History, Technology, Phaedrus

After last night, it feels as if I’ve momentarily wiped all the economic and sociological perspectives from my mind for a while. I know that for me and for a lot of other folks, this is pretty common practice; one gets so wrapped up in a perspective that putting it on the back-brain to bubble necessitates entirely wiping it from the front-brain for a bit. So, tonight, some initial notes on Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History, by Gail Hawisher, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia Selfe (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996).

I’m only part of the way through the book’s chronological history of the field, and so the attention to the early perspectives on computers may bias my perspective, but even in the introduction, I find the repeated use of words like “ability” and “deliver” in conjunction with the word “computers” to be remarkable. It’s interesting to see the construction of the computer as having a sort of individual agency coupled to the construction of the computer as instrument. Of course, the authors are describing a historical moment, and so these constructions may be unique to that moment, like the intersection of the growth of the process approach to writing instruction with the introduction of computers into the field of writing instruction. Still, it’s interesting: computers, the authors assert, “deliver” material and give students the “ability” to copy and paste paragraphs, to search the Web, to use grammar-checking and spell-checking functions. They point out in the early days (1979-1982) a primary focus on the functions of computers lending themselves more to routinization: grammar checkers, drills-and-skill instruction, and so on.

But even in broader society, even today, I think we still have a lot of the instrumental view (although the Macintosh has certainly foregrounded commodity fetishization); we believe the computer to be just a tool, one like any other. The tool doesn’t affect us: we use the tool and then leave it behind, our selves unchanged, however many quanta of labor completed, the object of our attentions with the tool somehow changed. The tool can be a pencil: we write with it and then we put the pencil down. We write with the computer, and the computer somehow changes our writing, or changes our students’ writing: it smooths transitions like an adze, cuts errant paragraphs like a chisel, fuses them like a soldering iron, even makes writing generally quicker and easier the way the cordless power screwdriver improves upon the yankee screwdriver. We believe, as a habit, that technological efficiencies are separable from human beings and demand no change in human beings.

Not so with the computer, I think. It’s inaccurate to say, “the computer can,” so I’ll be a little more explicit, and make my language a little more clunky: a computer user can manipulate the keyboard and mouse, with an understanding of metaphor (do one thing here, another thing happens there), in order to ask the computer to manipulate data in operations we refer to as copying, pasting, printing, typing, and so forth. (Another computer-lab instructor told me of the student from a poverty-stricken country who had never used a computer and understood very little about them, but caught on quickly to the concept of the keyboard, until, during that first day of class, he raised his hand and asked how one was to put spaces between the words he typed). But the important part there is an understanding of metaphor. A graphical user interface does not reward trial and error the way a hammer rewards trial and error. One must learn an array of cultural signs and complex skills and ways of thinking to use the computer, to engage the many different uses to which a computer may be put: what does the Start menu do? What about the recycle bin or trash can icon? Why doesn’t Microsoft Word follow the same metaphors that the task bar does? The computer demands change in the user, and that change is undergone at different rates among different people, yet as instructors we assume a fairly constant level of skill among students in our classrooms.

Another difference in our notions of instrumentalism: I’d wager writing teachers seldom heard students forty years ago stating that they wanted to manufacture pencils for a living. And yet we understand computers today to be multilayered instruments for which which a student in the engineering department might well aspire to design chips, or for which a student in computer science might well aspire to code applications. And, while the pencil does one thing — makes marks — quite well, the computer is used to surf the web, retouch photographs, write poetry, set up databases, play games, balance checkbooks, chat with peers, and so on. The computer is much more generalized in its instrumentality.

But all of this is old, well-trod ground. Still, rehearsals are useful reminders, as would be — for the consideration of the uses of the technology of writing — another reading of the Phaedrus.