Some very basic assumptions. (And we all know what the problem with “assume” is. . . So there’s a good chance these may change. Still, they’re a starting point.)
First, class has to do with people. Computers are objects. This, at first glance, might suggest some reasons why comp folk haven’t talked much about the intersection between the two.
Of course, that’s a fairly na�ve and reductive view of things, which ignores the ways in which computers are both products of and influences on relations of production, the ways computers have become associated more with some classes than others both in terms of culture and labor, and so on. Lots of challenging stuff to address here.
Second, the university is a vexed context in which to investigate class, which makes matters problematic since I’m looking at first-year writing students. The university is a vexed context because (1) it is, itself, a classed environment, and (2) it is also, historically, a transition point from one class to another. Also wrapped up in this problem is the question of what actually determines class: what’s the difference between having a particular class background and belonging to a particular class? If Mom and Dad pay for Chip to go to Exeter, where he’s terrific at polo but decides he’d be much happier as a shipyard welder, and he then has a successful career as such, to what class does Chip belong? Did he move from one class to another? When does one start and stop belonging to a class?
The most useful answer I’ve seen so far comes from what little I’ve read of Resnick and Wolff, who (I think) suggest that class is more of an adjective than a noun, and in fact is also a process. But I might be getting this way wrong; I really need to finish up the foundational readings and move on to what they have to say. But I think they also make the point that people can inhabit multiple class relations and positions at one time, which makes sense to me. (I think it’s what also makes them Marxists of the postmodern variety, or perhaps it’s Marxians, but it sounds to me more like a poststructural position: again, more reading to do.)
Third, class influences the ways people communicate, including the way they write. Linda Brodkey, in “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in the Literacy Letters,” has provided composition’s most compelling demonstration of this phenomenon. And, of course, as bloggers navel-gazingly contend ad infinitum, computers change and continue to change the ways people write. While I have very little interest in blogging itself as a research topic (and, to be honest, I sometimes get impatient with the surfeit of reflexivity and wish the bloggers blogging the self-celebratory metadiscoursal analysis of blogging in their blogs would, well, get over yourselves, y’all; at the same time, though, I totally enjoy and admire the work of people like Jill Walker, so maybe it’s just how the writing comes across), I do think that, in a post-Fordist information-age society, we need to develop a better economic understanding of the production of culture via writing.
And this is the point where some compositionists will call me crass for reducing writing to a dollar sign. But, actually, I’m not: I think the most important promise that the Web holds for first-year writing instruction is that if teachers ask students to publish their essays on the Web, rather than keeping them confined to the closed environment of the classroom, then the writing actually circulates; it comes to have a value beyond the value of the grade for which the student exchanges it. (And, well, yes, that is a pretty crass version of the comp classroom, but it’s for argument’s sake.) Obviously, the words “exchange” “circulation” and “value” carry multiple nuances here; one of those nuances is economic. (Much of the above argument about value is borrowed, in rather reductive form, from Bruce Horner’s Terms of Work for Composition.)
So: no strong connection between computers, class, and composition yet. (Maybe that’s actually what the whole dissertation is going to be about looking for.) But I think I’ve got some basic stuff set down here in terms of initial economic connections between computers and writing instruction. It’s a start.
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