|
The "Communicative Objective #2: Authorless Text De- and Re-Contextualization" is handed out and immediately Naphtali Barsky has a concept he's going to flesh out. He doesn't share what he is doing until the last two days of class where everyone can show everyone else what they have done all semester long. Barskey's end-product was a Dr. Seuss narrative (a children's book) promoting environmentalism and recycling. For thirty days he collected content/text from anything that was about to be thrown out: food wrappers, boxes, junk mail, advertisements, anything that was going into recycling or into un-recyclable garbage. What was not explained in the task order and was explained a few days later that if it became necessary, one could insert necessary words fro grammatical purposes that may have been missing from the authorless text we were finding. Of course, the designer would want to keep these insertions to a minimum because this would degrade the original intent or Shipka's argument in the task that "everything that has been said or is going to be said is out there somewhere in space and all we do is recycle what has been said."
The humorous part of this argument later comes back to bite Shipka in an argument in ENGL 407 where she states that researchers should be paid for the arguments they produce in academia because they are original/their work. I then argued that if every piece of text is simply a re-contextualization of some previous text then why should a researcher expect to get paid for what they create considering someone else already said it before?
The humor continues because Shipka is right, it's just that her argument at the time was poorly constructed. In the re-patent task order we proved that yes, ideas and text are recycled, but that every invention/text is build upon some previous research/knowledge/text, but the new designer sees a way to expand/improve the research, knowledge, invention, discovery or text; hence she is correct, that the new designer should receive credit and financial compensation for the discovery.