "I would prefer not to not think that what remains unsaid stays undelivered."

Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games is an edited collection of essays that examines the relationship between games and writing – examining how writing functions both within games and the networks of activity that surround games and gameplay. The collection is organized based on the primary location and function of the game-writing relationship, examining writing about games (games as objects of critique and sites of rhetorical action), ancillary and instructional writing that takes place around games, the writing that takes place within the game, using games as persuasive forms of communication (writing through games), and writing that goes into the production of games. While not every chapter focuses exclusively on pedagogy, the collection includes many selections that consider the possibilities of using computer games in writing instruction. However, it also provides a bridge between academic views of games as contexts for writing and industry approaches to the writing process in game design, as well as an examination of a variety of game-related genres that could be used in composition courses.

Electracy and Transmedia Studies Series Editors: Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes. IDENTITY AND COLLABORATION IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT tells the story of what happens when a Cherokee gamer, using a storyteller's perspective and a methodology built from equal parts Indigenous tradition and current academic field knowledge, spends a year in what was at-the-time the largest online video game in the world. Following from work by James Paul Gee and Bonnie Nardi, Phillip Michael Alexander ventured forth into the game world to see what someone who was a gamer long before he was an academic might see in this same fascinating virtual space. In working with, playing with, and sharing the stories of a ten-person "raid" group-players performing at the highest level within the game-he set out to determine how those gamers most invested in success built identities and communities. The resulting work is a reader-friendly, theory-informed, virtual-boots-on-the-virtual-ground look at how gamers craft in-game identities, find like-minded gamers to form group identities, then organize to do staggering amounts of work in a virtual world. For anyone who ever wondered what the appeal of World of Warcraft is, Phillip Michael Alexander illustrates how some of the most active, most engaged, and most talented players spend their time in that virtual world.