Internet Invention

Internet Invention is a book by Gregory Ulmer. The book describes Ulmer's definition of "electracy" (as opposed to orality or literacy) and leads readers through activities that ask them to examine their interactions with four discourses, which Ulmer labels career, family, entertainment, and community.

"To approach knowledge from the side of not knowing what it is, from the side of one who is learning, not from that of one who already knows, is mystory."—Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory

Mystory is the name of a new pedagogical genre created by Ulmer in his book Teletheory. It was a response to a suggestion by Hayden White that if the concept of history had been invented in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, it would be quite different. The idea was that if people had begun serious study of the past in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, the result would be quite different from what it is today.

Mystory is Ulmer's new approach towards learning in general. A mystory itself is a website created by the student that explores the four discourses (career, family, entertainment, and community) and then has the students find links between the various discourses to gain a new understanding of how they think. The final synthesis of these ideas is represented by a self-created emblem that represents the student, their history, and their method of thinking.

The final product of the mystory is to have a new approach to learning that allows them to learn better than they would by following the standard methods of learning usually propagated within colleges and universities. By learning to learn based on themselves and their own culture rather than the culture of the school, the students gain a deeper understanding of what they're learning. In addition, this new vantage point towards knowledge aids in thinking about problems and issues in society, which is part of the EmerAgency concept.

The idea behind the mystory comes from Ulmer's attempt to create electracy and the EmerAgency. The mystory site allows for students to re-evaluate their ways of thinking and then apply that to situations and ideas that the EmerAgency would deal with.

When Gregory Ulmer announced to his father and uncle that he was changing his major in college from Economics and Political Science to English, they were astonished, believing that such a degree would have no practical value. However, Ulmer contends that no issue in the world can be solved without considering the human aspect of it. The EmerAgency is Ulmer’s real life study of whether English can help to solve issues by considering them in light of humanity. He believes that this can be done through electracy, and if so, he posits that there is practical value in the field of English.

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