I can’t help but wonder at Gee’s rhetorical sorcery when he describes an enchanting moment in learning. He types, dictates, or writes, “If learners in the classrooms carry learning so far as to take on a projective identity, something magic happens—a magic that cannot, in fact, take place in playing a computer game. The learner comes to know that he or she has the capacity, at some level, to take on the virtual identity as a real-world identity” (115). When Gee conjures up these identity categories, I want to believe him and see this magic, but I feel (for you, Bizzell) that the identity categories are false. I especially dislike the distinction between virtual and real-world identities. Virtual is not really virtual. These are experiences. These are real-world identities where real-choices are made. He defines a “real-world identity” as “my own identity as ‘James Paul Gee,’ a non-virtual person playing a computer game. Of course in the real world I have a good many different non-virtual identities. I am a professor, a linguist…” (112) and I’ll add a video-game player whose Arcanum character is a half-elf named Bead. A virtual identity is “one’s identity as a virtual character in the virtual world of Arcanum” (111). Now I am not sure where exactly “one’s identity as a virtual character” ends and the “real world-identity begins.” It seems that the major difference between a virtual and real-world identity is the presence of a computer.
I am at a computer typing or was typing this for my class blog. So please help me analyze this in using Gee’s terms—virtual, real-world, and projective. Where am I virtual, real-world, and projective? Also, since I have produced and created this blog, I have product. What type of products are created in each type of identity? I ask because I am curious about how to assess the magic in a projective identity.
In “Hybrid Academic Discourse” Bizzell is also charming especially when she writes, “Thus, unlike a neighborhood in which people encounter one another face to face, a discourse community casts its discursive net over boundaries of geographic location, cultural background, socio-economic status and even time—the dead may participate in discourse communities if their ideas and their texts survive” (10). The “dead” participating. NO WAY. Bizzell is creating a relationship that does not necessarily exist—at least in my paradigm. Is this assumption that we are actually getting what the dead have said a virtual reality being created? In other words, we never really know what anyone ever said or meant thought we may be close. But add on geo, cultural, and temporal differences, then it seems even more difficult to determine what they meant or even said. Anyway, what I mean is and what this charmed me into thinking is does act of writing and reading mean that we are creating virtual realities? Keep in mind Gee’s definitions.
I am toasting ya’ll right now at Paul Simon’s Birthday party at the Hilton in New York City. He is singing “Kodachrome” for ya’ll.
Did I just create reality? Paul
