Cynthia and Richard Selfe, seminal scholars in computers and composition pedagogy, reflect on the ways that composition instructors who utilize computers are implicated in the establishment and maintenance of borders between non-traditional, marginalized student populations and access and experiential knowledge of requisite technologies.

Because the majority of contemporary scholarship tends to focus on the uninterrogated affordances that technology offers students, the Selfes offer an “alternative vision for teachers” that requires them to be informed, critical practitioners who can see, articulate, and traverse the political and ideological boundaries that welcome, detain, and reject certain student populations. This alternative vision will allow composition teachers to influence “the cultural project of technology design” (484). Adopting Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zones,” the Selfes envision interfaces as linguistic and electronic contact zones “that enact—among other things—the gestures and deeds of colonialism” (482). Adopting the widely-circulated, overly positive rhetoric of technology (Selfe & Hawisher, 1991) teachers have turned to computer-supported writing environments as a means to avoid creating and perpetuating an educational environment that excludes non-traditional, marginalized students, envisioning them as democratic, homogeneous spaces in which students can assert and insert themselves without stigma or rejection.

Computer interfaces are “cultural maps of computer systems” that “purport to represent fact—the world, a particular space—as it is in reality, while they naturalize the political and ideological interests of their authors” (485). Utilizing interfaces from Macintosh which construct a virtual reality based on real-world corporate culture, the Selfes demonstrate how interfaces serve as maps of capitalism and class privilege, designed for use and consumption by middle- and upper-class white men (men is my addition) with its utilization of objects like “manila folders, files, documents, fax machines, and desk calendars” (485). The interface’s omission of symbols and staples of the work environments associated with or ascribed to women, craftsmen/laborers, or those employed in the fast-food industry signifies the limited scope of its intended audience of users.

Utilizing word processing programs, the Selfes demonstrate how interfaces are maps of discursive privilege, ignoring and “othering” all non-English languages (I despised typing non-English), as the menu items generally only afford the ability to compose in English, though additional languages can be used after users maneuver their way through a number of functions. The Selfes’ claim that this limitation “may not represent a large problem to academic professionals”, underestimating the incredible diversification of the student populations currently attending American colleges and universities.

Using IBM’s DOS environment, the Selfes show that interfaces are maps of rationalism and logocentric privilege, “fundamentally dependent on an hierarchical representation of knowledge, a perspective characteristically—while not exclusively—associated with patriarchal cultures and rationalistic traditions of making meaning” (491). Representing knowledge in this way is incredibly pervasive and is problematic when articulated and understood as the way of knowing, serving to exclude alternate means. I gravitate towards the Selfes discussion of Turkle and Papert’s adoption of the term bricolage, as borrowed from Levi-Strauss. To know and construct knowledge must come from a position of experience and intimate knowledge of the subject gained from experience within it and its constituent parts. I decided to Google the term and on the first page of results, I found this site: http://bricolagecms.org/. The welcome page (the hype man for virtual spaces and faces) sells the publishing system as conducive to creativity, designed specifically for perfectionists and serious hackers alike. This particular moment finds me too terrified to try it out, but it is free and Adams University has provided images of the software in action for those of us who may just want to look and not do.

While instructors have to locate themselves on these maps, they must also become critics of technology and its use in the classroom, interrogating and occupying multiple territories from multiple vantage points and teaching students about the implications of the borders they encounter in any number of interfaces.

Haas, Christina. Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1996: 3-47.

Haas opens the first chapter with “The Technology Question,” which interrogates the effects of writing and material technologies on human thinking and culture. Seeing the relationship between technology and materiality as inextricable, Haas argues that this unarticulated link underlies contemporary controversies in literacy studies and must be realized and reflected to “appreciate the nature of literate acts” (3). Understanding writing as always material can provide the theoretical basis for arguments about more recent iterations of the technology question, which ask: “What is the nature of computer technologies, and what is their impact on writing?” (3).

Haas reviews three instances of the Technology question within literacy studies (philosophical, historical, sociopsychological) in an effort to make its existence explicit, as well as to help understand “the nature of computer technologies for literacy, their power in shaping literate acts, and people’s relationship to them” (5).

The Technology Question in Philosophy is taken up by and illustrated through the works of Plato and Derrida, as Haas argues that they understand that “writing is inherently bound up with issues of truth, knowledge, and ultimately power” (6). The effects of writing, the tainted crutch of the psychologist, are primarily psychological for Plato, and built upon his distinction between speech and writing. In response to this dichotomy, Derrida claims that writing is “already there” and the dichotomy exists because writing already exists, not because it is supplementing anything (which, according to Derrida’s reading of Plato, was absence). The implications here are profound and have been tacitly present for centuries.

The Technology Question in Histories of Ancient Greece is illustrated through the work of Walter Ong (literary theorist), Eric Havelock (classicist), and Jack Goody (anthropologist). In their comparative historical analyses, ancient Greece is “an exemplar of the cultural and cognitive power of literacy” (12). Each agree that writing is time made spatial and align themselves with Plato’s assessment of writing as a supplement to speech. Each emphasize the materiality of writing and, Haas argues define “written language by its links to the material world” (13).

To try and understand the relationship between cultural and cognitive changes brought about by technology, Haas turns to

Socio-pyschological theorists Lev Vygotsky, Sylvia Scribner, Michael Cole, and Jean Lave, as each address how culture and cognition mutually construct one another. Further, each interrogates the dichotomies of writing and speech and literacy and

illiteracy. Vygotsky’s understanding of writing as a material tool reminds me of Kenneth Burke’s Language as Symbolic Action (1965) and his assertion that the nature of our terms affect the nature of our observations, in the sense that the terms direct the attention to one field rather than the other”(46). Burke posits that “much that we take as observations about ‘reality’ may be but the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of terms” (46):

We must use terministic screens, since we can’t say anything

without the use of terms; whatever terms we use, they necessarily constitute a

corresponding kind of screen; and any such screen necessarily directs the

attention to one field rather than another. Within that field there can be

different screens, each with its ways of directing the attention and shaping

the range of observations implicit in the given terminology. All terminologies

must implicitly or explicitly embody choices between the principle of

continuity and the principle of discontinuity. (50)

I also vaguely recall Burke arguing that language is a tool that is (necessarily) sharpened by and in its use, but the source escapes me. I will add it as soon as I find it, as I recall that the quote was provocative (for me, at least).

Perhaps Burke’s theories of language as a symbolic system agree with Cindi & Dickie Selfe’s conception of screens as inherently ideological (“deflections of reality”, for Burke) and Vygotsky’s insistence upon the materiality and material reality deflected by and invested in language.