******work in progress, please click edit and shred it*********

Background/Rationale

Tagging is one easy way to organize and easily retrieve information. And when we get into the habit of tagging pages, ideas, relationships, and categories emerge. How does this phenomena relate to compositional practice?

Whether programmed into stuctured databases like HubMed or bottom-up folksonomies like de.licio.us, the commons' social bookmarking strategies work on principles of resonance. When we apply the mash-up principle and concatinate different media, such as del.icio.us, instant messaging, and wiki, we find out that alphabetic writing really is the "obligatory passage point" (OPP – Bruno Latour, Science in Action) in multimedia. Multimodal and multi-person, the art of tagging requires commons engineers to be "down with OPP."

Tags are little gestures that can do a lot: they can compress descriptions, definitions, analogies into single (sometimes seemingly meaningless) words. Tags can invoke or convey affective rhetorical elements, such as “tone,” “color,” “flavor,” and much more, well into the nonsemantic registers infusing all communications ecologies today. How? Is it the simplicity and repeatability of the gesture? Some of the oldest models we have for these communicative practices come in the form of mousike (distributed rhetorical/aesthetic/athletic practices of Ancient Greece), the asanas and methods of the Shaivist, Buddhist, and other traditions of yoga, chanting, mantra....this list could go on and on. More recently the collective and spontaneous genius of free jazz, and the recombinant art of djs and sound engineers teach instantaneous/spontaneous communication, and online gaming communities teach us that procedural and affective rhetorics can and must comingle if we endeavor write together.

notes towards "So, what can a course WIKI do with tagged browsing?"

*tag in common

**audience/writer smear = new forms of rhetorical address. When the distinction between producers and consumers of texts becomes less discernable (wikipedia, etc), counterargument takes on new dimensions; the 3 basic rhetorical appeals (ethos, logos, pathos) can be revisited as conversational and navigational devices...also, the literature on post-normal science's reckoning with the observer/observed distinction probably should inform this new way of finding audience....connecting classical rhetorical considerations of audience to today's p2p rhetorics of contingent cooperation.

***pausing in the gutter : digital granularity and parataxis

In Ecstatic Spontaneity (1987), Herbert Guenther analyzes the content and the form of Saraha's songs and rhyming couplets to create helpful diagrams illlustrating the importance of silence to any rhythmic practice. Likewise....

***media hopping: the mashups principle

By sharing riffs ("tweets?") early and often, by tagging pages, and fashioning links, we can render resonant domains, or "attractor states" of ideas. In these spaces, we find the sort of magnetism, maybe even magic, that Socrates, in the Ion, ascribes to the stone of Herculea. Simple, repeatable rhetorical gestures accrete and seem to impart “to the rings a force enabling them to do the same thing as the stone itself, that is, it attracts another ring, so that sometimes a chain is formed" (p. 220). This does not mean that alphabetic writing goes away. In fact, tagging and linking calls writing into being. Text, chains of words, become the fabric of our ideas and arguments, and create more space and an agreeable tempo, so that they can heard. Writing is the obligatory passage point (OPP) where compressed tags are unwound and links are explained; where stuck writers find gutters left behind by contingent cooperators, and where affect holds sway and effectuates resonance by providing clues for where to turn next, on how to write that next sentence. Moving between social bookmarking spaces, discussion forums, chat engines, and other networked media, in a collective compositional context, creates a pragmatic need for sentencing.

Exercises:

-use tagging organize a portfolio

-create "common tags" in the process of writing a collaborative essay

-actively create tags and explore in de.licio.us as a way to find audience and purpose

Blog Prompt Nursery