organizing attention on a commons-surface

Playing with students in musical commons opens up space for an ongoing rehearsal of and refinement of the role of attention in dynamic creative enterprise.

Paying close attention to tropes and forms has always helped us connect. In multimedia ecologies, such as wiki, where space consciousness freely mixes with time consciousness, rhetoric becomes that which can be identified as various take-up-able suites of rhythmic gestures, and the different variations users spin out of recognizable and repeatable information regulation methods. These rhythmic rhetorics coordinate two basic gestures: compose and repose. The rhythmic alternation of composing and reposing manages the flow of information as some links click, while other potentialities are forestalled. In Karnatic and Hindustani classical raga, each raga begins with a musical movement known as alapana or alap.

In a similar way, wiki necessarily directs students' attention to the important role the medium where we write plays when we write. Wiki, in turn, allows us to introduces students to a variety of media, which is especially important today, when new media and writing technologies emerge regularly. The medium itself is dynamic.

Rhetorical practice in dynamic, shifting media necessarily can learn a lot from diverse traditions and technologies of information compression. Working with these templates, students produce on-the-fly solutions that can nevertheless yield sample-able techniques. In ecologies awash in ubiquitous information writers must constantly tune, and the search for the timely and resonant forms of audience address becomes and art of finding bandwidth matching frequencies. Wiki's infinite linking capacities compel writers to entrain itineraries in a process of ongoing learning and teaching, in a medium of writing (wiki) that allows writers to experiment with available patterns, and then share best practice. When working with wiki content, the imperative is to "make it better." At the same time, we remember we are working in a common medium, where we can also make our methods and exportable and available to be taken up and repeated again in the commons, where writers are continously engaged in creating anew the conditions of information exchange and substantiation.

How do we actualize information?