Saturday, November 18, 2006

Syverson, Wealth of Reality

Syverson, Margaret. The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1999.

Syverson's The Wealth of Reality--revised from her dissertation, which won the Berlin and Burns awards in 1995--calls for a reconceptualization of writing activity as radically situated in the interest of moving us away from reductionism (182) and the idealized atomistic-individual writer (synecdochic relationships fail to explain complexity). That is, an ecology of composition affords us greater explanatory power (203) in an era when the increasing presence of technology is adding complexity to the environments in which writers write (205-206). Understanding the rich ecologies of composition depends on a methodological framework drawn from complex systems thinking and distributed cognition influences. The writing environment is integral, and our understanding of "writers, readers, and texts" must take the environment into account.

Syverson's method involves a blend of ecological perspectives on situated and distributed cognition and case study. In the opening chapter, she introduces the terms that constitute a simple graph (the analytical tools for this ecological method).

Four attributes of ecological systems:

  • distribution (7)
  • emergence (10)
  • embodiment (12)
  • enaction (13)

Five dimensions or manifestations of "every object, process, fact, idea, concept, activity, structure, [and] event" in an ecological system:

  • physical-material dimension (including technology) (18)
  • social dimension (19)
  • psychological dimension (19)
  • spatial dimension (20)
  • temporal dimension (20)

The "matrix" at the convergence of these two lists grounds us in a more complex (counter-reductive; expansive) framework for studying writing in situ.

Note: Six challenges to the ecological model (202).

Defn.

ecology: "a larger system that includes environmental structures, such as pens, paper, computers, books, telephones, fax machines, photocopiers, printing presses, and other natural and human-constructed features, as well as other complex systems operating at various levels of scale, such as families, global economies, publishing systems, theoretical frames, academic disciplines, and language itself. For my purposes, then, an ecology is a kind of meta-complex system composed of interrelated and interdependent complex systems and their environmental structures and processes" (5).

emergence: Syverson offers three senses of emergence: structural, dynamic, and integral or combined. The first applies to the structure of hierarchical organization; the second applies to history or processes of change. "Emergent properties suggest that all of our classificatory systems arte actually open-ended, explanatory theories rather than closed, deterministic containers" (11).

distributed cognition: "the way cognitive processes are shared, that is, both divided and coordinated among people and structures in the environment" (9).

situated cognition: "cognitive processes are always embedded in specific social, cultural, and physical-material situations, which determine not only how cognitive processes unfold but also the meanings they have for participants" (9).

Key terms: metasystems (xv), complex systems (xv, 2), ecological systems (xv, 5), wealth of reality (1), complementarity (1), ecology of composition (2), unit of analysis (3), complexity (3), case studies (3, 187), adaptive (4), mechanistic explanation defied (4), complex adaptive systems (5), textual ecologies (16), power law (142), reductionism (182), new technologies (185), research, pedagogy, and assessment (187), Learning Record (192), developmental scales vs. idealistic rubrics (195), analytical tools (203), areas of study (domains of scrutiny) (204).

"Suddenly [with Syverson's discovery of Hutchins] thinking was revealed as not simply a matter of logical processing neatly managed by a brain in splendid isolation but as a complex ensemble of activities and interactions among brains, hands, eyes, ears, other people, and an astonishing variety of structures in the environment, from airplane cockpits to cereal boxes to institutions" (xiv).

"Technological advances have proven to increase rather than reduce the complexity and difficulty of our work. We cannot hope to understand these situations by studying individuals in isolation; we need an ecological approach that considers the dynamics of systems of people situated in and codetermining particular social and material environments" (xv).

"In a complex system, a network of independent agents--people, atoms, neurons, or molecules, for instance--act and interact in parallel with each other, simultaneously reacting to and co-constructing their own environment" (3).

"Complex systems are also distributed across space and time in an ensemble of interrelated activities" (7).

"Away from this familiar supportive environment [full of tools and resources, see p. 10], writers think and write differently; when writing while on vacation or at a conference, for example, they may feel either stripped and helpless or liberated and refreshed" (10).

"Embodiment grounds our conceptual structures, our interactions with each other and with the environment, our perceptions, and our actions" (13).

"Vision is enacted--what we see is brought forth (emerges) through the coordination of our physical structure and our cognitive and physical activity" (15).

"Composing practices such as freewriting, invention heuristics, diagramming, outlining, sketching, and marking manuscripts for revision also structure the form and content of what is written" (17).

"The five dimensions outlined here [physical, social, psychological, spatial, and temporal] are not categories of classes of objects; they are five aspects of every object, process, fact, idea, concept, activity, structure, event, and so on. Thus, although we can distinguish these dimensions, they cannot be 'separated out' because they are independently specified. As in geometry, single-dimension objects can only exist theoretically, in the imagination" (22).

"I am not arguing for a mathematical approach to composing, but I am trying to get at complexities in ecological systems that have not been addressed by theorists in rhetoric and composition" (23).

"As contexts and technologies for writing continue to change at an ever accelerating pace, we cannot cling to our familiar, comfortable assumptions about writers, readers, and texts, or we will find ourselves increasingly irrelevant and obstructive" (27).

"Composition does not consist in transferring what is inside the head onto paper or a computer screen. It is a manifestation of the coordination between internal and external structures, which are constituted by and expressed through cultural and cognitive dimensions of every human activity" (183).

"In my opinion, the real value in taking an ecological perspective is that it compels us to ask a better set of questions about the dynamic relationships among writers, readers, and texts and drives us toward a deeper understanding of composition" (206).

Related sources:
Bak, Per, and Kan Chen. "Self-Organized Criticality." Scientific American. Jan. 1991: 46-53.
Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam, 1979.
Goodwin, Charles, and Marjorie Harness Goodwin. "Professional Vision." American Anthropologist 96 (1994): 606-33.
Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge: MIT P, 1995.
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