Words in the Clouds: Digital Writing and Letter Archives

[00:00:00][Music] [Music] I'd like to welcome everyone here this afternoon both students and visitors alike my name is dr. Phillip Phillips and I'm the associate dean of the University Honors College Dean John vile and I welcome you here today we have an exciting interdisciplinary series this semester on letters and we have I think a very dynamic and exciting speaker today who will talk to us about the kind of communication that I have discovered is the dominant mode of communication for just about everyone in this class when we had the reflection at the beginning of the course I asked you what your primary means of communication was and then what communication style you would like to work on and your personal and professional life and overwhelmingly the response is indicated that you use texting to communicate with each other that its fastest most direct easy way to communicate with each other so our presentation today is going to be talking about the digital spaces in which we communicate dr. Kate pants ladies his assistant professor of rhetoric and Composition in the Department of English here at MTSU she earned her bachelor's degree at Bowdoin College her master's at the University of Louisville and her PhD at the University of South Florida she's taught rhetoric composition and technical communication courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels her research interests include rhetorical genre studies discourse analysis computer mediated communication writing program administration and the experience appearance in academia a prolific scholar her work has been published in college composition and communication composition studies computers in composition and international journal composition forum and review of communication among other places she's probably published many other many other journals and she has other exciting projects in the works her topic today is words in the clouds how we talk to each other in digital spaces please join me in welcoming our [Applause] thank you so much I'm so delighted to be part of this lecture series I think talking about letters is fascinating and particularly that you've gotten the opportunity to look at such different kinds of letters so without further ado let's do that all right so I'm gonna start by telling you some stories about writing these days and they might be some stories you've heard first of all that we never do it we never write anymore our writing is riddled with errors it's superfluous it's lost that genesee qua the mystery the romance the serious seriousness that we used to have and that with all of us technology our heads are just in the clouds so I don't know if you can tell by the tone of my voice but I don't believe these stories and I've done a lot of research that demonstrates that these stories are not true we have some really useful empirical evidence that suggests that we're writing more than we ever have that we're making a lot of mistakes but not more mistakes than we've made in the past they're just different mistakes and that there are some real uses to the various spaces in which we write these days so today I'd like to focus on how we write letters but I want to expand our understanding of where we write letters because we have so many opportunities to write letters in digital space and they can be for many different opportunities for many reasons there's a lot of really different kind of audiences that we're writing to now and I want to look at that certainly the epistolary writing tradition and that's probably what we're most familiar with when we're thinking about what it means to write a letter to someone where you take a piece of paper you write a letter by hand and you read it to one person I want to complicate our understanding of that epistolary tradition as between two people because what I'm going to invite you to look at today are a number of really different kinds of letter archives so first one that comes from the epistolary tradition and then a few digital archives so we'll just look at different kinds of letters and complicate our understanding of the rhetorical situation in which those letters are written and by rhetorical situation I just mean the context in which those letters are written so who they're written to who is writing them and what that means in effect one more preface so when I'm talking about the clouds today I'm talking about that in a conceptual way so I'm not talking specifically about cloud storage but just this idea that when we write in the clouds there isn't a tangible artifact right we don't have that piece of paper so there it kind of just exists in in cloud space okay so that's the the understanding of cloud that I hope that we'll get the chance to work with today all right so I've told you all some stories about writing and I'm gonna invite you to tell me some stories too okay so I'm gonna ask you if you have a computer open fantastic or if you have a phone to go to mentee comm and enter code 17 25 90 and then I'm just gonna ask you to tell me your stories writing letters your experiences writing letters so what are your stories about writing do you write letters to whom in what platform so again remember I'm asking for this sort of broader understanding of letter writing so maybe it's a text that you send to somebody maybe it's a letter you write in social media maybe it's an email to a friend or professor and I'll see what y'all have written if this works let's see okay good it's working we're writing letters but is anybody gonna get to read them okay so I'm starting to write letters as traditionally as possible with a wax seal and everything just for fun I love that that's great I write letters to my professors in the form of emails absolutely that's a hundred percent of letter I send a lot of emails for academic purposes and mainly texts for social purposes I also occasionally write some handwritten notes for my girlfriend great so I really like how you're already demonstrating that you write in different platforms for different people for different reasons given the affordances of two Media I write to people using email dozens of times a day ditto meteo I write as an outlet for my emotions and how I feel about my situation that's great so I think some people are invoking just to sort of note this broader notion of writing I once wrote letters back and forth when I was younger and now do a lot of emails for various purposes so I think a lot of people have like a tradition of writing that sometimes changes and involves as their experiences do I used to have pen pals that I had met online when was from Finland and one was from Georgia and we sent letters back and forth for years that's great hopefully you still still do that or maybe you'll go home today and be inspired by thinking about writing letters and write them in another one the majority of letters I write our emails although on special occasions I write handwritten letters to my girlfriend so again we were invoking this sort of intimate notion of a handwritten letter that it's something you do for someone that you care about I'm used to writing formal letters of invitation for events but otherwise not often I still write write letters to my more intimate friends and significant others as we musician I feel that your life is oftentimes an open letter that you post to social media for fans and followers yeah that's a really nice way of thinking about that I used to write letters a lot just a few years ago I had a very close uncle of mine who lived in another state and we would communicate through letters I also write letters to myself and God excellent all right I'm just gonna read a couple more I wrote emails to my friend in Arizona before either of us got phones to communicate I email most of my professional messages for work and professors I write to make my dreams and goals tangible the biggest example of letter-writing I have experienced aside from email as I wrote over 25 free hand open when letters for by now for my now fiancé the first year of our relationship very romantic all right so I would love to continue hearing about your your your letters but I'll leave this open so everybody can see for a moment but again just in about two minutes we've seen that you all have very extensive experiences with letter writing and when we drill down on them we understand that you already have very nuanced ideas of audience of context and appropriate venues for different for different kinds of letter-writing all right let's read one last one I used to write paper letters when I was younger but now I write to people using text and emails every day I sometimes still write physical letters for more personal personal and meaningful communication great so I think this clearly demonstrates and I'll go back to my slides that you alright are writing but you are thinking about the writing that you do in digital space in a different way I'm gonna suggest that the writing that we can it that we do in digital space can still have can be really meaningful that it doesn't have to just be the sort of casual conversation that we often suggest it is and I'm gonna offer us a perspective at looking at an archive of letters that hopefully will demonstrate that a little bit more effectively so my dramatic music and dramatic clouds to suggest that I think there's still drama and intrigue and interest when we write in in the clouds okay and just to suggest tell you kind of what my setup today is I'm gonna start with looking at two theoretical understandings of clouds that I think are useful for understanding how we're interacting in digital space and then I'm going to show you some really different kinds of digital archives of letters okay so first the theories okay so um George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote a really interesting book in 1980 so this is an old book now but it's still really impactful for how we think about communication and particularly when we're talking about digital space so the book that they wrote is metaphors we live by and their thesis is that metaphors and someone remind us what's a metaphor so simile is so it's a-comin it's a comparison absolutely so a conceptual metaphor though which is what they're really interested in is it's a mastered metaphors or master trope but conceptual metaphors are ones that should not just shape our communication but they suggest it also shapes the way we think and act and that's the piece that was really revolutionary when they wrote this book that we're not just using metaphors to help us understand our lives but actually those metaphors impact the decisions we make in our lives and they make difficult ideas intelligible to our audience they posit that when we consider these metaphors and examine our talk in letters it tells us something about how we see ourselves and how we see our communities also how we value those things all right so I'm going to give you some examples so when we say this common thing how did you spend your time that is using a metaphor that time is money and there's a lot of time as money metaphors that we use in our everyday life right we talk about wasting our time but certainly that spending your time is a really really clear one also how are you doing today I'm feeling kind of down or I'm in high spirits I don't know if everybody says I'm in high school but it's something that you read more often and that metaphor is just that emotions are spatial we're at the end of the road or I'm unsure where to go with this we might talk about that if we're writing a paper or working on a project so that again that's this journey metaphor that we use in all kinds of things but particularly in our lives we're at a crossroads or we've come a long way or we're on the rocks this is this metaphor again of relationships being a journey and we hear this all the time and the ways that people talk about the relationships that they're in and then this notion of people being sort of temperate like I'm still warming up to this person or this person is cold this person is warm we use this frequently too and so we could spend hours and hours talking about this but hopefully you're already recognizing that you use some of these metaphors and again they impact the way that we interact with folks the metaphor of battle is something that we use frequently in argumentation when you make you make strong claims or somebody somebody notices the weak points in your argument so it's kind of everywhere so if you start thinking about it I promise once you go home today you'll start you start noticing that these metaphors all right I'm so continuing this the second theoretical piece that I want to suggest extends this is a more recent theorist and this is John Dern Peters who wrote this book called the marvelous clouds and he's a media scholar and he's extended lake often johnson's understandings of metaphor in a way that is really pretty pretty revolutionary he suggests that at some level expression and existence merge he argues that like lake often Johnson's understanding of how metaphors not only reflect our understandings but also constitute and understand or organize our understandings of interaction he says that media are not only carrier carriers of symbolic freight but also crafters of existence like metaphors media are not only about the world they are the world so very dramatic so what does this all mean okay what does it mean if we actually think that the metaphors that we live by are structuring our existence that this understanding of the way that we talk in metaphors that actually actually impacts the way that we interact and a way that we think of ourselves so letters offer an intimacy that sometimes starts to feel fleeting in digital space and I think that's certainly representative of what you all said about the kinds of letters that you write when you choose to handwrite something or when you choose to send an email or a text message one of the biggest differences is address Civet e an address Civet e is just to whom you're addressing the work you're writing so when you sit down to write a letter you are addressing usually just the one person but when you are writing in digital space sometimes you don't know who you're speaking to and that makes it really complex I'm gonna talk about email listservs when we move to digital space and in these in these spaces in particular and this is pretty much true of most digital space opportunities that maybe you're writing for a particular audience but somebody else may be reading somebody else may be lurking or just kind of listening and that really changes the potential interaction that you can have as a result of your letters all right so but before we look at some digital letters I want to look at some handwritten letters that I've been working with recently okay and I don't know if you can read these very well but I'll read them to you but I want to describe where they're from so I want to put these ideas into practice because I have had the opportunity to work with a really interesting archive recently this archive was gifted to the MTSU English department and their letters written by elementary school children to a Holocaust survivor she survived the Holocaust and she promised to her friends Holocaust whomever who ever lived and and was able to tell their story that they would and so she ultimately moved to the u.s. she moved to Tennessee and she spent her entire life going to elementary schools and telling kids on the stories of the Holocaust and so this this archive was kind of given to a number of museums and many of her her papers are in Holocaust museums but this particular piece nobody quite knew what to do with and thus it was gifted to the MTSU English department and so I've been looking at these letters with my students and we've been doing analysis so I'm gonna read you this first one and I'm I'm interested in your thoughts right if you all are gonna do some analysis similarly what-what might be some things that you pay attention to so this was written in 1980 and I've taken off names dear mrs. marks I found most most hard to believe that that that could happen in the 20th century I don't think it is right for them to think that if they can take over one country they can take over them all I'm glad you came to talk to us I hope they never take over us thank you for coming to talk to us it was very interesting and it was very nice of you to let us take that much of your time I enjoyed it I think everybody did too sorry it happened to your family okay so what do y'all think just this one letter any impressions it's intense first off she kinda talked about like taking over the country McKean sorry that happened yeah yeah yeah I know it's interesting and never mentioned the Holocaust yeah she focused on how could affect her personally because one of the things she says I hope they never take over us yeah so she was focused on herself and came in and told her story mm-hmm very very thoughtful yeah really prescient far-right Nazi sentiment becoming epicenter conversation America in another part of the world I mean I think it's really impressive you said yeah 30-knot yeah I mean so again remember these are elementary school children so a lot of what we're seeing is sort of how they're wrestling with these ideas yeah is there anything that in the mind of a child like that saying oh I really hope that doesn't happen as members are they they understood the hardship they just don't know how to express it isn't it expect nice to that subject first and certainly developmentally we might and I do not pretend to be a developmental psychologist but we might expect this experience like thinking first how would this impact me and then we get the PS o and I'm also thinking about other people because I know that's what happens developmentally I'm starting to think of others not just myself I'm in the back of the night up here I think there's a bit of evidence of disassociation there with how they said you know I hope they don't do this to us not at all kind of self-aware thinking about where might we be doing this whether or not that was being spoken by this woman who I visited and spoke but as we know in our country this is this is happening this is a growing movement and you know people people always find a voice for saying bigoted things that created a situation like the Holocaust but you know this child as a child you know considering their maturity and maybe not being able to imagine that oh the world they live in could look like that they're just imagining some sort of aliens or some sort of foreign entity coming and oppressing them instead of wondering where my depression already exists right so this disconnect and not and so going back a little bit to this earlier comment about sort of seeing difference outside of themselves very interesting saying it was very nice of you as take that much of your time like I feel like that to me from a child's perspective kind of ten days as much kind of emotional connection as they may have had if they could travel especially I mean obviously we don't know how this person was communicating their story but if they were appearing to be very emotional about it that that was kind of what this childhood Dublin I thought that was really interesting and that's a really nice connection to this whole idea of how you spend your time right that we give our time to focus that that's our resource so again returning to this metaphor of what's valuable so if you were gonna do some really close analysis of this you could go into the idea of thinking about spending time that's a nice connection okay so now we're gonna look at a few just quickly and I'm gonna ask you the same question after we've looked at a number of letters all right and again because they're hard to read I'm gonna read them out loud dear mrs. marks thank you for visiting our school to speak with us about the Holocaust I thought it was neat to hear about the war from a real Holocaust survivor I thought it was sad how the Nazi soldiers killed the girl who offered them a flower I'm of German descent my grandmother was German her parents were born in Germany I appreciate your visit to talk with us I enjoy hearing you speak I wish we could talk about all of them because they're so interesting this letter was written in 1988 dear mrs. marks I thank you for coming to our school since your visit everyone is getting books on the Holocaust I would like to tell you something I found out when I told my mother you were coming to our school my mother told me my father was pure German not knowing if he supported this time in history he told me no and I was glad to hear that again thank you for coming Thank You dears mrs. marks the lecture you gave us was thoroughly enlightening the experiences you told have helped me to further comprehend a time that only the survivors can speak of with any full knowledge your suffrage has helped me to see that Barbara barbarianism has not left human nature and won't for generations to come I can see the burden that everyone should carry so that this mass genocide does not does not occur again I can't help but think if I'd only been born 40 years earlier how I would react to a totally totalitarian dictator who wanted to rule the world would I submit or rebel live or die help or hinder I will only know if another World War occurs but World War three will leave the earth burning waste I can't read the bottom there so I hope yeah this is their your light afternoon reading I hope you continue your talks for years to come yes dear mrs. marks here's a different one that really was cool some that stuff is really sad you are really nice I'm I think it's I'm glad I'm glad I wasn't there happy holidays dear mrs. marks and this was interesting this whole class all the boys had sports paper and all the girls had ice cream paper so that's interesting too written in 96 dear mrs. marks thank you for teaching us about your experience in the Holocaust we all admire your bravery because some stuff you did I would have never done in that situation I also want to thank you for taking your time to come into our class and handing us a bunch of information your sixth-grade pal this one is from 1968 and this is again it's a really significant archive it spans multiple decades to mrs. marks we are very glad you spent some time talking to us about communism and fascism and the concentration camps we really enjoyed it we thought it was very good some of the fourth graders were playing it on the playground Germany sounds like kind of an exciting place after what you said about Thanksgiving yesterday I'm going to eat everything on my plate so now we don't we can't read 1500 letters right but now that you've read a little a small piece of the archive what I'm gonna ask you to think about I'm gonna ask for just a couple more comments do you start to see some patterns developing are there some things that you note that are sort of trends here or some things that are particularly marked that they stand out but they deviate from the trends that you're noticing yes it seemed like there was a very stark divide between the children you seem to understand the gravity of the situation to be like this was a terrible thing and ones who are like oh you know we're playing this out of a playground who you know only sort of saw the application if I want to eat everything on my plate to not waste it and I don't know if that speaks at the age of the maturity of the children right or just then trying to figure out how do I put this information into my worldview yeah but there's certainly that Great Divide between those who kind of reached out as if this was you know telling you grandma happy Christmas and those who were saying I am so sorry for what happened to you I feel some sort of empathy for what that must have been like right so yeah I think that's a really nice division that you're noting so those who are kind of demonstrating empathy and those who are thinking more specifically about the impact on themselves and certainly I haven't given you all the information right it would be helpful to know how old every single person is and we don't have all of that sometimes we do not all the time in the archive and and there's only so much we know because this is a pretty one-sided archive only we only have these letters so we can look at marks and recreate her life and her understanding but we could really I think a really fascinating view of her looking for this perspective okay I think yes sort of inherited guilt yeah and the kids you thought they were German people in their family that they were Germany to defend insulted and all family absolutely and not something in this research again this is a project in progress something that comes up quite a bit a lot of students talking about German heritage and and sort of negotiating that yeah it's really fascinating all right so last question about this before we look at a digital archive very different set of letters if you were looking at this entire archive would there's be some certain things you'd be looking for some patterns that you'd be thinking you might see based on this small sample just sort of a prediction something that you think you might find any prediction well it's hard to predict but one of the things that you can do as you start to look at these archives is get a sense of you start to see how trends aggregate so only looking at seven letters you may not see those trends necessarily but the more you see the more you get a sense of what is conventional and what is deviating and what is really worthy of notice so whereas these letters were originally written to one person and maybe they were also a bit of a performance potentially for an instructor right because they probably had to write these letters and you might make some guesses as to there are some things in the letters that suggest to you that they're written in a particular way because the instructor asked them to write it that way but now I'm reading these letters my students are working with these letters you all are reading these letters and they've taken on a very very different meaning because they're in this archive so what I'm going to invite you to think about is this relationship between the individual artifact and the larger archive itself and what I'm going to try to ask you to do is tack back and forth between these two views and that's my suggestion today my thesis is that we have to continually tack back and forth between this notion of the individual and the collective and when we have those multiple perspectives we can be really thoughtful Rutter's and effective writers in digital space so we're able to do that with this archive it's it has taken 50 years to be able to do that but now we can because we have this really rich differentiation across the archive alright so let's look at something else briefly and I want to kind of name what we're doing so the research that I do is discourse analysis and what discourse analysts do is they act sort of like discursive anthropologists they look at the talk and text that we create and they understand them to mean something about communities that write these artifacts and it's really exciting to have that opportunity because you learn a lot about the people and the communities that write this work and what they value and certainly we can look at that more specifically by looking at metaphors but there's a lot of a lot of things we can we can examine here so I'm gonna focus on digital archives of letters that were distributed on various listservs and listservs they are digital space but it's a very professor way to communicate does anybody belong to a listserv yeah probably the faculty right okay well you actually okay and yes and graduate students so you probably are on listservs but you may not participate in them but I want to encourage you and I'll talk to you about what a listserv is but I really wanted to encourage you to think about the space where you communicate most frequently in digital space and adapt some of what I'm talking about to those spaces because what I'm gonna talk about is not specific to a listserv but Alisa is just an email that you send to a bunch of folks who have the same interest so instead of sending an email to one person I sent it to potentially hundreds or thousands of people and they can respond or not and whether or not they respond tells you a lot about the initial artifacts okay so I'm gonna look at some examples here and here we're talking about computer mediated mediated communication and that is just writing in the clouds writing in digital space and there's asynchronous computer mediated communication that's an email right I send it to you and maybe you'll respond immediately but you don't have to it can sit there for a little bit and then maybe you'll respond later synchronous computer mediated communication is happening at the same time in a chatroom or something like that and you have this more natural natural more it's more like speaking having a conversation all right so I want to look at just a few examples and then I'm gonna be excited to answer any questions you have about this so this is an email it's not formatted as an email anymore but is an email that I received at a former University where I used to work and it is a crime alert so probably you all I know you all get crime alerts just like I do because you are on a listserv I'm here at MTSU and you have to get all of those same emails so I'm going to show you this first one and then I'm gonna show you what you can do with data visualization when you have a digital archive alright so this is a reported crime armed robbery off campus the police are investigating report of an armed robbery that occurred at approximately 1:30 a.m. Monday July 21 at 9:50 railroad Street the victim a female student reported that she was in her apartment when she was approached by three houseguests two of the suspects produced handguns and demanded her belongings the suspects fled in the air fled the area in a vehicle suspect one black male approximately five feet four inches tall dark skin with a high fade haircut suspect to blackmail lightly skinned curly afro wearing a black shirt and armed with a silver revolver suspect three black male dark-skinned armed with an unknown handgun all right so you probably or hopefully you're already starting to ask some questions about this or note some things that are interesting about this email but what I'm gonna skip to showing you what this whole archive looks like because I looked at this email with a couple collaborators we started to notice some trends as we're reading more and more of them that we thought it's kind of a strange a strange email so we ended up looking at the entire archive over seven years and we found that 72% of the campus crime releases refer to black or african-american assailants and one of my collaborators was a black student and he talked about the fact that every time he we get one of these crime alerts he felt really uncomfortable because they were so vague I don't know if you notice this they're so vague that they could be anyone any person of color and so some students started writing wearing t-shirts that said I am a timely warning because it just had the effect of because of how frequently we got them of making students and faculty of color just feel really uncomfortable when it turns out that these crime alerts actually ended up being representative of sort of the same people perpetrating perpetrating multiple crimes but was the same people okay does that make sense so the way that these emails functioned had an impact that they didn't intend and we were able to see that by looking at the aggregate the other thing was that they all of the most of the incidents happened at night 76% of them but they were always sent out in the morning and so people started feeling kind of like wow is this happening all the time and it gave this sort of always-on feeling to potential crime on campus again something that we can see when we look at this aggregate archive and we start looking not just at the individual artifact but how it becomes a collective and then you can do some really interesting analysis and find out how that might be meaningful all right so again that's what this this visualization demonstrates all right different archive different letter archive I looked at ten years of emails about job postings for writing faculty and I'm gonna read this one too also probably not super exciting but this is an email I look kind of email that I look at a lot seeking a director to oversee the development of a strong fully articulated Writing Center and a newly instituted campus Wak program the director will be positioned as a leader and an activist working with university administrators to develop and support policy she or he will have authority to chair and serve on committees providing a liaison among academic administrative and supporting units on campus the director will be working in the interest of all departments on campus all right so a job advertisement not super exciting but when you look at ten years of them you find some really interesting things so this is a word tree so another kind of data visit visualization and I noticed in looking at all of these letters together that one of the primary responsibilities was to collaborate and I'm sure you are all asked to collaborate all the time right but what does collaborate mean so you see it's really really disparate so whether or not you can actually read the different words you can see that collaborate even though it's mentioned a lot and the way this is developed is the size of the word tells you how frequently it's found in the data set so this is all the time and this these small ones not as frequently but these are the two words that happened before collaborate and then the two words that happen after okay so that's how that word tree works but looking at this helps us understand that even though everybody is saying this is something that you have to do you have to collaborate they really mean very very different things when they say collaborate all right another word that was used frequently there was team and again even if you can't see the words you can already see team means lots and lots of different things for this position this would be important if you're going to do some more analysis here to understand how we understand how we what we mean when we say we want somebody to collaborate or to be part of a team so again just looking at this relationship between the individual and the collective if we can look back and forth and back and forth we start to see some really interesting trends and some opportunities for analysis all right last but not least when you are writing in digital space some things to kind of think about so this is just a screenshot of a listserv that I'm a part of and I want to draw your attention to a couple things first of all this is the audience so when you write a letter to somebody right you have it in the two line if it's a listserv it's just to these thousands of people not to an individual person the when you look at when you get a listserv you can get it in this way that you have sort of a summary of what everybody has said in the day and this is particularly interesting because it measures how much people are paying attention to the various things that are said all right so let me explain how this is written these are the three different emails that were titled for the particular day and then you have a number that's how many people responded and that number tells you the the responsiveness of a particular email of a particular letter okay and if there's lots of people who responded there's lots of responsiveness and there's lots of uptake and that's what we're usually looking for when we write it means that somebody's taking up our idea responded to it and and been interested enough to to actually talk to you about whatever the interest see is that you've brought up one of the other things that happens a lot is anybody on Twitter you raise your hand if you are on Twitter so the one of the things that I've been particularly interested in and I'm happy to talk about this if anybody else is interested our transitional threads so it's a moment when a conversation changes so this here this number three was the original email that everybody was responding to and then somebody changed the title because they thought the whole conversation was changing and they changed it again so one into somebody decided you know it this is this is not what we're talking about initially so they changed the entire title so this happens in Twitter when somebody adds a hash tag or the hash tag changes like it starts as one thing and then it totally become something else so there's usually a way of marking this in different computer mediated communication platforms but this whole notion of responsive responsiveness and uptake I hope you think about for yourselves so my conclusion we are writing more than we ever have we're making just as many mistakes as we always have but they're new mistakes and though we may have our heads in the clouds at times and I'm sure I don't know if you all have been accused of that but I've been accused of that how might we filter and harness our understanding of these clouds and bring them down to earth so I'm just gonna return to my dramatic slide for a moment we started with drama we will end with some drama so the big piece that I hope you take away is this perspective that writing in the clouds allows for us to do this notion of the relationship between micro analysis and macro analysis individual artifacts just that one letter that you write to somebody and then the letters that you write over your entire life all right the individual letter and the archive of the letters and when we tack back and forth between those two perspectives we have a really useful understanding of ourselves as writers as writers and we can better understand the collective's in which we're writing so I challenge you to do that as you move forward to really think about this relationship between the individual and the collective and always always have that sort of tension in mind all right I had some questions for y'all but I'm more interested in your question so my challenge is to help us stay grounded just sticking with my metaphor of clouds how can we stay grounded when we are writing in the clouds in digital space so that we are writing an effective ways all right thank you very much I would love to to hear some of your questions to talk about any of these archives if if they're interesting to you any thoughts yes please so you kind of started off with this premise that today's sorts of communication cloud communication is undervalued that people think things about it they're not true because that is kind of the cultural consciousness of what today's sorts of digital communication is how do you suppose that we should respond to people who devalue it and also kind of teach ourselves not to think about it that way because we're in a society that speaks of it and kind of teaches us to devalue the sorts of communication I lose excellent question do you have an answer do you do you have an answer to it now okay because there was it was formulated so that way I think research I think research is the answer to most things I don't know if that's the right answer but that's my answer to demonstrate that there are really interesting and important things happening in digital writing but also to really allow for differentiation so I text my husband every day when I'm going home and it is not an important text it's just like I write like letters I write HHH headed home honey and so which I guess is cute but it's not it's not meaningful beyond that and so and it's okay to have levels of complication of complexity in your writing but just to be really thoughtful about switching gears and and as much as we can I invite certainly students in my classes and in my research I'm always trying to make the implicit explicit so we make a lot of decisions and our writing everyday when I write a text message to my husband it's very different than when I write an email to a colleague or when I write a journal article so I'm always very conscious about switching gears and so I would encourage you all to do that as well it should just be really rhetorically aware of who your audience is and as much as you can know right because often these audiences are much more complex than we give them credit for so when we are aware of that complexity hopefully it impacts the way that we that we communicate so I hope that answers that research research research research other questions all right please join me in thanking [Applause] [Music]