Resonance Technologies

Writing gestures stemming from tagging speak to the nature of movement in digital spaces, the rests that punctuate and promulgate this movement, and the rhetorical dimensions of resonance. Musical transmission strategies provide models for sharing consciousness, so considering an expanded rhetorical canon can help us compress, share, and unwind rhetorical placeholders and categorizations of the information content of a given url, commonly known as “tags,” when these gestures and their trace can be browsed, known, and shared in a common folksonomic space. Musical practice and tagging practice: when we move from file-sharing to pattern-sharing, and from pattern-sharing to consciousness-sharing, the affective and nonsemantic dimension of persuasion takes on a greater magnitude, and a pragmatic need for "sentencing" emerges. In what follows, I will refer to a so-called audience finder assignment, and consider how and why tagging, whether programmed into stuctured databases like HubMed or bottom-up folksonomies like de.licio.us, seems to work on principles of resonance; de.licio.us, like wiki, and like the phonograph and the tape recorder, are resonance technologies. At the same time, when we apply the mash-up principle and concatenate different media, such as del.icio.us, instant messaging, and wiki, we find out that traditional forms ofwriting become the \"obligatory passage point\" in multimedia. Multimodal and multi-person, the art of tagging requires commons engineers to be down with OPP.

Bergson (1911) , in the Duration and Tension section of Matter and Memory, brings movement together with quality and sensation, terms usually in opposition in his philosophical tradition. "Real movement is rather the transference of a state than of a thing" (p. 267). The Napster effect, along these lines, redirects our attention from "filesharing" to the consciousness-sharing that brings a commons into being. In digital ecologies, forming a commons is elemental to and inextricable from diverse investigative and persuasive practices, requiring us to listen, perform, and compose across and between diverse forms of media. Furthermore, while these practices place demands on what we might call traditional reading and writing skills, they also enlist many other modalities of substantiating information, and this expanded sense of composition requires empirical and heuristic rehearsal. Furthermore, these are "tune-able" economies and ecologies of information, where technical and affective rhythmizomena freely interanimate each other continuously. The repetitions and gestures that condition this space also condition the mind and bodies of the participants. Indeed, this demos is a far cry from the Athens of Ancient Greece. And yet, ancient concerns about the proper place and time for the lighting-like computations and resonances of affective practices, such as playing the aulos, somehow seem to address the phenomenology of the digital commons, which is a mixture of registers. Digital cultures aren't the first to palpably feel the dynamics of attraction and aversion when new modes of writing and performance mix semantic and nonsemantic, sense and nonsense together. But with resonance technologies like the phonograph, the tape recorder, wiki, and social bookmarking, the sacred and secular go into n-recombinations. Socrates, in Lane Cooper's translation of Plato's Ion , tells Ion that,

Here, Socrates defines Ion's facility with Homer as a sort of resonation, but only to distinguish it from any artistry or techne. This, I will argue, below, puts a placeholder on a gap, or lacuna, manifest not only Greek treatments of resonance and rhythm, but wherever principles of resonance, entrainment, or synmmetry-breaking take hold. Furthermore, Socrates hopes to make clear that, as it is with Ion's persuasive speech, so it is with song, and dance. "The worshipping Corybantes are not in their senses when they dance" and, likewise, the lyric poets are not in their senses when they make these lovely lyric poems No, when once they launch into harmony and rhythm, they are siezed with the Bacchic transport, and are possessed...for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he is inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him (Cooper, p. 220). Jaeger (1934), translates Aristotle's statements about the Eleusinean gatherings, where those who are being initiated are not required to grasp anything with "understanding," but rather become receptive to a certain inner experience, and so to be put into a particular frame of mind, presuming that they are capable of this frame of mind in the first place. (p. 134) Music, for the Greeks, was not just a specialized art of sound, but a generalized art of rendering harmony, rhythm, and orderly motion. This mousike, Alex Hardie (2004) tells us in his esssay "Music and the Mysteries," published in the edited collection Music and the Muses, played a significant role in the rites at Eleusis. The rhythmic and resonant arts work their wonders according to common principle, which is why the heterogenous lot of harmonikoi, Plato, Aristoxenus, and Aristotle spilled so much blood, sweat, tears, and ink investigating how and why. Sound, though, transfers complex information at lighting-like speed—the time interval of transmission, of musical communication may be indeed be the attraction of music for the sciences. What communicative uses will we find for sound, now, after the digital distribution of sense modalities put into question the function and  the allocation of perception?

In their unfoldment in space and time, "sounds manifest as a vast number of elaborate and complex variations," yet, at the same time, we seem to be able to easily deal with complexity and dynamism in sound, as compared with, say, mathematics. This leads Gibson to the conclusion that sound descriptors and categories such as loudness, pitch, duration and repetition don't adequately "get to" the physics of sound's unfoldment in time and space. For example, "instead of simple pitch," the pitch of sounds "in nature," in motion vary in "timbre or tone quality, in vowel quality, approximation to noise, in noise quality, and in changes of all these in time" and along with variations in duration (expanded to include qualities of transition into and out of other durations) variations in repetitiveness (expanded to include subtleties of sequence, regularities in rate, rhythmic capacities), loudness (changes in rate and directionality), all of "these variables can be combined to yield higher-order variable of staggering complexity. But these mathematical complexities seem nevertheless to be the simplicities of auditory information, and it is just these variabels that are distinguished naturally by an auditory system" (80). In digital ecologies of information, the commons has evolved strategies of tagging and emergent classification schemes know as folksonomies, and these practices function to simplify and compress information in a way similar to music, and, also, like musical practices they also shortcut and "get in front" of rationalist tendencies and prescribed categories in the ways "intuitive" and musical modes of response do. Finally, and most significantly, tagging practices can be mixed into a wiki pedagogy effectively, because tagging occasions rhetorical modes of description, definition, and much more. Wiki provides a space for these necessities born out of group-writing. Once in rhythm, writers seem to revalue Socrates' distinction between the artist and the mere "resonator" such as Ion himself. In the commons, technical and affective, sacred and secular, and other opposites go into n-dimension reanimations. In this context, the art of "metaprogramming tags" becomes an important part of any rhetoric of rhythm.

Music produces increasingly controversial examples of what sampling activates: communities build by means of sharing through rhythmic exchange of information. Even though music clients have pushed peer-to-peer and provoked the most legal controversy in the name of intellectual property, higher education has yet to ask why music pushes peer-to-peer activity to new extremes. Tagging practices already provide some of the answers. Wiki allows clusters of writers in composition classes to share lenses for simple and easily repeatable rhetorical tagging actions as these actions accrete into patterns. One obvious paradigm for conducting tagging with wiki is the history and aesthetics of gospel, reggae, jazz, hip-hop, skaldic, and all the poetic, bardic, and oratorical modes of commons formation that, in some way or another, are and have always been musical cultures of creativity and have always been part of important pedagogical practices. Sharing samples is a way to continue this most traditional approach to composition in emergent media. Sampling, the art of selecting information and placing it in new contexts and arrangements, is a practice common to musical and textual domains now that they share the digital medium. If sampling has also become the fundamental gesture of writing in today’s rhythmic, networked intermedia, then performing and teaching the art of the sample is the simplest starting point and "bass line" for a pedagogy open to digital culture. As the most focused form and gesture of composition, the sample can focus an important pedagogical goal: to teach students ethical modes of appropriation and transformation, fair use, and participation in distributed networks of production. Although it might not be necessary to have students turn their computers into musical instruments so that they could learn how to write to each other, it is a simple way to do so, and it has so far yielded the complexity necessary to make further rhetorical performance necessary. Students working in common create new recipies, new mixtures of definitions, analogies, icons, evaluations, and sounds calibrated to the niche they now tune towards together. These experiments in communicative performance allowed students to take seriously the idea of resonance (in technical communication, critical inquiry, in narrative) and taught me that resonance technologies can help shift pedagogical energy from communication to commons-formation. Metagging, after all is really the sacred art of sampling.