... Teaching our Students, Serving Our Communities:

      ... with further implications for change. PART THREE:

      "Regardless of whether students are headed for the highest or lowest levels of the job market, we ought to provide them with at least an understanding of the operation of the workforce as a whole." --James A. Berlin

      "The 'products' that best display knowledge-value--the economic offerings that result from accumulated wisdom--are those which transform the customer.... The customer is the product." --B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore

      Collaborating with E-Businesses:

           --Think also about this for a while:

                 ... It is amazing to see how close Jim is with the agents of business, especially Pine and Gilmore as educational-business agents. Actually, it's amazing to see how all of us are so alike in the creation of value, the student as product.

                 ... Yes, I make this statement with a certain uncertain irony, for whether or not we knowingly design a curriculum to prepare students for the e-world of business,
      Read the collection of articles in Commodify Your Dissent. Ed. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland. NY: Norton, 1997. And Frank's additional books @ amazon.com!
      we especially do so and quite successfully in our social-epistemic writing programs.
      It's the hip cultural critics--the great resistors!--among our students who get the positions in ad agencies and in writing & design and keep the Ad juice flowing. Yes, we create once again by way of an amphibology! Students who do it and know that they do it! Well! It's no longer the case that resistance is futile; it's the case that resistance is part of the sales pitch and a necessary e-component to keep the system of e-Capitalist values that is being piped into our homes flowing in a steady stream. Our colligs in CultStuds(tm) just don't get it! I read an article in Fast Company a couple years ago about an advertising agency called "Cultural Studies."

           Do you yet dig what I am saying! The amphibiology works like this: Like electrical engineers, we create, constantly reinvent,
      My pun on the word "resistance" is inspired by Ellen Strenski in her "Fa(c)ulty Wiring? Energy, Power, Work, and Resistance". A more fully developed version of this work has just been published in Insurrections. Ed. Andrea Greenbaum. Albany: SUNY, 2001. 89-117.
      customers as electrical circuit elements to provide resistance to keep the full e-business system going, and going, and going! It's the case that without resistance the whole infrastructure would burn down! And collapse, not be rebuilt by way of a palindrome as we witnessed earlier in the Keaton flick! It used to be a problem--perhaps still is for some of us--that Johnny and Mary could/cannot read and then could/cannot write; now it's the case, as Thomas Frank tells us, Johnny and Mary cannot dissent! except by commodifying their dissent. Commodifying their resistance. So the question is How might we best "transform our customers"?--Yes, turn them not only into resistors but also transformers--for the real market? We don't have to talk about and critique Adam Smith's notion of the "Invisible Hand" as the force that moves the market of our world and of our discipline; the force that through the green fuse drives the flower market, drives us and, in turn, our students! And we are the resistors of that force!

           So again the question is How might we best "transform our customers"? My best, studied sense of how this is to be done is to bring in collaborators from the market itself to help us prepare our products for the market. In an effort toward TOTAL COLLABORATION. It used to be said, perhaps it still is, at Carnegie-Mellon University, that if you wanted to do work in the composing process/es, you needed to collaborate with a cognitive psychologist. I am saying that if we want to come to understand the forces of the market, we need to collaborate with someone in e-Biz, e-Commerce, fast capital.

           I've done just that: In 1999, I facilitated a graduate seminar on "rhetoric, poetics, and the new economy." About rhetoric and poetics, I know a lot. About the new economy, I know very little except for what I have read, and know nothing about the everyday workings of e-business and e-commerce. So--and now I am introducing Lynda Greene Haas--I started talking with Lynda, who btw has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and at the time was Worldwide Manager, Advertising and Brand, for Xircom--about this seminar and she suggested that she participate online and perhaps visit the seminar and grab a few of her friends to do the same. Her friends were/are

    • Ira Bachrach, President of NameLab, who also has a Ph.D. in linguistics and is the man whose company comes up with such brand names as FedEx; and

    • Lori Feld, Vice President of Account Management at DSW, who has a Masters in Design and is the woman who managed the Pentium II account (no doubt, you've seen the ads on television)
    •      All three discussed issues online with us and eventually Lynda and Lori flew in from their trip to Japan conducting focus groups and spent the day and evening seminar with us. If you are interested, you can visit the site and see them on QuickTime video and read through the seminar description and notes.

       


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