Mechanisms for Forgetting

To follow up from yesterday’s post: the Phaedrus reminds us that writing once was new, that it was a technology with unexamined potential. But as Socrates warned, it’s become a mechanism for forgetting; we forgot even his warning. Writing instructors came to view writing as transcendent, as something separable from debates about correctness, assessment, separable from history and context. But we’re better than that now, of course; as the narrative goes, we’ve remembered again, and reshaped our views to account for an understanding of writing as always grounded in contexts.

And as we’ve done so, something else has slipped away. Now it’s technology that is magical, polymorphous, transcendent, because in the discourse of writing and technology it’s always separable from context. Writing, in Plato’s time, was a technology, and a mechanism for forgetting: now, technologies for writing have themselves become such acontextualized mechanisms for forgetting.

Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran and Selfe tell how “computers came into the field of composition studies in two rather different ways. They came in as fancy typewriters. . . and they came in as tools that would magically and mechanically improve students’ writing through style- and grammar-checking programs, spell checkers, computer-assisted instruction packages, and programs that would have the ability to parse English prose, which then seemed just around the technological corner” (71). Technology was a mechanism for efficiency in writing, something separable from writing that could make writing better.

Views changed, though. In the years from 1986 to 1988, Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran and Selfe point out, CMC (computer-mediated communication) became a significant part of the field of computers and composition. The networked environments of CMC were seen as offering the ability to flatten social distinctions. (In fact, even recent research in computers and composition that’s focused on race and gender has pointed to the ways in which networked environments can heighten certain social distinctions: in other words, technology itself is still separable from context.) And Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran and Selfe describe “the fundamental changes that proponents of technology saw to be possible” in the period from 1989 to 1991: “student-centered rather than teacher-centered classes, increased participation of marginalized students, expanded and increasingly democratic access to systems of publication and distribution, and the democratization of information” (202). Technology-as-instrument was the tool teachers could use to foster a fairer classroom. As Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran and Selfe point out, “computers were becoming everyone’s business — a seemingly transparent technology” (186). Part of my perspective in response to this proposition is shaped by the poststructuralist perspective on language as never transparent, as always politically laden and ideological (though seldom apparently so): I see technologies as always bearing similar properties, in similarly covert ways. Linda Brodkey, in her College English essay I’m always referring to (“On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters'”), argues that “Those who would occupy the best subject positions a discourse has to offer would have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of speaking rather than being spoken by discourse” (126). So too for computers: we always want to see ourselves in the privileged positions vis-a-vis computers, and the instrumental stance rewards that desire. We use computers to speak, and are never spoken by them. For whom might this not be true?

We seem to have the idea that technology is always separable from culture, separable from economics, separable from writing, separable from instruction: it’s an independent variable. And here’s where I start to come back to neoclassical and Marxian economics: both seem to construct technology as something separable from their systems.