contemporary understandings of life itself in its widely varied mediated forms. Such interrogation is at once metaphorical (DNA as the code of life, the metaphoricity of science, viral media), rhetorical (the appearance and development of outbreak narratives in films, digital art, and the popular press), and material (disease surveillance networks, media ecologies, forensic media practices). We developed the forum, invited other special guests, moderated the comments and continued the discussion offline. Launched March 2011, the forum has 57 lengthy comments and 8000+ page views.
PRESENTATONS Lacey, K. R. (2011, May). Some new laws of motion: Physics and digital writing. Paper presented at Computers and Writing Conference, Ann Arbor, MI. Our digital writing is always on the move, even without our nudging to keep it in motion or our desire to delete posts to keep them at rest. Anytime we write in digital spaces, we are automatically participating in what communication theorist Mark Andrejevic calls the digital enclosure, ―the creation of an interactive realm wherein every action and transaction generates information about itself.‖ Digital writing constantly produces an exponential amount of new information. When we shop for items on Amazon, for instance, our consumerist patterns are re-presented to us as tailored suggestions for future purchases. In order map the relationship between the laws of motion and digital writing, this paper asks: What forces act on our digital writing in order to cause change? What is digital writing‘s relationship to acceleration, force, and mass? For our actions in online spaces, what are the equal and opposite reactions that respond to our digital writing? Lacey, K. R. (2011, April). Manipulating memory: Keeping it real. Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, GA. Alongside information technologies, the role of personal writing has taken on a new meaning. As writing instructors, we encourage our students to use and create digital texts (blogs, websites, course Wikis), ones that are available long after they leave our classrooms. For these students, their constant online presence signifies that they have ―one hand in the past‖ while another ―hand is dipped in the future.‖ The ways we create and keep memories have radically changed in recent times, causing many (in and outside of composition studies) to ponder what we can literally do with
Research Bulletin 2011
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