I like the idea of a Web Ring on activity theory and related approaches.
Most of the Rings I've come across on the web seem to be for pornography
sites, but maybe that's just because there are a LOT of those! (BTW,
pornography is not a pejorative in my usage.)
There is an emerging genre of the personal website, and it can be analyzed
very much as our modeling our schizo-complex postmodern identities ... and
interesting alternative to the narrative construction of identity in
autobiography. I recommend the exercise (see mine below, still in an early
non-dynamic version). I remarked to Jerry Bruner in Aarhus this summer that
'we tell our lives as narratives, but we live them as hypertexts' and
something of the same thing was traditionally true I think of identities,
but we now have an important new tool, with new affordances, and no doubt
with new kinds of feedback on our views of ourselves and of the notion of
identity itself. A topic for my research a few years from now ...
meanwhile, on my website are some notes about the semantics of hypertext
that some might find interesting:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/webs/hypertext/tsld001.h
tm
It derives from a rather clunky PowerPoint presentation, so don't expect
too much!
I regret English imperialism insofar as one of its associated agendas is
the hegemony of a particular subculture (which is not all that totally
English-specific, though it is in some respects), and the benign neglect of
potential competitors (or potential hybridity partners). On the other hand,
I don't think we can do without one common second language for the world,
and barring big surprises, it will probably be English or some variant
thereof. Bilingualism is feasible in the world, in degrees, perhaps with
some diglossia of functions between home and local languages vs. the global
common second language. In that guise it doesn't have to spell the end of
language-based cultural diversity (there are also other bases, of course).
Perhaps what does have to happen is that ComSeL has to break its ties to
English-language culture to a greater degree. We need more nativized
Englishes, so long as they are more or less mutually intelligible, more
tolerance of dialect diversity, more use of ComSeL to express the meanings
of other cultures in ways that will sound strange to native English
speakers at first, but will eventually enlarge the repertory of ComSeL
beyond that of original English (proto-Anglic?). Given the present
dominance of hyperstandardized hegemonic English, we have plenty of freedom
to experiment with ComSeL without having to actually worry (yet) about
wrecking its usefulness as an LWC (applied linguistics jargon: language of
wider communication).
Looking forward to meeting Edouard-Reseau ... JAY-MAIL.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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