EMBODIED RHETORIC IN SCENES OF PRODUCTION:
THE CASE OF THE COFFEEHOUSE
By
Stacey Lynn Pigg

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Rhetoric and Writing
2011

ABSTRACT
EMBODIED RHETORIC IN SCENES OF PRODUCTION:
THE CASE OF THE COFFEEHOUSE
By
Stacey Lynn Pigg

Embodied Rhetoric in Scenes of Production: The Case of the Coffeehouse
develops and enacts a framework for conceptualizing and studying rhetoric and writing
practice. This framework develops insights of theorists like Michel De Certeau, Gloria
Anzaldúa, and Bruno Latour who call for attention to the actions, practices, and
intentionality of active bodies for meaning making. The framework further places the
insights of these theorists in a socially and materially rich context that emphasizes the
role of non-human actors in scenes of production, including writing technologies, places,
and times.
I enact this theoretical framework through an empirical approach for accessing
the everyday practice and experience of rhetoric and writing in a local Michigan coffee
shop. This empirical approach focused on the Gone Wired Café in Lansing, Michigan
and drew on field observations and videotaped writing sessions to access places and
moments of bodily action, as well as interviews to collect individuals! stories of use and
routine. Through this analysis I argue that the coffeehouse embodied is not only a civic
institution, but also a workplace where writers construct individualized writing spaces
around mobile technologies.
Central to this work that takes place in the contemporary coffeehouse is the role
of spatial practices related to maintaining proximity and distance to objects that matter

to writing—including people and technologies. Coffeehouse writers often go to great
lengths to preserve a level of interaction with people and objects that facilitates work but
maintains sociality, avoiding lengthy face-to-face conversations in favor of brief
interchanges through social media. Drawing on the moment-by-moment unfolding of
participants' work sessions in dialogue with their stories, I find that coffeehouse writing
unfolds in repetitive, patterned, and systematic ways. In routine writing tasks,
participants draw on habits from other parts of their lives and draw on writing practices
that have been successful in the past. As they draw on common temporal topoi
including crunch time and routine activity, writing emerges as an ongoing system of
arrangement and creation that builds on stores of past behaviors and materials.
Finally, many coffeehouse writers use social media to structure their writing
time/space, indicating that contemporary social media is more that just distraction in the
coffeehouse, even for academic writers who merge it as a planned part of writing activity
or who “wander” when facing non-routine writing tasks. I demonstrate how acts of digital
connecting are central to work done in the coffeehouse, both as a contemporary
backdrop for mobile composing and as a central tool for building relationships and
audiences for writing. The implications of this activity, and of this way of looking,
suggest that we may indeed benefit from using the virtual/physical body and its
movements as an indicator of rhetorical practice as the nature of work and workplaces
rapidly changes. The research further suggests that we consider the role of knowledge
work practices in writing, especially as we design contemporary pedagogical
interventions.

Copyright by
STACEY LYNN PIGG
2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Researching and writing this dissertation was fun. I owe my positive experience to
being well supported and intellectually pushed at Michigan State University, where I
benefitted from a University Distinguished Fellowship and RCAH Graduate Fellowship
that gave me time to spend writing and thinking. Beyond this kind of benefit, I would be
a different scholar and a different person had I not found my way to Michigan State. My
coursework and exams challenged me to expand how I understood the work that a
researcher with my interests might do, and my dissertation committee has been patient,
responsive, challenging, and encouraging. Malea Powell, Dánielle DeVoss, Bill HartDavidson, and John Monberg were a dream to work with and have shared with me most
of the attitudes toward rhetoric and research that are articulated here and that build my
orientation toward Rhetoric and Composition and Professional Writing more broadly. I
also have been lucky to rely on the good advice of Jeff Grabill as I worked on this
research alongside other projects with the Writing in Digital Environments Research
Center. Of course, I am also indebted to my research participants for sharing their time
and their writing lives with so much generosity and honesty.
Just a few of the other people who have helped me think through things along the
way include Matt Cox, Qwo-li Driskill, Casie Fedukovich, Janice Fernheimer, Jenn
Fishman, Angela Haas, Kendall Leon, Terese Monberg, Staci Perryman-Clark, Jim
Ridolfo, Martine Rife, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Robyn Tasaka,
Douglas Walls, and Stewart Whittemore. I could list all day—many more people have
v

influenced my work. Some know it and others probably do not. I am also privileged to
have friends and family who talk to me about things other than Rhetoric and
Composition and who do not get too mad when I assume the personality of madwoman
in the attic for a few hours (or days, or months) at a time. Of course, I!m looking at you
Aaron Ford, as well as my smart sisters, my Mom and Dad, and the rest of my family
and friends.

vi

PREFACE

Research means deciding where to place boundaries and determining which
stories are worth telling. I was influenced by Sullivan and Porter (1997) to believe that
good research also means building off what has been important to others but also
articulating how ways of looking and reporting emerge from who we are and the places
we have been. This dissertation project builds off my own interests and past
experiences as a researcher, teacher, writer, and student. In this preface, I reflect briefly
on my relationship to the project and to the way of looking at rhetoric and writing
practice that compels me.
When I entered Michigan State as a PhD student in 2006, I was interested in
identifying theoretical frameworks for studying embodiment as it intersects with rhetoric
and writing practice and for using those frameworks to better understand the role and
meaning of digital technologies within that practice. During my time as an MA student at
the University of Tennessee, I was lucky enough to work with Dr. Jenn Fishman and a
group of talented fellow graduate students on a research project that we called the
Embodied Literacies project. Coming out of the experience of that project, I arrived at
Michigan State with a lot of questions about student technology use, which stemmed
from our analyses of students who found ways to use classroom technologies to their
own benefit. My favorite example was and is the student who used our course blog to
find friends to eat lunch with after class (Pigg, 2010). While I knew many writing
teachers would find this use of the technology to be “off topic” and nonessential, it
vii

seemed to me (and other members of our research group) that we were getting a
glimpse of how writing intersected with the work of the class from students!
perspective—it involved the personal and relationship-building through acts that
sometimes appeared “off topic” from the perspective of the instructor of the course. It is
this sense of “embodiment” that is related to experience and how people interface with
the world around them that has motivated my research.
And thus began my life as a PhD student. As a transplanted Tennessean who
moved up north in Michigan for school, I also found myself looking for places where I
could be: not necessarily places that felt like home, just places where I could spend my
time that were not my house or my office. The Gone Wired Café was one of the first
places where I could sit and get things done. It somehow fit with who I was and what I
needed to accomplish. I could go there, be myself, and do the reading, writing, and
studying that comprised my graduate student life. I could talk to people when I felt like it
and avoid them when I needed to focus on work. In short, I could conduct my life in that
kind of space. Thinking back on the time I spent at Gone Wired over the first four years
of my time in Michigan, I realized I have laughed there, cried there, fought there, made
new friends there, encountered the theorists that shaped my whole outlook there, even
completed and sent off my comprehensive exams there. The place itself was deeply
important to who I have been and what I have done since moving to and living in
Lansing.
The other thing that is true about that space is that many of those moments of
interaction happened in writing and with technologies. Before I ever imagined that I
viii

would write about Gone Wired, I remember days of walking there with some kind of
rhetoric book in tow, but spending a lot of my time writing and answering emails, writing
and answering texts from my out-of-town partner, or chatting on AIM with friends who
live down the street or who live across the country. I used technologies within the space
of Gone Wired as a way of connecting people and things, even when I didn!t mean to.
Gone Wired, for me (like for the participants in my research), was a physical
space that seemed like a blank slate. After having researched the space, I realize that
Gone Wired is far from empty, and that my own engagement with it says something
about who I am as a person, about what I prefer, and about what is meaningful to me.
At the same time, however, as I look around the space of Gone Wired on any given day,
I see many people doing the same kinds of things I usually did—as well as some people
who inhabit the space and who use technologies differently or not at all. I began to
understand that looking at a place and the variety of people and objects that construct
that space could create a nice boundary line of a rhetorical ecology—a starting point to
understanding how rhetoric and writing are experienced.
Coffeehouses are further interesting to me because, quite frankly, I did not grow
up around them. Coffee is an institution of my upbringing, no doubt: most often a dingy
see-through light-brown color, weakly brewed in Mr. Coffee coffeemakers, and left
warming all day so that you can drink it constantly without ever needing to add milk or
experience adverse caffeine effects. Where I come from in rural Middle Tennessee, the
closest equivalent to a coffee shop is still the local diner, where you can get brewed
coffee alongside your hard scramble and bacon in the morning or meat and three at
ix

dinner (aka lunch). The local donut shop on the neighboring town square might also
count as a near-coffeehouse. While I have not studied these spaces, they do not appear
to function in quite the same ways as the coffeehouses I encountered after I left home to
go to college and then graduate school, though they may be some the best examples of
Ray Oldenburg!s (1999) “third places” that we have remaining.
Thus, for me, coffee shops in part represent something other, something urban
and connected to a kind of leisurely attitude toward work in the moment of doing it that
was necessarily not a part of how I grew up. My first encounters with coffeehouses were
in college, where I found myself an English and Spanish major in a city: Nashville,
Tennessee. And where do college students in the city go to read William Faulkner and
James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges? Without question, I thought, they went to the
coffee shop. And so I did. There were three places I often located myself for studying in
college: the Starbucks where my friend worked in Green Hills, a pretty upscale
neighborhood nearby; the Bongo Java, a local chain near Belmont University; or JJ!s
Market and Café, another independent café off 21st Avenue near Vanderbilt University. I
was sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, sometimes trying frantically to finish a
course paper or read and understand enough of a novel to not look ridiculous in class,
other times socializing or just being seen. I remember, though, being fascinated at some
level at how the space drew on something so familiar to me: congregating in public
space with a shared object, and yet at the same time seemed to represent a completely
different way of being. It was cool.

x

My relationship to coffee shops, of course, changed through the years and coffee
shops came to represent different things to me personally. The Starbucks housed in the
main library at my MA institution, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, was a de

facto spot for holding GTA office hours, as English department graduate offices were
1

housed in the basement of Neyland Stadium. This office location was problematic for a
number of reasons, including their distance from graduate and undergraduate
classrooms, their lack of lighting, and that they were often closed during games,
practices, and other uses of the stadium. The Hodges Library Starbucks became office
space for a group of Master!s and PhD students in the English Department: It was close
to books we needed, to coffee that kept us awake, and our students could find us in the
central location. And we bonded there: we found each other after depressing courses
we had been students in or teachers of or looked for familiar faces on days when we
had to be isolated for long hours working on completing reading, finishing course papers
or teaching assignments. We worked there, but we did not only work there. It was a
place we made into a space of comfort, but also into a practical workspace. I had just
purchased my first laptop (a huge Dell), and a great deal of my graduate student life
was lived in that Starbucks, as well as at the Golden Roast, an independent coffee shop
near campus where many of us spent long hours reading, writing, and chatting. From
my perspective, this was not a matter of going to the coffee shop to “look cool” or
because it was somehow exotic or different; it was more a way of coping with what it
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1

Neyland Stadium is one of the largest college football stadiums in the country, which
makes it a great place to catch a game, see the big orange checkerboard endzone, and
hear the band play “Rocky Top.”
xi

meant to be a graduate student in that particular time and space, where securing real
estate for getting things done was always part of the gig. If going to the coffee shop felt
leisurely before, now it felt like an essential part of everyday life. Whether I had just
become so accustomed and habituated to the kind of space as a place that it no longer
seemed cool, or whether my needs had simply changed, the coffee shop in general felt
different from how it did back in Nashville. With these experiences in my background, it
is no wonder that when I moved to Michigan for my PhD one of my first tasks was to
look for a local place to get work done.
These are just a few of the experiences that brought me to writing this text and to
a genuine curiosity about what the practices that happen within these spaces can teach
us about rhetoric, writing, and culture—and about ourselves. These are the kinds of
memories that helped me make sense of the things I saw and experienced during my
time researching Gone Wired. So, as I finish beginning this dissertation by thinking
about the trajectory that led me here, I leave you with just a few of those moments to
ponder:!
1) Two males in their late twenties or early thirties come in and sit together at a
booth. They share a laptop and work together, both wearing headphones and
trying to watch and listen to something on a laptop screen together.

2) I see someone I know from the university. Our conversation happens as we
walk in the building together and lasts about 45 seconds. She is someone I like
very much, but I really don!t want to talk to her any more than that. I have a lot of
xii

work to do that day.

3) My hand is sore on my second day of observing writer in the café from all the
handwriting I have done taking notes about what is going on in the coffee shop. I
get a “print blister” on my middle finger on day four.

4) As I sit in Gone Wired, I think about how my partner!s parents tell me that they
go to Starbucks "more for the social thing than for the coffee." They are not
making this up. The teenage workers at the local Starbucks drive thru know them
by name and their orders by heart. They hug them if they go inside. They give
them coffee for free any time they can get away with it.

5) A group sits together around a large rectangular table for over 2 hours. They
each have laptops open, but no one really seems to be using them. However,
they do seem to stare at them when other people are talking. The woman whose
screen is visible to me has a screen saver running and occasionally brings up
Facebook and looks at the home page. When the group finally gets up to leave,
one them says "Are we on for next week?" The general consensus is yes, but
one person asks, "Do you think we will actually write then?" And they all laugh.

xiii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES…………………….....…………………………………………………..xviii
LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………..….…xix
CHAPTER 1
ACCOUNTING FOR EMBODIED RHETORIC IN MOMENTS OF PRODUCTION………1
Embodiment in Rhetoric and Composition………………………………………..….3
Merging of Rhetorical Practice and Bodily Practice: Embodiment as a Rhetoric
and Writing Research Foundation……………………………………………………..7
Embodiment and Embodied Rhetorics……..……………………....………..9
Practice.....................................................................................................11
Scenes of Production................................................................................13
A Heuristic for Embodied Rhetoric…………………………………………………..15
1) Recognizing the rhetorical intentionality of bodies……………………...15
2) Situating bodies among material actors………………………...………..17
3) Accessing places and moments of bodily practice ……………………..19
4) Listening to stories of bodily use and routine………………...………….21
The Outcome of a Heuristic For Embodied Rhetoric: The Situated Account of
Practice…………..……………………………………………………………………..24
An Example Situated Account From Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: Gloria
Anzaldúa……………………………………….……………………………………….25
Conclusion: Questions and Challenges for Embodied Rhetoric……………….…30
CHAPTER 2
ENTERING A SCENE OF EMBODIED PRACTICE: THE COFFEE SHOP AS
LABORATORY…………………………………………………………………………………31
The Coffeehouse and Its Social and Cultural Associations: Historical ldeals of
Sociability………...……………………………………………………………………..32
The Contemporary Coffeehouse as Technologically Mediated Space and
Lingering Effects of a Historical Ideal…………………..……………………………35
Differences in an Embodied Approach to the Coffeehouse……………………….38
The Site in Particular: Gone Wired as a Place Among Others……………………40
A Plan for Seeing Embodied Rhetoric and Writing Practice in Gone Wired...…..43
Fieldnotes and Participant Observation…………………...….……………..46
Methods With Individual Participants…………………………..……………50
1. Videotaped observations of hour-long work sessions…………..52
2. Interviews with Participants………,,………………………………54
Conclusion: A Space Embodied……..………………………………………………56

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CHAPTER 3
THE COFFEE SHOP AS WORKSPACE: EMBODIED PRACTICES AND STORIES OF
LOCATION…………………………………………………………………………………….57
Reflecting on Stories of Location: Three Associations Between the Coffeehouse
and Writers Who Work There…………………………………….……….………….59
1. A “Clean” Space for Working………………………………………………60
2. A Space for Digital Writing Technologies…………...……………………64
3. A Sense of Comfort and Convenience……………………………………67
Embodied Practices of Spatial Location…………………………………………….69
1. Managing Proximity to Objects that Matter………………………………70
Managing proximity to other people: coffeehouse sociability….….75
Proximity of objects onscreen…...……………………………………78
2. Protecting Individual Work Locations……………………………………..79
3. Monitoring Change Outside the Coffeehouse……………………………82
Conclusions and What Is Missing Writing Work in the Coffee Shop …….………82
CHAPTER 4
CRUNCH TIME, WORKFLOWS, AND ONLINE WANDERINGS: LAYERED AND
ENACTED REPERTOIRES OF COFFEEHOUSE WRITING………………………….….88
Time Spent Writing in the Coffeehouse, or “Clocking in Your Hours”……...…….91
The Use of Coffeehouse for the “Routine Work” of Writing……………...………..94
Kim!s Story: Enacting a Routine Composing Workflow………………………...….96
Digging Deeper into Kim!s Movements: Embodied Strategies Developed
For Completing The Reading Response……………….………………….100
Writing that is Typical, But Not Routine: Repertoires of Online Wandering and
Crunch Time…………………………………………………………………………..106
Ed!s Story: The Pre-Deadline Social Media Wandering………………………….106
Kathryn!s Story: Performing Crunch Time As Repertoire…………………..……111
What We Can Learn From Embodied Repertoires of Coffeehouse Writing……114
1. The experience of writing time……………………….…………………..115
2. The development of writers over time…………………………..………118
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….118
CHAPTER 5
EMBODYING SOCIAL MEDIA: DIGITAL CONNECTING AND THE KNOWLEDGE
WORK OF WRITING……..………………………………………………………………….121
Digital Connecting and Establishing Relationships That Matter…………...……125
Dave!s Story: Digital Connecting in an Information Economy…………………...126
Digging Deeper into Dave!s Activity: Digital Connecting as Integral to
Online Writing Economies…………..……………………………………….131

xv

1. Dave used Twitter during writing sessions as a tool to locate and
create potential communities in which his writing could
circulate………………………………………………………………..132
2. Dave used Twitter during writing sessions as a research/inquiry
tool that allows him to stay abreast of what is currently discussed in
a knowledge community related to his writing……………...……..134
3. Dave used Twitter during writing sessions to perform connections
to others! ideas to establish himself as a member of a knowledge
community……………………………………………………………135
4. Dave used Twitter during writing sessions to enact the circulation
of his work, publicizing his writing to a community of readers..…136
Where Digital Connecting Gets Messy: Digital Connecting as Planned Distraction
or Wandering….………………………………………………………………………137
Returning to Ed: Digital Connecting That Is Disconnected From the Writing
Task………..............................................................................................138
1. Participants described digital connecting is a “distraction”;
however the planned nature of these distractions meant that they
often functioned more as a “break” than as an actual
distraction……………………………………………………………..141
2. Digital connecting allowed Kim and Ed to monitor activity of their
social networks while they wrote……………..…………………….141
3. Digital connecting provided cognitive down time needed to
refocus and complete difficult writing tasks………………..………142
4. Digital connecting often led writers into unexpected places, for
better and for worse………………………………………………….143
5. Social media created informal learning context for more formal
work and classroom tasks…………………………………………..144
Conclusions: The Complex Intersections of Digital Connecting, Writing, and
Productivity……...…………………………………………………………………….145
CHAPTER 6
IMPLICATIONS OF AN EMBODIED APPROACH TO RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
PRACTICE…………………………………………………………………………………….149
Negotiations and Limitations………………………………………………….…….151
Implications of Using the Body as a Rhetorical Indicator…..………………..…..153
Returning to the Situated Account for Rhetoric and Writing Research…………156
Areas For Future Research…..……………………………………………………..158
The Knowledge Work of Writing…………………………………………….158
Researching Writing Across Assumed Domains of Life………………….160
Social Media, Knowledge Work, and the Workflow of Writing: New Spaces for
Pedagogical Attention……………….……………………………………………….163
Conclusion: Using Embodied Research as a Framework for understanding Ideas
for Future Research…...……………………………………………………………..166
xvi

WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………….167

xvii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Objects that mattered when making decisions about where to locate oneself for
writing work…………………………………………………………………………………….73
Table 2: Three detailed social media moments in Ed's work session……………….…110

xviii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Gone Wired as seen from upstairs………………………………………………42
Figure 2. Workspaces of the four participants featuring laptops as the central hub......66
Figure 3. Spatial technique of separating activity using virtual sticky notes………...….78
Figure 4. “Nesting” technique for maintaining privacy and space………………………..80
Figure 5. Technique of filling screen with materials used in the moment………………..81
Figure 6. Time-use breakdown of Kim's work session………………………………...…..97
Figure 7. Kim's two open documents: the .pdf she is reading and notes she is copying
and pasting into a new document…………………..………………………………………101
Figure 8. Time-use breakdown of Ed's work session………………………………..…..108
Figure 9. Time-use breakdown of Dave's work session……..………………………..…129

xix

Chapter 1
Accounting for Embodied Rhetoric in Moments of Production

[I]n the vastly different technological world of computer writing, ignoring the
materiality of literacy, its basis in bodily movements and habits, is no longer
possible.
--Christina Haas, Writing Technology, 227
This chapter sketches a framework for studying the practices of rhetoric and
writing production as they are embedded in the everyday life of individuals. The
framework that I construct in this chapter draws from a range of scholarship in rhetoric
theory, writing studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Although this work is
diverse, it has common ground it its connection to embodiment, in the spirit that it was
articulated for writing research in Christina Haas!s 1996 Writing Technologies: Studies

on the Materiality of Literacy. Though Haas!s book is now fifteen years old, Writing
Technologies represented a landmark move to systematically understand the
relationship between technologies and writing through an emphasis on physical
embodiment, as well as spatial, temporal, and technological context. My framework
builds on this foundation by presenting a contemporary heuristic that conceptualizes the
body as an indicator of rhetorical practice. Within this heuristic, focusing on bodies in
action in moments of production can lead researchers to the intricacies of rhetorical
scenes including how technologies, space, and time are used. This framework further
builds on contemporary rhetorical theory!s recent focus on bodies and embodiment.
1

Within this understanding, bodies not only hold intentionality and perform rhetorically,
but also are imbued with layered cultural and discursive influences that we might “read”
rhetorically (see Anzaldúa, 2007; Cintron, 2003; Crowley, 2002; Hawhee, 2004; Selzer,
1999).
In this chapter, I first build context for this approach to embodied research by
describing how recent scholarship in Rhetoric and Writing Studies has engaged
embodiment. This discussion, supplemented with recent theory from outside Rhetoric
and Writing studies, helps me set a frame for key definitions (i.e., embodiment, practice,
and scenes of production) used within the remainder of the dissertation. To follow, I
introduce and theoretically situate a heuristic for embodied rhetoric that works through
the following four steps: 1) recognizing the rhetorical intentionality of bodies; 2) situating
bodies among material actors; 3) accessing places and moments of bodily practice; and
4) listening to stories of bodily use and routine. What can emerge from this heuristic, I
argue, is a potentially important unit of rhetoric: the situated account. Situated accounts,
as theoretically informed narratives of experience that connect to physical objects, can
be powerful theoretical tools for rhetoricians. To further illustrate the situated account of
practice, I conclude the chapter by reflecting on the narrative accounts of making
developed in Gloria Anzaldúa!s theory. Anzaldúa!s rhetoric theory, I argue, might be reenvisioned as providing a prototype for embodied rhetoric and the situated account. I
end the chapter by reflecting on challenges for embodied rhetoric and setting the scene
for the remainder of the dissertation, which offers a series of situated accounts of

2

practice based on the bodily activities of writers who spend time in an independent
Michigan coffeehouse.

Embodiment in Rhetoric and Composition
Responding to a conception of rhetoric as a cognitive enterprise, Sharon Crowley
(2002) recently established rhetorical practice as an important area of study for
rhetorical critics, while calling for a critical turn toward connecting rhetorical practice to
bodies and how they move:
The study of actual rhetorical practices is the province of rhetorical
criticism—a scholarly activity undertaken with much skill in departments of
speech communication but virtually absent from composition studies,
which could benefit, in my opinion, from attention to the ways in which
teachers! and students! bodies and rhetoric about them circulate in
classrooms and in the university. (186)
Important within this short quotation is the way in which “actual rhetorical practices” are
equated with “the ways in which teachers! and students! bodies and rhetoric about them
circulate,” creating a link between rhetorical practice and bodily practice. Though
Crowley limits her treatment to the classroom and the university, her argument raises an
important question: how do bodily practices intersect with rhetorical practices? This is a
question that remains steadily in the background throughout the unfolding of this
dissertation, as I analyze recent scholarship that theorizes the term “embodiment” and

3

as I develop and enact a research approach interested in both rhetoric practice and
bodily practice.
Recent scholarship in rhetorical studies has gestured toward different
understandings of the relationship between bodily practice and rhetorical practice. Jay
Dolmage (2006) pushes toward the idea that bodies signify rhetorically in ways that
make knowledge. Using a disability studies lens to reclaim the Greek God of
Hephaestus, Dolmage examines how the concept of metis provides a means for
understanding “bodily difference as generative of meaning” (122). Debra Hawhee!s

Bodily Arts (2004) pushes at a somewhat different relationship between bodily practice
and rhetorical practice by recovering the way that Classical Greek rhetoric has
historically relied on a relationship between bodily and mental training. Focusing on the
submerged relationship between rhetoric and athletics in Ancient Greece, Hawhee
articulates the ways in which highly trained bodily movements were central to rhetorical
education and the “classical ethos” (11). In linking rhetorical practice to bodily practice,
Crowley, Hawhee, and Dolmage expand the scope of rhetorical criticism and theory
beyond alphabetic text and language and into the history and contemporary ways in
which bodies carry rhetorical meaning—particularly for Dolmage and Hawhee because
of their “difference” or because of how they have been disciplined.
In his introduction to Rhetorical Bodies, Jack Selzer (1999) describes a
generalized movement that helps to place Dolmage and Hawhee!s studies within a
broader movement and context in Rhetoric Studies. Selzer described how a focus on
material rhetoric can elucidate the flip side of what the linguistic social constructionist
4

turn was poised to uncover. Parallel to the ways in which social constructionism
revealed how “reality has been constructed by language,” Selzer argues that language
is just as constructed by the material confines of everyday life in “the lived world” (4).
Thus, Selzer argues that rhetoricians should be concerned not only with material
realities as contexts for language use, but also as objects for rhetorical study. In this
way, nontextual artifacts such as bodies, along with what is typically deemed the
“context” or “situation” for rhetoric, become themselves viewed as rhetorical,
constructed, and within the domain of rhetorical analysis. Thus, Selzer shows that the
relationship between rhetoric and body that emerges in recent scholarship is in part a
disciplinary act of expansion for rhetoric studies—one that stands out against a
backdrop of rhetorical study built primarily from texts and language.
Making bodies a potential subject of rhetorical criticism, however, is different from
re-conceptualizing rhetorical practice as present not only in texts and language but also
2

in the bodies of those who make rhetoric. Haas!s research, which I mentioned briefly to
open this chapter, moved toward resituating where writing researchers conceptualize
the locus of practice—from the already completed “written page” or “inside the mind” to
the moments of interaction between individuals, texts, and technologies. Haas describes
her move toward materiality as a research foundation as an attempt to provide a
”corrective to accounts of writing that emphasize the cultural at the expense of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2

Dolmage (2009) has usefully described how conceptions of rhetoric are often built on a
foundational distrust of the flesh and body in interaction with the world, which is seen to
pollute the workings of pure mind through disease and disability, but also through
fostering deception and desire in embodied subjects (3-4).
5

cognitive, or that focus on writing as only an act of mind” (xv). Haas emphasized the
ways in which bodies and embodiment form a central link between individuals,
technologies, and acts of writing. As she put it, “Writers! relationships to their texts are
embodied in the most intimate of ways, because writers have no other way of either
producing text or of interacting with it than through their bodies, particularly their hands
and eyes” (226). This move served to shift the locus of researcher attention beyond the
printed page produced by a writer and toward the writing moment enacted by the
interaction of body with the technologies of writing.
Perhaps surprisingly, I find a great deal in common between the impulse to
expand rhetorical criticism to the realm of bodies and the impulse to expand the focus of
writing research to the moment of interaction between writing bodies and the
technologies that facilitate production. Both impulses attempt to account for a broader
sense of what scholars have recently conceptualized as a writing or rhetoric ecology
(see Cooper, 1986; Edbauer-Rice, 2008; Syverson, 1999; Spinuzzi, Hart-Davidson, and
Zachry, 2006). This impulse to better account for previously unexamined parts of the full
picture of rhetoric and writing extends to other work in Rhetoric and Composition that
invokes embodiment. For instance, Fleckenstein (2003) theorizes how the visualized
and image-laden nature of cognition and literacy should affect contemporary writing
3

pedagogy ; Kopelson (2003) reflects on how marked teaching bodies signify to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3

Fleckenstein focuses on how a logos-bound understanding of cognition and literacy
must be integrated with a conception that takes untextualized meaning into account. As
she puts it, “We cannot address how meaning is aesthetic, embodied, and spiritual at
the same time that it is intellectual, communal, and secular. What is necessary for our
6

students and thus should matter concretely in how instructors choose to perform
themselves in classroom spaces; and Banks (2003) argues that both writing and
teaching are gendered and sexualized practices through which it is possible to honor or
repress past experience (Banks, 2003). Methodologically, the work resulting from an
embracing of embodiment has varied from rich cultural analysis of rhetorically fashioned
bodies to new ways of conceiving of the subject of pedagogy to detailed explications of
the mundane ways bodies interact with technologies when they write.

Merging of Rhetorical Practice and Bodily Practice: Embodiment as a Rhetoric
and Writing Research Foundation
My impulse to make bodies a more explicit part of rhetoric research, thus, comes
within a diverse trend of expansion in contemporary scholarship in Rhetoric and Writing
studies: particularly, expansions beyond the cognitive and beyond language and into the
material productive context as an object of study. My own interest in the relationship
between rhetorical practice and bodily practice comes from a desire to better account
for how contemporary writing practices are enacted by individuals, how individuals! daily
operations of writing production form, and how they may signal broader cultural
meanings. The remainder of this chapter builds a research heuristic designed to enable
rhetoric researchers to account for rhetorical practice as bodily practice across different
cultural contexts and rhetorical scenes. This heuristic works by articulating and
explicating practices of embodied rhetoric and writing in the scenes in which they
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
meanings and our classrooms is a double dialectic, a double vision of literacy as image
and word, as imageword” (4).
7

happen without making prior assumptions about what that writing scene might involve
and why. My interest in embodiment, thus, builds from a desire to build rhetorical theory
4

empirically based on the practices and stories of active bodies.

With this in mind, here I briefly introduce the central definitional components of
the heuristic—embodiment, practice, and scenes of production—in order to
contextualize how I use these terms in this chapter and throughout the dissertation.
These definitions gesture to and correspond with three theoretical positions I draw from
to ground this developing analytical framework and which I develop more clearly in the
remainder of the chapter: Gloria Anzaldúa and Chicana feminism!s theory in the flesh;
Michel De Certeau and theories of practice; and Bruno Latour!s attention to enactment
within scenes of production. As will become clear through the explanation of the
heuristic, I do not understand myself as doing theory in the flesh, actor network theory,
or a DeCerteauian analysis. Rather, this heuristic builds from insights of that theory,
adapting it for use in studies of everyday Rhetoric and Composition practice. In
combination, insights from these theories allow for attention to bodies as they are
situated in and interact with a range of social and physical objects in scenes of making.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4

This draws on the spirit of historical rhetorical theory as “pragmatically empirical” as B.
Wayne Howell describes Aristotle!s methodological underpinnings for the Rhetoric,
which focus on “collecting, classifying, and systematizing data that were accessible
through the human senses” (43). Rhetoric theory has a rich and ongoing tradition of
attempting to account for rhetorical practice in building rhetorical theory. Perhaps most
famously Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca!s New Rhetoric expanded the
realm of rhetoric to account for how discourse actually works in the lives of those who
practice it.
8

Embodiment and Embodied Rhetorics
By embodiment, I refer to the phenomenological concept that individuals
interface with the world through their bodies, as well as the idea that those bodies hold
systems of cultural meaning that are enacted through those encounters.

5

Thus, my

interest in embodied rhetorics means a dual focus. First, uncovering embodied rhetoric
means accounting for how the body acts during moments of rhetorical activity. Second,
it involves understanding how rhetorics, as systems that structure meaning, are held,
transmitted, and circulated through the movement and interaction of active bodies.
These rhetorics might be systems of bodily knowledge on which people draw in
rhetorical acts; strategies for rhetoric and writing that develop out of people!s cultures
and past experiences; habits, routines, or movements that emerge as bodies build up
the multiple experiences of place and time; or fluid methods of doing things that are
often undefined and untaught. In this way, embodied rhetorics may be bodily intentional
or strategic rather than logically or cognitively so. Embodied rhetorics emphasize the
fact that there are not always pre-defined or textualized strategies for encountering
rhetorical situations and scenes, and when faced with these situations, people often
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5

Continental philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty have argued that the body
plays a role in acts of meaning by holding an intentionality through which “we can
understand bodily motility as consisting of movements that are both immediate (in the
sense that they are not mediated by thematic or reflective conscious acts of deliberation
or decision) and, at the same time, purposive (hence intentional)” (135). One way that
Merleau-Ponty conceives of bodily action is through the concept of sedimentations. By
sedimentations, Merleau-Ponty refers to the way in which bodily actions or
understandings become repeated in similar ways over time to create certain ritualistic
qualities in organizing behavior (Phenomenology, 217). See also Bourdieu!s conception
of habitus.
9

work from the meanings and past experiences they have encountered, and the meaning
6

held in their bodies that result from those experiences. This idea has important
intersections with Chicana theory in the flesh, which I will spend more time with in the
following section of this chapter.
In addition to responding to the recent calls of scholars like Crowley and Selzer,
this conception of embodied rhetoric connects to strands of current work in rhetoric
studies that call for the move beyond exemplary texts as objects of rhetorical study and
into the everyday lives of individuals and groups (Nystrand and Duffy, 2003), as well as
7

the move toward studying rhetoric as it is performed and enacted. These strands of
rhetoric research often lead toward ethnographic methodological approaches to
rhetorical practice like those of Ralph Cintron (2003, 1997), who argues “rhetorical
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6

I have already gestured to the Greek concept of metis, which has been the term most
often used by rhetorical theorists to describe the parts of rhetoric most responsive to
situation, least cognitive, and enacted “on the fly” through cunning (see Johnson, 1997;
Dolmage, 2006; Dolmage, 2009; Hawhee, 2004; Fredal, 2006; Kopelson, 2003; Baliff,
2001). Dolmage argues that “metis is a way to recognize that all rhetoric is embodied”
(6). In this project, I attempt to think through embodied practice without using the
rhetorical concept of metis as an origin. To attempt to understand rhetorical bodily
practice more inductively, I argue, can lead us to better understanding of the
contemporary nature of the term and help us understand its relevance for contemporary
writers and rhetors.

7

According to Stephen Mailloux, recent debates in rhetoric studies have involved the
scope of rhetoric!s objects of inquiry: is everything rhetorical or open to rhetorical
analysis? As Mailloux points out, the typical objects of analysis for rhetoric studies have
been exemplary texts: in particular the oral speeches of great men and the typical
domains of analysis have been the domains of public discourse. In recent years, the
tensions associated with this disciplinary argument have run high, and part of Mailloux!s
response is to create a new categorization of the kinds of domains in which the study of
rhetoric can be useful. Mailloux includes the everyday as one of the three domains
where rhetorical analysis can travel.
10

analysis need not be about famous speeches and/or the written word. Indeed, it need
not be about the discursive at all, and should also include the non-discursive and
performative” (6).

Practice
An important foundation of my heuristic involves understanding rhetorical practice as
embodied in the sense that I describe in the previous section. For me, this means: 1)
that rhetorical practices are connected to and enacted by bodies that interact with the
world around them; and 2) that the bodily practices that make up the ways that people
move through the world are rhetorical, reflecting cultural and social assumptions and
desires (see Reynolds, 2004). Thus, I argue, rhetorical practices can be seen in bodies,
indicated by habits or routines that are repeated or put in story through the narratives
people tell themselves and others about their rhetoric and writing activity.
This view of practices suggests that they are built through from the histories,
cultures, experiences and interactions between individuals and groups and the world
around them. This way of understanding a rhetorical practice diverges from common
definitions operating in rhetorical theory. In Norms of Rhetorical Culture, Thomas B.
Farrell (1995) traces a foundation for rhetorical practice from the work of Alasdair
McIntyre, who defines a practice with a moral imperative as central: "a coordinated form
of activity whose standards of accomplishment, when mastered and implemented, lead
to the development of praiseworthy human qualities as well" (4). Carolyn Miller (1984)
offered a less normative attitude toward practice as “the conventions of discourse that a
11

society establishes as ways of "acting together! (163). I see both of these conceptions of
practice as useful for different kinds of rhetorical study, but potentially limited for a deep
analysis of embodied rhetoric. While Farrell!s definition of practices seems potentially
open to the movements of active bodies, a focus on only normative practice would
potentially limit the ability to trace unfolding movements as they occur because it would
involve predetermining whether an action is praiseworthy or blameworthy. Though
Miller!s focus on “acting together” provides an important foundation for identifying
rhetorics across individuals, tying a rhetorical practice only to a language move
eliminates the possibility of making meaning from the movements of active bodies.
Michel DeCerteau!s (1984) conception of practice in The Practice of Everyday

Life focuses on enacted bodily movements of people as they build on past experience to
8

traverse the structured environments of their lived experience. . De Certeau in The

Practice of Everyday Life (1984) describes how people!s most mundane interaction with
environments and structures of others! creation—cooking, walking, renting—positions
9

them as producers of new embodied scripts of action. Within this theory, the meaning
held by bodies is a memory of past practice that is an essential actor in present and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8

It is notable that for de Certeau the structures that attempt to constrain behavior are
very clearly separate and separable from the tactics of everyday life. Structures appear
solid within De Certeau!s theory in such a way that makes them seem impenetrable.

9

Other phenomenologically influenced theorists describe the idea of trajectories of
practice using different language. For instance, Gaston Bachelard draws on the idea of
the path frequently tread as a literal example and a metaphor for the ways in which past
bodily movement influence future movement. He writes, “what a dynamic handsome
object is a path! How precise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscular
consciousness” (11).
12

future acts. Within Rhetoric and Composition, this concept of embodied practice is
similar to the concept of “situated practice” articulated by Patricia Sullivan and Jim
Porter (1997). In Opening Spaces, they describe a “situated practice” as
not just any action that anyone performs anytime, but rather stylized or
customized action: that is, action that through a certain amount of
repetition and experiential testing has become a habit or strategy that is or
can be passed on to others (like bricklaying, planting turnips, and writing)
and that meets some standard for human excellence. (22)
Notable here is not only the way that Sullivan and Porter rely on habit to describe
customized action, but also the way in which writing is listed amongst explicitly bodily
practices like bricklaying and planting turnips as systems of action requiring strenuous
physical movements and skills. Paying attention to the particular, contextualized
physical movement of practices, as imbued with these cultural associations can help us
understand what constitutes rhetoric and writing activity in the world today.

Scenes of Production
Scenes of production are important to embodied rhetoric that focuses on moments of
producing writing because they provide a means for understanding what tools, objects,
times, and places people draw on in practice (Latour, 2005). An important feature of the
way I have discussed practice involves the way in which it happens in real world
circumstances, drawing on tools, technologies, and texts and situated in time and
space. Thus, scenes of production, for me, are moments of time in particular spaces
13

where people come together with other objects in order to enact rhetoric. Scenes of
production also provide a way of setting boundaries in such a way that allows a
researcher to identify shared embodied rhetorical practices across multiple individual
bodies.
The move toward scenes of production was a central move in the sociology of
science that opened up the everyday practices of scientists to accounts that showed the
mundane nature of that work. For instance, in Laboratory Life (1986), Latour and
Woolgar compare themselves to anthropologists entering unknown cultures in order to
detail the intricacies of practice. This move involved focusing on closely detailing their
minute interactions with the elements of production. For Latour (2005) the
“making of” any enterprise—films, skyscrapers, facts, political meetings,
initiation rituals, haute couture, cooking—offers a view that is sufficiently
different from the official one. Not only does it lead you backstage and
introduce you to the skills and knacks of practitioners, it also provides a
rare glimpse of what it is for a thing to emerge out of inexistence by adding
to any existing entity its time dimension. Even more important, when you
are guided to any construction site you are experiencing the troubling and
exhilarating feeling that things could be different, or at least that they could
still fail—a feeling never so deep when faced with the final product, no
matter how beautiful or impressive it may be. (89)
With these terms defined and associated with theoretical foundations, I now turn toward
the four steps of my heuristic. I spend the most time developing the first step of the
14

heuristic, which provides the foundation for the rest of through the idea that bodies hold
rhetorical intentionality and meaning. Here I focus on the body as a site of confluence, a
material actor, and a site of memory of past activity. I also discuss the recent attention
to virtual bodies, arguing that we pay attention to virtual and physical bodies as
integrated.

A Heuristic for Embodied Rhetoric

1) Recognizing the rhetorical intentionality of bodies
The body is an active part of rhetoric and writing production, not only as a theoretical
symbol but also as a rhetorical agent in the process of creation. I develop this idea
through two related conceptual statements: 1) the body is a discursive and material site
where history, culture, identity, and memory come to a moment of confluence in
interaction with the physical and discursive objects of the present; 2) the body is an
agent in many moments of making.
Bodies

10

are sites of confluence between prior experience, cultural location,

current mediators (i.e., technologies), and present practice. Bodies hold meaning that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10

Digital writing environments increasingly call attention to the fact that selves often are
written in text and language. Because interactions online often happen without people
seeing each others! physical bodies, the so-called digital revolution for many highlighted
the possibility of existence and meaning making without body or drawing from a
radically redefined conception of body as centered in discourse. A central question for
embodied rhetoric, then, involves the phenomenological nature of the virtual bodies
written in discourse and active through technologies: what is the nature of this kind of
body? Early work analyzing this question clearly showed that virtual bodies are agentive
and active (Buckley, 1997; Dibbell, 1993; Turkle, 1995). However, important work in
Computers and Writing articulated the dangers of separating the virtual body from the
15

comes from the past and that is constantly layered upon it through interactions and
experiences with the world. The Chicana feminist concept of a theory in the flesh
provides an important theoretical foundation for this idea, eloquently linking body,
history, and cultural location to processes of making meaning. Cherrie Moraga (1984),
in the introduction to This Bridge Called My Back (1981), briefly describes the concept
of a theory in the flesh as “one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color,
the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic
born out of necessity” (23). Moraga emphasizes that the confluence of multiple objects
that are important to meaning making happen in bodies—narratives, technologies,
histories, and identities. This is important, first, for emphasizing that production is not
always cognitively learned and then practiced. Much of the time practices arise from the
situations people inhabit—and not always by choice. By focusing on “a politic born out
of necessity,” Moraga accentuates that the impulse toward production for queer women
of color in particular not only developed as the result of a conscious strategic course of
planned action but also as an inevitable, tacit response to conditions that meet and
cross in individual bodies—built from lived operation of past experience.
In addition to holding the memory of past experience, bodies are actors in
moments of making as physical objects that interface with technologies and objects in
the world. As Haas suggests, “Writers! relationships to their texts are embodied in the
most intimate of ways, because writers have no other way of either producing text or of
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physical for reasons of ethical action. (Taylor; 1997; Sanchez, 1998; Kolko, 1998; Blair
and Takayoshi, 1999; Webb, 2003; Romano, 1993; Rhodes, 2004; Alexander and
Banks, 2004).
16

interacting with it than through their bodies, particularly their hands and eyes” (226).
Scholarship in rhetorics of disability has also been important in developing this idea of
the role of body. In this vein, Gloria Anzaldúa!s work highlights struggles and
resistances of the body as it affects those who devote their lifetime to rhetoric and
writing production. Anzaldúa!s work details the constant struggle between the will to
create and the wills of the body, which were an ongoing issue in her life. In “Putting
Coyolxauhqui Back Together” (1999), Anzaldúa describes waking up to eye problems
and worrying about how her productive processes would change if she lost her sight. In
an interview with AnaLouise Keating (2000), Anzaldúa further discusses the role her
health and flesh played in the ways she practices writing. It determined her process and
was central to what she accomplished and how. The resistances that she confronted as
a writer were not only the resistances of ideologies written onto the body, but also of
disease and bodily distress, themselves products of culture.
Bodies become committed to spaces, times, and ideas, and active bodies can
help us understand how those change over time as rituals and practices change.
However, it is also clear that bodies do not act in isolation, but are rather mediated by
and in interaction with a range of material actors, which leads to the second step of my
heuristic.

2) Situating bodies among material actors
Physical and discursive objects come into contact with bodies in moments of
making. Those objects include other people, technologies, spaces, times, and existing
17

cultural narratives, just to name a few. Physical actors like technologies are an
important part of the bodily action of rhetoric and writing situations. Viewed from this
angle, contemporary technology use emerges as an integrated part of the whole portrait
of the motivations, desires, histories, and cultures that form part of contemporary
rhetorical activity. That is, individual!s interactions with technologies are visible clues to
how their work is structured, as well as to what they draw upon when they compose.
It is common to think of technologies and physical objects as resources drawn
upon when people compose, but discursive objects like narratives and understandings
are also part of the context for action. One notable feature of theories in the flesh is that
physical objects of life (e.g., skin color, land) become able to be viewed as rhetorical or
discursive, at the same time that rhetorical or discursive elements of life (e.g., social
11

locations, desires) become physical, tangible, and material . Thus, by allowing for
flexibility in the ability of objects to act, theorists in the flesh are able to describe the
confluence of multiple objects in the active body and to implicate these objects or
“physical realities” as central to the impulse to act, speak, believe, make meaning.
Much like in post-positivist realist theories of identity (Moya, 2002; Alcoff, 2006), social
and cultural relationships that had often previously been understood either as barriers to
individual rationality or “identity politics” are reconceived as physical, material objects
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11

Focusing on lived operation means paying attention to things in the world and how
people interact with them. Bachelard (1964) reads dwelling places and their effect on
the work of the mind: they inscribe images on us, they write. Anzaldúa!s borderland
emerges as a material symbolic: “A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a
steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional
residue of an unnatural boundary (25).
!
18

that are central to acts of making meaning. As Paula Moya (2002) explains it, “different
social categories of a woman's existence are relevant for the experiences she will have
and that those experiences will inform her understanding of the world” (50).

3) Accessing places and moments of bodily practice
The third step of my heuristic involves accessing places and moments of actual
bodily practice, as they are enacted in scenes of production. As I have previously
described, practices are not random or accidental, but can be understood as “schemata
of action” or “operations” that hold layered cultural and rhetorical meaning. In
DeCerteau!s terms, there are grammars or logics (rhetorics) underlying bodily
movement. DeCerteau states the goal of The Practice of Everyday Life will “be
achieved” if “everyday practices, "ways of operating! or doing things, no longer appear
as merely the obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical
questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it
possible to articulate them” (xi). When these logics of practice are articulated, they
reveal the spaces and cultures within which and against which people work, as well as
about the behaviors through which people exhibit agency and resistance.
I suggest that we gain access to patterns of embodied rhetorical activity by
visiting scenes of production, as places and moments (broadly conceived) where
rhetoric activity is produced in everyday life, an idea that draws upon Latour and
Woolgar!s (1984) move to the laboratory as a site of production. In Laboratory Life,
Latour and Woolgar argue that understanding the productive processes of scientists
19

means going to places where they make things. Their turn to the laboratory as the
prototypical place of making was a move designed to give insight into the intricacies of
the productive moment, a move that made what might seem “magic” to those outside a
particular cultural and sociological context look like the quite ordinary and mundane
manipulation of tools once we are privy to the knowledge and practices of insiders is
exposed.
Researching rhetoric and writing laboratories has the potential not only to attend
to individualized practices at a local level, but also to show how particularized practices
are laminated with cultural patterns shared across multiple individuals. Within these
spaces and moments of production, one way of seeing and understanding the
relationship between bodies and objects is to pay attention to the practices through
which those relationships are enacted. Theories of practice and enactment, rather than
focusing solely on elucidating individual human experience, typically look across a
cross-section of situated experience. Focusing on laboratories of production opens up
the potential to see where individualized practices intersect, where bodily movements
overlap and where they do not. This move shows where particular practices become
shared and generalized movements, trajectories in their own right enacted across
multiple individuals and instances.
For example, DeCerteau chooses to focus on the urban space of city streets as a
laboratory of production. Reading the city as a scene of production, DeCerteau
contrasts the “turns” and “detours” of walkers with the views from above that are
associated with maps or seeing an urban space from above. In DeCerteau!s terms,
20

production is an inevitable response to life in this kind of space, which has its own
structure against which active bodies work. Malea Powell (2008) has enacted a similar
idea in the context of rhetoric theory, showing how the archive as lived space not only
shapes and constrains the practices that take place within in, but also is shaped by the
choices and activities that when into its making, even as it denies its own temporality
and its own connection to other spaces, other times. From this, we can learn that
laboratories of production are not empty containers filled by practices within them, but
rather shape, as they are shaped by, the practices of bodies within them.

4) Listening to stories of bodily use and routine
Stories of bodily use and routine can further help uncover the cultural narratives
that shape moments of production, as well as personal narratives that point to influential
objects. This step of the heuristic sets it apart from many other methodological
frameworks because it conceives of individual accounts of practice as important not only
for their “standpoint” or “perspective” nor because they represent truth, but because
accounts are understood to be contextualized performances in which individuals enact
temporary commitments based on the situation at hand.
Personal stories are contextualized performances that enact how particular
bodies are committed to spaces, times, technologies, and narratives in particular times
and spaces. Anzaldúa!s work demonstrates how narratives of production built from
personal experience can teach about the specifics of bodies and their spatial, relational,
and time commitments: they exhibit a perceptual location and multiple levels of
21

intentionality. Narratives of situated bodily experience as Moraga and Anzaldúa explain,
“explore the contradictions of experience and … respond to the exigencies created by
their tensions and confluences” (23). Anzaldúa has openly critiqued postmodernist
theories that posit that individuals cannot write and speak their experience, but rather
are more akin to textual conduits playing out the inevitabilities of that which has
constructed them. For Anzaldúa, this is “a new form of domination, another way of
reinstating the old practice of appropriating the work of the “outsider” by saying that
writers like me are “being written through by my cultural matrix” and only they—the
imperial critics—can deconstruct and own my meaning” (272).
Theorists in the flesh remind us that stories that people tell change over time and
that people do not always “tell the truth,” particularly to researchers whom they may
associate with particular objects and points of view. Importantly, while social
relationships, individual geographies, and past experiences become “objects” that are
enacted in accounts in these embodied theories, those objects are not assumed to be
static. Rather, experiences and the interpretation of those experiences change over
time, as Moya illustrates through a close reading of the change over time in Moraga!s
understanding of her own positionality as a light-skinned person of Mexican descent.
This act of interpreting and re-interpreting the relationships between self and the objects
of life is key to a theory in the flesh as distinct from other feminist standpoint theories
(see Harding, 1991). Moya draws a distinction, in particular, between theories that
“seem to imply a self-evident relationship among social location, knowledge, and
identity” and that of a theory of the flesh which “explicitly posits that relationship as
22

theoretically mediated through the interpretation of experience” (50). Working from this
idea, the interpretation of one!s own embodied experience becomes an object—an
active and agentive object—that can be understood to influence production.
Because the accounts of theories in the flesh are first person accounts,
individuals are, furthermore, assumed to stand in the best position from which to locate
their own stories. As collections, third-wave feminist works like This Bridge Called my

Back and Making Face, Making Soul amass stories that explode easy categorization or
identification, and Moraga explains that “the theme echoing throughout most of these
stories is our refusal of the easy explanation to the conditions we live in,” and the move
by contrast but to explore the contradictions of experience and respond to exigencies
created by their tensions and confluences (23).

The four steps of the heuristic that I have described in the previous section are
designed to treat bodies as active within scenes of production. By paying attention to
the activity of bodies, rhetoric researchers gain can access to practice as it is enacted,
as well as to the objects and technologies that are influential in scenes of production.
The heuristic further works to dialogue people!s activity with their own understandings of
that activity as a means to understand how it works in their lives. This heuristic helps
rhetoricians create accounts of the meaning in bodies as they produce rhetoric and
writing in interaction with different kinds of objects. Even if individuals are not the sole
locus of rhetorical power, meaning is held and exhibited in bodies and paying attention
to enacted rhetorical interactions and to stories about those interactions across a
23

rhetorical scene can lead to a better understanding of internalized knowledge of
individual and culture. The accounts of active bodies lead us to the things, objects,
places (Bachelard, 1984), movements (Reynolds, 2004; Monberg, 2009), and practices
through which meaning is made. Notably, this heuristic does not treat bodies as static
texts to be read and interpreted, but rather attempts to give multiple dimensions of the
meaning held in active bodies through attention to enacted practices and the accounts
of those practices. The result of looking across individuals in scenes of production is a
situated account of practice, a unit that I argue can be a powerful meaning-making tool
for rhetoricians.

The Outcome of a Heuristic For Embodied Rhetoric: The Situated Account of
Practice
Working through the steps of the heuristic I have described in this chapter can
aid in the production of theoretically-informed, highly descriptive means of articulating
embodied rhetoric. I refer to the narratives produced by this process as “situated
accounts,” agentive objects that provide a means to portray and transmit situated
meaning, where, in actor-network theory terminology, agents are not simplified. As
Latour states, “To be accounted for, objects have to enter into accounts. If no trace is
produced, they offer no information to the observer and will have no visible effect on
other agents. They remain silent and are no longer actors: they remain, literally,
unaccountable” (79). Situated accounts are important for building concrete portraits of
how rhetoric and writing work in people!s lives. They do not only provide “perspectives”
24

but also tell what people do in very concrete terms: the way that materials are moved
from one place to the other, the places people go, and how they spend their time.
Situated accounts work from the understanding that different groups and stakeholders
construct objects differently—that reality is indeed multiple (Mol, 2003). Situated
accounts are also not new in rhetoric theory: they connect to present articulated
concerns of theorists like Gloria Anzaldúa.

An Example Situated Account From Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: Gloria
Anzaldúa
Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands (1999) has become a canonical work in rhetorical
studies, anthologized in Bizzell and Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition as well as in
numerous composition collections. In their introduction to included excerpts of

Borderlands, Bizzell and Herzberg (2001) situate Anzaldúa's contribution to rhetoric as
built primarily through her mixing of languages and discourses, concluding, “Anzaldúa
has shown that one can do such switching and mixing while communicating very
powerfully” (1584). Although Anzaldúa!s work often has been contextualized within
Rhetoric and Composition's debates about linguistic practices in discourse communities,
a larger vision operates within her textual corpus. In her interview with Andrea Lunsford,
Anzaldúa highlighted that she intended to break from traditional notions of meaning
making prevalent both in the academy and in the public/social imaginary. She refers to
norms of writing that link invention and delivery most closely with the rules of logical
argumentation (253). Tracing these “rules” back to Greco-Roman argumentation,
25

Anzaldúa insists that she was “trying to present another way of ordering and
composing, another rhetoric” (253).
I suggest Anzaldúa!s “new” rhetoric was built on the situated account of
embodied practice.

12

She described it as intimately tied to and constantly emerging

from her own raced, sexed, classed and actively changing, learning, and perceiving
body. She describes her own writing as coming from her body as a center of confluence
where emotions, histories, geographical locations, and cultural/spiritual identities
intersect. Anzaldúa!s body of work presents multiple examples of the situated account,
showing production within the context of the active body situated in time, space, and
culture and emphasizing that telling these stories of production is a powerful act of
agency. Anzaldúa narrates the local experience of creating meaning from her situated
and active body, from history and exigence that is located in the experience of living and
embodied in the flesh and locations of life.
Making and remaking the body is one of the central metaphors that Anzaldúa
articulates to explain her own creative processes. In “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together,”
Anzaldúa develops the circular concept of writing and meaning making as reassembling
a body through a process of invoking one!s own body. However, Anzaldúa!s acts of
embodied accounting are evident in the way she documents two bodily “states,” which
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12

Anzaldúa did not enacted a heuristic similar to the one I describe in this chapter;
however, I see her texts as articulating many of the same commitments that could
emerge from the heuristic I describe in this chapter. Similarly, Dolmage (2009) has
recently outlined how the malleability of identity associated with Anzaldúa!s conception
of mestiza consciousness stands as a direct challenge to conceptions of rhetoric that
believes “the flesh is capable only of deception” (4).
26

are recurring themes across her body of work. The Coatlicue and Shamanic states
13

contribute in different ways to Anzaldúa!s process of making , but they have in
common that they work to access and articulate the memories written onto and held
within the body, which Anzaldúa has described as “carved and tattooed” onto each of us
by “the sharp needles of experience” (xv). Anzaldúa spends much time working to
explicate the bodily practices of production, detailing the mundane practices of her
productive moments. In her accounting of the Coatlicue and Shamanic states, Anzaldúa
demonstrates two tangible ways in which her own body is connected to her processes
of meaning making.
The Coatlicue state Anzaldúa describes in Borderlands/La Frontera is an act of
decolonization that involves stepping outside of oneself in order to understand, reflect
on, and built from one!s own experience. Coatlicue or “Serpent Skirt,! was the Aztec
creator goddess who contained within her body the dualities of the universe and of
experience: “male and female, light and dark, life and death” (54). In the Coatlicue state,
Anzaldúa enters another realm of perspective in order to see her own body and her own
experience as objectified, as other. Anzaldúa!s dominant metaphor of the Coatlicue
stage is of looking into a mirror from different perspectives, acknowledging the
multiplicity of faces that look back, and understanding what ideologies by which they are
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13

Anzaldúa does not explicitly link the Coatlicue and Shamanic states in
Borderlands/La Frontera as part of a joint project of making, but works such as “Putting
Coyolxauhqui Together”: A Creative Process,” as well an unfinished and unpublished
manuscript, indicate that theorizing composing as a bodily process of putting things
together was central to the work she intended to complete before her death.
!
27

shaped. The experience of enacting the Coatlicue state is described in terms that
accentuate the effects on the body; she says that she is often “Sweating, with a
headache, unwilling to communicate, frightened by sudden noises, estoy asustada”
(70). Likewise, the culmination of this state is described as orgasmic: an erotic whirlwind
of knowledge, release, and activity.
In the Shamanic state, Anzaldúa describes the act of creating stories and images
through “trance,” drawing from the body (91). For Anzaldúa, the Shamanic state
connects making to indigenous tradition that does not separate spirit, emotion, and
body. During this state, she closes herself off to outside sensory influence in order to
interact fully with images within her. Describing this process, she writes “I plug up my
ears with wax, put on my black cloth eye-sash, lie horizontal and unmoving, in a state
between sleeping and waking” (92). She likewise describes the Shamanic state in the
interview with Lunsford, stating “I have to get into this heightened state which I access
sometimes by being very quiet and doing some breathing, or by some little meditation,
or by burning some incense, or by walking along the beach, or whatever gets me in
there. I get all psyched up, and then I do the writing” (257). The intense connection
between the body, emotions, and knowing what account to give make it necessary to
detach physically at points so that different perspectives might be attained.
Anzaldúa in the “states” of Borderlands/La Frontera highlights the role that her
“flesh” and body plays in her productive act by emphasizing bodily rituals of creation that
connect intellect to spirit, emotion, and indigenous history, that provide ways to make
the body remember, and that connect multiple perspectives and multiple bodies. While
28

she treats the body as a material object in her descriptions of the “states,” she also
highlights that her body is not anybody. Her accounts, I argue, are not designed to be
descriptive of all writing experiences or all bodily writing practice—we would not expect
the practices that correspond to what Anzaldúa describes as the Shamanic state to be
14

common for every writer.

Instead they are the highly situated narratives that deeply

describe the mundane nature of strategic decolonizing writing acts. Thus, Anzaldúa!s
descriptions highlight the ways in which Individual bodies are responsive in particular
ways because of the histories, myths, and even trauma attached to them. Her work
establishes concrete relationships between these objects and links them to a body:
between histories or spiritual myths and present emotions, feelings, familiar images,
and impulses to tell. Because bodies are both materially connected to individuals!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
14

All theory built from experience will encounter problems of generalizability. It is
problematic to draw from the experiences of one or a few and, in turn, to assume a
singular human experience and outlook. Continental phenomenologists like Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, for instance, employed a methodology that worked in opposition to more
traditional objective scientific method in order to describe some of the influences on
behavior and perception that often went unnoticed when methods took into account only
a strictly “natural” or “cultural” approach to explanation, or in his terms, an
“intellectualist” or “mechanistic approach. In particular, Merleau-Ponty!s conception of
the active body as the interface between human beings and things in the world is useful
for concepts of production. The result of continental phenomenological reflection,
however, is that accounts of production tend to be understood as universal, ironically
writing out difference between experiences or accounting for the fact that others have
different kinds of experiences and interpretations of them. By contrast, the embodied
accounts that are associated with theory in the flesh never make claims to universality,
but interestingly, they are often taken and used as such. Thus, Anzaldúa!s mestiza
consciousness or borderland becomes something that can be taught as a universal
strategy in composition classrooms. Furthermore, these accounts have typically been
valued in terms of the “standpoints” that they come to represent. In a move of
synecdoche, accounts like that of Anzaldúa and Moraga tend to be objectified, come to
represent “the” Chicana perspective that allows them to be tokenized.
29

experiences and their cultures, seeing the body as a place that holds and creates
meaning has implications for what makes meaning meaningful.

Conclusion: Questions and Challenges for Embodied Rhetoric
In this chapter, I have sketched a framework for researching embodied rhetoric in
a way that is socially and materially situated, focusing on practices in the spaces and
times of production. Emerging from this heuristic, I argue, can be a new productive unit
for rhetoricians: the situated account, which has precedent in Gloria Anzaldúa rhetorical
theory. There are key differences, however, between narrating one!s own experience of
making as connected with the body and working to narrate the experience of others
from the perspective of a researcher. In the following chapter, I describe how I enacted
this research framework in order to theorize from the bodily practices of writers in a local
rhetorical scene: an independent coffeehouse called the Gone Wired Café. As I draw
closer to the situated accounts of writers within the café, I encountered challenges
related to uncovering the cultural influence and systems of rhetoric embedded in
individuals! activity. The narratives that comprise the remainder of this dissertation come
from the thinking that this heuristic provoked combined with the challenges of employing
it in a real scene.
.

30

Chapter 2
Entering a Scene of Embodied Practice: The Coffee Shop as Laboratory
This chapter examines how a framework for the study of embodied rhetoric can
be enacted to understand a particular rhetorical scene. Here, I introduce the
coffeehouse as a historical and contemporary laboratory for rhetoric and writing
production. Contextualizing the coffeehouse as a rhetorical scene I, first, articulate a set
of complex stories connected to the historical coffeehouse, relating the space to an
idealized sociality associated with print culture, community, and dialogue. Next, I move
to show how an embodied approach to the space as a laboratory of rhetoric and writing
helps move beyond historical and contemporary ideals in order to revisualize the space
based on the embodied practices, movements, habits, and routines of current users
within it.
In order to enact this embodied approach, I introduce one instantiation of the
contemporary coffeehouse, the Gone Wired Café, describing its unique spatial and
social location in Lansing, Michigan. Finally, I describe the methods used within this
study to enact the embodied framework in Gone Wired, including participant observation
and videotaped writing sessions to access places and moments of bodily action, as well
as interviews to collect individuals! stories of use and routine. This chapter sets the
scene for the following chapters by suggesting that an embodied approach to the
coffeehouse as a rhetorical scene leads to a radically different understanding of the
space as assembling multiple activities and motivations while structuring the work of
those who use it.
31

The Coffeehouse and Its Social and Cultural Associations: Historical ldeals of
Sociability
Sullivan and Porter (1997) critique the ways in which different Rhetoric and
Composition and Professional Writing subfields tend to limit themselves to particular
locations for research. They argue that computers and composition research tends to
focus on the physical computer classroom, while professional writing studies adhere to
the workplace.

15

Sullivan and Porter follow up their critique by suggesting, "thoughtful

approaches to writing technologies should extend to all the sites where technology is
used in the production of writing" (95). This is a tall order, but one that I take up in the
following section as I consider the coffee shop as a potential laboratory for rhetoric and
writing practice.
The coffee shop is interesting as a scene of rhetoric and writing practice because
coffeehouses are establishments that people typically enter intentionally. Not everyone
writes in a coffee shop, but those who do generally enter because of their own
motivations and preferences. This move in itself means that choosing to write in the
coffee shop is a rhetorical choice, one that has strategy, as well as cultural and social
implications. Furthermore, the social and cultural implications of a move to write in a
coffeehouse are complex because of the history of often-conflicting narratives about the
space, which have played out in scholarship and the public imaginary. The coffeehouse
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15

Jeff Rice (2009) has recently expressed a similar concern arguing that we conceive of
meaningful space primarily through the lens of our experience as academics.
32

has often existed as a theoretical symbol, in such a way that has made it difficult to
visualize how it structures current practice and is structured by the practices of its users.
For many theorists and historians, coffeehouses signify the material embodiment
of an idealized sociality that combines the best of print culture, orality, and
public/community dialogue (see Eagleton, 14-15).

16

Associated with the rise of print

journalism, the birth of literary criticism, and the developing agency and self-fashioning
of a late seventeenth and eighteenth-century middle class, the coffeehouse is at the
very least a loaded space in terms of cultural associations (see Stallybrass and White,
99). Most famously, Jurgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public

Sphere points to the coffeehouse alongside the salon and other shared community
establishments as foundational to a newly developing late seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury British public, in which private individuals began to act not individually but
together in ways that radically shifted the possibilities for action.

17

The coffeehouse of

Habermas!s public sphere theory takes on this important status largely because of two
activities that hold unique relationships to communications media: first, the
dissemination and sharing of original print materials, and, second, the rational/critical
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16

For Eagleton, it was the act of speaking in the coffeehouse that was important and in
itself unruly: "What is spoken or written, within this rational space, pays due deference
to the niceties of class and rank; but the speech act itself, the enonciation as opposed to
the enonce, figures in its very form an equality, autonomy and reciprocity at odds with its
class-bound content" (14-15). It is the unruly act, always threatening to break down the
hierachies of power that attempt to contain it

17

Eagleton (1984) would later argue in The Function of Criticism that the coffee shop
provided a space that facilitated a transition from an atomized society of private
individuals to a “relatively cohesive body whose deliberations may assume the form of a
powerful political force" (9).
33

discussion central to that dissemination and the act of meeting together publicly.
Habermas thus describes coffeehouses as “centers of criticism—literary at first, then
also political” populated and enacted by a new “parity of the educated” (32). Importantly,
the coffeehouse was viewed as beyond government control, a place where people could
meet strategically and intentionally as a result of their own motivations and desires.
The idea of the coffee shop as a space of idealized sociality remains. Sociologist
Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place (1989), for instance, characterizes the coffee
shop as a “third place” where people escape home and work in favor of the experience
of pleasure through conversation and interaction with others. However, scholars have
long troubled the idea that the historical coffeehouse existed separate from work and
political spheres, as well as the idea that the coffeehouse was an uncontrolled
transgressive and progressive space. Stallybrass and White noted that, "the coffeehouses had a habit of metamorphosing into professional or business institutions," (99)
and Markman Ellis describes the raucous meetings and interactions of tradesmen that
took place across the thousands of coffeehouses in eighteenth century London.
Stallybrass and White also suggest that it was an enforced politeness that structured the
“productive leisure” that not only made the coffeehouse a more suitable alternative to
taverns and alehouses but also that established it as "an important instrument in the
regulation of the body, manners, and morals of its clientele in the public sphere" (96-98).
Brian Cowan has further argued that coffeehouses were perhaps more often spaces for
control and the attempted manipulation of manners and social mores, than for

34

uncontrolled rational dialogue (see pg. 351).

18

Finally, a host of scholars have pointed

to the exclusive nature of the public typically associated with the historical coffee shop,
which generally does not include women or people of color. While this scholarship
critiques the theoretical associations of the coffeehouse as a civic ideal, it does little to
reflect on contemporary use of the space, or to analyze how the narratives attached to
the space affect perceptions of the space in the present, a subject that I cover in the
following section as I introduce the contemporary coffeehouse and its relationship to the
historical ideal.

The Contemporary Coffeehouse as Technologically Mediated Space and
Lingering Effects of a Historical Ideal
Major changes in technology use and the integration of new media resources like
Wi-Fi have impacted the café space, what it represents, whom it includes, and whom it
excludes. Gupta (2004) and Hampton and Gupta (2008) find that mobile digital
technologies and networks are key to the use and activity of the contemporary
coffeehouse, demonstrating that dwellers of four urban coffeehouses often draw on the
space almost solely for Wi-Fi use and often refuse to take advantage of other resources
in the cafe. The use of mobile technologies and the solitary work of individuals Gupta
and Hampton describe combine to form a strong challenge to the idea that rational
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
18

Cowan centers his analysis of the relationship between the coffeehouse and the
attempt to enforce codes of politeness to the influence of Addison and Steele and their
journals,The Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian.
!
35

dialogue and print dissemination are inherent to the contemporary coffeehouse. These
changes in the central associations of the coffee shop, for many contemporary scholars,
threaten historical ideals of the coffee shop as a spatial story associated with particular
discursive media and embodied in particular kinds of face-to-face mediated activities
(rational and critical discussion on literary and political topics).
For instance, recent scholarship often associates the increasing association of
coffeehouse space with writing technologies as linked to the disappearance of civic
engagement and face-to-face communication and an accompanying “erosion of social
connectedness” (Putnam, 2001). Markman Ellis contrasts the idealized sociability of the
historical coffee shop with contemporary coffeehouse use, which he describes as
“Starbucks sociability.” For Ellis, Starbucks sociability reverses the historical
coffeehouse!s typical associations, highlighting contemporary users as a “tranquil even
docile, crowd of consumers” who engage in a sociability that “is not collective and public
but is rather about being alone together, about fragmenting public discourse into nonorganized entities, about consuming rather than debating" (n.p.). Kazys Varnelis and
Anne Friedberg likewise describe the contemporary coffee shop with Starbucks as their
exemplar: “a generic space of anonymity, its caffeinated habitués lost in the crowd” (20).
Although they are less indicting of this move than Ellis, Varnelis and Friedberg see the
contemporary coffee shop as a location in which people come not to talk to one another,
but to inhabit a space where “the bodily presence of the other café goers easing the
disconnect with the local that the network creates” (20).

36

Despite the tendency to make large-scale cultural claims about the practices of
contemporary cafegoers, Gupta suggests that use of coffeehouse space is far from
homogenous. Gupta identifies two basic user profiles of people that tend to inhabit
coffeehouse spaces as Wi-Fi users: "true mobiles" and “socializers” (or “placemakers”
as she and Hampton describe them in their 2008 follow-up publication from the same
study). True mobiles for Gupta are task-based users of coffee shop space, who enter
the cafe to do other things "such as reading or working at their computers" (57). These
kinds of users typically are not in the café to socialize, and "their main activities are
usually watching other people, maintaining their existing social ties through the Internet,
and getting work done" (68). “Socializers” or “placemakers,” by contrast, "come to the
coffee-shop to 'hang-out,' do something and possibly nothing in particular to fill or kill
time" (58). As Hampton and Gupta describe it, "The primary activity of placemakers was
'not work', rather it was interactions with co-present social ties, serendipitous exchanges
and availability for interactions with strangers" (844).

19

Notably, because Hampton and

Gupta frame their discussion within the context of whether Wi-Fi supports community
building or a sort of public privatism often associated with mobile phone use, the
researchers tend to value the activity of the “placemakers” or “socializers” more than
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19

Gupta and Howard and Gupta's two user categories share marked similarties to the
three user types described in Anne Sofie Laegran and James Stewart's (2003) article
detailing the use of cybercafes. Laegran and Stewart identify types of users as
extenders, who primarly use the cafe space to "keep in touch with people and places"
(371); players, who often need the technology that the cafe provides to use in online
gaming and other entertainment; and socializers, (373) who use the café to hang out.
!
37

they do the “true mobiles,” associating them with the extension of the historical and
idealized sociability of the eighteenth century English coffeehouse.

Differences in an Embodied Approach to the Coffeehouse
Amongst the work theorizing the importance of the historical English coffeehouse or
lamenting the potential of the contemporary coffeehouse for civic activity, the
contemporary coffee shop as an embodied space has been lost to some extent. Even
studies that have attempted to describe current use of coffeehouse space have done so
with attention to idealized civic use in ways that downplay the texture of current practice
and potentially disregard important transformations of the space as it is currently lived.
An embodied approach, by contrast, has the potential to take into account the historical
and contemporary idealizations of the space, but to read those as influential material
objects that exist alongside other motivations and meanings that the space holds.
Viewed as such, to use DeCerteau!s language, these narratives can be seen as
important spatial stories that influence current use, but that are not the only kinds of
meaning associated with the space (102). From an embodied perspective, these stories
must be put into dialogue not only with more particularized stories from actual people
about their use and routine, but also with the practices that form the activity of the
space. To understand the coffee shop embodied does not mean ignoring the historical
connections of the coffee shop to the civic, to rational debate, or to print culture.
However, it does mean seeing these narratives as one kind of actor among others
contributing to the current meaning of the space and to what active bodies do within it.
38

As laboratories for rhetoric and writing, I argue that contemporary coffeehouses
are phenomenologically more complex than failures of historical ideals. Alongside home
and workplace offices, they are places people go to do rhetoric and writing activity using
a range of technologies and drawing on a number of motivations. I argue that the
coffeehouse does not fit neatly into domains of activity that are common within the
contemporary scholarship, or within Rhetoric and Composition studies. Though civic
engagement and public conversation occur in the coffee shop, it is not merely a civic
space. Though academic work certainly happens there, it is not a classroom. Though
professional writing takes place there, for its patrons, it is neither a corporation, nor an
organization that employs them. While members of the public use it for writing, it is not
exactly a public space: it is in very real ways a commercial institution trying to survive in
a depressed economic climate. And it is not "home," which in many literacy studies
becomes the trope of in-group, family communication and language related to cultural,
racial, and ethnic heritage. In terms of domain, it exists in a no-man's land that blurs
typical categorizations.

20

This view of the coffee shop has emerged for me over the past

two years of enacting an embodied rhetorical approach within one coffeehouse in
Lansing, Michigan. In the following section, I describe the coffeehouse that I entered,
articulating it as a unique rhetorical scene that structures and is structured by the
rhetorical activity of the patrons who enter the space and do rhetoric and writing there.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20

This no-man's land extends to another one of the challenges that Sullivan and Porter
raise--that of disciplinary tension. The choice of a research site that does not easily
locate itself in the domain of any of Rhetoric and Writings' fields means just that: that a
study of the space is not easily locatable.
39

The Site in Particular: Gone Wired as a Place Among Others
The Gone Wired Cafe is an independent coffee shop in Lansing, Michigan.
Maybe the best way to introduce the Gone Wired Cafe is to say it is no Starbucks: the
décor is not generic, and the coffee is local. Visually, Gone Wired is a pastiche. Walking
in the front door, you are immediately confronted with a combination of old and new,
natural and symbolic, and just plain strange. The right-side wall on the bottom floor is a
mural of a lush green tropic, with a line of mountains and one erupting volcano behind it.
Sitting in front of this mural is a burgundy, cream, and green-tiled fountain with no water
in it. Instead, a metal sculpture, green from aging, sits in the fountain!s reservoir.
There!s a foosball table in front of all of this, amongst the two or three round tables
where large groups often gather to work. Against the left side of the wall is a glass
cabinet counter, a remnant from the building!s former life as an outdoor sporting goods
shop. However, instead of people behind the counter who might be ready to show off
fishing flies or tent stakes, there is a collection of stuff that just doesn!t seem to belong:
a box fan, an umbrella holder, leftover shelving, a lone detached computer monitor.
Sometimes people bring in their bikes and leave them propped up against this unused
countertop and storage area.
Spatially, Gone Wired is complex, and it is huge by Lansing coffee shop
standards. While the surface level adornments of Gone Wired are something to behold,
there are clear divisions of space. Gone Wired has multiple zones that are set up
differently and which lend themselves toward different kinds of activity. The café has an
40

upper and lower floor. The café!s bottom floor houses a coffee bar and kitchen along
with three seating zones: a semi-private room in the back, a front area with tables, and a
zone along the side wall with booths and tables. The semi-private space is often
reserved for different kinds of group and community functions. For example, during one
of my observations, the room was being used for a meeting of a local non-profit group
advocating for medical marijuana. The front area with tables was a frequent spot for
smaller community and working groups. For example, during an observation time, a
non-profit group met to discuss strategies for organizing volunteers, and a support
group met for people with chronic illness. Along the side wall on the bottom floor is a
couch where I often observed individuals sitting with coffee or food without appearing to
have other reasons for spending time in the café. But the rest of the front section and
tables along the side wall were typically populated by individuals or small groups of
people working with laptop computers and other digital technologies.
The coffeehouse also has an upper level, pictured at the right in Figure 1, which
extends like a loft to overlook the bottom floor of the building and contains two rows of
back-to-back booth seating along the length of the building. Most often the space is
populated with people alone with technologies and often using social media extensively,
while focused on their computers. The upstairs of Gone Wired tends to become a place
where individuals on laptops, many of them students, congregate. A little like a
graveyard at night, the light is low, and the screens of laptops look like tombstones
standing up one after another in rows from the booths. People are still and it is quiet.
Faces seen over the top of laptops glow from the bright light of the screens in front of
41

them. On given a day, Individuals working upstairs on singular tasks are juxtaposed
against a few small group meetings that are more “task-based” or “issue-based”: groups
working together to get things done and then leave.

Figure 1. Gone Wired as seen from upstairs. For interpretation of the
references to color in this and all other figures, the reader is referred to
the electronic version of this dissertation.
Temporally, Gone Wired is also a different place depending on the time of day,
week, month, semester, and year. During the course of any given day, the space
changes. In the mornings, Gone Wired is serene. People tend to sit alone. As the day
wears on, things change dramatically. Around 5 or 6 PM, Gone Wired becomes more of
a social, hang-out space, and you can hear people calling their friends asking to meet
42

up. In addition, because it is open until midnight on some nights, after 10 PM Gone
Wired becomes a place where people sit and work for a while before moving on to more
typical late night meeting spaces: local bars, friends' houses, and so forth. Gone Wired
is also a dramatically different place in September, for example, than it is in December.
During final exam periods at Michigan State University, Cooley Law School, and
Lansing Community College, Gone Wired is frantic and it is often too busy to find an
available seat or table. During the summer, the café is not air-conditioned and working
upstairs often means working up a sweat.

A Plan for Seeing Embodied Rhetoric and Writing Practice in Gone Wired
In Chapter 1, I introduced a framework for conceptualizing and researching embodied
practice. This framework included a generalized set of activities designed to see rhetoric
and writing differently, which included understanding the rhetorical intentionality of
bodies, situating the bodies among material actors, accessing scenes of bodily practice,
and listening to stories of use and routine. However, in order to enact this framework as
a way of seeing a large, diverse, and complex space, I translated the framework as a
methodology into a set of methods. Thus, in order to access embodied rhetoric and
writing practices, I entered Gone Wired Café with three different methods of analysis
focused on use: participant observation, videotaped work sessions, and interviews with
21

users.

The first of these methods, participant observation, focused on the café at

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
21

!This research protocol was approved by a Human Subjects review board at Michigan
State University and by the café owners.
43

large, helped me to get a feel for the diversity of activity across the space, and pointed
me toward individuals with whom I would later interact more closely. The second two
methods were focused on individuals who use the café space strategically for rhetoric
22

and writing activity.

As I detail the particulars of how I entered Gone Wired as a time/space, I attempt
to answer Sullivan and Porter!s call to articulate our positions and "'Fess up" to the
23

tensions, problems, and challenges of research as practice (69).

Because these

methods focused on seeing use of the café for rhetoric and writing activity, there are
many things about the café that appear as gaps in my study. For example, due to the
scope of this project, I chose not to interview cafe employees or owners, and so my take
on the design of the space does not reflect any sense of whether the arrangements of
objects and the bodily activity that are structured by the space were intentional or
strategic on the part of the owners. My study will not characterize every kind of activity
happening in the space, but focuses on what I have learned as an observer of the space
as a whole, as well as from the individuals who shared their routines and stories with
me. I also made the decision to approach people in the café who were using it primarily
for writing. In Chapter 1 I suggest that we might read a broad range of bodily practices
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
22

I identified a strategic use of the cafe by noting patterns of use and approaching
people who were in the cafe space repeatedly and for rhetoric and writing purposes.

23

In particular, Sullivan and Porter point to four areas of tension that deserve attention
in research write-ups: 1) potential disciplinary tensions, 2) tensions in the environment,
3) tensions between ideal methods and realizable possibilities, and 4) tensions between
researchers and participants.
44

as rhetorical, at the same time that rhetoric and writing researchers might understand
practices typically associated with rhetoric and writing to be bodily practices. Following
this premise, I might have usefully followed a broader range of activity the café (e.g.,
meeting friends, meeting for work). However, the focus on writing allowed me to place a
manageable boundary around the study, as well as to focus on an area of activity in the
coffeehouse that has often escaped study. Notably, this focus on writing has likely
pushed the study in the direction of work, rather that community engagement, though
both clearly are present in Gone Wired.
Another tension with the write-up of this study is a difficulty in describing the
changing nature of the cafe over time. I previously alluded to small-scale changes of the
space influenced by use of the space or by nature, but there also were large-scale
changes put into place by the café owners as well. The cafe was a different place from
the time I began visiting there in 2006 to the time I did focused data collection in 2009
and then to the time I was writing about the research in 2010 or filing the dissertation in
2011. Some changes were small. As Kim notes in her interview, a door and internal
walkway to the neighboring independent bookstore was added over the course of my
time in the café. The cafe added a full food menu at some point, and then revised the
full food menu and took away many of its selections later. During the course of my time
at Gone Wired, hours were likewise sometimes extended and sometimes reduced, and
sometimes maintained “on the fly” without corresponding to listed hours. Some changes
were big, and lore about the space constantly leads to rumors about what changes are
in store for the café in the future, particularly in the face of the difficult economic climate
45

in Michigan. Even to the moment I am writing this, I have had two discussions within the
past week with people from about big changes in the cafe's future. However, in this
dissertation I only speak of these kinds of changes as lore that surrounds the café as a
space used for rhetoric and writing work.

Fieldnotes and Participant Observation
I have done writing work at Gone Wired Café since I moved to Michigan in 2006, using it
more frequently as a workspace at particular times of my life (e.g., during my
comprehensive exams, during coursework, during times my partner is away for work)
than others.

24

In order to attempt to learn from others! use of the space, I took detailed

field notes for six weeks in the café during the fall of 2009. During this time, I was in
Gone Wired 6 days a week for 2 hours at a time, and I varied my observing hours to
cover different times of day throughout the week. I also took the same detailed field
notes during several trips to Gone Wired after this six-week period.
Participant observation methods are poised to uncover practices that might exist
below the threshold of individuals! consciousness and also provide a way to look across
a broad scope of activity happening In space and time. However, such methods should
be situated clearly and carefully. Scholars such as Renato Rosaldo and James Clifford
have complicated ethnography!s “classic modes of analysis, which in their pure type rely
exclusively on a detached observer using a neutral language to study a unified world of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24

Strangely, I found that I could not write my dissertation in Gone Wired after spending
research time there. After using the space for analysis, I hardly ever used the space for
my own writing.
46

brute facts, no longer hold a monopoly on truth” (Rosaldo, xviii). Clifford, in particular,
has argued for shifting the understanding of where knowledge is made in ethnographic
studies from the moment of action and to the moment of writing, a move which calls
attention to the role of the researcher in structuring the written report of activity and
bringing his or her lenses and understandings to the site of research. According to
Clifford, “ethnography is, from beginning to end, enmeshed in writing. This writing
includes, minimally, a translation of experience into textual form. The process is
complicated by the action of multiple subjectivities and political constraints beyond the
control of the writer” (25). Thus, in my terms, the participant observers! written report is
always an account, a moment of writing of place that comes from a place. For Clifford,
participant observation methods work through a number of tropes that reduce the
complexity of the given situation in a way that makes them manageable and write-able,
so that instead of taking away a place, a researcher is able to take away a corpus of
text, and from that text is able to produce even more text, which through a process of
ongoing reduction, changes individuals to cultures (metonymy) and observations to
findings.
In light of this important insight, I offer my observations humbly as my own
accounts and I work to continually contextualize my observations of activity alongside
participants! own stories of use and routine. Furthermore, my participant observation
work is deliberate and theoretically informed by the embodied rhetorical framework I
describe in Chapter 1. Being mindful of some of the historical tropes through which
complex activity is reduced, I build on Rosaldo!s understanding that “[a]ll interpretations
47

are provisional; they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain
things and not others” (8). Through this chapter and through this dissertation, I attempt
to situate myself physically, virtually, and disciplinarily within the scene of this research.
When observing, I sat at a normal workspace in the cafe (changing that space
each day) with a Moleskine journal and a pen and wrote what I saw. My goal for these
notes was to begin to identify common uses of the time/space spent/constructed in the
cafe and to begin to note some general patterns of activity at different levels of scope
(e.g., within individual behavior, within use of the space overall, within use of particular
areas within the space). My decision to write field notes in a journal rather than directly
onto a word processing document was a conscious one. I removed myself from the
space of my computer screen so that I could concentrate more easily on the physical
space and the things going on around me. An important and routine part of my normal
coffee shop activity before beginning the study was spent factoring out that physical
space and honing myself into the screen in front of me. In order to get myself into a
different routine in which observation was central, I changed the primary technologies I
was using. However, because my normal routine of work writing and coffee shop writing
before the study did not include a pen and paper for long stretches of time, my body had
to adjust. I found during my collection of field notes that my hand was sore on the
second day from doing so much handwriting taking field notes about what was going on
in the coffee shop. I got the “pencil blister” on my middle finger by day four, something I
remembered both from when I was a kid and from when I took a lot of lecture notes on

48

college-lined notebooks during college. To make myself more a part of that space
meant changing my routine (and giving myself "print" blisters).
In my journal, I wrote about things like a consultant helping a local politician draft
a campaign speech, a lawyer talking a potential defendant through what would happen
in his court date and how he should respond, a group discussing access to medical
marijuana (I initially thought this one was a pyramid scheme), a nonprofit group writing
out a plan for recruiting volunteers for a nonprofit event, and a group of poets meeting
together to revise their work. Activities like those I just described were noteworthy
because they were unusual and interesting. The more constant (and often boring)
stream of rhetoric and writing activity was related to the steady group of individuals and
smaller groups of people who came in to work on writing tasks using laptop computers.
These writing tasks brought together things from people!s personal, work, and school
lives which was evident in the placement of textbooks on their café tables alongside
laptops with social media open on their screens. The people I observed brought
materials to the coffee shop that were important to them, created their own
individualized working spaces, and used these at their own discretion toward their goals,
motivations, and purposes. In the following section, I detail the methods I used to
understand this embodied writing activity at a closer level of scope.

49

Methods With Individual Participants
In order to understand the virtual and physical movements of writers at a more micro
25

level, I observed, videotaped, and interviewed four individuals
26.

the Cafe: Kim, Kathryn, Ed, and Dave

who work routinely at

In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I tell more detailed

stories about these four writers, their current spatial, temporal, and social media work
routines in Gone Wired and how they told me they developed those habits. At this point,
I briefly overview how I interacted with these writers as part of learning about embodied
rhetorical practices in this scene.
In terms of participants, my initial goal was to talk to a diverse group of people
doing cool things with rhetoric and writing. What I ended up gaining access to was
notably much more mundane, probably less cool, but probably more indicative of what
the everyday of writing is like for people who spend time in Gone Wired. This was a
lesson that changed my outlook on rhetoric and writing research. Almost all of the
participants I focused on were doing a composing task with language and text (one of
them incorporated images) and they all conceived of this kind of writing activity as
“work.” While I did see new media forms being made at Gone Wired during my
participant observation moments (e.g., work with Audacity, iMovie, gaming, comics),
these forms were extremely less frequent than people doing boring things on their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25

Initially, I hoped to include case study observations and interviews with people
working in groups. My observations indicated that groups writing together were often
more “task directed” than individuals. I intend for future developments of this work to
incorporate more people working together on shared tasks.

26

All names used are pseudonyms per IRB guidelines.
50

laptops. Likely, people work on desktops in spaces better equipped for these kinds of
projects, rather than attempting them on laptops, which in my experience are usually
bound to fail with multimedia projects. However, I also believe that the bulk of writing
27

with technologies happens in forms that are more boring

that we often like to think,

and this point is central to understanding embodied rhetorical practice.
As I!ll detail in Chapter 3, my participants are mostly students, and mostly
students who are around my age and in graduate and professional programs. Kim is a
Master!s student in a Rhetoric and Writing program. Kathryn is a PhD student in
Philosophy, and Ed is a joint JD/MBA student. This is probably a reflection of who I am
and of who was most approachable for me in the position I occupy in this community
and in this coffee shop. As my neighbors on the Eastside often remind me, there is
tension here between students and longer-term residents, as the neighborhood is slowly
becoming a land of student rentals, which is a relatively new phenomenon in this part of
town. This is also a reflection of the population at Gone Wired, where students are the
most consistent user group in terms of using the space in the same ways habitually and
repeatedly, though certainly not the only, as the presence of my fourth participant, Dave,
the professional writer and self-described dad blogger, shows.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27

Michael Wojcik and Jeff Grabill remind me of why paying attention to the boring is
important.
51

1. Videotaped observations of hour-long work sessions
My first interaction with individual participants included a videotaped observation
of one hour of a work session they conducted at the café. I chose to videotape work
sessions rather than relying on video screen captures (VSC) for two main reasons. First,
I was concerned that VSC would be too invasive in this circumstance, since these
participants were people I contacted randomly during their structured work time in a
semi-public space, and VSC involves either installing software on a participant!s
computer or asking them to use a computer that is not theirs. Second, VSC would not
have allowed me to see simultaneous manipulation of desk space and of screen space,
which seemed crucial to me in attempting to reconcile the physical and virtual
movements of bodies. A limitation of this method was that I was not able to closely
follow an entire writing task during its invention, production, and dissemination stages.
For each work session I observed and videotaped, I opted to disturb the routine of the
writers as little as possible and to situate my camera to catch what they seemed willing
28

to show me.

For this reason, there is some variation in my work session videos and

observations. For three of the writers (Kim, Ed, and Dave), it made the most sense to
position my camera behind the workers in order to be able to see the minute details of
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28

!Because people do manage time and space so complexly, entering a crafted
workspace is difficult. People often naturally position themselves so that their computer
screens are not readily visible to others, and so I confronted the issue of whether or not
to step inside that space, to ask them to change the angle of their screen. I also dealt
carefully with the question of when it was right to approach people working in a public
space and ask for their participation in research.
!
52

their screens, as well as the bodily movements within the space of the desk. In the case
of Kathryn, the position in which she sat (with her back to the wall and her laptop in front
of her) meant that I was unable to position the camera to capture a view of her computer
screen. At first I was disappointed and worried that I would miss many virtual
movements in Kathryn!s work session, but found that much was happening at the level
of her desk/table and physical movement and during her interview she reflected on her
onscreen activity.
After collecting the videotaped work sessions, I categorized writers! moment-bymoment activity by coding for the central mediating artifacts that held participants!
attention during the unfolding of the work session (Slattery, 2007). In order to categorize
the sessions in this way, I transcribed the videotaped work sessions, making textualized
accounts of the moment-by-moment movements in writing for research and search, and
visualization purposes. As Clifford would remind us, this act puts my reading on their
texts, and a number of actors get factored out through this process.
One surprising part of my study was that one participant was extremely
interested in my analysis in a way that I had not foreseen. Ed was fascinated by
portraits of his own work process. When I showed him a visualization of the primary
objects he interacted with during his hour-long session, his first question to me was,
“Can I put this on Facebook?” I was amused by this, and even more surprised when he
contacted me a few days later to volunteer to be observed for a second session during
his last few days as a law and MBA student. He was interested, for himself, in how his
writing work habits were different during “crunch time” (a popular temporal/spatial story
53

participants relied on and which I will describe in Chapter 4) from during a more leisurely
work period.

29

Unfortunately, I was not able to conduct this final observation because

Ed decided Gone Wired was too busy to be a feasible workspace for him during this
moment when he had to get things accomplished, and he opted to complete his end-ofsemester work at a local twenty-four-hour diner instead.

2. Interviews with Participants
After analyzing the work session tapes, I scheduled an interview with each participant to
discuss his or her work session, as well as to gather their stories about why they use
the coffee shop space for writing. These interviews were conducted in Gone Wired,
further connecting the scene of their accounts to the scene of practice. This was
interesting because participants often repeated habits they exhibited during work
sessions during this interview time. For example, Dave repeatedly looked down at his
computer while we talked in order to check his Twitter and email accounts. Likewise,
Kathryn and Ed both interacted with friends who came to work at the café during our
discussion.
For the purposes of this interview, I chose not to delve too pointedly into the
cultural and identity motives that might influence participants' choices to work in the
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29

I was even more surprised when a friend and colleague suggested that I make timebreakdown visualizations of work activity to give to people as presents for the holidays.
All humor aside, this interest in visualizations of work activity leads me to think that
developing workers and writers might benefit and learn from new approaches to
textualizing embodied activity, a point I return to in Chapter 5.
!
54

coffee shop space or their strategies for completing particular tasks. Instead, I allowed
participants to decide for themselves when to reveal things about their cultural identity
that related to choices made in their writing habits and routines. This was a conscious
move on my part, as I attempted to walk the fine line between letting influences emerge
and prompting participants to give information that would relate to my own interests in
embodiment.
During the interviews, I found that two of my participants were eager to relate
their habits and routines to identity-based roles. Kim, a graduate student, was open with
the fact that choosing Gone Wired as a workspace had a distinct relationship to her
queer identity and the feeling of comfort that the space lent. Dave, likewise, linked the
use of space to his role as a stay-at-home dad in need of a quiet place to escape the
obligations of the other roles in his life. Kathryn and Ed did not point to individual identity
roles when describing why they write in the coffee shop. They were much more likely to
describe their choice as related to social motives: the fact that their friends and
colleagues did (or did not) do their rhetoric and writing work in the space.
During the interviews, participants generally articulated that they had not thought
about the physical setting of the coffee shop before the interview. However, as I will
detail in Chapter 3, participants often referred to many of the same objects as oddities in
the space: the murals, the fountain that does not run, the piano, and the “Pulp Fiction”
seating. These objects become part of a lore connecting those who use the space for
rhetoric and writing.

55

Conclusion: A Space Embodied
Because of the emergence of the coffeehouse as a symbol of civic engagement
and print media, it has been difficult to see the embodied use of the space outside of
that particular context. This is unfortunate, in part, because it leads to an impoverished
understanding of how coffee shops influence rhetoric and writing activity, as well as how
people!s rhetoric and writing practices affect the space. The coffeehouse, from an
embodied rhetorical perspective, structures rhetoric and writing activity that is diverse,
with many individuals working closely with laptop computers, social media, and other
mobile networked writing technologies, not only associated with civic roles but also with
work, school, and personal life. This diverse assembling of writing for different domains
was evident even in the short sessions in which I observed individuals! writing sessions.
In the following three chapters, I give texture to this account of coffeehouse writing,
focusing on embodied spatial, temporal, and social media practices.

56

Chapter 3
The Coffee Shop as Workspace: Embodied Practices and Stories of Location
And so I remember when I [first] came in here to do work, I!m like okay this
seems like a really cool, hip place. And, you know, now it!s three and a half
years later and I!m just kinda like this where I do my work. It!s close.”
--Ed, Graduate/Professional Student and Coffee Shop Writer

Both kinds of movement, physical and virtual, trouble the idea that work
occurs in a single, definable space. (280)
--Jason Swarts, Mobility and composition: The architecture of coherence

in non-places

In this chapter, I draw from the insights of an enacted embodied rhetorical
framework in order to report how one coffee shop functions as a workspace that both
structures and is structured by rhetoric and writing activity. I share stories and practices
of four different patrons who spend time writing in this coffeehouse—Kim, Kathryn, Ed,
and Dave—focusing on why they choose to spend time there, about how they usually
interact with the space, and what typically constitutes their activity. In dialogue, these
cases of work in the coffeehouse show the contemporary coffeehouse as embodied is
complex. Rather than merely structuring civic behavior through face-to-face and print
interaction, it likewise assembles writing for multiple domains, including for school, for
work, and for personal satisfaction and fulfillment. This happens because the unique
!

57

social configuration of the coffeehouse allows for individuals to customize workspaces,
which enables them to interact with others and perform sociability but still to complete
tasks that are important to their lives.
This chapter begins by presenting three characteristics that frequently emerge as
central to why writers choose to locate themselves in the Gone Wired Café: the idea
that it presents a “clean space” for customizing as workspace, the fact that it supports
the use of digital technologies with its WiFi network and space for setting up laptop
computers, and finally that it allows patrons to connect to other identities and routines
that are important to them. Based on these discussions and my observations, I identify
embodied practices that cut across stories of use, articulating some of the complex
methods individuals use for negotiating relationships between themselves, other people,
30

and objects that matter to their activity.

Through often unarticulated methods of

maintaining proximity, as well as protecting and monitoring their local spatial
configurations, these writers set scenes for production in ways that blend domains, draw
on the affordances of the space, and depend on the use of mobile technologies. These
collected embodied practices are not meant to be an exhaustive list of all practices
present in the coffeehouse, and they are also not meant to be associated only with the
coffeehouse. Instead, they are practices of arrangement present across these users!
stories and work and which deserve deeper attention in future studies of embodied
rhetoric.
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30

Chapter 4 will delve deeper into these practices at the level of both physical and
virtual movement with an eye toward what these movements enable for participants.
!
58

Reflecting on Stories of Location: Three Associations Between the Coffeehouse
and Writers Who Work There
Patrons who do writing work in Gone Wired are a diverse crowd, who undertake
a variety of activities. Among those individuals, I was able to interact with four people
closely. Kim is an Master!s student in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing and a
frequent user of Gone Wired. Kathryn, a Doctoral student in Philosophy, says she uses
Gone Wired as place to meet and talk to friends, do crossword puzzles, and do the
reading, writing, and grading that comes with her graduate student work. Ed is a joint
law and MBA student who says he uses Gone Wired frequently as a study space.
Finally, Dave identifies as a stay-at-home Dad who has used Gone Wired frequently as
a work and writing space for several years. In this section, I reflect on the way that much
of these individuals! activity is held together, drawing on Kim, Kathryn, Ed, and Dave!s
routines for use of the café as evidence. Focusing on why they visit the café and on
where they choose to locate themselves within it, routine use of Gone Wired for writing
emerges as providing clean space for what participants call “working,” a place for the
use of digital technologies (and particularly wireless networks and laptop computers),
and a place that relates to activities and identities important to individuals in their lives
outside any particular domain or project.

!

59

1. A “Clean” Space for Working
Each individual speaks of the coffeehouse as important for existing as a public
space that can easily be transformed to a personal workspace associated with the
digital writing technologies patrons bring to the café. Coming to the coffee shop is
central to writers' routines because it is a space that can be manipulated in ways that
make it controllable. As Kim says, "I come and I have a blank table, you know. The
coffee table at home is like full of [my partner's] stuff and my stuff and stuff stuff. You
know, just like crap. And I have this much space to put my computer. But here it's like
clean, clean workspace, you know?" And because of this, writers like the coffee shop
when it offers them a chance to control aspects of their environment and objects within
that environment that often feel out of their control in other spaces.

31

“Work” is the term that participants provided to describe the rhetoric and writing
activity I observed them doing in Gone Wired Café. Reflecting on his activity, Ed stated,
“Um, I generally come here to do work, although I often find myself surfing the Internet
and talking to my friends online.” Kathryn similarly described her choice to locate herself
in the café for writing, drawing on work as a key descriptor:
My office is shared with too many people, too small, to do good work
there. And I socialize more in my office, or on the philosophy floor. So,
working at home, I get a lot of work done once I!ve. . .like if there!s a
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31

Bemer, Moeller, and Ball write of students! “need to control” aspects of familiarity,
confidentiality, and presence when creating physical spaces that facilitate collaborative
work (159).
!
!

60

deadline. But I do like the social. Right? I do like having interactions . . .I
feel less lonely.
Ironically, parts of what makes the office an office also make it difficult for working,
because of the constant pressure of negotiating other peoples! presence. While her
house is generally free of social distractions in the form of other people, part of what
makes home home can also make it difficult for working: for Kathryn, being home
means being alone, and that loneliness can make it difficult, or at least less enjoyable,
to accomplish writing tasks. Kathryn alludes to the fact that both her office and home
are suited to particular facets of work. However, she also alludes to the fact that each
space is unsuited to other parts of it. For Kathryn, alternative spaces provide a middle
ground to this problem, and coffee shops are central to filling this void.
In general, Gone Wired represents a space that seems more “empty” to
participants in terms of things they must attend to since it is less filled with distractions
and thus more able to be filled strategically with the particular kinds of resources
needed to complete work. The four individuals I spoke with all either lack a physical
office space or, like Kathryn, find that office space is often inadequate for the kind of
writing work they do. In naming Gone Wired as a workspace, Kim, Kathryn, Ed, and
Dave define it against other kinds of spaces like home, the office, and other public
spaces like libraries where they might have workspace assigned to them. In their
comparisons of the café to these other workplaces, they emphasize the coffeehouse as
a space that is more controllable and more flexible for work tasks, at the same time that
it is more “empty” and free from distractions. Kim, for instance, associates Gone Wired
!

61

with focus and concentration. It!s a place to beat the pulls on her attention associated
with other spaces and moments. As she puts it, “there are certain things that I can!t do
at home because I get distracted. So the TV!s home, my dog!s at home, all these things
are sort of either need my attention or demand in some way my attention. Here I can put
my headphones on and be in this world.” If he does writing work at home, Dave
generally has to “negotiate time” with his wife or work after his wife and daughter have
both gone to sleep. Dave is really happy with his situation working in a number of
consulting and writing jobs and caring for his daughter full-time, but it is difficult to fit
writing into that space and the associated schedule. As he puts it, “now I am kinda stuck
in the house a little bit more. And more comfortable there too, but it takes me longer to
write if I!m there.”
For Kim, Ed, and Dave, home represents a place of distraction when it comes to
accomplishing work tasks. For Kim, this is because of particular objects (the dog, the
TV) that call for her attention. Ed did not elaborate on why doing work at home is so
difficult for him, but alludes to the fact that his current living situation, for whatever
reason, makes working difficult: “I can!t work in my house. Too many distractions.”
Because Ed feels that he can!t get work done at home, he seeks out multiple other nonschool and non-home places for working, including a nearby local diner that he says he
works at nearly as much as Gone Wired. He even refers to Gone Wired as a kind of
“safe haven” to escape the problems of trying to work at home.
As Kathryn indicated, creating a distraction-free zone for efficiency and
productivity are not always the most important motives for choosing writing locations.
!

62

For her, home is more lonely than distracting, and the day-to-day of writing work is more
tolerable when there is the chance to be social. Ed also indicates a social motivation for
working in the coffeehouse, though a much different one. He likes working in a public
space instead of in the Law Library because he does not know as many people at Gone
Wired as in some of the sanctioned spaces of the university, so he can people watch
when he gets bored. As he puts it, “I just don!t feel like seeing the same people
everyday.” Since Ed was nearing the end of his schooling during the Fall of 2009 when I
observed and interviewed him, the Law Library also reminded him of good friends who
had already graduated and left town. He seemed to enjoy the library space significantly
less now than he had previously during his four years in Lansing.
Notably, even compared to other coffee shops in the area, Gone Wired is
understood as more attuned to work because of its spaciousness and the ability to claim
personal and isolated workspace. Kathryn also goes to other coffee shops in the area,
but she uses them in different ways than she does Gone Wired. For example, she goes
to another coffee shop closer to the university campus primarily to “meet and greet”
rather than to get work done. While Kathryn talks about the other café as an explicitly
social gathering spot for her, she likes Gone Wired as a workspace because it has lots
of space for spreading out materials in a personalized way and for isolating herself
when necessary. She says, “The way the space is organized makes it so you can be
slightly more isolated from everyone else.”

!

63

2. A Space for Digital Writing Technologies
Participants indicate that the move to locate work in a coffee shop like Gone
Wired is largely connected to a movement in technologies that has made mobile writing
and networked technologies more central to the everyday work practices of individuals
and groups. Reflecting on why she moved her work to the coffeehouse, Kim said,
“Before I had the laptop, I had a desktop, so if I was writing I had to be at home, I had to
be at my desk. And I had to be, you know, in that space, which was a lot different. Using
a laptop, I can take it anywhere.” When I asked Dave why he came into Gone Wired for
the first time, he said, “I think it was the Wi-Fi.” Elaborating on this, he connected the
use of Wi-Fi, like Kim, to his first laptop computer and the sudden realization that he
could carry work outside of the spaces it had originally been confined to with his desktop
at home. Dave explained, “This is the first laptop I've ever had. So when I got this, I
think I thought, 'Oh, I can go out here and work instead of working at home.' Which is
cool.” In a similar vein, Ed said, “I just moved here, and I had seen the place because it
was really close to my house, and we didn!t have Internet. And so I saw a place named
Gone Wired, and I was like, “I bet they have Internet.” Ed picks up on the fact that even
the name of this particular coffee shop attempts to establish it as connected to digital
technologies, to a kind of production that draws on the Internet and mobile digital
technologies as central, not peripheral, to communication and sociality.
Laptop computers form the central hub of the workspaces of individuals in the
coffeehouse, around which they organize the materials of their writing. The workspaces
of the participants I observed were remarkably similar in this respect, fashioned around
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the laptop as a central focal point. As Figure 2 shows, during the time I watched Kim
work, she sat at a booth upstairs overlooking the bottom floor. She kept two notebooks
stacked below her noise reducing headphones, which she wore during most of the work
session. Her phone was placed neatly to the right of her print notebooks, one of which is
her school notebook, the other her personal notebook. Her laptop, which housed most
of the textual materials she interacted with, was to the right of these materials. Her
coffee, water, and muffin were to the right of the computer. On the day I observed Ed
working, he sat in one of the booths upstairs with a large stack of printed articles and a
local newspaper sitting to the right of his laptop. To the left of his laptop lay his phone, a
large coffee, and two other stacks of print articles. His headphones were on top of one
stack of papers, and a friend was sitting at a separate booth directly to his left. On the
day that I observed Dave working, he sat at a large round table on the bottom floor of
the café. He brought in a USB hub and an external drive, which lay to the left of his
laptop. To the right of his laptop, he kept a baked treat of some sort, a cup of coffee,
and an external mouse. His backpack got its own chair at the large, round table. On the
day I watched Kathryn work, she sat at a large round booth downstairs. Her workspace
was comprised of several stacks of print materials clustered around a computer. Two
large books were behind the computer with more print articles lying on top of them and
poking out from inside them. She had two cans of soda on her table, one of which she
had already drunk and the other of which she was saving. There was also a plate of
food already eaten and covered over with a napkin.

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Figure 2. Workspaces of the four participants featuring laptops as the central hub
The centralization of workspace in the laptop does not negate the relevance of
print materials as central to workspaces. When writers reflect on and use Gone Wired
as a space for everyday rhetoric and writing, it is clear that the relationship between the
coffeehouse and print materials is not dead. All of these participants bring in or pick up
print materials and those materials are clearly in display in their stories and the images
above of their workspaces. Sometimes those materials are personal ones, like Kim!s
journals; sometimes things to be shared and which become conversation pieces, like
Kathryn!s crossword puzzles; sometimes “news” and writing that participates in what it
means to be a citizen of the neighborhood, like Ed!s City Pulse newspaper. The place
becomes a hub for the dissemination of print material through different outlets,
especially the numerous bulletin boards, where people post flyers, and through the
center kiosk area where independent newspapers and zines are kept. In addition, print
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materials are key to the work that two of the participants are doing, a point that I treat in
more detail in Chapter 4. Kathryn and Ed both bring in and rely heavily on printed
articles to use for the course papers they both compose during their time in the café.
In the context of participants! characterization of the café as a workspace, textual
artifacts of print culture that occupy workspaces sometimes read differently than they
would if we considered the space to be primarily for civic activity. Instead, the coffee
shop begins to emerge as a space where different domains of activity (home, work,
school, civic) come together. In the context of a “work” place alone, the combination of
materials present and active in these workspaces might seem to represent a kind of
leisure, the ability to take a break from “work” in order to do something to participate in
civic life (read the local newspaper), to entertain oneself (do the crossword puzzle), or to
reflect or write for personal satisfaction (doing personal journaling). From the context of
civic engagement alone, which is the angle most previous studies have taken, this
behavior might portray the participant as detached or disengaged, unavailable for the
kind of rational dialogue that has historically been linked to this kind of space as having
a role in community action. From the context of embodied practices, the picture of
activity is more complicated.

3. A Sense of Comfort and Convenience
The four participants also articulated reasons for choosing to work in Gone Wired that
have to do with themselves as people outside of any individual domain—with what
makes them feel comfortable. I have detailed the ways in which participants differentiate
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Gone Wired from their homes; however, it is notable that Gone Wired is often invoked
as sharing some relationship to home through a sense of comfort. In her interview Kim
said, “There is this homey aspect” to Gone Wired as a space, and Ed said jokingly, “the
murals make me feel at home” (pg 13). All participants likewise invoke the way the
space is integrated into their lives by talking about how Gone Wired is close in proximity
to their homes. As such, the space represents a close tie to the rest of their lives and
the places in which they spend their time.
Kim, furthermore, connects the decision to work at Gone Wired to her identity in
an overt way. Kim says that she chooses to work in Gone Wired because it is an openly
queer-friendly establishment that makes her feel welcome, comfortable, and wanted.
Kim discovered Gone Wired when she visited the Lansing area with her partner who
was attending an orientation activity for a graduate program. Kim lived in a nearby city
at the time, and her friends told her to check the place out because it was a cool place
to work and located in the neighborhood (The Eastside) where Kim and her partner
already knew they wanted to move. She liked the food and the coffee, as well as the
overall niceness and community vibe. “There is this homey aspect of it,” she says, “I
mean my dog!s not on the floor, you know, but it!s a way to escape the messiness of like
my house.” This “homey feel” is related to a sense of comfort that Kim associates with
the space. As she puts it, “I feel comfortable here. It!s certainly, for me, writing needs a
certain level of being comfortable. I think that comfort is comfort with who I am. This
place is very queer friendly. The do a lot of stuff for the community, which makes me
feel like "oh they actually care.!” Kim also likes finding herself in the middle of the diverse
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groups who use the space. She mentioned the Compassion club, lesbian moms, and
gamers (“I don!t even know what they are called. . .gamer people? Doing the cards”).
Gone Wired is like home in the sense that it is a place where people live their life
in ways that are not segmented but that reflect who they are in a larger sense. In the
coffee shop as lived space, domains of activity that are often seen as separate overlap.
The café represents a space where it is expected that the writing activities that
constitute the different parts of a person!s life come together. We can see this in Ed!s
use of the time to talk to friends online, and Kathryn!s time spent meeting friends
alongside her work. And, indeed, in moments where individuals need the café to
represent one kind of activity domain rigidly, moments of conflict often happen in the
32

café.

In Dave!s case, when the café needed to become a structured workplace, it

began to feel to him as if the café were no longer serving its purpose. The overlapping
worlds of the personal, social, work, and civic that happened in Gone Wired were not
pleasing because he needed a space to function differently.

Embodied Practices of Spatial Location
These writers tell interesting stores about the ways in which Gone Wired has
become useful and even necessary in the context of their unique positions. In the
following section, I reflect across these stories, articulating practices that cut across their
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My favorite example of this was when the neighborhood mail carrier came in and
order eggs, only to be told that they were out. He was not happy. How can a place that
serves breakfast be out of eggs? Only if eggs are secondary to what they are really
serving.
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choices to write at Gone Wired instead of other places, as well as their choices about
where to locate themselves in the café. Drawing on an embodied framework, both of
these choices can be viewed as rhetorical: involving bodily strategy and reflecting on
current cultural narratives and norms. At the intersections of their practices and the
narratives that inform and form those practices, insights emerge about the role of the
coffee shop, as well as how space is managed. While these participants typically think
about the use of Gone Wired in terms of their own goals, motivations, and purposes,
their behavior and shared patterns of behavior begin to embody Gone Wired,
transforming it from place to lived space. The embodied practices I describe in the
following section arrange work by establishing and maintaining relationships between
people, objects, and other people, often physically marking relationships between
people and objects in a way that sustains writing action. Here I offer a way of describing
some of the key moves that cut across the choices that participants describe, focusing
on acts of managing proximity, managing and protecting space, and monitoring space.

1. Managing Proximity to Objects that Matter
Kim, Kathryn, Ed, and Dave indicate that a set of objects matters critically to
rhetoric and writing activity in the coffeehouse: tables, noise, food, light, power outlets,
and people, just to name a few. Objects not only mark Gone Wired as a particular kind
of space, but also structure the experience of rhetoric and writing as individuals in the
café find ways to manage their proximity to these influential actors in the process. This
practice is most evident in the ways in which participants choose to locate their bodies
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in relationship to resources in the café. Most often, participants invoke proximity to
objects that matter while negotiating the decision about where to set up shop for
33

writing.

Individuals strategically locate themselves in particular places within the cafe

and construct their space in strategic ways. I often observed writers sitting in the same
places over and over. Kim usually sits upstairs at one of the booths overlooking the
bottom floor. About this choice, Kim says, “I don!t like the circle tables. I think the tables
are too high, so I!m like writing up to here you know. Um, I don!t ever sit down there
(pointing to front bottom) because, I mean, I wouldn!t mind sitting by the windows but it!s
by the door and it!s cold and people are always coming in all the time. And I have to
look at them. (Laughs). I!m a people watcher, an observer.” Ed!s patterns fall similar to
Kim!s, and for similar reasons. He says, “I don!t like working anywhere downstairs.
Generally, I don!t think the seats are very comfortable down there, but then also I like
just kind of having the. . .I like the booths up here but also. . .it goes along with my
people watching. You know, I can watch people going by, at the same time I can peek
downstairs and see what!s going on down there. . .But where I sit upstairs is pretty
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The act of using physical objects to structure writing activity is an increasingly popular
concept in scholarship. Swarts and Kim remind us, "artifacts suggest a range of
opportunities for interacting with other people and with various objects of work in that
setting" (213). Gupta, in discussing coffeehouse activity, writes that "media objects
(devices, books, newspapers, etc.) worked as props that helped users play a social role
in the coffee-shop context," and she points to power outlets as the WiFi user!s necessity
(65,13). Paul Prior and Jody Shipka have likewise theorized interactions between
objects and writing time/space through their concept of environment-selecting and –
structuring practices or ESSP!s as they call them. ESSPs, as they describe them, are
“the intentional deployment of external aids and actors to shape, stabilize, and direct
consciousness in service of the task at hand” (n.p).
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much dictated by where an outlet is open.” Dave, who typically sits at the same table
downstairs, says about the upstairs, “I don!t like it. It!s too hot upstairs for me.” He
recently has begun choosing a particular section of the café to work in that is less
conspicuous and out in the open. Pointing to that section of the café, he says, “actually
there is a chair over there that you can!t even see.” And, Kathryn, who was the most
adaptable of the participants in terms of where she locates herself says, “I prefer to be
up here at a table that has light. Or I do like that back table if I!m working with a group” “I
do not like that big table down there [points downstairs to the front] at all. And I like
those two big tables with the purple tablecloths.” And, when she is in the café to see
people, she says she sits wherever the people are.

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Table 1: Objects that mattered when making decisions about where to locate oneself
for writing work

Object

Mentioned by

People

Dave, Kathryn, Ed, Kim

Light

Kathryn, Ed, Kim

Printouts or .pdfs

Kim, Ed, Kathryn

Noise or Music

Kathryn, Ed, Kim

Laptop

Kim, Dave

Booths

Kathryn, Ed

Fountains

Kim, Kathryn

Smells

Ed, Kathryn

Murals/Graffiti

Ed, Kim

Items sold (clothing,
jewels, crystals)
Food

Kathryn

External Drive

Dave

Power Outlets

Ed

Heat

Dave

Tables

Kathryn

Ed

The tendency to use proximity to objects extends beyond choices of bodily
location within the coffeehouse. As I have already discussed, participants choose to
work in Gone Wired because of its proximity to the other spaces of their lives.
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Participants like Gone Wired because it is close to home, with Kim and Kathryn also
invoking the particular neighborhood (the “Eastside”) as the location linking their homes
and the café. Gone Wired is located in the easternmost part of Lansing proper: what
locals call the “Eastside.” The Eastside has the reputation of being a crossroads within
in the city, where students mix with long-term residents, where East Lansing meets up
with Lansing. This part of the city at the crossroads of several communities gives it
proximity to a mix of people with different relationships to Michigan State University in
East Lansing and Cooley Law School in downtown Lansing. It is on the bus line that
connects downtown Lansing to East Lansing. It is close enough in proximity to East
Lansing to be an easy trip for those living and working at Michigan State, and yet it is
clearly outside of the co-ed world of East Lansing. Symbolically, the Eastside
represents a part of Lansing that is separate from some of the areas of town that have
suffered the most economically during the recent auto industry woes and overall
34

recession

yet it is also not a part of suburban East Lansing.

While Kathryn and Kim described the Eastside in relation to who they are and
what the neighborhood is like, all of the participants in the research indicated they live in
the Eastside and describe the proximity of the café to their homes. It is worth noting how
the unique location of the café in the space of the neighborhood and surrounding
communities offers café goers a particular kind of location that means something. Ed
says he works at Gone Wired mostly because it is within a block of his house and was
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34

The Eastside of Lansing is home to a number of community development projects
including the Michigan Corridor Project and the Cool Cities Initiative.
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also close to the house he lived in before moving to the current one. Kathryn lives on
the Eastside, where Gone Wired is located, and says she hardly ever comes to Gone
Wired when she does not know at least one other person who is there. Kathryn started
coming to Gone Wired about 4 years prior to my talking with her and before she moved
to the Eastside. She and a friend who lived nearer to the downtown area of Lansing
found that if they walked the 15-20 minute walk to Gone Wired to study together, they
could get out of the house, get some exercise, and then have a good place to get things
done. It was a combination of fun, social time, exercise, and work time. Kathryn!s use of
the space has changed, though, because now she lives closer.

Managing proximity to other people: coffeehouse sociability
While the proximity of the cafe itself to parts of the city matters, managing the
proximity to other people is one of the most important embodied practices of the writers
I talked with. Coffee shops represent a space that is always populated with people, and
often, for students or people who live in the community, with people they know. Because
a dimension of isolation is often synonymous with writing tasks, the coffee shop
represents a space associated with a kind of sociality that strikes a middle ground: a
place where one can enter a conversation, but also retain enough privacy to complete
tasks. Spaces like this often become domains of acquaintances. Because the social ties
to people there often are weak, they present less of an immediate challenge for people
than a space like an office or home. As I have described, participants often work with
friends in the coffee shop but try to find ways to maintain space away from them in order
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to protect their time. People watching, and dealing with Facebook are often described
as a more negotiable set of distractions than dealing with face-to-face interactions with
people who can!t be easily walked away from. As Ed put it, in spaces like the law library,
"I find myself getting caught up in talking to people a lot more and I feel a little bit guilty
about that like "I need to concentrate on this.!" Ed is also a close friend of Kathryn, and
the two often work at the same time in Gone Wired. However, usually they sit at
different places in the Café, Ed almost always sitting upstairs at a booth, and Kathryn
often sitting downstairs or at a different table or booth upstairs. When they study
“together but separately,” they often negotiate break times for themselves and meet up
periodically to chat or have a cigarette break.
Because Dave is well known at Gone Wired after working there so often for so
long and because he has worked with a number of community organizations, it is hard
for Dave to avoid people in Gone Wired. Dave says he often feels exasperated because
people will not leave him alone during his work time. This has caused him to put
increasing pressure on himself to get more work done in a shorter amount of time. This
pressure has made his writing work difficult of late, even though he is really enjoying his
current work. He says “Generally, when I go home on these days, I!m almost like in a
bad mood” because he feels like he “wasted the day.” He said, “I just have no space
and time for myself, and I really. . .when I!m here, I just really want to be left alone, you
know?” Because of the increasing difficulty of finding personal space in the coffee shop,
Dave has been considering finding a new place to work. At the same time, making a
change is difficult for him because Gone Wired provides most of the things he needs in
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a workspace and it is very close to home, which makes it convenient. Fed up with this
tension, Dave says in exasperation, “So uh where else can I go that. . .you know? It!s
just habit. But at the same time, it!s getting. . .ugh, I just need somewhere else to go.”
This desire to control proximity to people is one of the most feared aspects of the
contemporary coffeehouse, as many scholars worry that it signals a turn away from the
35

use of public space for rational/critical debate and civic activity.

Gupta offers a couple

of explanations for this desire, arguing
Having co-present people around in the proximity suggests, firstly people
are accessible and available for a potential encounter and secondly, there
is pleasure in people-watching and being watched. Further, being among
strangers permits the pleasure of being anonymous for real in public-something that is usually enjoyed while socializing in chat rooms online
where it is possible to remain anonymous. (51)
It also seems possible that the explanation may be more simple (and, at the same time,
more complex) that this. Writing work activity has migrated out of traditional workspaces
and has begun to mingle with other kinds of discursive activity in places and in ways
that qualitatively change what those spaces mean and what kinds of interactions exist
side-by-side there.
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This fear that people will forget how to talk to one another in face-to-face contexts is
echoed in the Computers and Writing literature on teaching in computer labs. Raul
Sanchez, for instance, in reflecting on the experience of conducting class discussion via
synchronous chat in a lab setting stated, “The students in the room are learning to be
alone together, and I am showing them the way” (104).
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Proximity of objects onscreen
Participants also managed the proximity to objects held on their desk or within
the space of their screens. While I will return to this in more detail in Chapter 4, it was
common for participants to describe compartmentalization techniques that allowed them
to structure their work. Evidencing this attitude, Kathryn, for example, says, “I need to
separate things in some crazy way that makes sense for my brain.”

Figure 3. Spatial technique of separating activity using virtual sticky notes
This kind of activity was central as a technique for managing others! thoughts and for
thinking about how to integrate them with one!s own. Thus, participants often discuss
marking particular places as crucial annotating work (Kathryn says, “I like to be able to
see right at this part on this article, this is what I thought was really important”). They
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also describe ad hoc methods for organizing material through acts of managing
proximity. Ed says, “I know when I was working on my paper I had different sets of
information, so I had a bunch of newspaper article, and then I had a bunch of law review
articles. But I would separate them into stacks and then I would just stack one
perpendicular to the other.”

2. Protecting Individual Work Locations
In addition to managing proximity between themselves and objects that matter,
participants also used material objects strategically to maintain and protect the writing
spaces they created for their work. One common method for doing this was through the
use of headphones, which allowed participants to focus in to the individual scenes that
writers create. During our conversation, Kim laughed as she described how things
would be different if she were working instead of talking to me: “like right now,” she
began, “if I was writing I could hear everybody talking. So I!d put headphones on and it
would just be like whatever music I!m listening to, the screen in front of me, and the
coffee.” When I asked her to elaborate, she explained that her headphones were
important to her workflow, something that she invested in about 8 years ago and used
routinely.
A similar example of the use of objects to protect writing space can be seen in
Kathryn!s use of her current materials to create a space in which she looks busy and
unapproachable. In her interview, Kathryn reflected that she likes to take up as much
space as possible with her materials, stacking papers all around herself. She wrote, “I
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like to nest, I guess? Like take up as much room as I can?” When thinking about the
night that I observed her working, Kathryn suggested a strategic reason for this action:
“People see that and they think, "that!s a serious person. Leave her be” (12). Hampton
and Gupta!s identified similar behavior in the Wi-Fi-using coffee shop patrons they
studied; however, in the context of conceiving of the coffee shop as civic space, they
conceptualized this as the use of "involvement shields" that work within their as "barriers
to interaction” (841). Here, we can see this to function in a more positive manner, as
Kathryn uses the coffeehouse space in conjunction with other materials to create a zone
where attention and focus are possible.

Figure 4. “Nesting” technique for maintaining privacy and space
Other similar practices of maintaining workspace were employed within the space of
individuals writing technologies. Ed, for instance, used compartmentalization techniques
within his workflow that directed different email accounts onto different mobile devices,
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so that he could avoid the potential distractions of email notifications entering his
workspace. As he put it, “I use, two for school, and one for personal” and he receives
those emails on his phone, so that it!s a different technology. In another similar move, all
participants who worked on a laptop screen tended, when possible, to fill up their entire
screen with the document or artifacts that were currently receiving their full attention.
Even when people were working across multiple kinds of documents and spaces, they
tended to maximize the size of those documents so that they took up the entire screen
on which they were working. Making the main objects of focus take up the entire
attention space of the screen likely has to do with the size screens on which they work;
however, this move also serves to essentially “block out” what is other from their scene
of visibility.

Figure 5. Technique of filling screen with materials used in the moment
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3. Monitoring Change Outside the Coffeehouse
Participants at work not only focus on “tasks” but also constantly monitor the world
around them in small acts that allow them to visually monitor the ever-changing spatial
stories unfolding around them. As I have already discussed, participants who need to
get work done are often overt about the ways in which “people watching” creates a
context that is useful for them, as in the case of Kim and Ed, in particular. Gupta draws
on Goffman's idea of "unfocused interaction" to describe this habitual actual of glancing
at others and making passive contact without engaging others in conversation or
interaction. In their videotaped work sessions, participants often glanced up at the
configuration of people and things around them, seemingly monitoring the setup and
looking for changes. Finally, similar acts happened online in virtual movements, where
“checking” was central to participants! control of their workspace, a point I will address
in more detail in Chapter 4. Acts of checking or monitoring, which give attention to the
maintenance of unfolding relationships between objects and people within the local
workspace as a scene of activity were central to the work performed by participants.

Conclusions and What!s Missing: Writing Work in the Coffee Shop
Kim, Kathryn, Ed, and Dave use Gone Wired Café for rhetoric and writing work;
they use physical café space primarily for work, and socializing happens differently here
than in other spaces of their lives—often subordinated to other kinds of personal goals.
Like the vast majority of people who enter the cafe alone, they bring in their
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technologies and focus themselves into them often for hours at a time. Their embodied
movements shed light on Gone Wired as a particular coffee shop. It also suggests that
we might link the coffee shop with a new set of spatial stories related to the
contemporary landscape of composing with writing technologies.
The link between rhetoric and writing activity and work echoes recent
descriptions of contemporary work as both distributed in space and time, as well as
heavily constituted in and coordinated by writing and writing technologies (Brandt, 2005;
Spinuzzi, 2007; McNely, forthcoming). To link “work” solely with activity in predetermined spaces like offices or predetermined roles like “employees” is increasingly
problematic. Jason Swarts (2007) has recently argued that the mobility and portability of
work technologies and practices is one reason for this. Swarts and Loel Kim (2009) offer
the concept of hybrid space to refer to the way in which zones for production have
overlapping physical/material and information dimensions, which have to be constructed
to suit the particular tasks that people must attend to in the moment. As they put it,
“information is constitutive of the environments in which we work, live, and interact with
others. Writing becomes an act of building the places in which that information is used”
(219). Here Swarts and Kim link writing to the act of constructing space, calling attention
to the ways in which the arrangement of workspaces at the level of physical and virtual
space is not only accidental or instrumental but an act that sustains productivity as well
36

as that creates opportunities for rhetorical action.
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McNely has described ambient research, in the movement between the frontchannel
and backchannel as one example of a developing practice happening in hybrid space.
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In moments of work, writers like Kathryn, Ed, and others who work in the Gone
Wired Café in Lansing, Michigan call attention to the fact that practices of creating and
maintaining space do not only happen in writing scenes associated with traditional
workplaces or “jobs.” The act of assembling hybrid space to support writing work is
widespread, what we might call a part of “knowledge work in everyday life” that extends
beyond writing for the job and into a number of roles that people inhabit (Grabill, 2007;
Diehl et. al, 2008). In these constructed hybrid workspaces, physical and virtual
embodied movements form the activity of writing as individuals and groups make
rhetorical choices that support and enable rhetorical action. In this way, the coffee shop
is a place of production, as I emphasized in Chapter 2, but also a workspace. That acts
of work central to production happen in coffee shops takes on additional meaning when
viewed in light of the coffee shop!s historical relationship to intellectual space,
knowledge production, and print culture.
Paying closer attention to writers! spatial practices has implications in two
senses. First, it adds needed depth to discussions of how the contemporary coffee shop
functions as a space of production, associated with the coordination of multiple portable
technologies assembled to do work. Frequently, the use of the coffeehouse for “work” is
assumed to be negative because of historical civic associations of the coffeehouse with
print culture, face-to-face conversation, and the assembling of discursive publics.
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He writes," Because they are characterized by the movement of people, devices, and
knowledge, there are profound opportunities for rhetorical action--for new practices of
thinking and doing in dynamic hybrid spaces."
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However, contemporary coffee shops offer writers a sense of control over many aspects
of environment, and particularly over social environment. This ability to (believe they
can) manipulate a social, spatial context for production is central to many peoples! acts
of rhetoric and writing in contemporary mediated scenes. Second, these spatial
practices form a new way of seeing scenes of rhetorical activity from an embodied
perspective. By making this claim, I introduce the idea that online and material spatial
practices are tightly integrated for writers, and that knowledge objects can be virtual,
textual, and material.
These movements are influenced by the nature of the contemporary
coffeehouse, including the opportunity to control and manipulate it as a social setting for
writing. While previous scholarship has often understood this kind of sociability
negatively, from the perspective of contemporary knowledge work, the coffee shop
offers writers the ability to create assemblies that give them a degree of control over
their social settings. The act to seek out spaces that escape some of the constraints of
the institutional “work” spaces or living spaces is a sign of a particular kind of writing act
that assembles actors for the creation of rhetorical action. This action can be seen as
adding a layer of meaning to the coffeehouse as a contemporary space of production
associated with work and with digital writing technologies like laptops and Wi-Fi
networks. These new embodiments of space do not signal a wholesale turn away from
historical uses of coffeehouses, however, as print materials and socializing acts were
still a part of why these participants make use of coffee shop space.

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These practices indicate that embodied rhetorics can be acts of arrangement
through which writers establish relationships with objects that matter to rhetoric and
writing activity at multiple levels of scope. As Prior and Shipka and others have
indicated, practices of selecting and structuring environments for writing are often highly
individualized, “depending on their tasks, the centrality of writing to their lives and work,
and their own personalities and preferred practices” (n.p.). However, the ways in which
these work as practice are common and concepts like proximity to objects that matter,
protecting space, and monitoring space tend to be the shared mechanisms through
which people individualize their work spaces. These participants signal that spatial
practices associated with managing writing work are not always enacted to the ends of
productivity and efficiency. Like Bemer, Moeller and Ball who suggest that controlling
physical boundaries is central to positive collaborative work situations, it seems that
many spatial practices are related to the ends of personal satisfaction and positive
affect—to making writing work do-able and livable. Coffee shops are amenable to, and
indeed assemble, multiple domains of activity, which creates a space with an attitude to
work that might be described as “leisurely.”
Much of the scholarship interested in coffee shop sociability has looked most
closely at the physical, face-to-face encounters that people make in coffee shop space.
In the following two chapters, I turn with more detail to how writing time unfolds within
the café for Kim, Kathryn, Ed, and Dave. By looking with more attention to the unfolding
of writing time, I am able to focus on the virtual spatial practices, enacted by virtual
writing bodies that assemble social and work practices. Next, I will pay attention to the
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embodied rhetoric invoked in moments of social media use, re-establishing the links
between the coffeehouse and civic interaction through the activities of mobile writing
devices.

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Chapter 4

Crunch Time, Workflows, and Online Wanderings: Layered and Enacted
Repertoires of Coffeehouse Writing
I wrote like a poem or something about like coming to Gone Wired,
(laughs) and [it was about] first thing you take out of your bag, you sit
down, or you plug your computer in, and like you take your laptop out, and
you sit down, and you plug it in, and you put your headphones in and you
open the laptop and you get all your stuff situated, you know? And then I
go check my email and I check Twitter and like all these things have to
happen in a very specific order for me to feel like okay now I can work.
You know?
--Kim, MA Student and Coffeehouse Writer

Kim, Ed, Kathryn, and Dave are writers who use the Gone Wired Café
strategically as a writing workspace, as well as for interacting with others through the
digital technologies that they bring with them to the coffee shop. Chapter 3 detailed the
ways in which these motivations come together in the unique work spaces writers
assemble in the “clean space” of the coffeehouse, allowing them to manage proximity to
a complex range of social objects and resources that matter to their everyday lives. This
chapter draws from the embodied rhetorical framework I introduce in Chapter 1 in order
to turn a closer eye to the ways in which coffeehouse work sessions unfold over time in
the moment-by-moment sequence of behaviors and actions writers perform. I draw on
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two types of data in order to flesh out the experience of writing time: first, observations
of the moment-by-moment virtual and physical movements of four writers enacted over
the course of an hour spent writing, and, second, the discourse about these writing
sessions produced in reflective interviews with Kim, Kathryn, Ed, and Dave.
Turning a closer eye to coffeehouse writing sessions reveals that they not only
are fragmented in terms of activity, calling to the “hyper attention” model advanced by N.
Katherine Hayles (2007) and further described in recent studies of work practice.
However, they also unfold for writers in surprisingly patterned, routine, and systematic
ways. While it is clear that self-sponsored writing sessions are complex and involve
multiple activities, writers are likely to develop embodied routines, or sets of behaviors
that are enacted repetitively in a particular order, as provisional strategies to accomplish
writing tasks. This is true within the context of individual work sessions, as well as within
larger writing time frames, such as over the scope of a writing project (like a course
paper or ongoing blog project) or the over the span of writing associated with particular
roles people have in their lives: like as students, or as bloggers. Through this analysis,
the embodied practices that I introduce in Chapter 3 emerge as highly structured and
influential rhetorical acts, movements that create potential for future action as they
become scripts in embodied repertoires of production.
As they develop familiarity with particular tasks and locations, writers create a
muscle memory that influences future rhetorical acts. Building on this focus on how past
experiences influence current embodied writing practice, I argue that we might usefully
consider the embodied and performative elements of writing development—the ongoing
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layering of stories of experience that are held in bodies and can be drawn upon in
writing moments. This argument extends the recent field attention to the transfer of
practices across writing moments with different domains and motivations (Witte, 1992;
Roozen, 2009; Roozen, 2010). Writers faced with new writing tasks draw upon and build
from the store of behaviors in their past—often reverting to habits that have worked for
them, or that are simply familiar. As they continually are faced with such situations,
rhetoric and writing experiences are layered in a way that is not unlike the “laminations”
that Prior (1998) and Prior and Shipka (2003) have described as associated with literate
activity as it develops over time.
This chapter opens by introducing temporal routines that participants report using
when they go to the coffee shop for writing. In particular, participants reported using the
space at set time and day each week much like one would “go to work” at a job location,
or they described using the space several times a week after class as a combined
social/work escape. Surprisingly formulaic and habitual, these routines are akin to habits
of time-use from other personal, work, and school spheres. The chapter then moves
closer into the writing sessions of the four participants in order to show how habits of
time-use and particular writing behaviors are likewise an important part of structuring the
moment-by-moment activity of writing sessions, resulting in sessions that enacting
identifiable combinations of behaviors I have termed “routine work,” “online wandering,”
and “crunch time.” These three distinct repertoires of production are common and often
repeated ways of enacting rhetoric and writing in coffeehouse work sessions—and likely
beyond the coffee shop as well. I conclude the chapter by reflecting on the implications
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of an embodied rhetorical framework for the experience of writing time, as well as our
understanding of how writers develop over time, and I gesture to Chapter 5, in which I
further analyze the role of social media play within the repertoires of coffeehouse writing
production described in this chapter.

Time Spent Writing in the Coffeehouse, or “Clocking in Your Hours”
Kim, Kathryn, Ed, and Dave each have a schedule for writing in the café. Instead
of being a casual, spur-of-the-moment decision, these writers use the coffee shop
systematically in association with a loose temporal routine for writing work that changes
along with what is happening in their lives. For example, Kim keeps a methodical routine
for what days and times she goes to Gone Wired, saying “this semester it!s been
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.” Thus, for Kim, making the time to visit the
coffeehouse is much like a job with regular hours, a scheduled weekly appointment, or a
course schedule. Her time spent in the coffee shop is devoted to work, a routine from
which she rarely diverges. Thus, she rarely uses the space for activities other than her
workflow. For example, she infrequently meets friends socially there, and when she
studies with her partner in Gone Wired, they tend to work separately on different
projects and often wear headphones, which keep their concentration on their laptop
screens. Kim has clearly structured her time to visit the coffeehouse much like she
would a job commitment.
Dave also structured and planned his time in Gone Wired as a weekly work
commitment that he dealt with every week at the same time. During the time of the
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study, Dave was using Gone Wired as a workspace one day a week, the day that his
mother-in-law comes to town to stay with his infant daughter. Like the other participants,
in the past Dave had worked in Gone Wired almost everyday. But now his schedule was
different due to the baby and his wife!s return to work. Because his time to work on his
blog without distractions was limited, Dave strictly scheduled time every week to
complete it, and that time was typically the time he spent in Gone Wired.
While Kim and Dave approached their time writing in the coffeehouse with a
specific work schedule, Kathryn and Ed treated the space a bit differently—though no
less systematically. When I spoke with Kathryn, she described how she came to café
more in the immediate past two months that she had in the previous few, but, before
that, often was there nearly everyday. She said, “over the last month and a half, I!ve
gotten back into being here maybe two, three times a week. But last semester I was
here . . .maybe seven days.” Although it seemed difficult for me to believe at first that
she spent so much time in the café, Ed, too, described working in Gone Wired between
four and seven nights a week—often heading straight from campus after class and
setting up shop with the materials he had with him. Kathryn and Ed treated the space a
bit more like home: their routines for using the space were more relaxed, they often
entered it after spending long days on campus, and they were more likely to incorporate
social and leisure behaviors explicitly into their time spent in the café.
This behavior of using the space strategically in patterned ways relates writing to
use of time in other spheres, such as time spent in the office for a job or in a classroom
for work. This time-use also becomes a habit that influences future actions and choices
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when writing. Specifically within the context of social action, Kristie S. Fleckenstein
(2010) defines a rhetorical habit by describing rhetoric as the system that influences
choices for language use, and habits as the ways in which rhetorics become systematic
and enacted. As she puts it,
Rhetoric provides the why for language use, the predisposition to act
through language for change. Rhetorical habits are the how of such
change, the means by which people respond to, perhaps even shape, the
why. Embedded within rhetoric are ingrained language patterns and
conventions—systemic rhetorical habits—that dispose community
members to use language in particular ways. (8)
In the context of embodiment, I extend the notion of a rhetorical habit to include the
repeated bodily actions that also structure behavior and that lead people to make
choices in their lives. For example, when describing his temporal routine for writing in
Gone Wired, Dave explains, “I!ve been actually here for 3 years, so there!s definitely
that habit of coming here. Even though the blog is brand new, that coming here to work
isn!t.” In this short quotation, it is partly the habit of using the space and getting things
done there that keeps him returning to Gone Wired. Even as the writing and knowledge
tasks that Dave is responsible for change over time, his past of experience of time spent
in this space—that “coming here to work”—is a constant that influences his current and
future writing behavior, and a learned practice that he draws on as part of an embodied
writing repertoire. As Roozen has described, an “enormously complex aggregation of
practices” informs writers! current action (345). A practiced drawn upon in the past, for
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Dave, makes it an easy choice, and one that keeps him returning to the café in spite of
current difficulties. This establishing of routine, and the drawing on it in future writing
acts is something that extends beyond use of space at this level of scope and into the
individualized work sessions of writers, on which I focus in the following section.

The Use of Coffeehouse for the “Routine Work” of Writing
Participants exhibit individualized approaches to meeting the demands of their
writing situations, using different kinds of organizational techniques to mark time and
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space.

However, across these differences in the particular kinds of tools,

technologies, and objects participants draw upon, there are patterns in the overall arc of
their writing sessions, particularly in the ways that they move across multiple materials
and motivations. Participants like Kim and Dave, in their coffeehouse writing sessions,
performed tasks they had previously repeated over and over, enacting system of
moving through multiple materials that had become a routine or workflow for
accomplishing tasks. This is likely related to their conceptualization of the time spent in
the coffeehouse as “work time,” as well as to their tendency to set aside particular hours
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37

The idiosyncratic and individualized nature of writing choices has become an
important discussion in recent scholarship. Van Ittersum notes that motives for choosing
whether to incorporate particular technologies into work practices are often highly
individualized, including reasons like ensuring correctness, saving labor, weighing the
time commitments of learning and adhering to particular kinds of technologies. Van
Ittersum draws on this insight in order to argue that we often should look above the level
of particular software and into the "functional systems in which memory practices and
other writing activities take place” (277). These functional systems are part of what I am
hoping to access in this article, both particularly and more generally.
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for writing in the coffeehouse much like they would treat a job. Within the workflows of
their sessions, Kim and Dave play out scripts that are familiar, at least to me, as
someone who does writing work: for example, they establish routines for filtering and
writing from existing information, and they use social media strategically to structure
time and attention.

38

In this way, I suggest that their writing sessions are not purely

idiosyncratic, but rather reflect repertoires of writing behavior that exist beyond these
individuals and their particular tasks. Across these repertoires, writing emerges as an
ongoing system of arrangement and creation that builds on the stores of past behaviors
and materials that allow writers to meet the demands of tasks they are motivated to
achieve.

39

In the following section, I focus on Kim!s individual writing session, in order to

show how a routine composing workflow unfolds in the coffeehouse during one of her
weekly work sessions.

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38

In this chapter, I connect the activities of checking email, using social networks like
Facebook and Twitter, and visiting blogs as “social media use” in order to look at the
use of these sites collectively. Seeing these activities together allows me to differentiate
them from other activities like note-taking or paper-writing, on which the work sessions
described in this chapter are more explicitly focused. In the next chapter, I differentiate
these activities and uses of media in order to show how they exist as very different kinds
of tools, technologies, and spaces for writers.

39

In addition, writing work common in the coffee shop space draws on patterns often
described in workplace writing studies, as well as studies of work behavior, an idea I will
return to in Chapter 6.
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Kim!s Story: Enacting a Routine Composing Workflow
When I visited Kim to observe and videotape one of her work sessions in the
Gone Wired Cafe, she was just beginning a task common to most students, and to
graduate students in particular. Kim!s goal for the work session was to turn in a reading
response document that was due online that day, within a few hours of when she was
working. The specific method Kim had developed for completing this task included first
reading the documents she had been assigned by her instructor, which were housed as
.pdf documents in folders on her computer. She then took notes on those documents
into a separate Microsoft Word file. Finally, she used those notes to compose a reading
response document that she would eventually digitally deliver to her instructor and
fellow course members later that day. Kim!s work session in many ways was typical:
reading, note taking, and then summarizing and reflecting on others! work is a task
students at many different levels are asked to do in some form as part of their study.
However, for Kim, this work was so typical that the routine of composing this kind of
document had developed into a predictable set of activities that she acted out almost
every week at this time in this order. In her words, “that!s my workflow.”

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Figure 6. Time-use breakdown of Kim's work session
The time breakdown for the first hour of this process, which she began and later
completed during a morning work session at Gone Wired, is shown in Figure 6. In this
figure, I detail the time spent with source .pdf documents Kim was reading, Microsoft
Word Documents where she was writing reading notes and her reading response, social
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media including Facebook, Twitter, and email, onscreen organizing artifacts like folders
where she found files on her computer. It also shows the break time that she spent
away from her computer.
When I observed and coded Kim!s activity for where time and attention was
spent, it was clear that Kim moved effortlessly and fluidly between the set of .pdf files
she was reading, the Microsoft Word notes document she was initially composing, and
then an additional Microsoft Word document she opened near the end of this
observation where she began moving quotes from her notes and composing the reading
response that would later become her final written product. Overall, there were few
surprises in terms of where and how Kim!s attention was directed. Her organizational
materials were largely contained within the space of her computer screen, so at fairly
regular intervals within her work session, Kim also accessed other kinds of resources,
including sticky notes housed on the dashboard of her computer and file folders that
contained the .pdf documents she was reading for class. These artifacts, and the
moments of using them, formed moments of meta-writing work, in which Kim stepped
back from the in-the-moment activity of reading and writing the response to organize,
plan, and execute the task as a whole. For this task, which was obviously routine to
Kim, this organizational work took only seconds.
While the organizational work (indicated in orange in the chart) happened at
regular intervals during Kim!s writing session, there were also other regular uses of time
outside the source and product documents that repeated themselves throughout the
bulk of the work session. As indicated in by the red slices of time in Figure 6, Kim turned
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to social media three times briefly during the course of her session. Kim!s activity on
these social media sites was not obviously related to the task at hand, with the
exception of her time spent on Wikipedia (noted in purple), which she used and cited as
a source alongside her .pdf readings. Generally, Kim would turn to social media for a
few seconds each time that she received an email notification in the top right-hand
corner of her screen. Typically, she would move from her .pdf or Word document into
her browser, delete this email, and then cycle quickly through her Twitter, and
occasionally also Facebook, interface. These social media moments were extremely
brief, as Kim mostly only checked and monitored the activity of others (i.e., checking the
Twitter and Facebook feeds), and she never composed anything for social media during
this work time. Kim also checked iTunes at regular times during her work session, as
indicated by the black sections of her time-breakdown. In Chapter 3, I described how
music and headphones were objects that mattered for Kim when working in the café,
helping her create a personal zone that allowed her to devote attention more
productively than she could otherwise. During this hour-long observation, Kim consulted
her iTunes about as often as she did her social media outlets, pulling up iTunes once to
change the music she was listening to, and twice more for a few seconds, seemingly to
double check what artist or song was currently playing.
It is notable that during this routine work session, different kinds of activities
interrupt or break the immediate acts of reading and writing taking place with what might
be seen as the most central artifacts of the work session: the .pdf readings and the
Microsoft Word documents. Sometimes these breaks were triggered by external
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artifacts or motivations, as in the case where an email notification led Kim to leave her
writing work and turn toward social media. Other times, the breaks were internally
motivated by the task. For example, when Kim finished reading and taking notes on a
particular source document, she naturally took a break to consult the “to do” list
contained on her onscreen sticky note to see what was left to do before returning to the
remainder her reading and writing routine. Other times, her breaks in activity seemed
unprompted, like when Kim randomly stopped work and checked her iTunes. Social
media, iTunes, and organizing “work-related” artifacts like her folders and sticky notes
all came at different times. Kim also took a 3-minute break at the end of this hour-long
period to get up and walk around, before returning to her booth and resuming work
where she left off after my observation time ended.

Digging Deeper into Kim!s Movements: Embodied Strategies Developed For Completing
The Reading Response
During her interview, Kim described this work session as a typical routine, which
is not surprising based on the fluidity with which she moved from object to object and
task to task. Kim saw composing a reading response as a step-by-step kind of linear
process that she could generally repeat in similar ways over and over again: “it!s a very
similar process,” she explained, “so the readings, and then the notes, and then the
reading response.” Looking at her actions during this time, however, reveals that habit
structured more than just the sequence of the activities that Kim performed. During this
work session, Kim employed a distinct note-taking strategy in which she, first, copied
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down a citation for each article, and then copied direct quotes from it onto her Microsoft
Word “notes” document with a page number beside these cut and pasted quotes. Figure
7 shows an image of Kim!s setup for handling this task on her laptop. She has the .pdf
she is reading on the left side of the screen and the notes document for quotes on the
right side of her screen. For any given article she read, she chose between one and five
quotations to copy directly into this notes document, and, in a couple of cases, she put
some thoughts or reactions in the form of bullet points underneath the direct quote.
While a couple of sentences of material in her own words was present in her notes
document, the language present in her notes was almost entirely direct language cited
from the .pdf document she was reading.

Figure 7. Kim's two open documents: the .pdf she is reading and
notes she is copying and pasting into a new document

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Because this note-taking strategy looked familiar to me from an earlier study of graduate
student writers I conducted (Leon and Pigg, 2011), I wondered whether Kim was
conscious of this strategy and why she chose to use it. Why not, for example,
summarize what she was reading, or note down “topics” instead of copying things wordfor-word from one document and putting them in another. When I asked her about her
process, Kim described her note-taking clearly, as an intentional act developed during
her coursework:
You know what I!ve learned especially in that class that I was taking notes
and doing that reading response for? I changed the way I took notes. It
wasn!t just something that I was reading and then I would say “Oh that!s
interesting” and write what I thought was happening. But what ended up
happening near the end of the semester was that I was taking full quotes
and putting that in my notes as a way to contextualize what this person
was talking about. And if I had something to say, I would write like
underneath it. […] Well, that!s how I take notes now. But that was a new
thing that I was trying out, and that ended up working a lot better. Because
I could refer back to my notes without having to go to the .pdf. Um, and
that cuts out a whole step. And it stays much more organized if I can close
a bunch of .pdf!s and I have the exact text that I need and the page
number that it!s on.
For Kim, a writer who voices a special concern with organization, focus, and
productivity, creating her own specially crafted document that tells exactly what the
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readings said, was important for facilitating writing that would come later. Her notes
document records little of her own reactions to the readings in the moment of
encountering them, but rather creates the beginning of a collection of material drawn
from the reading that was important and potentially in good shape to be reused later.
She describes this as “drawing out the things that I want to talk about or that I might
want to talk about.” Thus, Kim's reading and notetaking process begins to emerge as a
process of information management, a process of sifting, sorting, and arranging
information in a way that makes it most manageable for reuse in the multiple writing
projects that are part of her life as a student.
After taking notes in this way, writing the actual reading response for Kim began
as a cut and paste procedure. In the same way that she mined the initial .pdf files,
moving text from the author's paragraphs and separating it into manageable, recordable
chunks she believed would be valuable later, composing the reading response
document began through a process of sifting through her own notes document to find
the chunks of texts that could form a foundation to a response. She then cuts and
pastes these chunks of others' language from her own notes into a new file, which she
names as the reading response document. She then proceeds to write around these
citations, and to add the beginnings of introductory and personal narrative material at
the top of the document. Describing this moment of the writing task, Kim stated, “I!ll start
to make connections between the readings And then I!ll start composing I guess.” The
general virtual movement of the session proceeds by first rearranging text from other
places and other sources, and then, creating language that works around the contours
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of this imported language, both creating connective tissue and urging the text into new
places.
Kim describes this overall movement as a routine for writing, as well as
"something that I taught myself,” emphasizing the degree to which this procedure was
not something taught to her in school or even described in language. It was just
something that she did, and something that she developed as she approached the task
of composing a reading response repeatedly. I was interested in how this particular set
of writing movements so engrained as work habit functioned when Kim was faced with
other kinds of tasks. For example, if writing so typically and routinely unfolded for Kim
through this kind of movement, what would she do when faced with a different kind of
task that was not so routine, for example, a longer paper? Kim spoke of this process
that she had become accustomed to as one that she would adapt when attempting
other kinds of writing tasks. As she put it, when facing a longer writing task, “There
would be some type of task in between. There would be another step because there
would be way more. . .I!d be drawing from way more information. So that would have to
be parsed down and then parsed down again, and then I!d get to the actual writing
document I think.” Her articulated understanding of writing relates not only to the
continual mining and repurposing of information but also to the nature of the overall
activity as building additional “steps” into a routine that is embodied, and easily enacted.
Kim has developed a set of embodied practices that allow her to manage the task
of the graduate reading response with relative ease. These practices emerged from her
own experience of performing this task repeatedly, with gradually figuring out how to
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deal with the time constraints of a task she would need to complete repeatedly using the
set of tools available to her. As such, she forms an embodied repertoire that allows her
to know she will be effective at the task. And it works. This kind of process is one that
maximizes efficiency and productivity, and that allows Kim to be in the zone, to work
smoothly and with focus and without much struggle. In this example, Kim is at a point in
the trajectory of bodily interaction with this particular genre that is no longer challenging
to her. Writers draw on and build from writing practices that have proved successful in
the past. Kim explains that the note-taking process that we see in her work session
developed over time, as she found more productive ways to respond to the demands of
a task she was faced with repeatedly. Both Dave and Ed, likewise, allude to the fact that
they ways in which they write currently have relationships to similar practices from their
40

past—habits and routines that have become familiar to them.

This finding is important

because it has important implications for thinking about writing learning and how the
development of writing routine occurs in practice. From a perspective that understands
the emergence of writing practice building on past embodied writing behaviors that have
led to success, writing learning appears more like embodied trial and error than
rehearsed and drawn upon cognitive competencies.

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I present the details of Dave's composing routine in Chapter 5 in order to focus on the
role of social media and digital connecting as central to his process.
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Writing that is Typical, But Not Routine: Repertoires of Online Wandering and
Crunch Time
Kim demonstrates how a routine for writing can develop when a writer identifies
and repeats methods that work for accomplishing particular kinds of writing tasks. Kim
demonstrates sophisticated methods of creating and preserving writing time, of moving
through large amounts of information quickly, and of filtering large amounts of
information in order to manage and write from and around it. This display of a routine for
writing a particular kind of task was also present in Dave!s writing session. Other
participants, however, tackled writing work that was not a repeated task. These writers,
however, still enacted patterned and systematic behaviors, which I discuss in the
following sections. Like Kim, Ed demonstrates that achieving success while employing
particular writing movements leads writers to begin to understand that strategy as one
that should be repeated.

Ed!s Story: The Pre-Deadline Social Media Wandering
When I visited Ed to observe and videotape his work session, he was working on
a paper about bankruptcy law in China. Finishing the paper was important to Ed: it was
necessary to fulfill the upper level writing requirement for his joint JD and MBA degree,
and it required multiple sources and needed to be roughly sixty pages long. This task
was typical—a task that all students in Ed!s program faced, but it was not routine. It was
not the kind of writing that would be done on a day-to-day basis over and over again,
but instead the kind of writing that might get done once or twice over the course of one!s
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time in graduate or professional school. It was a big project, one that took several weeks
to complete, and on the day I observed Ed, he was about a week away from the
deadline. He had several pages of draft material already written with notes inserted
through the “track changes” feature on Microsoft Word; however, he did not necessarily
see the draft material he had as fully formed. Reflecting on where he was that day, Ed
stated, “I had about I think it was 32 pages total. So I was just about halfway, and that!s
just page-wise, not content-wise, because I found more research later on that kind of
reshaped what I was trying to do.” On the day I observed him working, Ed brought in
printed source material from law reviews and more popular periodicals to potentially
incorporate into the writing he already had done. As the breakdown of Ed!s time-use in
Figure 8 indicates, he was also working with Twitter, Facebook, SMS texting, and AOL
instant messenger, as well as a few blogs that he visits repeatedly.
Like Kim, Ed!s overall work goal for this work session involved reading source
material and incorporating it into the written draft that he brought with him to the work
session. His materials, instead of in .pdf form like Kim!s, had been printed out on copy
paper, and were arranged in large stacks on the booth Ed had chosen to use as his
workspace. In the time-use breakdown, it is clear that, like Kim, Ed moves back and
forth between the print source materials, which are shown in gray, and the Microsoft
Word Document he is composing, which is shown in blue. However, in this session, time
is spent quite differently. Rather than a fluid workflow centered almost entirely on a
back-and-forth between source documents and Microsoft word product, Ed!s activity
takes many more detours. He is spending much more time reading source material
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Figure 8. Time-use breakdown of Ed's work session

rather than writing from it, and he virtually moves into online spaces that occupy him for
longer periods of time, especially changing as time passes during the work session.
During the first fifteen minutes of work, Ed moves quickly between attention to his
source material, the paper he is composing, social media, and talking to a friend sitting
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in the booth beside him. During the next 30 minutes, Ed, spends several minutes
reading printed source material followed by several minutes using social media and
checking email on his phone. The final 15 minutes of his hour is spent almost
exclusively using social media, composing a blog comment in response to something a
friend has written on her blog and also conducting an extended AIM chat with a friend.
Notably, unlike Kim, Ed!s social media moments include writing and responding, not
merely “checking” or “monitoring.” Thus, he spends more time and attention during
these social media moments.
The task Ed was working on was different in several ways from Kim!s. It was a
project that could not be completed in the space of one trip to Gone Wired Cafe, and
that, instead, would take many different work sessions that would happen across
different spaces and times. Even if incorporating source materials into a draft was a task
with which he was familiar, for Ed, the “workflow” of completing a 60-page paper was
not necessarily routine and the way of completing the task was not as easy to see on
the front end. At the same time, however, his method of work was highly ritualized and
circular in terms of which sites he visited, and Ed spoke of his social media use as a
normal way of spending work time during this stage of his writing process. Figure 9
shows a more detailed time break down of three moments of social media use during
Ed!s work session, in which he visits Twitter, AIM, Facebook, and a number of blogs
repeatedly.

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Table 2. Three detailed social media moments in Ed's work session

Moment 1
(3:04-4:03)

Moment 2
(37:40 – 38:30)

Moment 3
(46:12-48:08)

03:04: Goes to Twitter,
scrolls down

37:40: Opens Twitter.

46:12: Reading blog posting

37:46: Opens AIM chat
window.

46:20: Goes back to
Facebook and closes AIM
window.

03:10: Pulls up another
window, an AIM log
03:12: Opens Facebook
03:33: Opens another AIM
chat log

37:48: Closes AIM chat
window.
38:06: Looks in the web
address history and opens
Facebook.

03:38: Opens a blog
03:53: Opens another AIM
chat log over the top of the
blog

38:18: Opens AIM chat
window.
38:21: Closes AIM chat
window.

46:36: Uses web address
history to open Twitter.
46:50: Opens another blog.
47:37: Increases window size
for blog.
48:08: Begins typing a
comment to the blog

04:03: Back to Twitter
38:30: Opens up a blog

He says that at the point in time he was with the project when I observed him
working, rampant social media use is just part of the way he works: “especially when I
don!t have anything due right away. If it!s kind of a long-term thing. I let myself get
distracted quite often.” This repetitive social media use takes Ed through many different
kinds of domains, most of which are not-so-guilty digital writing pleasures related to his
personal life and to maintaining social relationships. For him, it's talking to his best
friend who lives in another state using AOL instant messenger, reading and responding
to friends! blogs, and monitoring and checking Facebook and Twitter. Reflecting on how
his work time at Gone Wired combines social media use with other more expected work
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activities, Ed said, "I wish I were more productive, but at the same time, I just
understand at this point that that's not how I work unless I have that. . ." Ed stopped at
this point, and when he couldn't seem to find the words he wanted, I offered him some
language. I finished his sentence with, "the "oh my god, this is due at midnight! feeling?"
And he replied: "exactly." During the earlier stages of composing a larger project, at the
point he was at the time I observed him, Ed!s writing happens at a more leisurely pace
that allows him to do other kinds of activities that make writing feel more pleasant—like
talking to friends and maintaining social relationships.

Kathryn!s Story: Performing Crunch Time As Repertoire
On the day I visited Kathryn to observe and videotape her work session, she was
only four hours away from the deadline of a long project, not unlike the kind of longer
writing project on which Ed had been working. It was around 8 PM when I observed
Kathryn, and, at midnight that night, she had a deadline for a final course paper due.
Her paper was a holdover from the previous semester, and she needed to turn in her
paper by midnight on that night in order to finish a course and have a deferred grade
removed from her transcript. This was a pretty frantic time for Kathryn, and I was
surprised that she would allow me to videotape her during these moments. Later,
reflecting on the situation that night, she said, "I was in crunch. I remember [...] that
night I was here until a little past closing time. . .I was just like typy-typy-typa, typy-typytypa." For Kathryn, this was the moment where there was no time to stall, and, indeed,
not even much time to spend with social media. Though I was not able to record
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Kathryn!s onscreen virtual movements during this crunch-time work session because
she had situated herself to close off her screen to others, I asked her what we would
have seen if we had been able to observe her screen during the session. Referring to
social media use, she said, “There was like maybe a moment or two when I would be
like "I need to check Facebook because something important could be happening.” But
this activity, according to Kim, happened much less often on this busy night, where
there wasn!t even time to break for a crossword puzzle. Kathryn says on that night she
was diverting herself from her central writing task “far less than usual,” adding that she
was avoiding doing crossword puzzles even though she says, “I carry this book with me
[referring to book of crossword puzzles] like it!s my baby.”
Even though Kathryn was in self-described crunch time as a writer, she did not
exactly see herself as in a bad place, though she looked a bit stressed during the
observation. Looking back, she described the way she was feeling that night by saying,
"so yeah, I was stressed, but also you know that stressed feeling of like. . .the amount of
work you can get done in those moments is pretty impressive. It was an impressive
feat.” Interestingly, Kathryn!s work, much like Ed!s, was spent moving between printed
source documents she had already read and annotated, and a paper in Microsoft Word,
into which she was incorporating source additional material. In her words, “So, what I
was doing online was mostly editing and adding new content, and lot of extra stuff.”
Kathryn was not the only participant to talk about the time nearest a writing
deadline as experienced differently and assembling a different set of resources and
activities, especially in regards to the use of social media within the writing process. As
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Kim put it, "Well if it's like crunch time, I turn the Internet off, like if it's the end of the
semester, I turn off the notifications. Um because it'll just distract me." Interestingly, just
as the other participants stress that some kind of escape from writing work is needed
even in tight deadline situations, on the night of this observation, Kathryn made a plan
with Ed, who is a close friend of hers, to meet up at a particular point in the night to chat,
since they were both working and she knew she would need a break from the stressful
writing task. She said, “sometimes it!s nice, [Ed] and I will step outside and you know,
goof around, chat, catch up. Like that can be our time to be distracting to one another.”
Kathryn also described how routine might look on a day when she was not under so
much stress, when she would likely use cigarette breaks to structure writing time. She
noted, “I mean, obviously when I don!t have a really close deadline, I have a different
attitude.” She continued, “ I will go outside and have, what, like somewhere between
four and ten minutes.” For a routine writing session structured in this way, she says that
“I want to do like 40 minutes [of work] and then like go smoke, come back, and usually
when I come back from smoking I!ll check emails and things like that.”
The temporal unfolding of writing work happens with familiar peaks and valleys
for the participants in this research. The part of writing work that happens immediately
before a deadline is something that writers eventually understand to be different from
other parts of the writing process overall. They behave differently, with respect to how
they structure and maintain writing space during this time. Over the course of
accomplishing a given task, writers described different combinations of social media use
and academic writing activity corresponding to how close to the deadline they
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were. Again, as in the case of Ed!s social media behavior, this structure to writing time is
not one that tends to be viewed favorably. Writing teacher lore usually admonishes
students for putting things off until the last minute, and yet the practice of accomplishing
much during crunch time seems to remain for many writers, who presumably, find
success while drawing on the “impressive” amount of work that can get done near
deadline time. Looking back, Kathryn reflected favorably on her experience that night,
saying, “And I didn't do poorly on it, so hurrah." It seems safe to assume she will be
taking advantage of her crunch time writing highs in the future as well.

What We Can Learn From Embodied Repertoires of Coffeehouse Writing
Time offers challenges for writing researchers, and it is often one of the most
important implicit factors determining how writing research is structured, and yet we
have surprisingly little vocabulary for helping us show how writing time is experienced
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and lived in the moment, particularly in connection to current writing technologies.

We

also lack ways of understanding and conceptualizing how writing performed in the past
influences writing performed in the present and future. An embodied rhetorical
framework is ideal for elucidating these components of writing moments, and while this
study focuses on just four writers within the coffee shop space, they raise a number of
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See Hart-Davidson!s (2007) discussion of time-use diaries for one contemporary
writing research method designed to account for the experience of writing time. A
number of ecent studies such have drawn on this method in order to make some
preliminary observations about the experience of time for contemporary digital writing
practice.
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points that should be further explored in studies of writing time. In the following section
and to conclude this chapter, I reflect briefly on the implications of their stories and
practices for our understanding of the experience of writing time as it unfolds, as well as
for the development of writing over time.

1. The experience of writing time
The habits and routines of participants in this study suggest that there are
common recurring stories of writing time including deadlines, crunch time, down time,
and distractions. In practice, “distractions” were described as necessary parts of the
writing process, and many writers planned for them. Deadlines were important
influences on the way writing time was structured, and proximity to deadline changed
the way that writers managed distractions, both onscreen with social media and with
other kinds of planned distractions, such as the crossword puzzles to which Kathryn
often refers.
The incorporation of planned distractions into writing work led to work sessions
that combine many activities and actions, even as work remains more or less focused
on a particular motivated task. In terms of time, participants in the study often noted that
writing work unfolds amidst other activity, so that during writing work sessions,
individuals are usually not putting language on paper (or screen) for the entirely (or even
the majority) of a writing session. “Writing work,” for the kind of writing tasks and
routines that happen in Gone Wired, is embedded in the habits, motives, and desires of
people outside the context of the particular writing project on which they are focused.
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This idea connects to recent studies of work behavior. Gonzalez and Mark (2004)
studied the work practices of knowledge workers with an eye toward multi-tasking and
the substance and unfolding of work over time. Based on this research, Gonzalez and
Mark suggest that "information work is very fragmented," “requiring attentional
resources to constantly change between different events, tools, and working spheres”
(119). While writers did keep generally to a particular task during these short work
sessions, their movements within these particular spheres were frequent and several
different activities were combined in the service of their work.
With the recent attention toward multi-tasking as a common trait of millennials, it
is tempting to use that label to describe the writing behavior of participants, who all
invoke multiple kinds of activity during short work sessions (McMahon and Pospisil,
2005). Writing has been connected to multi-tasking, not as only a positive learning
outcome, but central to what writing is (Kramer and Bernhardt, 1999; see also McNely).
However, the writing behavior of these participants might be better described not as
multi-tasking, but as moving across multiple activities in close proximity. Participants
generally did not do two or more things at once. Rather, they moved quickly and adeptly
from one sphere and one activity to the other, sometimes so quickly it was difficult to
notice.
Within the context of writing studies, Geisler, studying her own use of mobile
Palm technologies, pointed to fragmented motives for using the technology
corresponding to a large number of different textual “projects,” “activities,” times, and
motivations, which challenged not only the activity theory framework she used for the
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study, but also the idea of systematic management on which both the technology and
many understandings of the use of time are based. Geisler suggests,
Recognizing the fragmentation of motive between task and task
management will also compel a more complex analysis of the role of
writing in the age of information technology. Many studies of writing,
including those conducted from an activity theoretic perspective, have
been limited to project-based analyses. It is as if we have focused on the
contents of a single project file without noticing the larger filing system to
which Yeats (1993) has called to our attention. Instead we need to pay
special attention to the kind of multi-tasking textual phenomenon we have
seen associated with Palm. Indeed, the use of texts for the multi-tasking of
task management may be one of the most significant uses of writing in the
information age. (153)
Recognizing the fragmented nature of work practices as lived is important, in part,
because technologies often are structured to deal with narrow tasks. Writers often must
develop strategies of putting together disparate technologies into combinations of tools
and actions that can be successful for them. This is a problem they will face as writers
throughout their lives, as they continually travel to new situations where old workflows
no longer map perfectly onto new writing problems.

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2. The development of writers over time
This idea of the continual presentation of new writing tasks leads to another
important implications of the stories and practices of these writers. Almost inevitably,
Kim, Kathryn, Dave, and Ed describe their current practices in relationship to practices
in their past. In addition, they tend to repeat short practices frequently—checking email
over and over again, or sipping coffee at regular intervals in their work sessions. The
habitual nature of writing, as well as the way in which particular activities are repeated,
suggests that writing development can be understood as embodied and active: a laying
of experience that provides stores on which writers draw in their current and future
writing activity.
This view of writing development has the potential to change attitudes toward
pedagogical interventions dramatically. It means that writers work from a store of
experiences, and that being exposed to new situations for writing may be generative, as
individuals are forced to re-combine behaviors, tools, and actions to adapt to changing
contexts and situations.

Conclusion
The routine of coffeehouse writing involves interaction patterns that people bring
in from other places, alongside the technologies they bring in with them. People often
treat the coffeehouse much like a classroom or a workplace: a space that should be
used methodically at the same times daily or weekly in order to accomplish tasks.
Perhaps in the same way that coffee shop writers tend to thrive on the “clean space” of
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the café, they also thrive on the “clean time”: the ability to schedule time not dedicated
to other tasks or distractions. This same tendency to form and draw on habits and
routines for using the space over time is also present in the unfolding of work habits in
individual writing sessions, as participants often draw on ways of doing things that have
been successful in the past and enact identifiable repertoires like “crunch time,” “online
wandering,” and “routine work.”
The degree to which patterns of work are “productive” for coffeehouse writers
depends upon a number of factors, including how close the deadline for writing is, how
they are feeling, and what kinds of tasks they are involved in. For each of the writers,
understandings about how time unfolds for writing are invoked, and virtual spatial
movements are enacted repeatedly as an organizing factor for writing time. Through
these cases, I suggest that the ways in which writers manage writing time matters, first,
because this movement establishes repeated habits and routines that shape future
writing acts. Second, these acts are important because they shed light on the
experience of writing time for work, where practices and motives are often short-term,
fragmented, cross between different spheres, and where contemporary digital writing
technologies form an influential backdrop.
In the following chapter, I pick up more explicitly on how digital spaces create a
contemporary backdrop for coffeehouse writing. In Chapter 5, social media emerge as a
key resource that coffeehouse writers use to structure their time, whether it gives them a
momentary escape from tough cognitive work during a routine task or allows them to

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feel a sense of social connection during the midst of a writing session that is less
planned or less stressful.

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Chapter 5
Embodying Social Media: Digital Connecting and the Knowledge Work of Writing

I think writing online as compared to writing with pen and paper, I think
there's more things involved with it than just writing. Because it's really
important to me, if I'm writing about something, then I'd like to—whether
it's a post I wrote or if I'm talking about somebody else—to link back to
them. It connects back to them. It helps me, it helps them, it's connected
to a whole give and take.
--Dave, Blogger, Technology Consultant, and Coffee Shop Writer

There was this one time I was reading something [online] about Adlai
Stevenson. And somehow I ended up like reading about the Boer's
Republic in South Africa. It just makes sense.
--Ed, Graduate Student and Coffee Shop Writer

The previous chapter described how habits and routines are central to writing as
it unfolds moment-by-moment, illustrating how writers who already have systematic
workflows connected a given task often move through it fluidly while those in unknown
territory tend to “wander.” Although the coffeehouse writers I discussed in Chapter 4
were experiencing different stages of the writing they were completing in the Gone
Wired café, social media use emerged as an activity that was integrated into the habits
and routines associated with their time spent writing in the coffeehouse—a central
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component of how they moved through materials and how “on task” their writing
sessions remained. In one sense, this is not surprising. boyd and Ellison (2008) explain
that the years since the emergence of the first social network site in 1997 have been
marked by the continual emergence of new accessible online sites for connecting
interpersonally. Since 2003 and 2004, when sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr,
LinkedIn, and LastFM were initially released, social media have been a routine part of
many people!s lives—for many, the first place they go when they begin using their
computers. Though the particular media that are most prevalent change over time, the
PEW Internet and Life Research Center (2010) indicates that 81% of adults are wireless
internet users, and among these, 73% of wired American teens, and 47% of American
adults use social networking sites (3).
However, although social media use has become steadily more prevalent as a
part of the everyday lives of millions of Americans, the effects of this activity on writing
practices, habits, routines has not yet been described in concrete terms. I suggest that
social media outlets have become a significant factor in how many writing routines are
enacted in practice, particularly when individuals construct workspaces for writing
through that are built around mobile computing devices like laptops, as is the case with
coffeehouse writing. Laptops and mobile devices like cell phones centralize many of the
elements of writing that unfold in the coffee shop: texts are accessible on these devices,
but multiple online reading writing environments also come together on the screens of
mobile devices, including not only word processors and .pdf readers, but also social
media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, just to name two.
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This turn toward completing writing work using laptop computers as a central
organizing hub has an influential effect on writing workflows, creating easy proximity to a
number of resources and activities that writers assemble in work sessions. This
proximity leads to particular habits and routines of structuring, ordering, and moving
through work time. It also calls into question many assumptions about what it is that
makes a given writing session successful: does the use of social media during writing
help or hinder writing progress? Does it lead to more successful or less successful
writing experiences? The answer to this question is that, of course, it depends. Social
media writing practices play multiple and distinct roles during the unfolding of writing
work, serving at times as invention resources or connective practices to establish
audiences and participation in complex economies of online information exchange, as
well as cognitive break time during difficult tasks that are not part of fluid work routines.
While we tend to value productivity highly during work time, exploring how time unfolds
for writers working with networked and connective tools suggests that “distraction” may
be an increasingly unhelpful way of categorizing writers! virtual movements across
multiple social media writing spaces. Instead, it may be more productive to begin to
conceive of these movements as part of the intentional and tightly integrated and
multiple tasks that writers assemble in moments of writing work, which change with the
ebbs and flows as writers approach deadlines that signal the completion of writing
moments.
In this chapter, I argue that social media are often influential in coffeehouse
writing as a means of digital connecting. The two quotes that introduce this chapter—
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and, to which I return later in this chapter—represent a dual sense of digital connecting
that I develop from the cases in Gone Wired. The first sense of digital connecting is
interpersonal, and—in a sense—economical. That is, the writing sessions of these
participants include making distinct linkages to other people through practices of online
citation, network- and community-building, and the establishing of potential audiences
through the “give and take” that Dave describes in the first quotation above. Without
connecting to communities in which a writer hopes to participate, many writers cannot
expect to receive readership or to have actual audiences for their writing. The second
sense of digital connecting involves the use of social media as a tactic that removes
writers from their immediate task through a process of connecting to external spaces,
and, indeed, from space to space and idea to idea. Because of the ever present network
of associations represented by the Internet, writers often move quickly from online
research about one subject to reading about another, following a trajectory of
possibilities developed by strong links between weak associations. In this way, it is quite
easy for a writer like Ed, who is researching Adlai Stevenson, to end up learning about
something that is at best only tangentially related, though digitally connected to the
writing work at hand. The same is true in the context of the use of social network
websites—writers often find themselves wandering through a maze of connections,
often losing track of their original work habits and goals.
In order to develop this concept of digital connecting more fully, I first detail the
story of Dave!s writing session. Dave is a professional writer who works as a technology
consultant and writes for a number of online outlets, conducting much of his work in
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coffeehouse spaces like Gone Wired. I then return to Ed, the graduate student whose
work session I detailed in the previous chapter, in order to reflect on the relationship
between writing and digital connecting when the digital connecting work is less
integrated into the current writing task. I then reflect across the case studies presented
in this dissertation in order to more closely examine the way in which different online
writing environments including email systems, microblogging applications like Twitter,
Facebook, blogs, and Wikipedia work within the context of the writing sessions I have
observed.

Digital Connecting and Establishing Relationships That Matter
Recent scholarship has shown that the use of social media typically intersects
with interpersonal relationship maintenance and building, with the degree to which users
are forming new relationships online versus maintaining established offline relationships
depending on the particular media in question. Facebook users tend to use the media to
support already established offline relationships (Lampe et. al., 2006). Twitter, by
contrast, is connected more clearly to the establishing and maintenance of information
and knowledge networks that are dispersed geographically, and which often originate
online. People who use social media typically experience increasingly geographically
distributed ties, and Internet users typically participate in larger social circles than nonusers (Boase et. al, 2006). Zhao and Rosson (2009) cite the benefits of this kind of
informal communication as relational and personal, including the establishment of
feelings of connectedness with others by sharing personal and real-time information.
Discussing Twitter in particular, they argue that, “The real-time personal updates found
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in Twitter may help sustain a virtual feeling of proximity (i.e., being there, still there),
enable more chances of exposure to what is on others! minds and what they have been
doing, and provide possibilities to explore similar experiences and attitudes with each
other” (n.p.). Thomson (2008) has suggested that social media often lead toward
“ambient awareness” and the maintenance of weak social ties; however, studies have
found that establishing and maintaining connections online does not preclude people
from talking face-to-face or on the phone and instead people often use multiple media to
connect to those closest to them (Haythornthwaite and Wellman, 1998).
The work that into maintaining relationships on social media sites often happens
through writing; however, as Chapter 4 suggests, the relationship work done using
social media also affects writing that does not happen on those sites because of its
integration into the routines of writers during work sessions. Thus, more attention is
needed to determine the way in which social media use affects many different kinds of
writing tasks that happen using laptops and mobile phones in spaces like the
coffeehouse. In the following section, I detail the story of the writing session of one
writer, drawing on that story to develop some of the ways that writing and relationshipbuilding intersect during the context of one writing session.

Dave!s Story: Digital Connecting in an Information Economy
In Chapter 3, I introduced Dave by outlining the reasons that he spends so much
time in the Gone Wired Cafe. As a contemporary professional writer, he performs
technology and writing consulting and teaching for a number of different academic,
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community, and non-profit entities, and he initiates his own writing ventures online.
Dave needs a workspace for undertaking this work; however, because, as a selfemployed contractor, he has no official workspace and finds that writing at home is
difficult because of his status as a stay-at-home dad caring for his infant daughter. As I
have described in earlier chapters of the dissertation, at the time of our interactions,
Dave had just begun a dad blog

42

that he was excited about, and he was using time at

Gone Wired in part to write and promote blog entries. When we talked, Dave mentioned
a range of motivations for keeping the blog including keeping a record of his
experiences and interactions as a stay-at-home dad, a status and identity that he felt
often isolated him in his current physical and geographical location. Online, he met
people who were in the same position as he was; thus, he sees his blog as an
opportunity to connect to people he has a lot in common with but who are dispersed
geographically. Dave, however, is also interested in the blog as a potential means of
both income and as a seed for new future writing projects. He mentioned that he had
already been contacted by potential advertisers looking to place ads on the blog, and he
also saw the blog as a venture that could open up new opportunities for him in different
kinds of print and online writing jobs, including a print collection of dad blogs that was
already in the works, as well as ideas for possible children!s books based on his writing.
Notably, then, the motives involved with this particular project were both explicitly
personal and work-related, and an intricate blend of personal and work satisfaction kept

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Dad blogs are blogs written by fathers about their children and the experience of fatherhood.

127!

him spending time with this work, though he was not being compensated for it at the
time.
On the Friday morning I visited Dave to videotape and observe a work session,
he was composing an entry to his Dad blog. The blog was a relatively new project for
him at the time, but the process of composing a blog had become routine for Dave since
he had put together over 50 posts to it in just a few months and had already tapped into
networks of blogging dads from all over the country and beyond. Though Dave!s work
sessions for the blog are not structured by deadlines of coursework or paid employment,
Dave takes his blogging seriously and sets time aside to complete it. Dave, like the
other writers described in this dissertation, completes his work session by enacting a
series of movements across different kinds of writing spaces. However, instead of
toggling between Microsoft Word and source material in .pdf or print form like the writers
I described in Chapter 4, Dave was moving between social media outlets and the
control panel/WYSIWYG text editor in WordPress, where he was composing the blog
entry that he would later publish. Thus, the activity of composing during his hour-long
session happened almost exclusively online, utilizing networked digital tools. As Figure
10 depicting Dave!s time-use by attention to central mediating artifact indicates, Dave
moved constantly and fluidly between social media outlets, which were primarily related
to the task of composing the Dad blog (with the exception of email) and the WordPress
Control Panel where he was doing the work of composing.

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Figure 9. Time-use breakdown of Dave's work session

Dave!s entire blog posting was finished in about 55 minutes, including the time it took
him to find the picture that inspired his posting, to compose the body text with links to
other material, to proofread his finished post, and to post a link to Twitter publicizing his
new blog entry. His work session began with a short moment of sipping coffee and then
his first move online was to visit Twitter through TweetDeck, scrolling down and reading
the current status messages of those in his network. He then turned toward a brief
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moment of organizational work, which involved setting up an external drive and
navigating to find a picture of his daughter around which he had planned to organize his
blog posting. His work then took the shape that continued throughout the session—he
moved fluidly between work composing in the WYSIWYG WordPress editor and
checking various blogs, his email account, and Twitter. For Dave, these social media
moments that happened in the midst of his session sometimes may have played a role
as a momentary, unrelated escape from the production of text in his WordPress control
panel. However, it is clear that social media was centrally related not only in proximity
but also in subject to the production of Dave!s text, and his movements into social media
appeared to be inventive moments. While composing his blog posting, Dave spent a
large amount of time reading other Dad blogs, looking at the images on them, and
perusing that other dad bloggers had left on other blog entries.
As I detailed in Chapter 3, Dave stressed during our conversation that he had
some problems working without interruption in the café and had become increasingly
unhappy with how the space was functioning to support his work. Because he had little
time to devote to work, he felt he must make the most of every minute and be extremely
productive and mindful of his time. In this particular early-morning work session, Dave
was interrupted twice by other café patrons who approached him to chat, and also took
a 5 minute break to talk after he finished, proofread, and post his blog entry. Other than
these brief moments spent chatting with people in the café and working to set up his
external hard drive, Dave spent his entire hour online, in networked writing space
toggling between WordPress and social media outlets like other Dad blogs, Twitter, and
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his email client.

43

Social media was tightly integrated into the way that his writing

unfolded, and he never spent more than a couple of minutes in any particular interaction
with social media before moving back to WordPress and the composing task at hand.

Digging Deeper into Dave!s Activity: Digital Connecting as Integral to Online Writing
Economies
After his work session was complete, I had a chance to talk in more detail to
Dave about the role of social media and different online writing sites like Twitter within
his process. When I asked Dave if social media was part of his habit for writing, he
replied, “It!s also part of the blog. Part of it is trying to stay connected, because that!s
how I got the blog to be kinda popular.” This linking of social media to connectedness
happened through a number of practices and for a number of motivating reasons. Dave,
as a professional writer, clearly described different social media outlets as central to his
work, even when it might not appear to be. Twitter, in particular, facilitated linkages and
connections to other resources, including people, texts and ideas. His use of this
microblogging application during writing work sessions facilitated knowledge work
practices of creating and establishing communities of practice who share reading and
writing, while working together toward common goals. In this section, I detail a few of

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In reference to why the external drive is so important, Dave explains, “I just don!t like
keeping a lot of stuff on there [points to laptop]. It!s. . .anything could happen to this. So
I can keep stuff hacked up on the external and media stuff on here. It!s more than that.
Um it!s habit too.
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the specific ways that Twitter use during his writing session allowed Dave to participate
in online writing within a community of like-minded practitioners.

1. Dave used Twitter during writing sessions as a tool to locate and create potential
communities in which his writing could circulate.
Establishing a community for the reception of his work was a task that Dave
undertook even before he ever wrote his first blog posting.

44

As Boase et. al. (2006)

suggest in a Pew Internet and American Life Project report, the internet and email mean
that people!s communities are increasingly geographically distributed. Dave used the
microblogging application, Twitter, proactively to both create and join an already existing
audience for his work. Explaining this activity, Dave said,
Well what I did before I even launched the blog was that I got on Twitter
and I started connecting with people So then when I launched, I had a little
big of a following from the Twitter. And the, so right around. . .I was gonna
wait until I had 100 people following me on Twitter on my [name] Twitter
account just for that.
Dave was explicit about the ways in which Twitter worked for him, not as a way to gain
connections related to his physical and geographical proximity, but instead to his
knowledge proximity—to people with similar ideas and interests. In fact, Dave struggled
with his relationship to geographically local Twitter users who followed him based on
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44

Dave's practices illustrate how the work of what Ridolfo calls rhetorical velocity plays
out as writers utilize social media outlets strategically to prepare and assemble
audiences for digital compositions.
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their offline relationship ties but who did not share the kinds of interests that were
central to the online communities in which he participated:
I tried connecting with a lot of them on Twitter early on and it didn't
happen. So it kinda like, it kind turned me off to be honest a little bit. And
then um I haven't really wanted to . . . because I get like the, I'm on that
one thing that recommends you who you should follow. And it's interesting
because it's people I dropped early on because they didn't, they didn't
contribute anything to it, you know?
What irked Dave most about many local Tweeters was that they did not offer knowledge
content, but instead, personal content about their daily lives and their connections to
other people in the area. More than once, Dave reiterated his discontent with this use of
Twitter, saying. “They do the same thing on there as Facebook and that's why I don't
like it” and later, “I don't care that you had a date tonight. Okay? That's for Facebook.
45

Do it on Facebook.”

He believed that using Twitter for documenting personal life can

be detrimental professionally: “I think it damages you professionally too because it's all
searchable on Google.” His twitter use, however, did lead to personal relationships,
which he continued to develop using other media. He said, “I've made deeper
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45

While overall Dave equates the documenting of personal life with Facebook and says
“I don!t do Facebook hardly at all anymore,” he does contribute to Facebook as part of
his work as a professional writer, though he seems to sneer a bit at this kind of work:
Yeah, yeah, it's mostly early childhood stuff or parenting stuff and. . . I
contract with [Company name]. So if I see some stuff, I can post it on
Facebook. And they think it's like amazing when I do it even though it's like
nothing. [Laughs] So it just kinda makes me look good, I guess.
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connections on Twitter than with Facebook. It's really weird. I talk to a dad from
Portland. We chat on Skype every week, you know?”

2. Dave used Twitter during writing sessions as a research/inquiry tool that allowed him
to stay abreast of what was currently discussed in a knowledge community related to his
writing.
Social media allowed Dave to be connected to his network of fellow
writer/readers by writing about topics that others are discussing, or that provide ideas for
him. Dave said it best when he stated, “Twitter to me was like a resource. I could tweet
and I have like three accounts. And I found so many cool stuff on Twitter resource-wise
that I would share and would retweet those links to people.” These resources for Dave
were sometimes connected to his own invention practices as well, not just as a means
to share what he was seeing being written about. In this vein, he says, “Sometimes it
sparks an idea for me to write a blog.”
This work of digital connecting is central to maintaining groups of people who
support one anothers! blogs—and who, in turn, keep each others! blogs alive. He
explained,
I!m connected to like 200 dads on Twitter. So a lot of the dads, and now
that I!m reviewing blogs, the dads want to be reviewed, but they won!t ask
me to review them, but they come and the comment on the blog and I can
tell like. . .so usually on Friday I announce too who I!m going to review so
that gives me a lot of traffic.
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Dave suggested here that others comment on his blog when they would like for him to
review their blog. Checking and reading social media lended toward participation in this
give and take.

3. Dave used Twitter during writing sessions to perform connections to others! ideas to
establish himself as a member of a knowledge community.
Another aspect of Dave!s digital connectedness involved creating physical links
between his work and the work of others in his network of dad bloggers. So, as Dave
explained, and as I referenced as a way to open this chapter:
Well part of it is because a lot of times in the post I link to stuff, so I have
to be looking up links. So it!s like totally a multi-. . .I think writing online as
compared to writing with pen and paper, I think there!s more things
involved with it than just writing. Because it!s really important to me, if I!m
writing about something [online], then I I!d like to, whether it!s a post I
wrote or if I!m talking about somebody else, to link back to them. It
connects back to them. It helps me, it helps them, it!s connected to a
whole give and take.
This give and take of making and maintaining connections emerged as one of the most
important aspects of the work that Dave did with the blog. This also explains that
reviewing other blogs had become part of what he does, and this in connection to using
social media to maintain connections, facilitated a lot of the traffic and readers of his
blog.
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4. Dave used Twitter during writing sessions to enact the circulation of his work,
publicizing his writing to a community of readers.
Dave took several measures to make sure that the particular post he was
working on that day would receive notice from his network of followers. First, he
included an image, which he knew would attract a large number of people to his blog.
As he put it, “This post will be popular because people will like to see her” Following up,
“that will get a lot of traffic because that will be something like, "ooh I have a daughter
and I want to see.! And dads do that all the time. I!ll get a lot of comments on this one.”
Traffic was a key motivator for Dave!s writing, influencing him across different kinds of
decisions made in the moment of writing.
Dave went so far as to structure the timing of work sessions based on the
demands of the social networks and audiences his blog touches. Dave explained that
within the circle of folks who read and make dad blogs, Fridays were an especially
important day, named “Fatherhood Fridays” by those who are part of the community.
Reflecting on his writing that day, he told me, “I!ve had 120 hits on Fridays. I have huge
days on Fridays.” This is because on Fridays, many individuals who produce Dad blogs
send out links and lists via Twitter, drawing on and expanding the tradition of “Follow
Fridays,” in which many Twitter users recommend new followers to their networks. So,
the particular day I visited Dave was important—it was a Friday, and getting up a blog
posting that morning would allow him to tap into Fatherhood Friday, and perhaps draw
quite a bit of attention to his blog. The timing presented Dave with a number of
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opportunities and also created a deadline for him. He needed to get his blog posting up
that morning, early enough in the day to become a central part of Fatherhood Friday.
Dave's digital connecting work through Twitter was tightly integrated into the
writing task on which he was focused. It is easy to imagine how Dave's practices of
digital connecting were necessary to make his blog a functional part of the online
economy of producing and consuming texts developed by the members of the
community with whom he interacts. Dave's social networking practices are motivated by
the demands of the project at hand, and only extend into the realm of personal life
insofar as the people who participate in the community of bloggers have also become
his close friends. And yet the work of maintaining relationships is work that allows him to
feel productive, even when more inventive writing tasks are more of a struggle. As Dave
says, “At the very least, even if I just end up messing around on Twitter, that!s
something, you know? If I!m just doing something interactive on there.”

Where Digital Connecting Gets Messy: Digital Connecting as Planned Distraction
or Wandering
In Dave's example, the online community he prefers to engage with using social
media is the same one that he is writing for during the work session. Thus, his acts of
digital connecting are tightly integrated with the writing task he is attempting to
accomplish. However, this is not always the case. Digital connecting happens in another
way that leads to what people often think of as distractions during their writing sessions.
Writers also use social media during work sessions to connect to individuals, groups,
objects, or ideas that are not related at all to the writing task that is at hand. In this case,
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the relationship between digital connecting and writing practices is more difficult to
explain.

Returning to Ed: Digital Connecting That Is Disconnected From the Writing Task
Readers may remember from Chapter 4 that Ed was the graduate student whose
writing work session in the café took the most detours. Working on a long-term project
that was large in scope, Ed used most of the session checking and interacting on
Twitter, a series of blogs, AIM Instant Messenger, and Facebook. With the deadline far
away and the methods for completing the project less than routine, Ed tended to wander
during his work session, which took him to a number of social media sites related to
both his work and his personal life. In this chapter, I focus in on that activity in a bit more
detail, in order to show the nature of Ed!s digital connecting.
In Ed!s work session, Twitter and Facebook were used to monitor activity going
on in the world. During his work session, Ed did not write or post anything to Twitter or
Facebook, but he almost always checked them first and last during any moment of
turning away from his word processed text and toward the moments digital connecting
that were interspersed throughout his work session. He typically spent less than five
seconds on each site and rarely needed to scroll down to read more of the screen,
presumably because he checked the sites often and only needed to see the top of the
feed to know what had been added to the sites.
Though Facebook and Twitter seemed to provide ways of monitoring the news of
the world around him, other social media outlets took up more of his time during the
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work session. Ed also participated frequently as a reader and commenter on others!
blogs. The first blog that he spent time reading was the personal blog of a close friend,
with whom he also often had instant messenger conversations. He initially consulted
this blog about four minutes into his work session. Later on, about twenty-five minutes
into the work session, Ed began reading a college football blog, including, first, a posting
about the bowl game possibilities for his favorite team. He then went to the forum of the
blog dedicated to discussion about the team (it was called the “lounge”) and from there
he navigated into and began reading three different discussion threads about the
football team. During his time spent perusing these posts, Ed was interrupted by emails
and texts received on his phone and turned away from time spent with the forum in
order to deal with the incoming messages on the phone.
Instant messaging software was also open during the entire work session. When
someone sent Ed a message on IM, he would receive an alert that interrupted his work
with a page tab for the conversation that would turn red and flash. Thus, Ed knew
immediately when someone was trying to contact him using the instant messaging
service. Ed was first contacted for a conversation about six and a half minutes into the
work session, and he answered the initial message, and continued this conversation off
and on for the entire hour, pulling up the transcript periodically to respond. Ed would
often leave these conversations open while he turned to do other things, reading or
writing on his paper for a while and then responding when he received an IM alert. Ed
also monitored his AIM buddy list periodically and separately from this conversation to
see who was online by opening the list momentarily to check it (he did about nine and a
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half minutes and then twelve minutes into his work session) and then minimizing it
immediately afterward. Turning his attention to an IM conversation also often prompted
Ed to then monitor other social media sites, especially Twitter and Facebook, which he
often returned to for a moment before beginning work on his paper again.
Around 40 minutes into his work session, Ed!s social media activity and his work
at hand finally began to merge in ways more like those of Dave, when he visited a blog
for the Intellectual Property and Communication Law Program at the school. Ed spent
time reading the latest blog entry carefully, interrupting his reading only to pick up a
printed out article and look at it while he read. He then scrolled down the front page of
this blog, and spends about two minutes of uninterrupted time with the blog posting,
before returning to the IM conversation that his friend had begun several moments prior.
After briefly reading his IM conversation, he headed back to the work-related blog, and
then on to Gizmodo, a technology and popular culture blog. About forty-seven minutes
into the session, he returned to the original personal blog of his friend and then began to
compose a comment to a blog posting, which took him around two minutes to complete.
He finished his work time with an extended IM conversation that he initiated with a
different friend before heading over to the LexisNexis search engine where he appeared
to be beginning more research work for his paper.
In the following section, I detail some of the ways that Ed, Kim, and Kathryn
employed digital connecting in their writing sessions, in ways that did not always relate
clearly to the task at hand.

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1. Participants described digital connecting is a “distraction”; however the planned
nature of these distractions meant that they often functioned more as a “break” than as
an actual distraction.
As I initially described in Chapter 3, when I asked Ed about the overlapping of his
social media use and writing work activities, he described the use of social media as a
kind of “distraction” that was effective for him in the context of writing for coursework. It
allowed him to be social and interact with people without getting pulled into a face-toface conversation that would be more difficult to control. In this way, he said, visiting
Facebook, Twitter, and blogs while writing in the coffeehouse helped him feel more
social and able to accomplish things than if he were alone at home.
In the work session that I observed, social media use related to maintaining
friendships claimed almost as much time as work-related reading and writing combined.
However, this activity was hardly unexpected—it was integrated as a planned part of the
writing routine and emerged more as habitual action than as distraction or interruption.

2. Digital connecting allowed Kim and Ed to monitor activity of their social networks
while they wrote.
Facebook for academic writers often became a way of checking and monitoring
life outside the bubble they had created to get academic writing accomplished.
Haythornthwaite and Wellman (1998) found that people often use multiple media to
connect to the people they care about the most, and this was consistent with what we
saw from both Kim and Ed!s activity with social media during their work sessions. Ed
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and Kim used social media both to remain in touch with those closest to them, as well
as to monitor the activity of people tied to them in weaker ways. Recall that Kathryn,
reflecting on her crunch-time work session, stated, “There was like maybe a moment or
two when I would be like "I need to check Facebook,! because something important
could be happening.” Ed similarly stated, “need to find time to take a break from things.
And that's usually what I do is just go on Facebook or Twitter or check things out.” Kim
said, “it becomes a resource that I then use to distract myself. I'll check my email and I'll
check Twitter, and I'll check Facebook, and I'll check the news, and I'll check the
weather.” For the graduate students in the study, Twitter and Facebook and email
tended to happen in tandem, not clearly differentiated, though that may not mean they
are not used differently in practice.

3. Digital connecting provided cognitive down time needed to refocus and complete
difficult writing tasks
Even Kim, who demonstrated a great capacity for focus and attention during
writing work sessions, stressed that in the context of longer projects short breaks in
which she virtually moved to reading unrelated online material helped to organize her
writing time in ways that facilitated finishing the task. She said, "sometimes I just need
to go. I need to get out of what I'm doing. . .I'm finding that that has been something that
I've needed to do to write.” Reflecting on the longer project she was describing here she
said, “Right now I'm working on my portfolio and I was recently working on a project [for
a class] and I had to make sense, and I found that if I wrote for ten minutes, I could go
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away and check CNN and come back and write for ten minutes. And that became part
of the workflow. And it worked! And I was happy with the thing that I produced." Ed also
expressed that even during times when writing was closer to the deadline, finding
momentary places to go was still an important part of managing writing time. As he put
it:
even when I have something due, I still need to find time to take a break
from things. And that!s usually what I do is just go on Facebook or Twitter
or check things out. But, I mean, breaks are less frequent in that situation.
I just, I would say that when I!m going full bore, I probably work 45 minutes
in an hour. When I!m not, it!s more like 20 to 30 minutes working in an
hour.
It is notable here that writing social media takes more time than “checking” and
therefore removes writers more from the context of their central task.

4. Digital connecting often led writers into unexpected places, for better and for worse.
The network of associations that makes up the Internet lends itself toward a kind
of online movement that is difficult to capture in time. In this vein, Kathryn said, “I found
when email is a distraction or when the Internet is a distraction for me, it is a total
distraction. Like if I start fooling around on Facebook, it could be a good 45 minutes to
an hour. Well, I don't just do Facebook. I'll be like I've got to check these different email
accounts, clearly there is a dress on sale here. [Laughs]. Like I can get lost in a world.”

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Because of the number of associations that are possible when visiting online
reading and writing environments, writers often end up in territory that they never
predicted, and which might be only tangentially related to their current project—or not
related at all. For example, Kathryn told me about “how I started reading about a killer
whale that supposedly killed the trainer, the orca. I somehow ended up reading about so
many different things just from. . .I just wanted to know what people think about these
orcas.” Ed offered a similar story, which I related at the beginning of this chapter, stating
that, “There was this one time I was reading something about Adlai Stevenson. And
somehow I ended up like reading about the Boer's Republic in South Africa. It just
makes sense.” This wandering led writers to access ideas and thoughts that are outside
their previous realm of understanding at the same time that it diverted them from the
task at hand. Thus, this activity can be seen both as potentially leading toward creative
thinking and as detracting from productivity.

5. Social media created informal learning context for more formal work and classroom
tasks.
Ed and Kim both went to online social media sites that were related to the more
formal readings associated with their work. Kim accessed Wikipedia to read about
popular definitions of “queercore,” the concept with which she was working during her
session. Ed accessed an intellectual property blog, as well as online databases related
to his work. The digital backdrop to writing is not only about interpersonal connecting,

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but also about connecting ideas and making context for the learning, reading, and
writing people do as part of roles they are asked to play in their lives.

Conclusions: The Complex Intersections of Digital Connecting, Writing, and
Productivity
The stories I have presented in this chapter raise more questions than they
provide answers. When we begin to consider the implications of the relationship
between social media and work time, these stories raise questions about the
relationship between digital connecting and social media, writing, and productivity. That
is, should productivity be the goal of writing sessions? Or, by contrast, should creativity
and the ability to wander while attending to relationships be valued as part of the
unfolding of writing work—for it!s ability to lead writers out of their typical comfort zones
and into new areas? While answers to these questions likely must be addressed
situationally, the structures of work time and the role that social media play in those
structures should become more of an overt focus of our discussions of the nature of
knowledge work.
Kim notably, articulated a strategy for she deals with the digital backdrop that is
part of writing sessions:
Probably the people that I interact with the most online is through Twitter,
email certainly and even that goes through a process of priority. If it's
somebody I feel I need to get back to, I will. If it's quick, I'll get right back to
them. Um but if it requires any sort of thought or. . . Like sometimes if my
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mom emails me and I'm like "Shit I don't have time to respond to this"
(Laughs). . .I'll just do it later. I'll put a star on it and try to remember to go
back. Um but I do IM with my sister and with Katie. But otherwise I try not
to engage. I mean, briefly, I don't mind but I don't want to have in-depth
conversations on IM while I'm working or really even at all. Um and I don't
know really why that is. Like some people talk on IM a lot and that's cool,
but I just. . .I don't even know what it is about it. I don't want to interact with
people that much maybe. (Laughs).
What is impressive here is that Kim has taken time to think through how she wants to
deal with the intersections of focused writing and interpersonal communication that is
centered on her laptop. Other writers might deal with the issue differently, deciding to try
one of the now-popular distraction-free environments like WriteRoom, which work
through different methods to isolate writers with their words.
From an embodied perspective, when writers successfully incorporate the use of
social media as a method for organizing the time of their composing, they are likely to
develop routines and habits that build on these actions and apply them in similar
situations in the future. Ed!s behavior further suggests that when writers do not have
past strategies to build from, this often seems to be the moment of both the most
experimentation and the most wandering into routines they have from other parts of
their life. Thus, we can expect to deal with the issues of the intersections between digital
connecting and writing work in places like computer classrooms, writing centers, or any
spaces where time can unfold informally enough for writers to bring their own habits and
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practices into the space of writing. Writing teachers and researcher might be quick to
judge this kind of writing routine: to think that so-called distracted writers need to get
their act together and get off Facebook and other social media outlets and to devote
attention more fully to the writing task at hand. The kind of writing behavior that Ed
exhibits here may be exactly what frightens people the most about the ways in which
laptops and networked writing space assemble writing space and time for production.
However, these writers, while always seeming a bit embarrassed about their forays into
social media, also explain as part of what it means to do contemporary writing work—
and, as I have detailed in this chapter, it often plays important roles in allowing them to
finish writing work. In her recent dissertation, Huatong Sun described a similar
phenomenon in a case study detailing the incorporation of SMS texting into the normal
work practices of a participant named Sophie. Sophie used text messaging like
“chocolate” during her workday: as a short, non-committal, but pleasing excursion from
work that allowed her to break the monotony of the rest of her day at work. It became a
short highlight that cheered her up and made her feel like she was still connected to the
people she cared about most, even when her work took her away from them physically.
Contemporary social media is more that just a distraction for writers, almost
certainly in the case of writing for and with the web, but also even for academic writers
who merge it as a planned distraction, especially when facing non-routine writing tasks.
Participants in this research indicate that social media play a number of roles in the
current composing environment. Sometimes, in the case of writing that is most digitally
native, social media allow for the work of building connections that create and sustain
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an audience for writing, as well as that aid in invention moments. Social media and
virtual movements across digital writing spaces also allow writers to manage time in
ways that strike a delicate balance: become too immersed alone in their work and they
feel lonely or bored, stray too far toward another activity like socializing or reading for
their own motives and purposes and they get nothing accomplished. Especially writers
doing hard work or far from their deadlines often take frequent trips into a number of
social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs they tend to spend a lot of
time reading. As previously described, writers plan for these distractions and describe
them as integral parts of writing work practice. The embodied reality of contemporary
writing practice is that the work of relationship-building and digital connecting is often
integrated into the routines and habits of writers. In the following final chapter, I
conclude this dissertation by examining the implications of this finding, as well as the
implications of the research framework I have developed and employed in this
dissertation.

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Chapter 6

Implications of an Embodied Approach to Rhetoric and Composition Practice
We can no longer see work as a discreet and separate situation that is
only knowable through complete immersion. Work and life are merging
with new instantiations of social media.
--Jennifer Bay, “Networking Pedagogies for Professional Writing Students”
After introducing a heuristic for an embodied approach to rhetoric research in
Chapter 1, the following four chapters have drawn successively closer to the writing
practices of four individuals who make a coffeehouse central to their writing routines. As
I finish this dissertation, the short-term narratives of the participants in this research are
over. All participants have moved on from the writing projects that were most important
to their lives during the time I spent with them, and some of them have even moved on
from Lansing and into different places geographically and professionally. Ed, the writer
who spent the most time in social media environments unrelated to his writing task at
hand, did eventually complete his researched paper despite his numerous forays into
social media. He has since graduated from the joint degree program in which he was
enrolled at the time and has since begun a new graduate program in another state.
Kathryn and Kim both remain in the area, have finished the projects they were working
on during my research, and continue successfully completing degree requirements in
their respective graduate programs. Dave!s blog project has continued to expand a year
after I initially met him, and, just as he expected, the project has led him into a number
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of side projects and group writing ventures with other stay-at-home dads across the
country, which he continues to post about on his dad blog.
Changes in the writing lives of these participants mean that they have moved on
to different kinds of projects and activities in the relatively short amount of time it has
taken me to write about what I have learned from them. Some of them have even
moved on to different cities and different writing workspaces. In short, the boundaries I
placed around the coffeehouse in order to see it as a stable space have not limited the
writing lives of those who work there. The “characters” appear in this dissertation and
who to varying degrees stand in as representatives of a set of practices may or may not
inhabit the space now. They represent a moment in a place, a small representation of a
phenomenon that is dynamic and developing.
In this chapter ending the dissertation, I reflect briefly on some of the
implications of the research framework developed and enacted in the dissertation, as
well as the knowledge about practice that has come from it. First, I explicate what I have
learned about the implications of the embodied approach to rhetoric research that I
developed and enacted in this study, focusing on narratives and data that this project
yielded, why they are important to contemporary Rhetoric and Composition studies, and
how I understand the heuristic after employing it in a site of everyday writing practice.
Finally, I briefly focus on future research and pedagogical implications emerging from
this project, putting these findings in dialogue with recent scholarship treating the
intersections of writing and knowledge work.

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Negotiations and Limitations
As I detail in Chapter 1, I began this dissertation project with a problem and a body of
theory that might respond to that problem. I believed that Rhetoric and Composition
could benefit from research approaches that created detailed portraits of contemporary
rhetoric and writing practice. Thus, I set out to develop a distinct and theoretically
informed way of looking—a methodological approach to rhetorical inquiry that involved
carefully avoiding predetermining the nature of rhetoric and writing practice or activity
that might be associated with a given place and time through a focus on bodily practice.
As I argue in Chapter 2, approaching a site like the coffeehouse based on the
assumptions of past theories might have led me to a different set of research methods
and assumptions about the role of the space or the activity within it. Like many other
researchers, I likely would have read the technologically mediated writing of the
coffeehouse negatively, focusing on how it separates people who are located in close
physical proximity. Instead, drawing on the theories of Chicana feminists and theories of
networked activity, I entered the coffeehouse with the aim of finding the rhetorical theory
living in the bodies and articulated in stories of those who use coffeehouses. Because of
the strategic nature of the decision to locate oneself in a coffeehouse for writing,
studying this kind of space from an embodied perspective seemed especially likely to
yield a set of stories of use and routine that explicated a set of strategic choices
currently enacted by contemporary writers but often left tacit.
It is in this space of explicating tacit rhetoric and writing choices that I see my
project and the methodology I employed situated most specifically. At this point in the
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dissertation, I address the nature of the inquiry in relationship to the idea of embodiment
once again to reflect on what I learned about this heuristic during my research project.
First, I learned that the heuristic focused my research gaze on the activity within the site,
rather than on the site itself. This means that my relationship to Gone Wired within the
research was somewhat unusual in that I did not focus on the history, development, or
how the owners of the coffeehouse chose to design the space. A different project might
have attended to this angle of the rhetorical ecology and uncovered a different portrait of
the cultural activity of the space. Instead, for the purposes of focusing on the embodied
activity, I made the physical site a somewhat static backdrop that enabled me to focus
on the individuals within it and the ways that they interacted with and constructed worlds
around themselves.
Though I stabilize “place” in order to see movement in bodies, my project treats
bodies and embodiment as a particular kind of rhetorical indicator. Now, at the end of
my dissertation project, I have a more precise sense of how this research approach
relates to the body within rhetorical scenes. At different points in this research process, I
have had my doubts about whether “embodiment” was the correct word to describe the
way of looking that my project has employed. My unease stemmed from the relationship
of the body to the narratives produced in the research, where practices are more central
than bodies in my articulation. In fact, I did not make judgments about how the bodies of
the participants of this research with their particular race, gender, and sexual affiliation
performed within the space. As I mention in Chapter 2, I only referred to these kinds of
embodied identity markers when participants themselves brought them up. With this in
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mind, I have come to understand that my research heuristic is not suited specifically to
study “the body” or even the state of “embodiment” in particular rhetorical situations.
Rather, this framework focuses on what bodies can indicate about rhetoric and writing
practice. In this way of looking, the body is “objectified”; it is understood as an object
among other actors in places and moments of production, but as an actor that is telling
because of its status as a hub that connects multiple other actors—including past
experiences, cultural influences, and memories. Thus, making this distinction between
understanding the body as a rhetorical indicator and developing a study of rhetorical
body or embodiment is important, particularly as contemporary rhetorical theorists
continue to develop more nuanced understandings of how bodies signify within different
kinds of rhetorical situations.

46

Implications of Using the Body as a Rhetorical Indicator
While there were many limitations to my study, using the body as a rhetorical
indicator allowed me to create portraits of writing as it is experienced and lived. Rhetoric
and Writing teachers and scholars often must make assumptions about the nature of
writing space and time as we design curricula, pedagogies, and policy. However, we
often have limited access to the unfolding of writing in the moments in which it happens.
Seeing snapshots of those moments as enacted by Kim, Ed, Kathryn, and Dave shows
that people spread out their writing effort across a variety of interests, spaces, and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46

Collin Craig and Daisy Levy both have dissertation projects that conceptualize and
use the idea of embodiment differently.
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times. They often wander “off topic” during writing sessions and they assemble many
domains and technologies at once during these moments. I have found that these
portraits of writing are at once somewhat shocking and also intimately familiar to most
people with whom I share them.
Especially with the ubiquity of current networked technologies, it is possible to
focus a research lens—a rhetoric and writing research lens—only on texts as indicators
of rhetorical practice. The explosion of online writing means that it is possible to look for
rhetorical practice related to all domains of life archived online, without connecting those
movements to physical action outside the boundaries of the computer screen. While I
think discourse analytic and other systematic textual mining approaches are well suited
to describing rhetorical practices that intersect with textual practices,

47

like all methods,

they are limited in other ways. The tendency to use texts to identify practices has
become an even more seductive problem for rhetoric and writing researchers of late,
because of the ever-growing archives of textual data available online.
Marshall McLuhan (2003) offers a perspective that can speak to implications of
seeing textual constructions either as static or as a perfect reflection of the physical. In

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan rereads the myth of Narcissus
to emphasize the fact that Narcissus became obsessed with a mediated image—an
extension—of himself, which he characterized with other, not merely with himself:
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human
experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word
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47

I practice discourse analytic methods in other research.
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narcosis or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in
the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed
his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended
or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments
of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his
extension of himself and had become a closed system.
McLuhan uses his reading of the myth to argue “men at once become fascinated by any
extension of themselves in any materials other than themselves” (63). He also is able to
reflect on the ways in which media create seductive images and resemblances that
conceal the reality of themselves and their function. Read in the context of the problems
of texts and practices, McLuhan!s story emphasizes the idea that extensions are not
perfect representations of activity, though they often seduce us into believing that they
are. Virtual representations tend both to captivate us and to shift our attention away
from the physical, leading us once again to treat it as a static constant. Similarly, texts
are seductive objects for rhetoric researchers. They appear to contain within themselves
all aspects of practice. And yet we know that the contexts, resources, and objects
related to them cannot always be accurately traced after the moments of their creation.
Active bodies give clues to these aspects of practice, and yet they should not replace
texts as the only indicators of practice. We need situated accounts that draw
connections across texts, bodies, technologies, narratives, and memories that intersect
in moments of rhetorical practice.

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Returning to the Situated Account for Rhetoric and Writing Research
Rhetoric needs a discursive unit of analysis that responds to the culturally
situated and integrated nature of practice and theory. To state it most simply, I believe
“situated accounts” of practice are—or at the very least can be—critical to meaning and
the way it travels in the digitized and networked present. Detailed portraits of the work of
rhetoric and writing can (and perhaps should) become the foundation to many kinds of
disciplinary action of contemporary Rhetoric and Composition, including asking difficult
questions about the nature of “success” in contemporary mediated rhetoric and writing,
and developing pedagogical interventions that are responsive to contemporary practice.
Situated accounts do not only provide “perspectives” or readings of texts; they
concretely describe what people do with rhetoric and writing in particular contexts. Thus,
they reflect contemporary understandings of culture and practice: they document what
resources people draw on, how materials are moved from one place to the other, the
places people go, and the things they do. Situated accounts work from the
understanding that different individuals, groups, and stakeholders use and construct
rhetoric and writing differently—that the reality of our practice is indeed multiple. To
return briefly to the theory on which my research heuristic rests, theory in the flesh
begins at one!s own body as the center against which meaning must be tested and
transformation carried out. Theory in the flesh as a model means not only a new set of
objects to consider as rhetorical theorists, but a renewed purpose for looking—
connecting to practitioners and not merely those in formal education and in writing
education. Rhetoricians building from this framework have the opportunity to incorporate
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empirical components, and to collect and learn from individual stories of use and
routine. Creating accounts of contemporary practice becomes differently meaningful:
these accounts not only add to the ongoing historical record, but also can be adapted
for practitioner use in ways that lead to the creation of better spaces and infrastructures
to support the work of making.
This approach to research and theory-building, I suggest, could be an important
part of what rhetorical theorists do. In the same way that we constantly revise and rewrite the histories on which our field is built, we should make commitments to an
ongoing attempt to revise our understandings of the phenomena of contemporary
rhetorical practice. To skip this step is to deny the ongoing adaptations related to
technological, ecological, and sociological change. It is here, I believe, that the kind of
approach that I have been calling “embodied” has the potential to intervene.
This implication of my research further calls attention to the recursive nature of
our inquiry and practice: the ways we should question and return to the origins of our
understandings—with practice, as much as with history and theory. Periodically, we
should revisit the foundations of the phenomenon we study, in order to re-establish the
nature of what it is that we teach and study. This work is tedious and by nature is poised
to create more questions than it answers. It is a generative starting point requiring
ongoing returns to scholarship and a kind of commitment to looking beyond scholarship
and inquiry with which a researcher is already familiar. Tracing the associations of
writers and then attempting to explain them means a commitment to ongoing
description, inquiry, and change. It involves a commitment with which we are familiar—
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intervening in current practice—but also one that is less habitual: allowing contemporary
practice to intervene in our disciplinary approaches.

Areas For Future Research
In the following section I outline two more specific areas for research emerging
from this inquiry: the knowledge work and space-making practices of writing, and
research that cuts across typical domains of rhetoric and writing use.

The Knowledge Work of Writing
The methodological approach that I have described in Chapter 1 and on which I
reflect in the previous paragraphs led me to understand the coffeehouse as associated
with “work,” a finding that was initially surprising to me. “Work” for the participants in this
research took on a complex meaning that combined personal and social obligations that
not only extend beyond traditional workplaces but indeed across the multiple identities
and roles people inhabit. As I detail in Chapter 3, this finding came directly from the
language of participants, who continually described the location as one they entered to
do work, by which they meant completing tasks associated with different identity roles in
their lives. These identity roles were sometimes work-related in overt ways, but most
“work” for the coffeehouse writers I interviewed and observed was associated with
personal lives, goals for the future, identities like being students or stay-at-home dads,
and activities like blogging that supported their occupational development, but which
were not paid employment.
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The importance of “work” in the third-space site like the coffeehouse intersects
with a range of current Rhetoric and Composition and Professional Writing research and
scholarship. For example, in the introduction to Datacloud, Johndan Johnson Eillola
describes a “dispersed network of subtle, yet profound changes in the patterns of
working, living, and communicating” (1). These changes connected to the ubiquity of
networked and social media writing technologies and the changing economy create a
context for contemporary rhetoric and writing activity that puts the construction and
negotiation of complex information at the center of writing activity. Within the contexts of
these changes, the writers that I observed entered public spaces in order to construct
space and time for writing. In the “clean space” of the coffeehouse, individuals
manipulated workspaces in order to provide sociality and yet freedom to complete work
at the same time. These workspaces are built around mobile writing technologies and in
proximity to objects that matter.
Looking for embodied practices using the methods that I chose for this study led
me to see how individuals locate and construct writing space and time. In order to reflect
on the implications of this finding for future research, here I want to connect the
practices I have described more explicitly to “knowledge work” that is integral to the
experience of composing. Echoing the recent arguments of Johnson-Eilola, coffeehouse
writers were tasked with developing structures of work—what he might call “information
spaces” or what Swarts and Kim might call “hybrid spaces” for completing work that was
complex and meaningful (59). For Johnson-Eilola, much like for De Certeau, the act of
writing is synonymous with the activity of making space through the act of establishing
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relationships between objects. As he puts it, “networks are simply another name for the
recursive, collective, building of conceptual spaces or field: that is, writing” (265). The
act of establishing connections to objects that matter—both in terms of people as well
as technologies and texts—was central to the acts of writing that unfolded in
coffeehouse. These bodily acts of making space could be seen as equivalent to a set of
moves to create cognitive space, through acts of digital connecting. Digital connecting,
as I describe it in Chapter 5, creates cognitive space through integrating social media
use as cognitive down time into work sessions, as well as the perhaps more obvious
ways that participants like Dave used social media to create potential audiences for
writing. As Jodie Nicotra (2009) suggests, “the idea the writing is about making
connections is nothing new. What is new, perhaps, is the visibility that these
connections have gained in the decade since the advent and explosive proliferation of
the World Wide Web and other communication technologies” (259). With this visibility in
place, Rhetoric and Writing researchers have the potential to learn much from how
contemporary writers structure their work practice.

Researching Writing Across Assumed Domains of Life
Separating the writing of people!s lives by domain does not always reflect the
ways that writing and rhetoric are experienced in the moment, where individuals often
blend and blur what we might think of as personal, work, and school writing. For
example, as Ed!s example showed, personal writing and academic writing often happen
at the same time. Furthermore, this study revealed that domain distinctions may be less
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helpful that researchers might assume, as academic writing completed within the
coffeehouse work sessions often followed patterns of writing describe in studies of
workplace writing. For example, the practices of composing academic artifacts follow
patterns of information mining and assembly often previously identified in studies of
workplace writing. Kim!s case in particular points to the ways in which reuse and cutand-paste work in the context of writing for school. Kim!s note taking practices suggest
that more digitally native “cut and paste”

48

approaches to constructing compositions are

routine at least for some writers, even when faced with what might be seen as traditional
academic tasks. This action is interesting in the context of Slattery!s (2005) recent
descriptions of whole-cloth and pastiche reuse amongst professional writers. With
writing more and more often tied to technological skill in reuse, Slattery suggests, “there
is the very real concern that the difficulty of these technologies and environments might
relegate technical writing to technological skill” (318). I see this practice in particular as
an important habit of writing that should be studied in the future, in order to understand
how prevalent this practice is beyond Kim!s individual case. As Swarts and Kim write,
Given this function of writing and the fluidity of the places it shapes, it is
necessary to look with fresh eyes at what we mean by the category of
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48

In reference to problems of plagiarism in particular, Logie (2005) has argued that
composition pedagogy often still operates from “print-directed, print focused approach”
as opposed to digitally-native approaches (302). If one of the affordances of digital text
is its ease of movement across boundaries, the implications of cut-and-paste and the
movement of text across document boundaries may be an important focus of future
studies of academic writers.
!
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writer, no longer someone who designs content for a specific literate use,
but increasingly someone who works with content that is flexible enough to
be taken up, transformed, and moved across the boundaries of rhetorical
places where that information serves new kinds of rhetorical enactments
(291-220).
While Kim!s case in particular is unique in its focus on reuse, she, Kathryn, and Ed all
show evidence of using many kinds of texts over the course of work sessions and draw
on fragmented work practices related to those that have been identified in workplace
studies.
I argue that findings such as this one suggest that we need studies that
purposefully cross-cut the commonly accepted domains of writing in order to better
understand how writing unfolds outside the boundaries we typically impose on them
through our research and theory. As Yancey (2009) has recently described, writing
practices have historically remained rich and changing, even as our theories of
composition and of composing have placed constraints on our abilities to locate and
understand those practices. Furthermore, third spaces like cafes and coffeehouses
represent fruitful locations for tracing both writing and rhetoric that cross-cut domains of
activity and that allow us to learn more about the ways in which individuals create space
for writing.

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Social Media, Knowledge Work, and the Workflow of Writing: New Spaces for
Pedagogical Attention
My project is not of scope to create a developed and tested set of pedagogical
interventions based on the nature of my findings. This is foundational research, and
pedagogical implications will take many years to develop. However, the unfolding of
writing sessions and their embeddedness in the habits, routines, and everyday lives of
these research participants indicates that our writing and rhetoric pedagogical
approaches should be responsive to the everyday unfolding of writing activity as highly
influenced by social media use, participants! past action, and the ongoing formation of
writing habit. Furthermore, it indicates that the structuring practices of writing are highly
influential in the way that writing unfolds. This idea, for me, leads to the idea that rather
than focusing solely on introducing students to the technologies and genres that may
comprise their future rhetoric and writing endeavors, we need increased attention to the
practices that structure writing, giving students practice in how to work across multiple
genres and technologies—which change rapidly.
Again, this potential pedagogical shift is responsive both to recent scholarship
and to the current cultural, social, and economic changes that affect the nature of
workplace and academic writing. Jennifer Bay (2010) has recently summarized the
current landscape of change, arguing for a concept of "networked pedagogies" that
"attempt to leverage the erasure of boundaries between work and life through new
media technologies." Understanding the implications of convergence, indeed, will be key
to developing innovative twenty-first century pedagogies. Describing research in
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particular, Purdy (2010) has recently described how facets of knowledge work are often
compartmentalized in writing instruction, ignoring the overlap of writing and research
activities in practice. Purdy offers online tools as potential ways to think about the
convergence of often separated activities, explaining, “Web 2.0 technologies showcase
how research and writing together participate in knowledge production” (48).
In addition to this focus on connecting, I suggest that rhetoric and writing
instructors carefully consider the development of rhetorical habits as we develop writing
pedagogies. This idea initially might seem counterintuitive to writing pedagogies that
stress the role of critical thinking—of taking the time to deliberate and make conscious
choices based on the situation at hand. However, the two do not have to be mutually
exclusive. Habits of interacting with the world often drive the decisions of rhetoric and
writing as they unfold. Thus, the more students can practice developing frames of mind
and habits of body that will facilitate positive rhetorical choices in the future, the better
chance they have of success across the multiplicity of domains in which they will find
themselves as lifelong writers, learners, and citizens. Though I see myself working in
future teaching and teacher research to develop approaches for developing rhetorical
habit, for the present I imagine designing pedagogical interventions that 1) encourage
inquiry into the rhetorical habits and practices that structure writing

49

; 2) provide time

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49

These inquiries might take very different shape depending upon the writing course in
question. For example, in a business and technical writing course, students might
research knowledge practices of professionals at work. First-year writing students or
advanced undergraduates might focus on different particular knowledge practices. In
their recent article, Maranto and Barton (2010) caution instructors about the implications
of becoming “too involved” with students in social networking spaces. However, a
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for critical reflection on individual practices, as well as the practices of others, and 3)
provide repetitive practice at the micro level of classroom activity in order to encourage
50

habit formation.

This approach shares some of the disciplinary perspective of the recent Writing
about Writing (WAW) movement as described by Downs and Wardle. In particular, the
pedagogical shift that I advocate, like that of WAW, involves the movement away from
the understanding of a generalized academic discourse or set of genre conventions that
can be internalized by students and then repeated (or “transferred”) across different
domains and situations. Instead, the goals of a pedagogical approach emerging from
my findings would likely be in line with the WAW idea of “teaching realistic and useful
conceptions of writing—perhaps the most significant of which would be that writing is
neither basic nor universal but content- and context- contingent and irreducibly complex”
(557-8). Furthermore, making knowledge work practices the object of student inquiry
may allow them to access more portraits of the ways that writing unfolds and is
experienced in practice in ways that facilitate invention of new habits and practices.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
practice like “digital connecting” might become the subject of student inquiry rather than
a skill with which students are initially expected to be proficient.
50

Abram Anders is doing very interesting work in this area. During the Great Plains
Alliance for Computers and Writing, Anders described a “speed reviewing” assignment
in which he tries to develop business and technical reviewing competencies by moving
students quickly around a computerized classroom, allowing them to quickly identify
important elements of texts habitually.
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Conclusion: Using Embodied Research as a Framework for Understanding
In this final chapter of the dissertation, I have argued that the knowledge created
by this dissertation involves something broader than just nature of writing in coffeehouse
spaces—it has implications for the way we think about the nature of rhetorical learning,
for the way that current writing situations are connected to cultural change, and to the
experience of writing that cuts across the domains that separate areas of inquiry in
Rhetoric and Composition. At the same time, this dissertation also performs some of the
implications of the methodological approach that I have practiced: it leads in directions
that are difficult to foresee, and it asks more questions and provides more foundation for
future work than it gives set answers. Yancey (2009) has recently called on scholars in
Rhetoric and Composition “Articulate the new models of composing developing right in
front of our eyes. Through documenting these new models, we can create the theory
that has too often been absent from composition historically” (7). In the Preface to this
dissertation, I begin by suggesting that all research is about placing boundaries and
deciding which stories are most important to tell. In my mind, this dissertation
represents a first step in a longer line of inquiry that involves continually and carefully
tracing rhetoric and writing practice as it unfolds as a means for creating the theory and
models for which Yancey calls.

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