Hypertext

Digital Classroom

This is a place for a community of readers and writers to engage texts; to create lines of flight through texts; to revel in the vertiginous speed of such lines of flight; to participate in the slow decomposition of language and ideas; to discover new shoots of thought rising from a rich compost; to experience the potential energy of a text turn kinesthetic (see bibliography for sources of the theory outlined here). 

This is a place to revel in something organic, and, like a rhizome, the organic nature of the Digital Classroom needs time to grow.  To call this a “resource” is to miss the vision.  It is, rather, a (de)composition where your acts of “wreading” are not only welcome.  They are what keeps the compost a verb.   

Remix

“Generally speaking, remix culture can be defined as a global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies” (Eduardo Navas)

We are a remix culture; Lawrence Lessig calls Read/Write (RW) culture and RW Internet “an ecosystem” (63). It seems fitting, then, for the work of Emerson to be shared within the ecosystem as an organic, living, breathing entity that is reflective not only of Emerson’s own intentions but reflects the natural ebb and flow of the ecosystem itself.

In the essay “Intellect,” Emerson wrote, “The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity.” In RW culture, the mode is fluid, and the hierarchy is uncontained; essentially, the learning process embedded in RW culture is spontaneous, the way Emerson envisioned. Lessig tells us that RW creativity is about “the effect it has upon the person producing the speech” rather than “the quality of the speech it produces.” 

Contributions

Following Emerson’s admonition that “each generation must write its own books,” this section invites users to produce material that helps to extend Emerson beyond the limits of his immediate period and published texts.

Bibliography

This is where we are keeping a working bibliography of the texts this exibit explores.