Module 4

Circulation

This week we are looking at circulation. It’s how writing—actually, all communication—moves from one place to another. Consider Harry Potter. JK Rowling’s tale was turned down by 12 publishers, often in insulting ways, before it was finally picked up in 1997. The book went on to become eight books, nine movies, two amusement parks, twelve video games, and countless toys and collectibles.

Despite many popular examples, whether Harry Potter, Star Wars, or Marvel comics, sometimes it’s difficult to imagine our own work as part of an ecosystem. However, if you have ever written a research paper, you are part of an ecosystem. The paper becomes part of a professional ecosystem in “work” that informs a professor grading it and the peers who read it, and it becomes part of your own writing ecology in that you can draw on writing and research lessons you derived from it. We go on to change our actions based on these experiences, so that the ecosystem lives beyond the immediate assignment.

We can think of circulation as an outward and inward circulation of writing. When we think of the outward movement of our writing, we consider the ways work moves through the world and can change for  different audiences and purposes. When we think of the inward movements of our writing, we consider how our lived, delivered, and experienced writing tasks move through ourselves and our reflective identities and skills.

In this module, we want you to begin thinking of the ecosystems of your writing and reflecting on how writing has changed you.

You have two options this week: choose one.

The first option is to create an ecosystem map of ONE piece of writing that you are considering for your portfolio. This can be your eventual Revision piece. Here’s a brief video that Richard created to show you what that might look like. It’s called A wife’s happiness.

The second option is more inwardly focused, and asks you to consider your curated works from last week, and to consider the lived, delivered, and experienced curriculum.

While circulation and ecosystems are academic terms, we can add more popular terms as well. The first is “spreadability.” Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green in Spreadable Media (2013) write that, “spreadability refers to the potential—both technical and cultural—for audiences to share content for their own purposes” (p. 3). They introduce the term in relation to “stickiness,” a term popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point (2000). Stickiness is the potential of content to attract an audience. These terms are not in opposition, but refer to two logics of content creation. You want content to drive an audience to that content, but you also want that content to circulate into other forums and for other audiences, even if it’s not by the original author.

Doug Eyman’s excerpt on digital ecologies brings some of these ideas together.

The other reading for this week is the first chapter from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation. Here, they introduce the two logics of immediacy and hypermediacy. This book from 1999, and the images within, will feel dated even as the argument rings just as true today as it was then. The subtle differences are that a virtual reality headset is mainstream; our news channels have become even more cluttered with tickers, chyrons, sidebars and real-time Twitter updates; and our internet interfaces filled with video, text, sound, and image are now transported right to the mobile devices in our pockets.

The major idea to bring away from this week is that writing in a digital age is not just putting words on a page and calling it a day. Writing is about imagining its trajectory, where it is from, what it means to you, where it can go, what it can do, and in what genre, media, and mode will it do those things best.

 

Reading this week

Design this Week

EITHER

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