The Gifting Logos
The Gifting Logos
Expertise in the Digital Commons
E. Johanna Hartelius
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2020 by E. Johanna Hartelius
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hartelius, E. Johanna, 1979– author.
Title: The gifting logos : expertise in the digital commons / E. Johanna Hartelius.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020010006 | ISBN 9780520339637 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520339644 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520974449 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)—Social aspects. | Knowledge economy—Social aspects. | Expertise. | Digital communications.
Classification: LCC BD161 .H295 2020 | DDC 303.48/3301—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010006
Manufactured in the United States of America
29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Zander
For Elin
You fill my heart.
Contents
1. The Commons Aggregate and the Gift
2. The Infrastructural Commons
3. The Archival Commons
4. The Popular Commons
5. The Gifting Logos
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Analyzing the rhetoricity of the gift, it seems imperative to acknowledge one’s gratitude. And indeed, I am intensely grateful for the various kinds of support that made this book possible.
First, I appreciate the gentle efficiency of Lyn Uhl, executive editor at the University of California Press, and the anonymous reviewers. I wish to thank the University of Pittsburgh Department of Communication, especially Caitlin Bruce, Paul E. Johnson, Brent Malin, Calum Matheson, and Gordon Mitchell, and the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center, who funded my research with a faculty fellowship in 2017. For giving me a new home and cheering me on as I carried the book across the finish line, I thank the faculty of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Hook ’em!
I am grateful for friends and colleagues who create intellectual community across the country: Jennifer Asenas, Vanessa Beasley, Jon Carter, Jay Childers, John Durham Peters, Katya Haskins, Kevin Johnson, Bryan McCann, Mari Lee Mifsud, Jessica Moore, Annie Laurie Nichols, Tom Oates, Ned O’Gorman, Angela Ray, Tim Steffensmeier, Mary Stuckey, Mary Anne Taylor, Jaime Wright, Amy Young, and many others.
For championing this project with unyielding confidence, I am grateful to my friend Damien Smith Pfister, who provided encouragement even when I was losing steam. For word swapping among logophiles, I am forever grateful to JP. And for teaching me new aspects of the Logos, I am grateful to Jason Micheli.
I am grateful to my parents Lena Hartelius and Göran Larson, who remain inexhaustibly enthusiastic from afar. Finally, my deepest thanks to Zack Fogelman and our kids for all the most important gifts.
Introduction
Expertise has never been more ubiquitous than in the present moment of information superabundance, nor has it ever raised more complicated questions: What does it mean to have expertise? What kinds of experiences, and interpretations thereof, qualify as expertise? How is it made, and by whom? What are the effects of defining social and political relations via this value-laden term? Marcus Boon, author of In Praise of Copying, suggests that humans are conditioned to repeat and imitate. Through mimesis, or cultural copying, we learn how to be creative on our own. What troubles Boon is the contemporary moment of ambivalence; digital technologies allow easy reproduction, but reproduction itself is often associated with inauthenticity or even a vague sense of guilt. Boon reflects on his students’ plagiarism conundrum:
They are encouraged to learn through the act of repeating information, quoting, appending citations, in the traditional academic way; but with access to the Internet, to computers that can copy, replicate, and multiply text at extraordinary speed, they are also exhorted not to imitate too much, not to plagiarize, and to always acknowledge sources. They are ordered not to copy—but they are equally aware that they will be punished if they do not imitate the teacher enough!1
Boon’s students are like many of us, in that they are expected to absorb information and learn by repeating but are penalized if they go too far. The prospect of expertise pins them between the norms of repetition and the impetus to be original, in both cases in the interest of acquiring and producing knowledge. Pairing formal knowledge with creativity, then, Boon uses the example of improvisational jazz. He understands this art form as striving for a fully “depropriated” event, a moment that cannot be identically restaged. Boon describes “the erosion of the line that separates performer and audience, accompanied by a destabilizing of notions of profession and expertise that produces a new (but hardly unknown) type of collective; and the challenge of a ‘being-with’ based on a dynamic, immanent sense of relationship to what’s going on.”2 Improvisational musicians, much like Boon’s students, repeat and innovate, encountering each other through interdependent productivity. And as I highlight, copy, and paste quotes from an electronic version of Boon’s book, hoping to gather insights and learn, his argument reverberates.
If asked to define expert, most people characterize a person who has extensive knowledge and competence. This definition is not inaccurate so much as it is incomplete
