Quotations About Electracy and Mystory

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Sarah Arroyo (2006) Participatory Composition: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy "Electracy can be compared to digital literacy but encompasses much more: a worldview for civic engagement, community building, and participation." (1)

"electracy is often associated with electronic literacy; however, as he was quick to point out, electracy has less to do with a new version of literacy and more to do with a combination of electricity and trace. By combining the two terms, Ulmer echoes Derrida's idea that the trace "is rupture in metaphysics, a pattern of incongruities where the metaphysical rubs up against the non-meta-physical" ("Jacques Derrida").  The trace of something does not appear as such, but the logic of it can be exposed through a deconstructive intervention (Of Gramatology 65)." (Arroyo, 2006, 6)

The goal of electracy is to develop an image supplement for literacy. Literacy tells us what justice “is” (ontology), and electracy images its mood (its affect), addressing motivation (care). Literacy already provides the knowledge relevant to problems; electracy supplements that knowledge with feeling, by drawing upon the arts. The ultimate purpose of the testimonial is not to make art, however, but to articulate a general education mass electracy: to use arts methods and the networking resources of the Internet as means to allow egents to participate as witnesses in public policy decisions. The immediate benefit of this practice is a fluency in the image discourse of electracy (becoming electrate). The ultimate benefit is to organize a constituency that speaks on behalf of well-being, the general good. (Ulmer, 2011, 5)

"[electracy was designed] to describe and capture the skills and competencies that are required to master the new media-rich world in which we live."  (Holmevik, 2012, 3)

"[talking about the term digital literacy] It is a dangerous grammatological misappropriation on the part of the Literati that, in a very real Foucaultian sense, attempts to name and relegate new digital media forms as subjugated practices to the old print media discourses and its established literate institutions."(Holmevik, 2012, 4)

Electracy works with Derrida and Huizinga's theories about play, and translates this play into learning.  With this sort of learning, "we don't always have a particular goal in mind or some winning condition to reach.  A lot of the time, humans play because we enjoy it and because we wish to see where it takes us." (Holmevik, 2012, 6)

What literacy is to the analytical mind, electracy is to the affective body: a prosthesis that enhances and augments a natural or organic human potential. Alphabetic writing is an artificial memory that supports long complex chains of reasoning impossible to sustain within the organic mind. Digital imaging similarly supports extensive complexes of mood atmospheres beyond organic capacity. Electrate logic proposes to design these atmospheres into affective group intelligence. Literacy and electracy in collaboration produce a civilizational left-brain right-brain integration. If literacy focused on universally valid methodologies of knowledge (sciences), electracy focuses on the individual state of mind within which knowing takes place (arts).  (http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/glue/longman/pedagogy/electracy.html)

The new skill that must be explicitly taught is "collaboration," and the new mode of consciousness-raising or reflexivity (self-knowledge) activated by this education is that of the group (between the individual and the collective community). One of the dilemmas or paradoxes of the literate era has been the condition of individually intelligent persons behaving stupidly as groups or collective entities (the notoriously fascistic nature of groups). A promise and challenge of electrate education is to invent a pedagogy for group learning and self-knowledge. (http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/glue/longman/pedagogy/electracy.html)

Ulmer proposes "mystory"—a text that integrates public discourse (films, myths, events, etc.), private biographies (memory, real or fantasy) and disciplinary discourse (the subject matter doesn't matter)—as an inventional method that "assumes that one's thinking begins not from generalized classifications of subject formation, but from the specific experiences historically situated, and that one always thinks by means of and through these specifics, even if that thinking is directed against the institutions of one's own formation" (vii-viii). (http://cdh.sc.edu/~hawkb/bystory/mystory.html)

I am telling not only how to make a mystory, but why I want to make one.  I do not expect to be able to persuade anyone by means of argument that conduction is an effective inventio, but it is important to note that this argument itself is constructed conductively, as well as inductively and deductively (as is usually the case in descriptions of genre). (Ulmer, Teletheory, 1989, 82)