Print.
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?”
Participatory
Composition:
Video, Culture, Writing and Electracy
Like. Share. Comment. Subscribe. Embed. Upload. Check in. The commands of the modern online world relentlessly prompt participation and encourage collaboration, connecting people in ways not possible even five years ago. This connectedness no doubt influences college writing courses in both form and content, creating possibilities for investigating new forms of writing and student participation. In this innovative volume, Sarah J. Arroyo argues for a “participatory composition,” inspired by the culture of online video sharing and framed by theorist Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy.
Tubing the Future:
Participatory Pedagogy and YouTube U in 2020
Our vision for the future of composition focuses on the “tube” and the culture inspired by online video sharing. Understanding
composition in 2020 requires further theorizing about the participatory practices occurring in online video culture. Based on practices
found on the platform YouTube, we turn to the term “tubing” to explain phenomena taking place there, and we put forward the
concept of “participatory pedagogy” that we see emerging in 21st century classrooms. The ubiquitous and historically loaded “tube”
(noun) and its YouTube-specific counterpart “tubing” (verb), explain many of the shifts taking place as acts of writing expand to
include participation in online video sharing.
Video and Participatory Cultures:
Writing, Rhetoric, Performance, and the Tube
In a special issue of Enculturation, we invited scholars to explore the ubiquity of video and participatory cultures. We started our own investigation into this theme in a panel presentation, “YouTube U.: Home Video Goes to College” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans in 2008. In our work, we considered the limitations of viewingYouTube merely as a broadcasting platform and argued that YouTube should be regarded within the context of an ever-changing and growing networked ecology. We decided our questions and conclusions might be best extended in an on-line journal setting like Enculturation, especially as possible contributors could link to and engage with examples of video directly. Our initial CFP drew inspiration from a series of propositions about video culture forwarded by Henry Jenkins, and as the project unfolded, we looked for ways for our authors to respond to emerging scholarship, such as John Burgess and Joshua Green’s YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Michael Strangelove’s Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People, and Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau’s The YouTube Reader. We see our collection as speaking to these recent works while also forging new connections and drawing sometimes conflicting conclusions about video and participatory cultures.
Curriculum Vitae