Friday, September 3, 2004
Invention, continued. From yesterday:
So maybe here's my point: blogging is not democratic only because it gives each person a place to publish -- it is also democratic because it is a body of practices that help each person invent something worth reading. It is as if freedom of speech is not valuable only or even mainly for its freedom, but rather it is valuable for the social practices that it helps a society cultivate, for the internal and social work it helps individuals do, and for the quality of the speech that results from those things. Not to mention the quality of listening.
So it is no coincidence, I realize today (what people with substantial classical rhetoric under their belt would already know), that invention was invented as part of the training for citizenship in ancient Greece, where wider participation in civil society became important in the new democracies. The Greeks realized that you needed to be able to think of ideas for your speeches that might persuade others; that you needed to be able to spur your thinking by knowing and carrying out certain habits of mind; that there were proven ways to help yourself generate ideas.
Some of these habits of mind are simple intellectual moves, such as contrast. Think a fresh thought for yourself today about Kerry and Bush by contrasting their convention speeches, for example. Think a fresh thought for yourself by quoting a good sentence from someone's blog and living with it for an hour, letting its specific point be tested against the particulars of your experience. Think a fresh thought by dividing a subject into components and talking about how the pieces work together. And so forth.
Having a turn at the microphone at the town hall meeting or having access to the T1 line -- these are examples of free speech, then. Having the skills to invent ideas to try out there at the microphone or here in the blogosphere -- this is what enriches the society and the individual and makes that free speech meaningful, rather than the crude power exercise or the bungling and repetitive chanting of common notions that we often see in print or hear on the air.
You can probably learn invention skills by immersing yourself in debate with others, in such places as the blogosphere, but done that way we are asking each citizen to reinvent something that skilled rhetoricians have worked on for centuries. Better, then, to teach invention.
There may be a bit of an analogy to the movie Field of Dreams, where we hear the idea, "Build it and they will come." It's true that if you establish a space for free speech that people will come, will be satisfied by the opportunity, and will have a chance to learn how to speak better there. We see this in a blogger whose writing improves as the first months of blogging pass. We even see it is a blogger who started out as a skilled writer (a mid-career journalist, say) whose sense of how a blog can help you think and write grows, and so the blogger's blogging improves. But there is little time in a college course and some students don't start out as writers with a lively sense of adapting to genre, say -- they would benefit by direct teaching of such things as invention, rather than by simply building the blogs and hoping that the skills will come.
If no teaching is needed, then I don't see why teachers should involve themselves with student blogging in the first place. Let's teach invention as the backbone of democractic free speech. [0 & P]
So maybe here's my point: blogging is not democratic only because it gives each person a place to publish -- it is also democratic because it is a body of practices that help each person invent something worth reading. It is as if freedom of speech is not valuable only or even mainly for its freedom, but rather it is valuable for the social practices that it helps a society cultivate, for the internal and social work it helps individuals do, and for the quality of the speech that results from those things. Not to mention the quality of listening.
So it is no coincidence, I realize today (what people with substantial classical rhetoric under their belt would already know), that invention was invented as part of the training for citizenship in ancient Greece, where wider participation in civil society became important in the new democracies. The Greeks realized that you needed to be able to think of ideas for your speeches that might persuade others; that you needed to be able to spur your thinking by knowing and carrying out certain habits of mind; that there were proven ways to help yourself generate ideas.
Some of these habits of mind are simple intellectual moves, such as contrast. Think a fresh thought for yourself today about Kerry and Bush by contrasting their convention speeches, for example. Think a fresh thought for yourself by quoting a good sentence from someone's blog and living with it for an hour, letting its specific point be tested against the particulars of your experience. Think a fresh thought by dividing a subject into components and talking about how the pieces work together. And so forth.
Having a turn at the microphone at the town hall meeting or having access to the T1 line -- these are examples of free speech, then. Having the skills to invent ideas to try out there at the microphone or here in the blogosphere -- this is what enriches the society and the individual and makes that free speech meaningful, rather than the crude power exercise or the bungling and repetitive chanting of common notions that we often see in print or hear on the air.
You can probably learn invention skills by immersing yourself in debate with others, in such places as the blogosphere, but done that way we are asking each citizen to reinvent something that skilled rhetoricians have worked on for centuries. Better, then, to teach invention.
There may be a bit of an analogy to the movie Field of Dreams, where we hear the idea, "Build it and they will come." It's true that if you establish a space for free speech that people will come, will be satisfied by the opportunity, and will have a chance to learn how to speak better there. We see this in a blogger whose writing improves as the first months of blogging pass. We even see it is a blogger who started out as a skilled writer (a mid-career journalist, say) whose sense of how a blog can help you think and write grows, and so the blogger's blogging improves. But there is little time in a college course and some students don't start out as writers with a lively sense of adapting to genre, say -- they would benefit by direct teaching of such things as invention, rather than by simply building the blogs and hoping that the skills will come.
If no teaching is needed, then I don't see why teachers should involve themselves with student blogging in the first place. Let's teach invention as the backbone of democractic free speech. [0 & P]