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1 1. Introduction: Electracy, Videocy, and Participatory Composition All the practices used to conduct schooling are relative to the apparatus of literacy. In the history of human culture there are but three apparatuses : orality, literacy, and now electracy. We live in the moment of the emergence of electracy, comparable to the two principal moments of literacy (the Greece of Plato, and the Europe of Galileo). —Gregory Ulmer, “What Is Electracy?” I believe that the arrival of free online video may turn out to be just as significant a media development as the arrival of print. It is creating new global communities, granting their members both the means and the motivation to step up their skills and broaden their imaginations. It is unleashing an unprecedented wave of innovation in thousands of different disciplines: some trivial, some niche in the extreme, some central to solving humanity’s problems. In short, it is boosting the net sum of global talent. It is helping the world get smarter. —Chris Anderson, “Film School: Why Online Video Is More Powerful than You Think” Embed. Share. Comment. Like. Subscribe. Upload. Check in. The commands of our online world relentlessly prompt participation, encourage collaboration, and quite literally connect us in ways not possible even five years ago. This connectedness no doubt changes college writing courses in both form and content, thus creating a wide-open space for investigating new forms of writing and student participation. This book explores this dynamic space by arguing for a “participatory composition,” inspired by the culture of online video sharing and framed through Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy. Electracy can be compared to digital literacy but encompasses much more: a worldview for civic engagement, community building, and participation. For three decades, Ulmer has been predicting electracy’s emergence, and he casts electracy as an “apparatus,” a type of I N T R O D U C T I O N 2 social machine that influences laws and conventions in a given historical era. Participatory Composition begins by exploring the apparatus of electracy in many of its manifestations while focusing on the participatory practices found in online video culture. Online video is becoming the prototypical experience of the Internet, and the culture it cultivates is both growing and already permeating the institutions of our daily lives. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast, 2009–2014, more than 91 percent of the web’s global consumer traffic will be video by 2014. Surprisingly, Ulmer first envisioned electracy by way of analogue video in his 1989 book Teletheory, but he later changed the direction for electracy toward writing with hypertext in the 1990s. Thus, it will be my contention throughout Participatory Composition that we can again envision electracy through the lens of video: that writing practices are indeed shifting in the direction Ulmer has anticipated but with the added layer of sharing, networking, and participating that Ulmer could not entirely foresee. In Teletheory, Ulmer wrote, “The implication, and this is a premise, is that video permits the institutional dissemination of inventive thinking” (94; emphasis added), and while this has certainly been the case for the past several years, we can now add that video permits participation in inventive thinking. Participatory Composition, then, will cast electracy as the apparatus in which practices from video culture can be interrogated. As the framework for participatory composition, electracy “is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic writing: an apparatus, or social machine, partly technological, partly institutional ” (Ulmer, Introduction: “Electracy”). From this definition, we can see that electracy has a wide scope of influence. Writing, largely defined, is at the center of this scope of influence, and this book aims to interrogate the vast changes writing is undergoing within the larger context of the apparatus of electracy, participatory culture, and video culture. This wide framework creates the conditions for long-lasting disciplinary challenges to be addressed through a context framed by electracy, such as the construction of the writing subject, the role of definition in digital, malleable spaces, the question of authorship, and, of course, the creation of pedagogies for the electrate apparatus. If the first purpose of this book is located in a general perspective in the sense that it merges the larger conceptions of participatory and video cultures with established practices for electracy, the second purpose takes a distinctly disciplinary perspective from within rhetoric and composition . D. Diane Davis argues that “the alliance between computers and composition [f]‍orces the posthumanist paradox into the writing...

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