I am in the midst of trying to clarify the central argument in my book.  So bear with me here as I ask myself some questions:

What is the problem?

Higher education is undergoing significant transformation, along with many segments of our culture, as part of the inter-related developments of information technologies and globalization. Together these evelopments promise or threaten to alter the ways we produce, organize, disseminate and value knowledge both within and without the academy. In short, they are changing the very nature of our profession.

It is easy enough to respond to these changes as a threat and thus resist them or try to ignore them. It is also easy enough to view these changes as some kind of social panacea. However, these historical
developments are, in my view, neither intrinsically better nor worse than the industrial, print, mass media cultures of the twentieth century.

The real task, as I argue, is to evolve our intellectual and pedagogic practices to engage these historical developments in a critical and productive fashion.

Why is the problem relevant to the audience?

My audience is graduate students and faculty in English, in rhetoric and composition in particular. I see our discipline as particularly affected by these changes. Right now a department might have a single new media or technology specialist. In the near future however, having a new media specialist will make as much sense as having a print specialist would seem now. In short, we will all be working in a multimedia, networked environment much as we work in an environment of textbooks and classrooms today

How am I going to go about addressing the problem and why?

Obviously part of the task here will be becoming fluent in these new technologies and remaining so. Without an understanding of how new media works, we can hardly expect to shape its use in our discipline.

<!–
D(["mb","culture. Our theories of interpretation, our reading practices, our
concepts of composition and argumentation, our modes of research and
our discourses are all linked to print. Indeed our fundamental
epistemologies and ontologies—our notions of how we learn and
communicate—are print-based. Obviously our discipline is not alone in
this; it is a product of the historical and material development of
Western philosophy from the beginnings of written philosophy with
Plato.

So my approach to this problem is to try to step back from our
discipline. That is, if English Studies is a discipline that
investigates the rhetoric and aesthetics of print technologies, then we
need to understand ourselves more broadly as investigating the
rhetorical and aesthetic intersections between embodied minds and
information technologies. This is a difficult backward step as it
requires us to denaturalize our assumptions about the texts we read and
place them into a context of material, cultural, and historical
information systems.

In doing this, my book takes up a series of historico-material
investigations from the emergence of symbolic behavior among the
earliest humans to the development of mechanical media and cybernetics
in the twentieth century. Actually that makes the book sound more
sweeping and comprehensive that it has any intention of being. The
investigations are more like examples or key points rather than any
kind of linear history.

Where do I end up? I.e. what is the fundamental argument?

All of this historical investigation has a motive.
“,1]
);
//–>However, there’s a deeper issue. English Studies, including rhetoric, is deeply rooted in intellectual premises that are tied to print culture. Our theories of interpretation, our reading practices, our
concepts of composition and argumentation, our modes of research and our discourses are all linked to print. Indeed our fundamental epistemologies and ontologies—our notions of how we learn and
communicate—are print-based. Obviously our discipline is not alone in this; it is a product of the historical and material development of Western philosophy from the beginnings of written philosophy with Plato.

So my approach to this problem is to try to step back from our discipline. That is, if English Studies is a discipline that investigates the rhetoric and aesthetics of print technologies, then we need to understand ourselves more broadly as investigating the rhetorical and aesthetic intersections between embodied minds and information technologies. This is a difficult backward step as it requires us to denaturalize our assumptions about the texts we read and place them into a context of material, cultural, and historical information systems.

In doing this, my book takes up a series of historico-material investigations from the emergence of symbolic behavior among the earliest humans to the development of mechanical media and cybernetics in the twentieth century. Actually that makes the book sound more sweeping and comprehensive that it has any intention of being. The investigations are more like examples or key points rather than any kind of linear history.

All of this historical investigation has a motive. Rhetoric implicitly has built into it a questioning of knowledge in that it places all knowledge within discursive practices and limits; this is what connects rhetoric to cultural studies and critical theory (a la Foucault). In addition to the discursive and ideological elements we commonly discuss, I am adding technological and material/embodied elements as they shape the production of knowledge. Only in doing so can we investigate the ways technologies shape knowledge production.

To make this relation between knowledge production and technology clear, I write about what I call "the two virtuals." The first virtual is the "technological" one. I.e., it’s the one that appears in the phrase "virtual reality;" it’s the one with which we are the most familiar. Here virtual essentially means simulation: a media event that simulates a physical event. In this sense, all media are simulations. I write about how these simulations create anxiety from the film camera onward and how cybernetics offers us the simulation of consciousness and how that has unnerved us as well.

This is relevant to the problem above, as much of the ambivalence and concern that we have about computing comes from our perception that it threatens to replace us and dehumanize us–not in the uber-paranoid, "machines are taking over," Matrix/Terminator way, but just in the mundane sense of our lives changing.

However, all of this comes out of a sense that our "natural" condition, our condition up to even a century or so ago, was one in which we thought and produced knowledge as individuals, separate from technology and one another. Given this, the palpable encroachment of technology into our thought processes and our dependency on networks to manage information for us appear to threaten our independence.

This is where the "second virtual" comes in. If the first virtual references technology; the second comes from philosophy. It references a minor philosophy that is alternate to our conventional Western ideas of materiality. The virtual offers a different set of answers to the basic questions, "why is there something rather than nothing?" and "how to things in the world relate to one another?" Our traditional logic organizes objects into categories according to intrinsic characteristics and sees those objects as versions of one another based on some abstract concept (e.g. bears, dogs, cats, monkeys are all versions of mammals; any particular dog is a verison of dogs).

The virtual offers a different way of understanding the unfolding of materiality. This unfolding articulates a sense of the particular emerging from a continuous materiality. Briefly put, it allows us to understand the composition of thought and knowledge in a different way that incorporates the operation of technology and material conditions. Rather than seeing technology, materiality, or ideology as threatening an already existing consciousness, these are seen as constituitive of human thought. Furthermore, this doesn’t mean that our experience of freedom or agency goes away, that our sense of these things was/is pure illusion, but rather that our concept of freedom was inadequate to the subjective event it attempted to describe, largely because it was founded on a flawed notion of materaility and consciousness (BTW, that doesn’t mean that the virtual is the truth, but rather that I am arguing that it is a "better" theory–better in the sense that it actually extends human agency by allowing us to more directly engage the material processes consitutitive of consciousness).

Where do I end up? I.e. what is the fundamental argument?

In a nutshell, the two virtuals allows us to understand the role materiality, most notably information networks and media, plays in the composition of thought and knowledge. Not only does this permit us to engage emerging technologies in a more productive and critical fashion, it also opens new avenues for participating in shaping the future of our discipline, higher education, and the culture-at-large in the context of a globalizing, capitalistic, information society. To use the vernacular of file-sharing, these avenues or practices unfold from ripping existing data from networks and senses, mixing that information within a distributed network of cognition, and burning new knowledge as it emerges into the consciousness in a form that can then re-interface with a network and be distribted in the form of symbolic data.