C. Paul Olson’s 1987 essay “Who Computes?” seems to gain more depth each time I read it. It’s not that the essay is changing, but more like what Samuel Clemens was talking about when he quipped, “The older I get, the smarter my Dad gets.” I’ve learned a little more since the two times I read it before taking my exams several months ago, and several months ago I’d read a little more widely in computers and composition than I had when I first encountered the essay in Charlie Moran’s “Writing and Emerging Technologies” seminar a couple years ago. The essay’s so central to what I’ve been talking about with computers and economy and education that I wish I could just reproduce the whole thing right here, but since that won’t work, I figure I’ll just talk about it a little. And, even though I’ve got all these fine things to say, that doesn’t mean I find the essay entirely non-problematic.
The core of Olson’s argument is that “the debate on computers in schools comprises a new form of the old debate on what schools should be about and whose interests they should serve. From this perspective, the debate on computers in schools involves more than the technical issue of the computer’s capacity; within this discourse is nested a struggle over the ideology and practice of the politics of literacy” (182). Olson offers some “interesting conjectural issues” to show some of the forms this debate has taken:
“1. Do computers increase or decrease the perceived skilfulness of users?
2. Do they reduce or increase observed differences in class-based learning?
3. Will they further centralize or decentralize education and society’s knowledge?
4. Does implementation of computer-assisted curriculum lead to greater individual autonomy in learning or to greater dependency on rigidly prescribed formulas?” (180)
The immediately obvious problem is that these are all reductive binaries (up or down? yes or no? good or bad?), so far abstracted from any pedagogical context as to be useless — but the interesting thing, I think, is that they suggest a certain agency or determinism on the part of the technology itself, a point of view that Olson seems to reverse when he asserts that “What computers are, plain and simple, is a very efficient tool for processing information” (182). Hence my question yesterday, to which I’d still be most grateful for any feedback folks might offer. Furthermore, “Tools are used by people for particular ends (good and bad),” Olson asserts, and “no tool autonomously organizes and employs itself” (182). But it’s not quite the “neutral” view of instrumentality that one sees so often espoused on Slashdot and elsewhere: Olson points out (and this, for me, is where it starts to get good) that “the computer as a tool does fundamentally reorganize material relationships and organizations of production and our thoughts about what production is” (183, emphasis in original). Couple that to what Jameson has to say about the intersection of culture and economics, and all of a sudden what I’m looking at — the intersection of computers, composition, and class — does feel like it matters, and does feel like it’s not some nonexistent connection I’m inventing.
This fundamental reorganization comes about, Olson notes, from the way in which “the computer allows substitution of capital intensive processes for what were formerly labor intensive ones” (184). As I came to understand from Mankiw, increasing productivity — the goal of any good capitalist — “means substituting capital for labor; or substituting cheap labor for expensive labor” (Olson 189), and “if work processes are being reorganized around greater efficiencies afforded by computers, then anyone not reskilling will move down and out, not up and in” (194): fear of falling, as Curtiss helped me understand. The difficulty is that, although computers reorganize relations of production, what Olson calls educational “reskilling” is itself classed: “The curriculum form in [middle-class] schools. . . tends to be general, emphasizing cognate skills, industry, generalizability, and language and programming skills,” and “tends to have transferability across content. The use of computers in working-class schools, by contrast, tends to be rote and is either based on mechanical skills or involves operations of games” (195). And “Since rapid change in computer use is all but a given, any authentic ‘literacy’ is predicated upon a general knowledge of underlying skills. Since the curriculum stratifies along these dimensions, which are far more subtle than issues of access to the machine. . ., it is a doubly important — and threatening — innovation since it stratifies both sanctioned knowledge (as Bernstein describes), and genuine technical skills” (195). What Olson could not have foreseen in 1987 was the explosion of the internet and the ways in which those “genuine technical skills” would be put to work in the manufacture of culture on the Web. Writing teachers have been saying for a long time that classroom writing must matter; that the best way to help students learn to write well is to ask them to write for a real, living audience. The Web, to many of us, seems like an ideal solution: what better way to make writing matter than to publish it to millions of people? Olson allows us to see, I think, that such solutions aren’t quite so simple.
There’s much more to Olson’s argument and its implications than I can do justice to in this post. For me, though, it’s a fundamental text; one I’ll continue to return to as I work through this project.
Recent Comments